Eduardo Mendieta

The essay considers three classic definitions of philosophy, namely those offered by Socrates, Boethius, as semantically enriched by Montaigne, and Kant, in order to reflected on individual and collective death. Kant’s philosophical tool of the antinomies of reason is deployed to think through the antinomies of our pandemic in order to make clear that in a pandemic there is only collective, and not individual or even national, inoculation. The false dichotomies of physical versus social, embodiment versus virtuality, nationalism versus planetarization, and propaganda versus science, are discussed. Lady philosophy appears wearing blue plastic gloves.

The Anthropocene must also be seen as the convergence of the historicization of nature and human historicity, not simply metaphorically, but factually. As historical time is injected in nature through anthropogenesis, resulting in our having to see nature as a product of a historical process, our understanding of time is being transformed. The Anthropocene must be understood as a temporalization of time tout court. The key concern is what could be called an Anthropocenic matrix of intelligibility and its corresponding image of Anthropos. In the time of the end of time and the time of the end, the new image of humanity is that of a destroyer of world.

The so-called War on Terror has given rise to a virulent discourse that demonizes all those who allegedly seek to do harm and kill Americans. A veritable bestiary of demonic and bestial creatures has been thus ensembled, constituting what one cannot but call an “imperial bestiary.” Here we do not so much consider the contents of this imperial bestiary, as much as seek to analyze its grammar, that is, the way it operates on certain moral assumptions that have very pernicious moral consequences. Reconstructing the work of some recent critical philosophers, a possible way to dismantle all bestiaries, whether imperial or colonial, is elaborated. The work of Mary Midgley, Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway are brought together to develop what has been here called a politics beyond monsters, beasts, roguish animals, and infesting vermin that must be at best domesticated, and at worst exterminated

Arthur Schopenhauer, in an essay titled “On Authorship and Style,” included in volume 2 of his Parerga and Paralipomena, writes, “First there are two kinds of authors, those who write for the sake of the subject and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating; the latter need money and thus write for money.”1 Schopenhauer, however, changes his mind quickly a page later and writes: “Again, we can say that there are three kinds of authors; first those who write without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscences, or even directly from the books of others. This class is the most numerous. Secondly, those who think while they are ..

This article focuses on Karl Jaspers’s notion of the Axial Age, some of its critical appropriation, and how in particular Habermas has returned to this idea, after several critical engagements with Jaspers’s work through his long scholarly productivity. The article, however, centers on Habermas’s selective and critical use of Jaspers’s notion in his own latest and extensive engagement with what he calls “a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking.” The goal of the article is to identify the ways in which Habermas is refurbishing Jaspers’s generative concept, but at the same time, how his work on postsecular consciousness opens itself to some liabilities by not taking enough distance from the concept.

ABSTRACT In this article I set out to develop an alternative analysis of national borders that grants them moral and politically normative standing while at the same time showing the limits of such merely normative analytics. The aim is to develop a genealogical analysis of the U.S. border, which is taken here as an exemplar of how not to implement borders. The first section develops what will be called here the “mobile panopticon,” one that colonizes the so-called heartland, making of all citizens potentially extraditable subjects. The second section argues that the assemblage of institutions that make of the border not simply a geographic marker has become deeply enmeshed with the United States' peculiar institutions of hyperpenality and criminal branding, thus leading to the expansion and exacerbation of what I have called the “ethnoracial prison industrial complex.” This analysis then offers warrants for the argument that the U.S. border is no longer a neutral arbiter of sovereignty but, instead, has become a “genocidal machine.” In the closing section an engagement with Casey and Watkins's recent work on the U.S. border offers a bridge to the genealogical claim that the U.S. border is in fact a thanatological dispositif.

Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well as a more recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions.

Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to look at the human relationship with animals from the critical or 'left' tradition in political and social thought. The contributions in this volume highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of oppression, violence, and domination. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of 'animal rights,' the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order

In this chapter I will bring together two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of Rorty’s intellectual biography: on the one hand its consistency, loyalty, and deference to what I call his “vision,” and on the other, the expansiveness, capaciousness, voraciousness, and encyclopedic thrust of that vision. I argue that in contrast to many canonical philosophers, Rorty did not undergo a turn, a “Kehre,” a shift, a revelation, a Damascus moment. Rather, when reading his epochal texts, and numerous essays, one gets the impression of an Amazonian river widening its shores and drinking its tributaries, relentlessly moving forward following its own course. I thus argue that we think of Rorty, following Berlin’s famous allegory, as a foxy hedgehog, one that pursued one truth, while rummaging inquisitively along the plains and forests of Western culture. From Platonism to metaphilosophy, from metaphilosophy to post-philosophy, and from there to the project of a liberal utopia, which brings together what I called his Brechtian patriotism, with his honest, open, and sincere ethnocentrism, the Rortyan vision has been held steady by one thought: “There are only languages that serve some human purposes better than others. Human purposes and human languages change in tandem with each other” (Rorty 2010, p. 22). Another way of expressing this vision is to say that what makes humans a unique animal is that we can recreate ourselves by means of changing our vocabularies.

ABSTRACT This article begins with a consideration of whether the January 6, 2021, attack on the United State’s Capitol building can be considered a form of “legitimate political discourse” and compares the insurrectionists to the Black Lives Matter protest movement. Both movements, as different and antithetical as they are, raised meta-questions about how it is that we establish by means of law the forms to express dissent. It is proposed that “constitutionalism,” namely, the doctrine that the primary means to create and sustain free institutions are constitutions, which were and are result of historical events, i.e., revolutions such as the French, the American, and Haitian, that nonetheless unleashed normative powers and aspirations. After an analysis of constitutionalism through the lens of the US Constitution, the text turns to an analysis of what here are called “constitutional deconstructions.” Six such deconstructions are discussed: of the written constitution itself, of the law, of rights, of the people, of the state, and finally, of the Supreme Court as the protector and ultimate reader of the constitition. In this last section, the 2021 Report of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States is considered.

i want to begin by thanking my good friend Richard Hart for the invitation to be part of this wonderful panel in which we are honoring while also being challenged by the work of Charles Johnson to think differently about our discipline. I also want to thank the organizers of SAAP for hosting this important series of lectures, in which we are invited to engage the work of thinkers who challenge us to think differently because they either come to our problems from different disciplines and fields, or teach us to see their problems as ours. From the outset, I must admit my trepidation at engaging Johnson’s work, which spans nearly half a century and a variety of genres. Johnson began as a cartoonist, then became a...

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer

Available in English for the first time, this much-anticipated translation of Enrique Dussel's _Ethics of Liberation_ marks a milestone in ethical discourse. Dussel is one of the world's foremost philosophers. This treatise, originally published in 1998, is his masterwork and a cornerstone of the philosophy of liberation, which he helped to found and develop. Throughout his career, Dussel has sought to open a space for articulating new possibilities for humanity out of, and in light of, the suffering, dignity, and creative drive of those who have been excluded from Western Modernity and neoliberal rationalism. Grounded in engagement with the oppressed, his thinking has figured prominently in philosophy, political theory, and liberation movements around the world. In _Ethics of Liberation_, Dussel provides a comprehensive world history of ethics, demonstrating that our most fundamental moral and ethical traditions did not emerge in ancient Greece and develop through modern European and North American thought. The obscured and ignored origins of Modernity lie outside the Western tradition. _Ethics of Liberation_ is a monumental rethinking of the history, origins, and aims of ethics. It is a critical reorientation of ethical theory.