Ian Angus

There are three steps in my description of the ground-problem of value: First, Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of reason is based on the systematic loss and phenomenological recovery of the intuitive evidence of the lifeworld. But if letter symbols are essential to formalizing abstraction, as Klein’s de-sedimentation of Vieta’s institution of modern algebra shows, then the ultimate substrates upon which formalization rests cannot be “individuals” in Husserl’s sense. The consequence of the essentiality of the letter symbols to formalization is that no direct reference to intuitive evidence of individuals is possible from formal structures. Second, the crisis of reason in Marx’s Capital on commodities contains a parallel analysis of the contradictory relation between formalism and evidence. The value-structure of capitalist society expels qualitative value to subjective use and imposes a homogeneous standard on social representation of value such that quantitative values are not grounded in the experience of use which entails that the system of general value becomes a mere aggregate. Third, the problem of value, or formal axiology, is the core of a teleological convergence between phenomenology and Marxism. A short phenomenological description of the experience of value shows that practical activities generate valuations that are experienced with an intensity through which they aim toward social representation. The conclusion is that the social representation of value in capitalist society intervenes into the constitution of the community by the intensity of individuals’ value-experience to reduce its system of value to an unthematized simple aggregate of value-quantities.

Concerned with criticizing representational theories of knowledge by developing alternative concepts of knowing and communicating, Ian Angus and Lenore Langsdorf bring together eight essays that are united by a common theme: the convergence of philosophy and rhetoric. In the first chapter, Angus and Langsdorf illustrate the centrality of critical reasoning to the nature of questioning itself, arguing that human inquiry has entered a "new situation" where "the convictions and orientations that have traditionally marked the separation of rhetoric and philosophy—the concern for truth and the focus on persuasion—have begun to converge on a new space that can be defined through the central term _discourse._"_ _In these essays, this convergence of rhetoric and philosophy is addressed as it presents itself to a variety of interests that transcend the traditional boundaries of these fields. The two editors, Raymie E. McKerrow, Michael J. Hyde and Craig R. Smith, James W. Hikins and Kenneth S. Zagacki, Calvin O. Schrag and David James Miller, and Richard L. Lanigan map this new space, recognizing that such mapping "simultaneously _constitutes _the territory mapped."

A strand of contemporary philosophy has turned from the traditional focus on universality toward conceptions of “one’s own,” “place,” and “particularity.” In the recovery of “place” and “Iocation,” no attempt has been made to distinguish betwen these terms nor to investigate their different implications even though there is an incipient distinction between them in Heidegger’s late work. This meditation on the relationship between place (Ort) and locality (Ortschaft) begins from Heidegger’s texts in which the distinction was made. The second part follows the thought of location further. Third, the implication of this distinctionfor the task of thinking and its distinction from poetry is explored. In conclusion, some implicationsfor the interpretation and application of Heidegger’s work and for the place that a definition and defence of particularity and locality might have in contemporary philosophy are explored. Une certaine voie de la philosophie contemporaine a déplacé son attention traditionnelle portée à I’universeI pour se tourner vers des conceptions du “propre,” du “lieu,” du “particulier.” Dans la récupération des concepts de “lieu” et d’ “emplacement,” on n’a pas, jusqu’ ici, tenté de distinguer ces terms ou d'etudier leurs implications respectives, bien qu 'une distinction emerge dans I’oeuvre tardive de Heidegger. La présente méditation sur la relation entre lieu (Ort) et localité (Ortschaft) part du texte heideggérien dans lequel la distinction a été faite. Le seconde partie poursuit la pensée de la localité. La troisième sonde la portée de cette distinction pour la tâche de la pensée et la façon dont elle se démarque de la poésie. En conclusion, j’explore I’incidence qu ’une definition et une défense de la particularité et de la localité pourrait avoir sur I’interpretation et I’application de I’oeuvre de Heidegger en philosophie contemporaine.

Recalling the phenomenological and Hegelian bases of the critique of misplaced concreteness, and supplementing these by the contribution of Gregory Bateson, it is possible to say that a contemporary critique of digital media cannot appeal to an irrevocable concreteness nor finally defeat abstraction. Since the digital media complex is characterized by temporal decay, transversality, and singularity, a new departure for a critical theory of digital media must centre on the cultural unconscious and the limit, or edge, of the cultural complex.

In response to Leroy Little Bear's description of the Blackfoot identity as rooted in place, the article articulates an ecological conception of value based in European thought that can be in close dialogue with the telling aboriginal phrase “I am the environment.” While important similarities are noted, especially the convergence of aboriginal and ecological conceptions of value on a critique of the assessment of value by commodity price, the difficulty of rooting value in Being within the European tradition contrasts with the continuity of human, animal, and cosmic intelligence in aboriginal thought.

Leslie Armour is the author of numerous books and essays on epistemology, metaphysics, logic, Canadian philosophy and Blaise Pascal, as well as on ethics, social and political philosophy, the history of philosophy (especially seventeenth-century philosophy) and social economics. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he has worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Province, briefly as a sub-editor at Reuters News Agency, and for several years as a columnist and feature writer for London Express News and Feature Services. He has taught at universities in Montana, California, Ohio and Ontario. Now a researchprofessor of philosophy at the Dominican University College, Ottawa, an emeritus professor at the University of Ottawa, and editor of the International Journal of Social Economics, he and his wife, Diana, divide their time between Ottawa and London, U.K.

There has been, over the last decades, a deep crisis in the models which, for a long time, have been central metaphors governing thought and research in the social sciences. The main symptom in this paradigmatic shift has been the increasing centrality of the 'discourse' approach in social theory. The philosophical implications of this shift have not, until now, been thoroughly explored. Ranging over the work of Heidegger and Gramsci, this philosophical exploration is not carried out by Angus as a purely analytical enterprise, but as a comprehensive attempt at rethinking the whole project of a critical philosophy.