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49Government in FoucaultCanadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 421-439. 1991.The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says…Read more
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3Kai Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 11 (5): 344-348. 1991.
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72Forbidding KnowledgeThe Monist 79 (2): 294-310. 1996.Are there matters we should exclude from inquiry? Personal privacy apart, it seems difficult to justify. By what higher, better knowledge than the results of inquiry itself could one know what inquiry ought not know? Is such knowledge a metaphysical intuition whose authority cannot be questioned? Isn't that a fairy-tale? But what about ethics? What about ethical limitations on knowledge? Can they not concern more than simply what to do with knowledge we have, concerning instead the very dynamic …Read more
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2Frederick L. Will, Beyond Deduction: Ampliative Aspects of Philosophical Reflection Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 9 (6): 255-257. 1989.
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13Dewey and the Art of ExperiencePragmatism Today 7 (1): 93-99. 2016.Instead of following the behaviorists and abandoning the concept of experience, Dewey wanted to reconstruct it. Dewey was an ardent Darwinist, so whatever experience is, it has to be an evolved, presumably adaptive power. “Experience” became for him one word for the multiplex relation between the evolved, adapted organism and its environment. Human environments include groups and social relations mediated by language. But “experience” is not centered there, or restricted to the use of language. …Read more
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A. Phillips Griffiths, Ed., The Impulse To Philosophise (review)Philosophy in Review 13 (4): 158-160. 1993.
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37Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (review)Common Knowledge 17 (1): 198-199. 2011.Gilles Deleuze has a growing readership in English philosophy, where for long he was eclipsed by brilliant contemporaries like Derrida and Foucault. It is good that we are coming to appreciate his highly original and fascinatingly intricate philosophy. He worked with integrity and genius to do something different in philosophy from everything he was hearing in contemporaries. None of the familiar labels—structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics…Read more
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81Turning Back the Linguistic Turn in the Theory of KnowledgeThesis Eleven 89 (1): 6-22. 2007.The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, disc…Read more
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58The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (review)Common Knowledge 16 (3): 559-559. 2010.Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sex…Read more
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35Postmodern Pragmatism and Skeptical Hermeneutics: Richard Rorty and Odo MarquardContemporary Pragmatism 10 (1): 91-111. 2013.
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74Review of Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (10). 2008.
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2Foucault's nominalismIn Shelley Tremain (ed.), _Foucault and the Government of Disability_, University of Michigan Press. pp. 93--107. 2005.
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37Foucault's theory of knowledgeIn Timothy O'Leary & Christopher Falzon (eds.), Foucault and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 143--162. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: References.
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44Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (review) (review)Common Knowledge 8 (1): 208-208. 2002.According to Davidson, Quine, by overcoming the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, made the philosophy of language a serious subject. According to Rorty, Davidson, in concluding that "there is no such thing as a language," attains its most advanced position. How impoverished philosophy has become! It even becomes a kind of accomplishment to show that work which seemed new and different (deconstruction) is really the same old thing. Wheeler's book domesticates deconstruction for An…Read more
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25Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (review)Common Knowledge 23 (1): 104-104. 2017.Wikipedia currently exists in 270 languages, with more than 20 million articles. The English-language Wikipedia has 2.5 billion words, sixty times the size of Britannica. It may be the largest collaborative initiative in history, and influences what people the world over know or think they know. Wikipedia’s distinctive feature is the non-expert, non-professional, non-certified, non-formal production of knowledge with credible content. Academics like to sneer at that, even as more of us acknowled…Read more
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Difference UnlimitedIn Gary Brent Madison (ed.), Working through Derrida, Northwestern University Press. 1993.
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81Games of Sport, Works of Art, and the Striking Beauty of Asian Martial ArtsJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 40 (2). 2013.Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and works of per…Read more
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17The Philosophical Challenge from China (review)Common Knowledge 22 (1): 133-133. 2016.The premise of this volume, which collects the work of thirteen contributors, is that Chinese philosophy has plenty to say to the problems that occupy current philosophers. Turns out that means plenty to say in their terms and by their standards. For many—not all—of the contributors, the only “challenge” Chinese thought poses is assimilation, how same can they make it. Part of the problem is that the philosophy asked to receive this challenge is our insipid, directionless, imaginatively exhauste…Read more
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20War as a Problem of Knowledge: Theory of Knowledge in China’s Military PhilosophyPhilosophy East and West 65 (1): 1-17. 2015.A singularity of the famous Art of War《孫子兵法》 attributed to Sunzi is the way this work conceives of knowledge as a resource for the military strategist. The idea is new in Chinese tradition, and new in the worldwide context of thinking about strategy, where Sunzi’s ideas about the value of knowledge are far in advance of the thinking of Western theorists like Machiavelli or especially Clausewitz. In this paper I analyze the role of knowledge in the Sunzi theory of strategy, and show the consisten…Read more
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16To Really See the Little Things: Sage Knowledge in ActionJournal of Chinese Philosophy 42 (3-4): 359-370. 2015.Sage knowledge knows the evolution of circumstances from an early point, when tendencies may be inconspicuously, “effortlessly” diverted. This knowledge is expressed, not “represented,” being an intensive quality of action rather than of belief, proposition, or theory, and its effortlessness is not a matter of effort versus no effort, but of the intensity with which effort tends to vanish. The value of such knowledge and the explanation of its accomplishment in terms of perceiving incipience or …Read more
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133The virtual and the vacant—emptiness and knowledge in Chan and daoismJournal of Chinese Philosophy 37 (3): 457-471. 2010.Similarities between Daoism and Chan (Zen) are often merely verbal, a skillful appropriation by Chan authors of a vocabulary that seems Daoist only to a point, and then departs in a predictable way. What makes the departure predictable is the completely different understanding of emptiness in Chan and Daoism, supporting a no less different understanding of the value of knowledge. Daoism remains optimistic about knowledge in a way Chan is not. Buddhist wisdom exhausts life, extinguishes it, does …Read more
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36Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in Chinese TraditionHarvard University Press. 2015.Barry Allen explores the concept of knowledge in Chinese thought over two millennia and compares the different philosophical imperatives that have driven Chinese and Western thought. Challenging the hyperspecialized epistemology of modern Western philosophy, he urges his readers toward an ethical appreciation of why knowledge is worth pursuing.
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45Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry (review)Common Knowledge 15 (2): 219-220. 2009.
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20The cloud of knowing blurring the difference with chinaCommon Knowledge 17 (3): 450-532. 2011.In this monograph-length article, which inaugurates a multipart symposium titled “Fuzzy Studies,” the significance and virtues of blur are investigated through the whole history of Chinese intellectual tradition. In the Western tradition, the blur of becoming seems to disqualify an object for knowledge; nothing can be an object of knowledge until the blur is resolved and clarity attained. Chinese tradition offers suggestive examples of the thought that blur, so far from being incompatible with k…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Knowledge |
Continental Philosophy |
Chinese Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy, Misc |
Aesthetics |