Andrew Kirkpatrick

What bearing did the works of Whitehead have on the late Merleau-Ponty and his emerging ontology of flesh? When gauged by analysis of citations alone, Whitehead’s influence on Merleau-Ponty appears to be a brief and minor encounter. However, despite the paucity of explicit reference to Whitehead, there is an argument to be made that Whitehead’s philosophy played a pivotal role in the development of Merleau-Ponty’s late thought. This can be understood in relation to Whitehead’s theory of education, which consists of three stages: romance, precision, and generalization. It will also be shown how Whitehead’s theory of education corresponds to Merleau-Ponty’s incomplete phenomenological reduction. From this, we are provided with access to a metaphenomenological reading of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre, which can be understood as an ongoing movement between phenomenology and ontology, a movement in which Whitehead’s thought played a significant—if largely “invisible”—role.

Asia is now home to some 800 million multilingual speakers of English, more than the total number of native English speakers, and how they use English is continuously evolving and changing to reflect their cultural backgrounds and everyday experiences. Can English, therefore, be considered an Asian language? Drawing upon the Asian Corpus of English, this book will be the first comprehensive account of the roles, uses and features of English in Asia, encompassing several different varieties of Asian English. Chapters cover the distinctive linguistic features of English in different settings, such as in law, religion and popular culture, as well as the use of local rhetorical, pragmatic and cultural styles and its use as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals. It will also examine the role of English in education - from primary through to higher education - and consider the implications of this for other languages of Asia.

The ecological crisis demonstrates the inadequacy of current modes of thought to grasp the nature of reality and to act accordingly. A more sophisticated metaphysical system is necessary. Arran Gare, a prominent Australian philosopher, has produced such a system, which takes into account the post modern sciences of non-linear thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and complexity theory. The present article promotes a cosmology based on Gare's metaphysics. In contrast to modern science, the postmodern account offered here will come to terms with a world governed by indifference, which is the same indifference that Albert Camus describes as "absurd". Camus will be interpreted in light of Gare's metaphysics.

As a grand narrative of progress, the utopian project of modernity is primarily concerned with notions of rationalism, universalism, and the development of a metalanguage. The triumph of the Moderate Enlightenment has seen logics of domination, accumulation and individualism incorporated into the project of modernity, with these logics giving rise to globalised capitalism as the metalanguage of modernity and neoliberal economics as the grand narrative of rational progress. The project of modernity is all but complete, requiring only the formality of an end. However, rather than utopia, the foreseeable endpoint of modernity is environmental collapse, with neoliberal economics also serving as a grand narrative of environmental destruction. As an anti-modern response, postmodernism has been a triumphant failure. While there is much to be gained from the postmodern critique of modernity, its incredulity towards metanarratives has left it incapable of forming an adequate response to modernity, especially in regards to action on climate change. Postmodernism is better characterized as a crisis located within modernity itself and it will be argued that rather than the pursuit of the modern or the post-modern, we need to re-imagine ourselves as proto- historical to overcome the impasse of late-capitalism.