Fiona Jenkins

The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions Philip Kitcher, 1993 Oxford University Press pp. ix + 421, £30.00, ISBN 019 504628 5 Mind, Brain, Behavior. The Mind‐Body Problem and the Philosophy of Psychology Martin Carrier & JÜrgen Mittelstrass, 1991 Berlin, Walter de Gruyter pp. 314, £51.82, ISBN 3 11012876 4 Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault's Histoire de la Folie Arthur Still & Irving Velody (Eds), 1992 Routledge pp. x + 225, £45, ISBN 0 415 06654 9 Economics and the Philosophy of Science Deborah Redman, 1993 Oxford, Oxford University Press pp. xiv + 252, £10.95 (paperback), ISBN 019 508274 5 The Disorder of Things John Dupré, 1993 Cambridge, MA/london, UK, Harvard University Press pp. viii+ 308, £27.95, ISBN 0 674 21260 6 The Philosophy of Vacuum Simon Saunders & Harvey R. Brown (Eds), 1991 Oxford, Oxford University Press pp. 291, £37.50, ISBN 0 19 824449 5 The Laboratory of the Mind James R. Brown, 1991 London, Routledge pp. xi+ 175, £11.99 (paperback), ISBN 0 415 095794 The Revision Theory of Truth A. Gupta & N. D. Belnap, 1993 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press pp. xii + 299, £31.50, ISBN 0 262 07144 4.

Wide-ranging essays making up the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. This volume collects a wide-ranging set of essays examining Friedrich Nietzsche's engagement with antiquity in all its aspects. It investigates Nietzsche's reaction and response to the concept of "classicism," with particular reference to his work on Greek culture as a philologist in Basel and later as a philosopher of modernity, and to his reception of German classicism in all his texts. The book should be of interest to students of ancient history and classics, philosophy, comparative literature, and Germanistik. Taken together, these papers suggest that classicism is both a more significant, and a more contested, concept for Nietzsche than is often realized, and it demonstratesthe need for a return to a close attention to the intellectual-historical context in terms of which Nietzsche saw himself operating. An awareness of the rich variety of academic backgrounds, methodologies, and techniques of reading evinced in these chapters is perhaps the only way for the contemporary scholar to come to grips with what classicism meant for Nietzsche, and hence what Nietzsche means for us today. The book is divided into five sections -- The Classical Greeks; Pre-Socratics and Pythagoreans, Cynics and Stoics; Nietzsche and the Platonic Tradition; Contestations; and German Classicism -- and constitutes the first major study of Nietzsche and the classical tradition in a quarter of a century. Contributors: Jessica N. Berry, Benjamin Biebuyck, Danny Praet and Isabelle Vanden Poel, Paul Bishop, R. Bracht Branham, Thomas Brobjer, David Campbell, Alan Cardew, Roy Elveton, Christian Emden, Simon Gillham, John Hamilton, Mark Hammond, Albert Henrichs, Dirk t.D. Held, David F. Horkott, Dylan Jaggard, Fiona Jenkins, Anthony K. Jensen, Laurence Lampert, Nicholas Martin, Thomas A. Meyer, Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, John S. Moore, Neville Morley, David N. McNeill, James I. Porter, Martin A. Ruehl, Herman Siemens, Barry Stocker, Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, and Peter Yates. Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the University of Glasgow.

Despite its place in the humanities, the career prospects and numbers of women in philosophy much more closely resemble those found in the sciences and engineering. This book collects a series of critical essays by female philosophers pursuing the question of why philosophy continues to be inhospitable to women and what can be done to change it. By examining the social and institutional conditions of contemporary academic philosophy in the Anglophone world as well as its methods, culture, and characteristic commitments, the volume provides a case study in interpretation of one academic discipline in which women's progress seems to have stalled since initial gains made in the 1980s. Some contributors make use of concepts developed in other contexts to explain women's under-representation, including the effects of unconscious biases, stereotype threat, and micro-inequities. Other chapters draw on the resources of feminist philosophy to challenge everyday understandings of time, communication, authority and merit, as these shape effective but often unrecognized forms of discrimination and exclusion. Often it is assumed that women need to change to fit existing institutions. This book instead offers concrete reflections on the way in which philosophy needs to change, in order to accommodate and benefit from the important contribution women's full participation makes to the discipline.

How might philosophically based counseling avoid becoming just one more form of private therapy, to be set alongside all the others now sold to individual consumers? Although several practitioners of philosophical counseling have sought to distinguish their approach from psychotherapeutic models, Foucault’s critique of the dominant modern model of ethical reflection might be used to argue for their essential continuity with one another, based on their common acceptance of the primacy of the imperatives of knowledge. Foucault turned in his late writings to ancient Greek models of ethics as ‘care of the self ’, delineating a self-relation prior to knowledge. This paper argues for the interest and importance for philosophical counseling of the idea of ethics as ‘care of the self ’ in articulating a model of ethical reflection distinct from both rationalist and irrationalist tendencies in modern thought and focussed on self-mastery conceived as addressing our relation to otherness rather than as authenticity or autonomy. Moreover, the ‘aesthetics of existence’ that Foucault prescribes to the present has a significant and affirmative relationship to po­litical life; this distinguishes it from the private and individualistic project, dismissed by Foucault as ‘the Californian cult of the self ’, for which philosophical counseling can all too readily be mistaken.

How might we construe the demand that is posed by the circulation of photographic images in the contemporary world other than the sense that is given to these in contemporary cosmopolitanism, that is, as an extension of the realm of representation to a wider humanity? The ontological reading of the image and its way of marking life given here delineates an approach to the evidence that images present that de-centres the place of human subjectivity as the locus of meaning. Using the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on the image, and Judith Butler on the apprehension of grievable life, the essay seeks to phrase the nature of a demand arising from the image, as that which exceeds an immediate or given context. It is this demand, I suggest, that is given in the non-representational aspect of the image, its circulation out of context. To heed this demand, I argue, is to attend to what Nancy terms “being-singular-plural” and Butler “grievable life,” and to move beyond the cosmopolitan form of vision toward what Derrida terms “hospitality.”

The current discourse on gender equity in universities most often situates itself in relation to eliminating bias and thus ensuring objectivity in rankings of excellence. With a focus on the discipline of philosophy, the article asks whether we thereby miss what it is important to contest but also cultivate in social worlds organized by their ever-partial and imperfect forms of discrimination in judgment? An approach based in efforts to engage in socio-political regulation of discrimination is proposed as advantageous.

Interrogating the concepts of allegiance and identity in a globalised world involves renewing our understanding of membership and participation within and beyond the nation-state. Allegiance can be used to define a singular national identity and common connection to a nation-state. In a global context, however, we need more dynamic conceptions to understand the importance of maintaining diversity and building allegiance with others outside borders. Understanding how allegiance and identity are being reconfigured today provides valuable insights into important contemporary debates around citizenship. This book reveals how public and international law understand allegiance and identity. Each involves viewing the nation-state as fundamental to concepts of allegiance and identity, but they also see the world slightly differently. With contributions from philosophers, political scientists and social psychologists, the result is a thorough appraisal of allegiance and identity in a range of socio-legal contexts.

This chapter argues that despite the wide-spread institution of gender-blind procedures for appointments and promotions, meritocracy as it operates in academic institutions still fails to realise progressive ideals. Although in certain respects meritocratic systems facilitate women’s entry to institutions, they can also serve to validate women’s ‘failures’ to advance in their careers. Arguing from the fact of the persistence of women’s minor status in certain disciplinary areas, and taking philosophy as a case-study, the chapter advocates a critique of meritocracy that goes beyond bias in individual judgments to explore systemic and gendered conservatism in the reproduction of disciplinary norms. The chapter contests the possibility of separating ideas of disciplinary ‘excellence’ from social contexts that include gender inequity, arguing that the assumed disjunction of ‘equity’ and ‘excellence’ serves to support an untenable understanding of the ‘essence’ of a discipline as given independently of the context provided by a gendered academy.

This discussion of Infinitely Demanding explores the terms of the paradox with which Critchley is centrally concerned: how an ethico-politics can at once begin in disappointment and yet allow for engagement, the infinite renewal of commitment and optimism. Placing this in critical relation to the paradox Rorty meets with his account of the "private ironist and public liberal" in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I argue that Critchley's ethico-politics invokes the possibility of a non-ironical categorical imperative, at the meeting point of finitude and the infinite and at the heart of what is also a political space of intersubjectivity. I examine the logic of humour and of commitment within the Kantian frame thus suggested, arguing for their relevance to certain aspects of anarcho-activism, but also for their limitations in desperate circumstances, posing the risk that Critchley's preferred politics falls back into liberal complacency.