Jay Martin

Taking on the stigma of inauthenticity : Adorno's critique of genuineness -- Is experience still in crisis? : reflections on a Frankfurt school lament -- Mourning a metaphor: the revolution is over -- Cultural relativism and the visual turn -- Scopic regimes of modernity revisited -- No state of grace : violence in the garden -- Visual parrhesia? : Foucault and the truth of the gaze -- The Kremlin of modernism -- Phenomenology and lived experience -- Aesthetic experience and historical experience : a twenty-first-century constellation -- Still waiting to hear from derrida -- Pseudology : Derrida on Arendt and lying in politics -- The menace of consilience : keeping the disciplines unreconciled -- Can there be national philosophies in a transnational world? -- Straddling a watershed? -- Allons enfants de l'humanité : the French and human rights -- Intellectual family values : William Phillips, Hannah Arendt, and the Partisan review -- Still sleeping rough : Colin Wilson's the outsider at fifty.

Both the metaphorology of Hans Blumenberg and negative dialectics of Theodor W. Adorno recognized the value of the “nonconceptual” as an antidote to the tyranny of rational concepts imposed on a reality that was too diverse, contingent, and qualitatively unique to be subsumed under them. But whereas Blumenberg focused on metaphor and myth as rhetorical alternatives to concepts designed to deal with the incomprehensibility of “absolute reality,” Adorno understood nonconceptuality in terms of the material and corporeal limits to cultural constructivism of any kind. He held out hope for a balance between the power of constitutive subjectivity and the resistance of the material world to its sway.

As demonstrated by Marx’s fierce defence of his integrity when anonymously accused of lying in 1872, he was a principled believer in both personal honesty and the value of truth in politics. Whether understood as enabling an accurate, ‘scientific’ depiction of the contradictions of the present society or a normative image of a truly just society to come, truth-telling was privileged by Marx over hypocrisy as a political virtue. Contemporary Marxists like Alain Badiou continue this tradition, arguing that revolutionary politics should be understood as a ‘truth procedure’. Drawing on the alternative position of political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, who distrusted tin; monologic and absolutist implications of a strong notion of truth in politics, this paper defends the role that hypocrisy and mendacity, understood in terms of lots of little lies rather than one big one, can play in a pluralist politics, in which, pace Marx, rhetoric, opinion and the clash of values resist being subsumed under a singular notion of the truth.

The removal of water from mines was one of the key issues that former miners had to deal with. Roman colonists brought new technology to the Iberian Peninsula that addressed this problem. However, they did not invent this technology because it had already been applied to the growth of other endeavours in the Hellenistic society throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. In the mine, the Archimedes screw, waterwheels, bucket pulleys, and Ctesibius pumps were the primary drainage systems. In this essay, the primary characteristics, and modes of operation of machines are examined. Without leaving out the most significant finds made in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula, one of the regions with the longest history of mining exploitation. To serve as a foundation for future research in this field, this work compares the primary mining mechanisms in ancient Huelva on a qualitative and quantitative level by the implementation of a TOPSIS methodology, a multi-criteria decision analysis method.

Formułowane w ostatnim czasie przez postępowych Amerykanów zarzuty wobec cynicznej, konserwatywnej „weaponizacji” wolności słowa trafnie zwracają uwagę na tkwiący w niej aspekt hipokryzji. Przesłankę tych oskarżeń często stanowi jednak wolność słowa rozumiana „absolutystycznie” jako bezwzględne dobro. W istocie należy ją zawsze rozumieć jako coś, co prowadzi do innego celu: mającego wymiar obiektywny, subiektywny bądź intersubiektywny. Najczęstszą funkcją wolności słowa jest tworzenie warunków dla epistemologicznego poszukiwania prawdy. Zwracali na to uwagę liberałowie, tacy jak John Stuart Mill, oraz marksiści, tacy jak Herbert Marcuse – twierdzący, że realizację tego celu utrudnia „represywna tolerancja” dla szkodliwych lub błędnych idei. Wolności słowa można bronić również ze względu na wpisaną w nią możliwość wyrażania indywidualnych opinii i uczuć, bez której nie ma mowy o jednostkowej autonomii. Trzecia funkcja wolności słowa ma charakter performatywny: język może służyć do działania w świecie. Współcześnie najczęściej mówi się w tym kontekście o ograniczaniu „mowy nienawiści” jako aktu przemocy symbolicznej, jednak konsekwencje tak rozumianej wolności słowa mogą być również pozytywne. Czwarty telos wolności wypowiedzi – semantyczny raczej niż epistemologiczny, ekspresywny czy performatywny – to tworzenie nowych znaczeń kulturowych bądź krytyka konwencjonalnych. Ponieważ wolność słowa może służyć jednej lub większej liczbie z tych funkcji, warto jej bronić również w niedoskonałym społeczeństwie, niezależnie od tego (przy całym szacunku dla Marcusego), że nie ma ona wartości bezwzględnej.

Re/reading the Past is concerned with the discourses of history, from the complementary perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The papers in the book stress the discursive construction of the past, focussing on the different social narratives which compete for official acknowledgement. Issues of collective and cultural memory are addressed, reflecting the "linguistic turn" in the Social Sciences. The book covers a range of discourses, interpreting texts from popular culture to academic discourse including the construction and evaluation of past events in a variety of places around the world. It is especially timely in its focus on the construction of time and value in a post-colonial world where history discourses are central to on-going processes of reconciliation, debates on war crimes, and the issues of amnesty and restitution. As such the book fills a significant gap in interdisciplinary debates as well as in register and genre analysis, and will be of general interest to historians, political scientists and discourse analysts as well as students and teachers of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes).

There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so doing earn abiding respect for their intrinsic merit? Or do they inevitably reflect them in ways that undermine their universal aspirations? Are discrete contexts so incommensurable and unique that the smooth passage of ideas from one to the other is impossible? Are we always trapped by the limits of our own cultural standpoints and partial perspectives, or can we somehow escape their constraints and enter into a fruitful dialogue with others? These persistent questions are at the heart of the discipline known as intellectual history, which deals not only with ideas, but also with the men and women who generate, disseminate, and criticize them. The essays in this collection, by one of the most recognized figures in the field, address them through engagement with leading intellectual historians—Hans Blumenberg, Quentin Skinner, Hayden White, Isaiah Berlin, Frank Ankersmit—as well other giants of modern thought—Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Georg Lukács. They touch on a wide variety of related topics, ranging from the heroism of modern life to the ability of photographs to lie. In addition, they explore the fraught connections between philosophy and theory, the truth of history and the truthfulness of historians, and the weaponization of free speech for other purposes.

Few words in both everyday parlance and theoretical discourse have been as rhapsodically defended or as fervently resisted as "experience." Yet, to date, there have been no comprehensive studies of how the concept of experience has evolved over time and why so many thinkers in so many different traditions have been compelled to understand it. _Songs of Experience _is a remarkable history of Western ideas about the nature of human experience written by one of our best-known intellectual historians. With its sweeping historical reach and lucid comparative analysis—qualities that have made Martin Jay's previous books so distinctive and so successful—_Songs of Experience _explores Western discourse from the sixteenth century to the present, asking why the concept of experience has been such a magnet for controversy. Resisting any single overarching narrative, Jay discovers themes and patterns that transcend individuals and particular schools of thought and illuminate the entire spectrum of intellectual history. As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience—epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical—Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit. Provocative, engaging, erudite, this key work will be an essential source for anyone who joins the ongoing debate about the material, linguistic, cultural, and theoretical meaning of "experience" in modern cultures.