Megan Craig

This essay explores the situation of thinking and writing while in motion between places. Building on the authors’ experiences as philosophers who commute regularly, they explore what it means to do creative work while being conveyed by vehicles that mediate their direct contact with the earth, freeing them to think and write otherwise than when engaged in more fully practical ways. They identify three parameters of this situation: movement across space and in time, the suspension of body mass, and the transportation of this mass in a manner that releases new energies and new directions of thought. They conclude that serious writing need not happen in the traditional sedentary manner—in libraries and personal studies—but can be done, and sometimes done better, in transit.

Thinking The Plural: Richard J. Bernstein and the Expansion of American Philosophy is a text devoted to highlighting, scrutinizing, and deploying Bernstein’s philosophical research as it has intersected and impacted American and European philosophy. Collecting essays written explicitly for the volume from former students of Bernstein’s, the book shows the breadth and scope of his work while expanding key insights into new contexts and testing his work against thinkers outside the canon of his own scholarship. In light of urgent contemporary ethical and political problems, the papers collected here show the continuing relevance of Bernstein’s lifelong focus on democracy, dialogue, pragmatism, fallibilism, and pluralism. Bernstein has always contested the supposed Analytic/Continental divide, insisting on the pluralism of philosophical discourses and styles that contribute to genuine debate and save philosophy from stale academicism. This book enacts Bernstein’s pluralistic spirit by crossing traditions and generating new avenues for ongoing research. A central argument of the book is that thinkers of different backgrounds, using diverse, and even clashing methodologies, contribute to the understanding of a given problem, issue, or theme. This argument lies at the heart of Bernstein’s published works and is central to the fallibilistic pragmatism of his pedagogy. This book therefore does not rest on a single answer to a question or a univocal theme, but shows the differentiation of Bernstein’s scholarship through the extension of pluralism into territory Bernstein himself did not enter. The chapters, individually and collectively, demonstrate the force of Bernstein’s pluralism beyond mere commentary on his works. This book will be of interest to many people: 1) scholars, students and others in American philosophy who have worked on or with Richard J. Bernstein or in the tradition of American Pragmatism widely construed, 2) those interested in the intersections between American and European philosophy or between the Analytic and Continental traditions, 3) professional philosophers, philosophy students, and public intellectuals concerned with the application of theory to contemporary ethical and political problems, and 4) those interested in an introduction to the key concepts animating Bernstein’s work and their relationship to the history of philosophy.

ABSTRACT This article considers three kinds of relations: being-there-alongside, waiting, and staying, that come into focus at or after the end of life. The first relation is explored in light of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s contrasting accounts of responsibility, the second in terms of Bergson’s notion of hesitation, and the third in relation to Winnicott’s description of a “holding environment.” The work serves as a plea for spaces and practices that support more generous, open-ended, and nuanced relations among those who are dying and those who attend to and survive them.

ABSTRACT This article investigates drawing as a form of devotional attention. Engaging with the work of María Lugones and examples from Josef Albers, Corita Kent, Franz Opalka, Georgia O’Keeffe, and William Kentridge, each section revolves around drawing in relation to embodied practices of being together with others. In addition to a personal account of memories and rituals of drawings, this article examines the degree to which drawing hones a pragmatic sense for fallibility, fluidity, and open-ended research, while arguing for drawing as a form of commitment to community that challenges historical associations of creativity with individualistic or uninhibited freedom.

This article explores nonpathological fear in relation to nonhuman animal encounters in the wild. Critiquing a contemporary, philosophical romance with animal life, Craig turns to Cora Diamond to consider alternative styles of thinking and writing about animals and experiences that defy ready-made paradigms. Diamond diagnoses the tendency for philosophers to deflect from reality. The author follows Diamond in seeking methods to forestall or delay deflection in favor of an open-ended examination of the ways that fear, imagination, and childhood memories inform the sense of oneself as an animal in relation to other animals.

ABSTRACT This article brings together Toni Morrison, Jane Jacobs, and Howard Hodgkin to consider the stress they each place on “contact,” albeit through their distinctive media of literature, urban planning, and oil paint, respectively. The article begins with Morrison's account of the stranger as not foreign or unusual but “random.” Morrison views literature as a means of bringing readers into controlled contact with others and especially with those others (those strangers) one might fear, avoid, or overlook. Morrison sets the stage for thinking about contact in relation to the concept of randomness. Part 2 turns to Jacobs, who investigates city sidewalks as sites of interpersonal contact that affect the safety, health, solidarity, responsibility, and freedoms of those living in urban environments. Part 3 turns to Hodgkin and his obsession with the frame as an invitation to touch. The figures brought together in this article serve as touchstones for how to create, foster, or enlarge sites for contact. Together they might help us to expand the parameters of what contact might mean, how it might occur, and where it can happen.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Play, Laugh, LoveCynthia Willett’s Challenge to PhilosophyMegan CraigIt is an honor to respond to Cynthia Willett’s work, which has been an inspiration for me personally as well as a crucial corrective to the biases and blind spots of Western philosophy. Reading her entails reviewing some of the most basic features of one’s life: the place you call home, the people you live with, your mother or primary caregiver, the words you utter, the other animals you love or ignore, and local conditions for justice, for play, for laughter, and for art. Her four major texts, all of them ethical, confront irony, motherhood, social justice, and animals. Because it would be impossible to deal comprehensively with the ways in which Willett has challenged and strategically sabotaged philosophy, my remarks here will focus on her most recent book, Interspecies Ethics, which expands several aspects of her early work on irony and laughter and her groundbreaking research on affect in Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities.Interspecies Ethics is a brave and joyful investigation into the possibilities for camaraderie and justice among and between animal species. The book is moving in its descriptions of animal behaviors and sharp in its critique of philosophy’s implication in the chasm between human beings and other animals. Willett’s text is also ingenious in its performative aspects. She devotes much of her attention to the comic and to laughter, in spite of the grave subject matter she tackles and a final chapter devoted to J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. She not only enjoins us to consider other animals’ capacities for laughter and humor, she tells jokes. Her first chapter, “Can the Animal Subaltern Laugh?” [End Page 59] (co-written with her sister) revolves around a Colbert Report episode relating to monkeys and ends with the phrase “ jello and porn” (probably the first-ever invocation of these terms, together, in a philosophical text). Willett’s humor recalibrates the expectations we have for philosophical prose and expands the resources we might use when philosophizing. Additionally, in laughing along with Willett, we are already exhibiting our animal natures. As she writes, “Waves of laughter lower defenses and mock the borders of subjects and groups, exposing these borders as more porous than they might have been thought” (Willett 2014, 79). In the spirit of forging a community of the laughing, Willett begins her thinking about animals not from the perspective of pity, shame, or horror at what we do to them, but from a celebratory glee in animal life.In this essay, I will stress a few of the themes running through Willett’s work and pose three questions for further discussion. These relate, in order, to interspecies contact, playgrounds, and to her reading of Disgrace.Contact EthicsWillett is concerned with the world we share with other animals, with our common lots and the blurred edges of our differing bodies and habitats. Her book invites an awareness of the tragic fates of so many animals, but also the ridiculous, comical, and joyous aspects of our overlapping animal natures. Her emphases fall on playfulness, laughter, and musicality—traits she observes across animal species and that challenge human exceptionalism. Interspecies Ethics continues Willett’s ongoing project of reimagining the conditions for ethical life. Rather than an ethics based in infinite responsibility, one premised on sympathy and the recognition of mutual suffering, or an ethics rooted in the internalization of a universal law, Willett envisions an ethics grounded in “call and response,” which she describes as “discourse ethics across species” (Willett 2014, 27). For her, “discourse” means an initial, preverbal, rhythmic participation in the life of another creature. This is a far cry from the rational discourse ethics associated with Habermas. Instead, she sees call and response ethics as a tentative, playful exchange that challenges accounts of language, reason, and rationality. It also corrects Levinasian response or alterity ethics by reminding us that “responding to alterity is not [equivalent to] living with those other creatures” (Willett 2014, 9). In a way, Willett’s vision of ethics entails normalizing and extending the Levinasian face to face encounter to see what happens when we face...

This article is about the relationship between philosophy and storytelling. It also ends up being about animals, communication, sympathy, and imagination. Many contemporary philosophers have written about the relationship between literature and philosophy, but, for two reasons, I will frame my remarks by referencing the American philosopher Cora Diamond. The first reason that I want to focus on Diamond is that she has argued for the importance of literature in the development and education of what she calls “moral imagination.” Following Diamond’s lead, I hope to say a few things about the relationship between the stories we tell and hear and our..

ABSTRACT This article employs Richard Rorty's 1996 text “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096” as a model for examining the state of America, education, and philosophy from the year 2117. The imaginative engagement explores how past and present structures might yield to future forms with a focus on early childhood education, guns, literacy, higher education and the state of the university, and the relationships between professional philosophy and social activism in America. Arguing for a shift in the paradigms of thinking and writing to include more revolutionary and artistic practice, this essay envisions a future in which philosophy takes increasingly pluralistic, creative, and political forms. Rorty's prophetic writings serve as one example of the value of imagination in the production of social change, hope, and the destabilization of entrenched patterns of thought.