Michael Levine

Many people who do not believe in God believe that 'everything is God' - that everything is part of an all-inclusive divine unity. In _Pantheism_, this concept is presented as a legitimate position and its philosophical basis is examined. Michael Levine compares it to theism, and discusses the scope for resolving the problems inherent in theism through pantheism. He also considers the implications of pantheism in terms of practice. This book will appeal to those who study philosophy or theology. It will also be of interest to anyone who does not believe in a personal God, but does have faith in a higher unifying force, and is interested in the justification of this as a legitimate system of thought.

This is a timely and stimulating collection of essays on the importance of Freudian thought for analytic philosophy, investigating its impact on mind, ethics, sexuality, religion and epistemology. Marking a clear departure from the long-standing debate over whether Freudian thought is scientific or not, _The Analytic Freud_ expands the framework of philosophical inquiry, demonstrating how fertile and mutually enriching the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis can be. The essays are divided into four clear sections, addressing the implications of Freud for philosophy of mind, ethics, sexuality and civilisation. The authors discuss the problems psychoanalysis poses for contemporary philosophy as well as what philosophy can learn from Freud's legacy and undeniable influence. For instance, _The Analytic Freud_ discusses the problems presented by pyschoanalytic theories of the mind for the philosophy of language; the issues which current theories of mind and meaning raise for psychoanalytic accounts of emotion, metaphor, the will and self-deception; the question whether psychoanalytic theory is essential in understanding sexuality, love, humour and the tensions which arise out of personal relationships. _The Analytic Freud_ is a critical and thorough examination of Freudian and post-Freudian theory, adding a welcome and significant dimension to the debate between psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy.

Many people who do not believe in God believe that 'everything is God' - that everything is part of an all-inclusive divine unity. In _Pantheism_, this concept is presented as a legitimate position and its philosophical basis is examined. Michael Levine compares it to theism, and discusses the scope for resolving the problems inherent in theism through pantheism. He also considers the implications of pantheism in terms of practice. This book will appeal to those who study philosophy or theology. It will also be of interest to anyone who does not believe in a personal God, but does have faith in a higher unifying force, and is interested in the justification of this as a legitimate system of thought.

This philosophical analysis of the phenomenon of racism brings together some of the most influential analytic philosophers writing on racism today. The introduction by Tamas Pataki outlines the historical and thematic development of conceptions of race and racism, and locates the following essays against the backdrop of contemporary reactions to that development. While the framework is primarily analytic, the volume also includes essays deeply informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminist and social theory. The fourteen chapters in this collection address three interrelated questions: What is racism? What are the causes of racism? and What are the moral and political implications of racism? Although their approaches are wide ranging, the contributors to Racism in Mind broadly endorse a psychological-characterological approach to the understanding of many aspects of racism.

This essay challenges the claim that fusion philosophy is the successor to comparative philosophy. Comparative philosophy should find itself deeply at odds with the approach to various philosophical problems and traditions that fusion philosophy is taking, and comparative philosophers will surely deny Mark Siderits’1 claim that they have been superseded. The manner then in which fusion philosophy dismisses comparativist concerns and objections is to admit that such objections are valid in some case but to deny that they are intrinsic to good fusion philosophy. Comparativists however generally do not claim that fusion philosophy is necessarily or inherently bound to make the mistakes and contribute to misunderstandings that they claim it often does. Their claim is that from the start such philosophy often does make just these kinds of problematic errors and assumptions, and that this is what comparativist philosophy must seek to avoid. By the time fusionists are done defending – actually 'sanitizing' – fusion philosophy from comparativist objections, one is left not with fusion philosophy but with what is – from the comparativist perspective – comparative philosophy. There is no succession from comparative philosophy to fusion philosophy and no segue from one to the other.

Derrida’s “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”, first delivered at the fifteenth annual Assises de la Traduction Littéraire à Arles in 1998, is an address that appears at first to speak from the outside and with a certain deference to professional translators. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that Derrida not only counts himself among them but uses the occasion to reflect on his own surprising success as a translator of Hegel. This success has to do first and foremost with the proven “relevance” of his translation of the notoriously untranslatable term Aufhebung as relève [in English: sublation]. Not a little perplexed by this apparent triumph, Derrida takes up the French term again, this time redeploying it in the translation of a crucial line from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In doing so, he relaunches his engagement with Hegel, asking what energies bound up in the concept of relève might yet be released, what internal resistances silently at work in it might still be mobilized to take it in an entirely new direction. Such an engagement enables him to explore in turn what resistances may be at work in the notion of translation itself. Inhabited by an internal otherness, by a constitutive resistance to itself, translation must be understood from the very first as transference. While translation studies have long been attentive to the transferential dynamics in which individual translators find themselves enmeshed, Derrida’s text views transference in more impersonal terms as the tenacious grip in which certain structures of thought hold us, structures which also inform our understanding of translation. How to work with and against this structural unconscious? To address this question, it is necessary to examine Derrida’s own translational practice and the privilege he accords to the term trouvaille.

Taking as its point of departure Derrida's essay “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” this article is concerned with the relation between the poetic discourse of several Celan lyrics and the problematic of circumcision—as religious operation, wound, inscription, linguistic structure—foregrounded in Derrida's reading, and thus on the relation between the event of Celan's lyric, the critical language with which Derrida and other readers engage it, and the discourse of Jewish identity. Also crucial is the relation to Kafka, since the lyric principally under investigation here, Celan's “Einem, der vor der Tür stand,” alludes to Kafka's parable “Before the Law.”

This chapter argues that Hume’s argument against justified belief in miracles in Part 1 of his essay is a priori and applies to firsthand experience of a miracle as well as to testimony. The disputed issues cannot be decided on how closely one reads the text or on what Hume “actually says” but are interpretive and require setting them in the context of Hume’s Treatise—his peculiar empiricism, his account of causation, and his theory of a posteriori reasoning. But even if, contrary to the a priori reading of Hume’s argument in Part 1, Hume never thought it impossible to justifiably believe in a miracle, and even if Hume’s argument in Part 1 fails, this does nothing to support the view that anyone has ever been “justified” in believing in a miracle or that “difficult and delicate empirical investigations” are needed before one justifiably rejects such belief.