Tim O'Leary

_The Ends of Critique_ re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volume’s reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research network _Terra Critica_.

Nervous systems are formidably complex networks of nonlinear interacting components that self organise and continually adapt to enable flexible behaviour. Robust and reliable function is therefore non-trivial to achieve and requires a number of dynamic mechanisms and design principles that are the subject of current research in neuroscience. A striking feature of these principles is that they resemble engineering solutions, albeit at a greater level of complexity and layered organisation than any artificial system. I will draw on these observations to argue that biological robustness in the nervous system remains a deep scientific puzzle, but not one that demands radically new concepts.