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21. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18
David E. Schrader

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Environmental ethics uniquely challenges us to re-examine the foundations of ethical thought. Ethical frameworks that focus on individual ethical agents and ethical patients, ignoring their status as parts of interrelated communities, lead to strongly counterintuitive results in important cases. Ideas only hinted at in Aldo Leopold’s idea of “land ethic” can be developed fruitfully by extending a pragmatist ethical framework drawn from the work of William James. Such a framework is not without difficulties, but does offer a potentially valuable way of framing our ethical obligations toward the encompassing environment within which we live.

22. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18
Arjun Poudel

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This essay draws a parallel between Macaulay’s stint as the “lawgiver” of India under the East India Company and the Anglicists-Orientalists debate that he brought to a decisive end on the one hand and on the other the culture/canon wars of the 1980s, and the neoconservative ascendancy that followed it and remained influential during the second Iraq War. Although neo-conservativism’s fierce resistance to a more inclusive liberal arts curriculum in the 1980s and its towering role during the militarization of the US foreign policy in the last decade has established it as the most Eurocentric and logocentric intellectual movement at present, post-colonial studies is yet to take a serious reckoning of this ideological movement. This essay tries to fill this lacuna with an attempt to first establish Macaulayite Whiggism as a precursor of the American neo-conservatism and then to focus on Macaulay’s oedipal hostility with Sir William Temple, who was not just the most accomplished statesman of English Restoration Era (that Macaulay himself considered the golden period of English history and became its historian laureate), but also stood on the exact opposite pole of Macaulay’s Whiggish Eurocentrism. Finally, the essay will briefly consider Temple’s little-known essay “On the Ancient and Modern Learning” and its genuine and uniquely anti-logocentric outlook on non-European cultures and their histories.

23. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18
Brian Mussaumi

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book reviews

24. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18
Rockwell F. Clancy

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25. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18
Dušan Ristić

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26. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18

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27. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Yubraj Aryal

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28. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
R. Victoria Arana

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William Blake and Zadie Smith reached strikingly similar critical positions towards philosophical trends current in their respective eras. Both excoriate those who, for selfish ends, disparage beauty and in so doing sabotage justice, love, joy and genuine freedom. Smith’s On Beauty, like Blake’s America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, indicts the reprehensible intellectual discourses of the day that undermine human happiness and corrupt the social order. Whereas Blake critiqued the rights revolutions set in motion by Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and others from a more broadly moral and future-oriented angle than has generally been recognized (as Saree Makdisi has shown), Smith wittily dramatizes that same vision through a huge range of up-to-date ideological discourses and antagonisms–many of them descended from Paine et al.–to refurbish Blake’s particular brand of radical antinomianism and to celebrate much the same optimistic spirit that Blake invested in America and Visions. Indeed, Smith’s novel anticipates and critiques ab ovo the sweepingenthusiasms that are animating current uprisings worldwide.

29. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
David A. Colón

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Salomón de la Selva (1893-1959) was a Nicaraguan writer/activist who authored many books of verse in Spanish, but only one in English: TropicalTown, And Other Poems (1918). Published in New York by John Lane–and regarded by Silvio Sirias as the first book of English verse published in the U.S.by a Latin American–Tropical Town exhibits a curious dynamic of avantgarde impulse: radically subversive in invoking counter-politics resisting U.S. colonial transnationalism, yet tending toward inherited, traditional aesthetic forms of poetry meant to legitimize Selva’s Latin American identity with an impression of authority that contiguous Modernist experimental poetries could not. Through its sympathy for the U.S. immigrant’s nostalgia for homeland, coupled with express disapproval of U.S. international affairs, Tropical Town leaves a poetic record that challenges presuppositions about the integral relationships between ethos, aesthetics, and consciousness vis-à-vis assumed understandings of what constitutes radical poetry in the Modernist moment.

30. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
James Tar Tsaaior

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This paper, therefore, ploughs the furrow of postcolonial history, memory and the poetic imagination deploying the poetry of the Nigerian poet Joe Ushie.In particular, the paper negotiates the Rwandan genocide as a tragic foreground of the imperial process through its indulgent, artificial fixing of boundaries to accomplish its empire-building project in Africa. But beyond the colonial mediation in, and onslaught on, the cultures of others, the paper argues that African societies have also been complicit in their agonistic and violent history as the Rwandan genocide amply demonstrates. The paper concludes that a martial culture reminiscent of Civan, the warmonger, which manifests itself in private and especially public domains will only entrench intolerance, ethnocentrism, communal wars and violent death on the continent.

31. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Laurie Johnson

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The prospects for a phenomenology of technology have been guided in the past decade by a split between supporters of Martin Heidegger and those who subscribe to Bernard Stiegler’s critique of Heidegger. This essay proposes that both are needed for a phenomenology of what Edward Castronova calls “synthetic worlds” (large on-line environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft). Here is a phenomenology that must take into account histories of design and technical evolution to account for the particular “fantasy of disembodiment” that shapes a user’s experience of a synthetic world, forgetting the bodily engagement with hardware.

32. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Mihaela P. Harper

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This article examines the difference between two concepts of critical importance to the philosophical frameworks of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze–pleasure and desire–through the troubling and troubled figure of suicide. My contention is that, in the work of both thinkers, suicide makes legible an affirmative impulsion and a mode or tekhnē (in both senses of the term: practice and art) of encountering an unforeseeable virtuality (the Outside). Of aesthetic and ethical significance, this mode is experimental and dangerous, a frequency of passion, situated between pleasure and desire. Souci de soi (the care of the self) and a line of flight, I suggest, coincide in suicide, “an art that it takes a lifetime to learn.”

33. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Lauren Berlant

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book reviews

34. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Yubraj Aryal

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35. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17
Martin Savransky

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36. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 17

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editorial

37. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Yubraj Aryal

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38. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Johanna Drucker

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Modern poetics takes one crucial turn through Ezra Pound’s notion of the “ideogram,” a concept that had a lasting impact through the Imagists andtheir influence. The ideogram borrows from Pound’s ideas about Chinese characters, their ability to condense complex representation into a figuredform in an economic but resonant image. By contrast, the compositional technique embodied in French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s unique work, UnCoup de Dés, can be characterized as “diagrammatic,” driven by semantic relations expressed spatially in a distributed field. This essay explores thatdiagrammatic work and it implications as a compositional technique.

39. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Sandor Goodhart

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In the interest of moving conflict resolution toward reconciliation, theorists have turned to René Girard whose understanding of scapegoating and imitative desire acquires special importance. But Girardian thinking offers no unique ethical solution, and so theorists have turned to Emmanuel Levinas for such an account. Four ideas especially from Levinas appear helpful: his criticism of totality (and, concomitantly, his substitution of the idea of the infinite); the face as an opening (or gateway) to the infinite; the Other (or other individual) and my infinite (or unlimited) responsibility toward her (or him); and language as the dire as opposed to the dit, the saying (or “to say”) as opposed to the said, as one modality in which this openness to the other individual takes place. Combining Girard’s analysis of the sacrificial with Levinas’s analysis of the ethical may offer conflict resolution theorists an account as thoroughgoing and as old as Biblical scripture, and one to which, in the interest of moving toward reconciliation, they would do well to pay heed.

40. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 16
Paul Redding

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G. W. Leibniz was a philosopher caught up in both the scientific and theological disputes of his day. Here I argue that a set of common concerns underlay hisengagement within two seemingly very different disputes: that with Newton over the nature of space and time, and that with Socinians over the Christian doctrineof the Trinity.First, Leibniz’s objections to Newton’s conception of space and time were linked to his objection to Newton’s model of the mind with which they was linkedbecause of Newton’s attempt to find support for his notions of absolute space and time by treating them as attributes of an infinitely extended immaterial God.Significantly, Newton had himself been a defender of the anti-trinitarian heresy of Arianism, and Leibniz’s alternative model of mindedness was in turn tied tohis trinitarian theology, as he saw the idea of three persons in one God as providing a model for human self-consciousness in which the identity of thereflecting and reflected upon thinking subject must be maintained. We can see within Leibniz’s triune model of self-consciousness the kernel of laterintersubjective models of human intentionality developed within the period of German Idealism.