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1. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Peter Nicholls

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Pound’s Thrones de los Cantares, the last full sequence of The Cantos has always been the least popular part of the long poem. Ronald Bush speaks for many when he concludes that its “substance is so abbreviated as to be unreadable” and that “the truncated and gnomic style of Thrones is inappropriate to the point of absurdity.”This essay seeks to analyze in detail one Canto from the sequence–Canto CVII–so as to define more closely the particular problems, formal and conceptual, that it presents to the reader. The essay offers a reading of the Canto and of Thrones that detects a profound tension in Pound’s writing between reference and allusion.

2. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Daniel Thomières

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The article is concerned with the problem of tradition. In what tradition should we place ourselves in order to understand Emily Dickinson a little better? For a number of reasons, empiricism is suggested and redefined, as there are at least two conceptions available (Locke's and Hume's). It is argued that this approach helps us account for the way Dickinson uses language in order to go as far as words will let her go. Can empiricism and Emily Dickinson enable us to see what the self, or identity–for want of better words–are? The poem "It was not Death, for I stood up" is studied in detail.

3. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Hoyt Edge, Margaret A. McLaren

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Our paper examines the impact of the intersection of cultural and gender identity on moral reasoning. We argue that concepts of self and approaches to moral reasoning are connected, concepts of self differ by gender and culture, moral reasoning differs by gender and culture. We propose that moral philosophy strives to be as inclusive as possible by including the full range of human diversity and experience. This would mean embracing—indeed, starting from—a multicultural, feminist approach to moral theories and questions; this approach would not only be sensitive to gender and cultural bias, but also offer an alternative model to the paradigmatic rational, autonomous, independent agent of traditional moral theory. This has implications for other areas of philosophy as well, such as recent work in philosophy of mind on the idea of extended cognition.

4. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Charley Ejede Mejame

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Contemporary philosophers, humanists, and social scientists have been wrestling with the difficulties mankind has in living together, with the problem of alterity, the problem of the other, the conundrum of the damnation of hell (as Jean-Paul Sartre terms it), its torture or agony and sufferings in the modern world. It is mentioned that we are nothing without others, that we are strongly interdependent, and that it is beyond the bounds of possibility avoiding their presence, which is basic to what we are. Yet living together with them is complex and difficult. Sundry problems, torments are, as it were, caused by their behaviors and judgments. We are sent negative images as well as deterministic plans to wrestle with. For Jean-Paul Sartre our relation with others is per se conflictual. The problem of alterity has all along presented serious problems to philosophers and humanists; they have not only found themselves powerless in the face of these manifestations but even seems foster them. This article identifies and examines the function and the devastating repercussions of this conflict, the representation, which we every one of us can have of himself in terms of identity in contemporary society. The paper also establishes significant points of convergence and contrast between contemporary Western thinkers (Levinas, Derrida etc.) and the healing wisdom of Africa implicit in its yet to be explored linguistic and literary corpus in addressing contemporary problems in humans living together, the problematic of an ethical life. According to Edgar Morin, we are in the prehistory of the human mind, meaning that the human mental capacities are yet to be explored, especially at the level of our relations with others.

5. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Lisa S. Banu

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This essay attempts to come to a philosophical understanding of the ethical provocation of speculation as evident in design. I argue that speculative design is a material practice of ethical creative coexistence and present three features of speculative philosophy that manifest in the design and use of two design examples: the Starbuck’s coffee cup and Marti Guixe’s design project, Solar Kitchen Restaurant in La Pin Kulta (2011). The philosophical interpretation relies on object-oriented works of Ian Bogost, Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett and their shared insistence on recognized non-identity.

6. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 20
Joseph Weiss

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This essay aims to lay the grounds for further exploration into how Louis Althusser’s conception of ideological interpellation might relate to the contemporary stage of neo-liberal capitalism. While bearing in mind Althusser’s framework, I mainly focus on how both Marx’s conception of the turnover-time (Umschlagszeit) of circulation and T.W. Adorno’s conception of the war-torn process of negative dialectics bring to the fore the moment when the unity of subjectivity ruptures. Through an examination of the process of reproduction, we not only observe how much German Idealism’s appeal to the unity of apperception was already structured by the logic of the commodity-form, we also witness how modern subjection has always been caught up in a speculative fetishism that disavows the negativity of experience, prioritizes time over space, and remains in thrall to the ever-accelerating speed of the totality. This indicates that the historical transformations in the temporal and spatial organization of subjectivity may, on the one hand, strengthen subjectivity by upsetting the capacity or desire to answer the so-called “hail” of the State, but may also, on the other hand, increase its malleability to domination.

7. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19

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8. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Charles Ross

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Michael Murrin’s work on allegory provides an instructive contrast to Stephen Greenblatt’s Aristotelian conception of art as representation. This essay argues that Christian Platonism created the allegorical mode in which Spenser wrote, allowing a different perspective of the self than the one Greenblatt describes in Renaissance Self-Fashioning. The essay then suggests that those Christian thinkers (cited by Greenblatt in The Swerve) who rejected Lucretius and Epicureanism did so for philosophical reasons deeply grounded in Plato’s thought–reasons that in the twentieth century found a home in the work of C. S. Lewis.

9. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Mamikon Asatryan

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The defeat of the USSR and of the world system of socialism, which was of a world-wide significance, raised a key question of its underlying causes. As an answer to that question, it is shown that the defeat was by no way accidental as it was brought forth not only because of mistakes in the application of Marxism but also of significant economic and socio-political fallacies. The key is in the fallacies, which are hidden deeply inside the methodology of Marxism and which therefore went unnoticed by anyone, i.e. in the violation in Marx’s Das Kapital of the requirements of a number of scientific methods that he used. Marx violated the requirements of the main method used in Das Kapital, viz. the method of ascension from the abstract to the concrete (he attributed the function of forecasting the future to that method, even though the method does not have it) as well as the methods of forecast, systems approach and hypothesis. Those methodological fallacies and distortions and their epistemological consequences provide evidence that Marxism is a result of seriously flawed beliefs and it could not avoid failure. Exposure of the above-mentioned fallacies and distortions will help broad masses of people to shed communist illusions and to avoid new social and political upheavals.

10. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
John F. DeCarlo

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Busting the Hermenuetical Ghosts: Steering clear of pre-modern, Romantic, Freudian, and post-modern readings, DeCarlo asserts how Shakespeare's Hamlet text foreshadows the modern philosophical thought of Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, particularly in regard to the intellectual issues of thought and doubt, time and action, and being and death.

11. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Heidi L. Pennington

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In this article, I investigate the ethical potential of Victorian literature that markedly discourages readerly sympathy with the protagonists. Generating sympathy for fictional characters was, and often still is, considered to be the primary way in which the novel promotes ethical thoughts, feelings, and behavior in readers. For this reason, the ethical prospects of novels that fail or refuse to make their main characters appealing and instead inspire aversion in readers have received very little critical attention. Taking an unpopular novel by Anthony Trollope as my primary example, I analyze how the formal narrative strategy of “disnarration” (theorized by Gerald Prince) creates profound dislike for the book’s protagonists. Further, I propose that these same passages of disnarration, by emphasizing the text’s fictionality, can encourage readers to seek the sympathetic fulfillment that the text refuses them by engaging with the real world. In this way, I argue, even Victorian realist novels that defy the conventions of sympathy might still share an investment in realizing the ethical potential of fiction.

12. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Charles Altiei

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13. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Arjun Poudel

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14. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
Rockwell F. Clancy

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15. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19
J. Chris Westgate

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16. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 8 > Issue: 19

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

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

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This paper considers a minor if not fleeting detail from Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu which easily escapes noticeability though it is a signifier that reverberates with and, in fact, repeats the extremely well known epiphany of the Madeleine, though by way of an extremely muted parody that I doubt a reader would notice if he or she had not stopped to examine it. This detail concerns a lobster dismantled on Marcel's plate during lunch at the home of the Swanns. My argument is that the figure of the lobster is what psychologists call a "somatic projection," which in this case has a surreal effect, given that the lobster suddenly becomes a substitute for, say, a woman's body. Moreover, by way of a culinary issue concerning the preparation of lobsters in France and the types of lobstersthat are being prepared, the lobster improbably becomes an object that symbolically traverses sexual orientations, which is also a somatic projection of sorts. That the lobster is a fantasized sexual object whose monstrosity is constitutive of a sexual field divided by different orientations is a matter that this paper takes up. The paper ends with a few remarks about Salvador Dali's surrealist use of imagining the lobster as a fetish object for woman's sex. In various degrees, this paper is relevant to gay studies, object relations theory, the study of fantasy, surrealism in fiction, literature and the culinary, psychology and epistemology, visual art, and, of course, Proust studies.

19. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18
Chris Hughes

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This paper explores the relationship between Fukuyama’s account of history and Derrida’s theory of hauntology. Initially, I use Derrida’s idea of hauntology tocritique Fukuyama’s account of an end of history. I argue that Derrida’s idea of a hauntology is a valuable theoretical tool for theorising about politics, sinceDerrida shows that the death of a particular social/political system (e.g. Communism) does not entail the death/devaluing of the thinker(s) who inspired that system, since critics of the contemporary social and political order may have something valuable to offer contemporary political thought. However, I do notendorse the view that history cannot reach an end point just because there are specters waiting to return. Instead, I argue that it is possible to bridge theapparent dualistic binary between Derrida’s hauntology and Fukuyama’s end of history, since the specter is something which must be recognised and realised atthe end of history.

20. Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry: Volume > 7 > Issue: 18
Geraldine Friedman

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Among Marxists and Communists, Louis Althusser has long had a reputation for theoreticism and scientism, the factors most often cited to explain the eclipse of his work since the 1960’s. According to the standard account, the distinguishing characteristic and major flaw of his work is that it brings everything back to knowledge. In this essay, I interrogate this understanding of Althusser by reconsidering two cornerstones of Althusserian theory that seem most to exemplify his extreme privileging of epistemology: the symptom and the interpellation theory of ideology. I argue not that taking them to work on the epistemological level is wrong but rather incomplete; there exists a not quite acknowledged beyond of knowledge and interpellation in Althusser, which takes the form of a traumaticnarrative of history, enjoyment, and desire. The production of knowledge in Althusser unfolds as a pathos-laden story, which on one level gestures toward the turbulent world history in which he developed his theory: primarily WW II and the post-war Stalinist revelations, along with the conflicts it provoked in the Communist Party, and the French Communist Party in particular. Although not the subject of extended analysis, these events haunt Althusser’s texts in the form of allusions and the surprisingly violent figurative language with which Althusser discusses theoretical labor. I contend that they call to be analyzed as a kind of return of the repressed, best approached through Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytically inflected theory of ideology.