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Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century
Remains, even after half a century, the most comprehensive serious general survey available of the development of intellectual and scientific attitudes toward nature in the history of western civilization from antiquity up to the end of the…
“De la percepción popular a la reflexión erudite: La transmisión de la ‘cultura de la catástrofe’ en la España del siglo XVIII”
In this article, Alberola argues that while the first formal reflections on the physical nature of disasters appeared in the philosophical and scientific works of the Classical era, it was in the eighteenth century that these environmental ideas took…
Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics
Allewaert uncovers the enmeshment of persons in places-- and the imbrication of the nonhuman and the human-- in eighteenth-century American plantations (and the literature, culture, and thought circulating around and through them). Her book imagines…
Cris sur le Bayou: Naissance d'une Poésie Acadienne en Louisiane
A number of works in this anthology of Cajun French poetry treat the expulsion of Acadian French settlers from Novia Scotia beginning in 1755, known as the Grand Dérangement. Many of the poems testify to the role this eighteenth-century displacement…
Tags: collective identity, migration, upheavals
The Imperative of Integration
This book examines racial segregation and integration from the perspectives of political philosophy and social science. The author argues for the democratic advantages of integration as a social practice.
Tags: In-between, integration, race
The Guillotine and the Terror
A very original if somewhat disturbing book on the imaginary of the French Revolution. Arasse, a historian of art, discusses the stories that were created about and around the guillotine. He shows how the machine was invested with the values and…
Tags: art, destruction, disciplines, revolution, science
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
Argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgment represents his mature political philosophy. Judgment is important for Arendt as the faculty which mediates between particularity and universality, thereby providing the conditions for a uniquely human…
Tags: aesthetic, Arendt, citizenship, contemporary, disciplines, Kant, philosophy, Schiller
The Starship Philosophy: Its Heritage and Competitors
Examines the distinctive features of the astronautical philosophy characteristic of the current surge of interest in interstellar spaceflight. Contrasts them with the conflicting features of more Earthbound philosophies in order to elucidate the…
Tags: colonialism, diaspora, history, Matter, philosophy, political philosophy, science
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Meaning
Barad builds on the insights of Niels Bohr's quantum physics to develop a new queer and feminist ontology and epistemology that radically reframes questions of being, individualism, relationality, representation,agency, and identity. Her notion of…
Nature's Queer Performativity
Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative mode. Barad expands…
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
Quickly becoming a classic, Bennett's book asks (among other things) how the term "materialism" came to be synonymous with Marx's notion of materiality, "as economic structures and exchanges that provoke many other events." She asks, "Why did…
“The Past is Evil/Evil is Past: On Retrospective Politics, Philosophy of History, and Temporal Manichaeism,”
Bevernage turns to the Enlightenment in order to explain why so much of contemporary politics is focused on rectifying past wrongs. He argues that the 18th century saw the emergence of a modern philosophy of history, which identified the past with…
Tags: destruction, disciplines, historiography, human rights
Sade/Surreal. Der Marquis de Sade und die erotische Fantasie des Surrealismus in Text und Bild
Explores Sade's impact on the political surrealist art movement in Europe, especially before the 1930s. Sade was hailed for what the surrealists perceived to be his atheistic, materialist, nihilistic and individualistic anarchism that appealed to…
Special Section: Integration in Biology: Philosophical Perspectives on the Dynamics of Interdisciplinarity
This set of articles considers how integration manifests in various biological specialities as well as in the history of biology. Integration as a topic of philosophical investigation extends beyond socio-political philosophy and into philosophy of…
Tags: biology, In-between, integration
How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about…
Machine and Organism
Canguilhem inverts the normal scientific question--what is the mechanism underlying this organic process?--and asks how machines are organic. He traces the history of the relationships between organism and machine from the ancient Greek political…
Tags: biology, disciplines, history, materialism, mechanism, philosophy, politics, science
"Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society, 1640–1790"
Shows how Kant wrote his Critique of Judgment as a synthesis of English theories of “taste” and civil society and German theories of “aesthetic.” Writers since Hobbes have used theories of art to advance theories of society. Kant sought a middle way…
Tags: 18th century, aesthetic, citizenship, disciplines, Kant, philosophy, Schiller
"The Climate of History: Four Theses."
This article argues that the thesis of the Anthropocene offers grounds for a reconciliation between human history and natural history, abolishing the Enlightenment ideology of history as the progressive conquest of nature by Man. Drawing on research…
Tags: Anthropocene, capitalism, climate, ecology, materialism
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