Philosophy Podcasts: Recent Episodes

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Sharon Patricia Holland

an other

In an other, Sharon Patricia Holland offers a new theorization of the human animal/divide by shifting focus from distinction toward relation in ways that acknowledge that humans are also animals. Holland centers ethical commitments over ontological concerns to spotlight those moments when Black people ethically relate with animals. Drawing on writers and thinkers ranging from Hortense Spillers, Sara Ahmed, Toni Morrison, and C. E. Morgan to Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, Holland decenters the human in Black feminist thought to interrogate blackness, insurgence, flesh, and femaleness. She examines MOVE’s incarnation as an animal liberation group; uses sovereignty in Morrison’s A Mercy to understand blackness, indigeneity, and the animal; analyzes Charles Burnett’s films as commentaries on the place of animals in Black life; and shows how equestrian novels address Black and animal life in ways that rehearse the practices of the slavocracy. By focusing on doing rather than being, Holland demonstrates that Black life is not solely likened to animal life; it is relational and world-forming with animal lives.

“With her characteristic brilliance and speculative flair, Sharon Patricia Holland breaks new ground in an other, a book that will prove to be her most philosophical and speculative text yet. Holland pulls at the ways that blackness as ontology and epistemology undoes and ethically remakes the bio/zoopolitical distinction between animals and humans. She remakes the very ideas that underline life itself as a human project that both denies and relies on animality: love, death, knowing, being, and ultimately revolution as it happens on the scale of the ordinary and the everyday. An essential volume.” — Kyla Wazana Tompkins, author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century

“Sharon Patricia Holland’s an other is a beautiful, expansive, rich, and genius gift to a world that could not have anticipated it. Her work at the level of the animal and cohabitation and about relationality and comportment is assuredly a necessary and brilliant offering. Holland’s enormous intervention cannot be overstated. Black studies will not be the same after this book.” — Sarah Jane Cervenak, author of Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life

Sharon Patricia Holland is Townsend Ludington Distinguished Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of The Erotic Life of Racism and Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, both also published by Duke University Press

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Stephanie Li

Ugly White People: Writing Whiteness in Contemporary America

White Americans are confronting their whiteness more than ever before, with political and social shifts ushering in a newfound racial awareness. And with white people increasingly seeing themselves as distinctly racialized (not simply as American or human), white writers are exposing a self-awareness of white racialized behavior—from staunch antiracism to virulent forms of xenophobic nationalism. Ugly White People explores representations of whiteness from twenty-first-century white American authors, revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take.

Stephanie Li argues that much of the twenty-first century has been defined by this rising consciousness of whiteness because of the imminent shift to a “majority minority” population and the growing diversification of America’s political, social, and cultural institutions. The result is literature that more directly grapples with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm. Li contextualizes a series of literary novels as collectively influenced by changes in racial and political attitudes. Turning to works by Dave Eggers, Sarah Smarsh, J. D. Vance, Claire Messud, Ben Lerner, and others, she traces the responses to white consciousness that breed shared manifestations of ugliness. The tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice is often the source of the ugly whiteness portrayed through these narratives.

The questions posed in Ugly White People about the nature and future of whiteness are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America. From the election of Trump and the rise of white nationalism to Karen memes and the war against critical race theory to the pervasive pattern of behavior among largely liberal-leaning whites, Li elucidates truths about whiteness that challenge any hope of national unity and, most devastatingly, the basic humanity of others.

Ugly White People is not about the 'racists' but about the way whiteness shapes the subjectivity of all white people. Relying on an elegant and parsimonious textual analysis of the work of contemporary authors, Stephanie Li shows how whites manage to evade while they acknowledge their whiteness, how they consume people of color through racist love, and how they accept whiteness in a way that neglects addressing racism. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in understanding contemporary whiteness.

— Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University

The best writing critically studying whiteness today intensely engages imbrications of race with other identities, especially class, gender, nationality, and disability. No one does all of that better than Stephanie Li. Addressing literary moments with a sure grasp of history and an adventuresome readings of texts, Ugly White People speaks compellingly to the persisting strength of Trump and white nationalism and to the desire for social media celebrity as something authors both explore and share.

— David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right

Stephanie Li is Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Pan-African American Literature, Playing in the White, and Signifying without Specifying.

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Gilligan, Carol In a Human Voice

Carol Gilligan's landmark book In a Different Voice – the "little book that started a revolution" – brought women's voices to the fore in work on the self and moral development, enabling women to be heard in their own right, and with their own integrity, for the first time.

Forty years later, Gilligan returns to the subject matter of her classic book, re-examining its central arguments and concerns from the vantage point of the present. Thanks to the work that she and others have done in recent decades, it is now possible to clarify and articulate what couldn't quite be seen or said at the time of the original publication: that the "different voice" (of care ethics), although initially heard as a "feminine" voice, is in fact a human voice; that the voice it differs from is a patriarchal voice (bound to gender binaries and hierarchies); and that where patriarchy is in force or enforced, the human voice is a voice of resistance, and care ethics is an ethics of liberation. While gender is central to the story Gilligan tells, this is not a story about gender: it is a human story.

With this clarification, it becomes evident why In a Different Voice continues to resonate strongly with people's experience and, perhaps more crucially, why the different voice is a voice for the 21st century.

During the podcast, Mary Gaitskill's piece on Anna Karenina, from Fassler, Joe. Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process (pp. 69-73). Penguin, excepted here:

MARY GAITSKILL "I Don’t Know You Anymore"

I READ ANNA KARENINA for the first time about two years ago. It’s something I’d always meant to read, but for some reason I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did. ... I found one section in particular so beautiful and intelligent that I actually stood up as I was reading. I had to put the book down, I was so surprised by it—and it took the novel to a whole other level for me.

Anna’s told her husband, Karenin, that she’s in love with another man and has been sleeping with him. You’re set up to see Karenin as an overly dignified but somewhat pitiable figure: He’s a proud, stiff person. He’s older than Anna is, and he’s balding, and he has this embarrassing mannerism of a squeaky voice. He’s hardened himself against Anna. He’s utterly disgusted with her for having gotten pregnant by her lover, Vronsky. But you have the impression at first that his pride is hurt more than anything else—which makes him unsympathetic.

Then he finds out Anna is dying, and he goes to visit her.] He hears her babbling, in the height of her fever. And her words are unexpected: She’s saying how kind he is. That, of course, she knows he will forgive her. When Anna finally sees him, she looks at him with a kind of love he’s never seen before. ...

Throughout the book, he’s always hated the way he’s felt disturbed by other people’s tears or sadness. But as he struggles with this feeling while Anna’s talking, Karenin finally realizes that the compassion he feels for other people is not weakness: For the first time, he perceives this reaction as joyful, and becomes completely overwhelmed with love and forgiveness. He actually kneels down and begins to cry in her arms; Anna holds him and embraces his balding head. The quality he hated is completely who he is—and this realization gives him incredible peace. He even decides he wants to shelter the little girl that Anna’s had with Vronsky (who sits nearby, so completely shamed by what he’s witnessing that he covers his face with his hands). You believe this complete turnaround.

You believe it’s who these people really are. I find it strange that the moment these characters seem most like themselves is the moment when they’re behaving in ways we’ve never before seen. I don’t fully understand how this could be, but it’s wonderful that it works.

But then the moment passes. Anna never talks about the “other woman” inside of her again. At first, I was disappointed. But then I thought: No, that’s actually much more realistic. What Tolstoy does is actually much better, because it’s more truthful. We feel a greater sense of loss, knowing it will never happen again.

I very much saw that as the core of the book. Everyone says Anna Karenina is about individual desire going against society, but I think the opposite perspective is stronger: the way social forces actively go against the soft feelings of the individual.

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Merav Roth

A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature: Reading the Reader

(Art, Creativity, and Psychoanalysis Book Series) 1st Edition What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development and existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature offers a unique glimpse into the unconscious psychic processes and development involved in reading. The author listens to the 'free associations' of various literary characters, in numerous scenarios where the characters are themselves reading literature, thus revealing the mysterious ways in which reading literature helps us and contributes to our development.

The book offers an introduction both to classic literature (Poe, Proust, Sartre, Semprún, Pessoa, Agnon and more) and to the major psychoanalytic concepts that can be used in reading it – all described and widely explained before being used as tools for interpreting the literary illustrations. The book thus offers a rich lexical psychoanalytic source, alongside its main aim in analysing the reader’s psychological mechanisms and development. Psychoanalytic interpretation of those literary readers opens three main avenues to the reader’s experience:

the transference relations toward the literary characters; the literary work as means to transcend beyond the reader’s self-identity and existential boundaries; and mobilization of internal dialectic tensions towards new integration and psychic equilibrium. An Epilogue concludes by emphasising the transformational power embedded in reading literature.

The fascinating dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis illuminates hitherto concealed aspects of each discipline and contributes to new insights in both fields. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature will be of great interest not only to psychoanalytic-psychotherapists and literature scholars, but also to a wider readership beyond these areas of study.

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William Egginton

Alejandro Jodorowsky: Filmmaker and Philosopher

Description

Alejandro Jodorowsky is a force of nature. At 95 years old he is still making films and is a cultural phenomenon who has influenced other artists as disparate as John Waters and Yoko Ono. Although his body of work has long been considered disjointed and random, William Egginton claims that Jodorowsky's writings, theatre work and mime, and his films, along with the therapeutic practice he calls psychomagic, can all be tied together to form the philosophical programme that underpins his films.

Incorporating surrealism and thinkers including Lacan, Kant, Hegel, and Žižek into his interpretation of Jodorowsky's work, Egginton shows how his diverse films are connected by interpretive practices with a fundamental similarity to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using case studies of Jodorowsky's cult films, El Topo, Fando y Lis and Holy Mountain and more, this book provides a unique perspective on a filmmaker whose work has been notoriously difficult to analyse.

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Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei

The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on effective altrusism, engaged Buddhism, and how to build a better world

ABOUT THE BUDDHIST AND THE ETHICIST Eastern spirituality and utilitarian philosophy meet in these unique dialogues between a Buddhist monastic and a moral philosopher on such issues as animal welfare, gender equality, the death penalty, and more

An unlikely duo—Professor Peter Singer, a preeminent philosopher and professor of bioethics, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist monastic and social activist—join forces to talk ethics in lively conversations that cross oceans, overcome language barriers, and bridge philosophies. The eye-opening dialogues collected here share unique perspectives on contemporary issues like animal welfare, gender equality, the death penalty, and more. Together, these two deep thinkers explore the foundation of ethics and key Buddhist concepts, and ultimately reveal how we can all move toward making the world a better place.

“A remarkable and historical meeting of minds between one of the greatest philosophers of our times and a leading proponent of Buddhist ethics, grounded on utilitarianism and guided by compassion and insight, which aims at preventing and relieving all kinds of suffering, whatever they might be, and doing as much good as possible to all sentient beings without discrimination.” —Matthieu Ricard, author of Altruism and A Plea for Animals

“Few things are more enlightening than good dialogue, and this engrossing conversation between a Western philosopher and an Asian Buddhist is a case in point. Their probing exploration of each other’s worldviews illuminates key concepts in the Buddhist and utilitarian traditions and reveals an underlying unity; these two schools of thought, though quite different in cultural ancestry, exhibit much commonality of purpose and spirit as they address some of life’s most important and challenging questions.” —Robert Wright, author of Why Buddhism Is True

“The Buddhist and the Ethicist is a fascinating exchange between two brilliant and wide-ranging thinkers who were originally brought together because of their shared interests in animal welfare. Their conversations cover a staggering array of topics, and I truly enjoyed seeing what came out of their extremely active brains and hearts and how much they got mine going in many different directions. I guarantee you, too, will rethink some views you have on different ethical questions and will be exposed to many situations and dilemmas about which you’ve rarely or never thought. I know I’ll be returning to this valuable collection time and time again.” —Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado, author of The Animals’ Agenda: Freedom, Compassion, and Coexistence in the Human Age (with Jessica Pierce) and A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans (with Jessica Pierce)

“This gem of a book invites readers to listen in as two brilliant contemporary moral philosophers talk about what it means to be a good person and live an ethical life. The Buddhist and the Ethicist offers us a living encounter between Western and Eastern moral traditions. We have the honor of sitting in as Peter Singer, one of the West’s most innovative and influential utilitarian philosophers, and Shih Chao-Hwei, a prominent Buddhist scholar, monastic, and activist, talk some of the most contentious and significant moral issues of our time, including human-animal relations, equality, sexuality, and effective altruism. Singer and Chao-Hwei show us how to have constructive, respectful dialogue about values—a skill more vitally important now than ever before. They remind us that it is possible to begin from seemingly conflicting points of view and, through open-minded conversation, to find and expand common ground.” —Jessica Pierce, author of Who’s a Good Dog? And How to Be a Better Human

“This timely and stimulating dialogue between Professor Peter Singer and Venerable Chao-Hwei Shih takes place at the intersection between altruism and engaged Buddhism. Their many conversations through the intervening years have examined diverse and relevant social issues during the twenty-first century. Their incisive examination of ethical considerations for all life-forms, while ages old, are brought together in this book through candid discussions about ending life and killing from in utero, to euthanasia, suicide, and killing during wartime. At the same time, their dialogue integrates the crosscutting themes of women and equality, sexuality, animal rights, and more. I invite you to become a part of their dialogue through which you can revisit these topics that transcend cultures and countries.” —Sulak Sivaraksa, author, activist, and cofounder of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists

“An enlightening exploration of ethics, altruism, and social justice through the engaging dialogue between a prominent philosopher and a great scholar of Buddhism. A must-read for those seeking to expand their understanding of these traditions and the pressing issues of our time.” —Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, student activist, author, and engaged Buddhist

“A wonderful book that does what philosophy and religious teachings are supposed to do: challenge us to think better, to live better, and to be better.” —Ryan Holiday, podcast host and author of The Daily Stoic

“Their dialogues unfold in rigorous detail and probe rich and trenchant ethical questions. . . . Plenty of insight in these thought-provoking and challenging investigations.” —Publishers Weekly

“In this fascinating book, Singer and Chao-Hwei explore dynamic topics, including animal welfare, capital punishment, gender equality, and the foundations of both Buddhism and ethics.” —Tricycle

“Particularly illuminating is Chao-Hwei’s clarification of terms, often misunderstood in the West, such as karma, rebirth and nirvana, as well as the central role and nature of compassion in Buddhist ethics. For those interested in how nuanced philosophical thought can inform our daily lives and actions, this accessible meeting of minds is a good place to start.” —The Sydney Morning Herald (Non-fiction pick of the week)

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Peter Brooks (Yale) Seduced by story: The use and abuse of narrative

Chosen by New York Magazine/Vulture as a Best Book of 2022

“There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.” So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks’s reckoning with today’s flourishing cult of story. Forty years after publishing his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his important contribution to what came to be known as the “narrative turn” in contemporary criticism and philosophy, Brooks returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as an excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from The Girl on the Train to legal argument, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive.

Praise

A potent defense of attentive reading and its real-world applications. —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

Brooks spent most of his career trying to impress upon readers the particular power of narrative…In his most recent book, “Seduced by Story,” he describes the horrifying feeling of having succeeded all too well. —Parul Sehgal, The New Yorker

A succinct account of narrative persuasion, offering a solid case for the ambivalent power that stories can have in shaping us as individuals and nations. —Caterina Domeneghini, Los Angeles Review of Books

Brooks explores various fields – including psychoanalysis, legal practice and modern political discourse – in which the distinction between narrative and “reality” has been eroded, or even collapsed. . . . It is in this context that a critical faculty – the ability to understand and critique narrative – is of vital importance. —Jonathan Taylor, TLS

Brooks built an influential career arguing that stories are key features of how we all experience ‘human temporality’ and strive to articulate ‘meaning in general.’ This new book is, therefore, a kind of personal as well as intellectual reckoning with narrative turns and what may be their less salubrious legacies. —Killian Quigley, Australian Book Review

Society’s obsession with résumé, and its use to construct an aura of credibility, is such a pervasive element of contemporary life that it inevitably implicates even the author and his own field of “literary humanities.” But that dynamic is exactly what Brooks parses in his terrific critical survey: the essential differences between surface stories and the ways in which they’re constructed. —J. Howard Rosier, New York Magazine/Vulture

A bracing and insightful look at the downsides of reducing everything to storytelling. . . A thoughtful and revelatory analysis of what’s lost when story trumps all. —Publishers Weekly

For writers, readers, and citizens of the story-addled world. —Emily Temple, Lit Hub

A rhapsody to the partial suspension of disbelief that allows us to immerse ourselves in novels, but simultaneously and most crucially, a brilliant intervention against the complete suspension of disbelief that allows a citizenry to succumb to conspiracy theories, false-flag narratives, authoritarian fictions. An eloquent and triumphant culmination of Peter Brooks’s lifelong inquiry into the aesthetic and ethical intersection of literature, psychoanalysis, law, and politics. Impossibly good. —David Shields

Stories are everywhere—shaping us, shocking us, showing us what really happened (or making it up). Peter Brooks invites us to step to one side of our over-storied surroundings to think about all the ways they work. . . . In the process, he tells a gripping tale of his own. —Rachel Bowlby

This is an amazing book, crossing back and forth between literature and politics, illuminating each side by the other. It is written without fuss, continually evocative and surprising. —Richard Sennett

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Daniel C. Dennett

I've been thinking

Description

"How unfair for one man to be blessed with such a torrent of stimulating thoughts. Stimulating is an understatement." —Richard Dawkins A memoir by one of the greatest minds of our age, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett. Daniel C. Dennett, preeminent philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering the thorniest, most fundamental mysteries of the mind. Do we have free will? What is consciousness and how did it come about? What distinguishes human minds from the minds of animals? Dennett’s answers have profoundly shaped our age of philosophical thought. In I’ve Been Thinking, he reflects on his amazing career and lifelong scientific fascinations.

Dennett’s relentless curiosity has taken him from a childhood in Beirut and the classrooms of Harvard, Oxford, and Tufts, to “Cognitive Cruises” on sailboats and the fields and orchards of Maine, and to laboratories and think tanks around the world. Along the way, I’ve Been Thinking provides a master class in the dominant themes of twentieth-century philosophy and cognitive science—including language, evolution, logic, religion, and AI—and reveals both the mistakes and breakthroughs that shaped Dennett’s theories.

Key to this journey are Dennett’s interlocutors—Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, Willard Van Orman Quine, Gilbert Ryle, Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, John Searle, Gerald Edelman, Stephen Jay Gould, Jerry Fodor, Rodney Brooks, and more—whose ideas, even when he disagreed with them, helped to form his convictions about the mind and consciousness. Studded with photographs and told with characteristic warmth, I’ve Been Thinking also instills the value of life beyond the university, one enriched by sculpture, music, farming, and deep connection to family.

Dennett compels us to consider: What do I really think? And what if I’m wrong? This memoir by one of the greatest minds of our time will speak to anyone who seeks to balance a life of the mind with adventure and creativity.

Reviews and endorsements

A delightful memoir from one of our deepest thinkers. Kirkus (starred review)

Always an enthusiastic learner with an insatiable curiosity, Dennett’s amiable autodidacticism illustrates a life of the mind intertwined with the rich home life of a true Renaissance man. Highly recommended. Booklist (starred review) About the author

Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Emeritus at Tufts University and the author of numerous books, including Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained. He lives with his wife in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

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Christopher Bollas

Conversations

Transcript erratum: The director of the film “Zone of Interest” is Jonathan Glazer.

Christopher Bollas presents us with a new literary form in his Conversations: twenty-three unique dialogues to captivate, amuse, and inspire. The psychoanalyst Paula Heimann asked: 'Who is speaking? To whom? About what? And why now?' We speak with the voice and position of many others - mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers - and ordinary conversation therefore stages the history of our interpersonal engagements. Heimann's questions also apply when we talk to ourselves, and our inner dialogues reveal the hidden genius of our private world in which we are both actor and audience, poet and reader, politician and electorate. It's quite a ride, and an art form all of its own.

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"Do you know my mom?" The court-appointed monitor says that's off limits.

In this episode, Anna (pseudonym) tells her story. Her son is 1yo, in diapers, when the police come to arrest her, while she attempts to contact her dealer for drugs before prison. From there, she loses custody of her son, enters treatment, and tries to re-gain contact with her son.

Strong mom love, Anna shares her hard-earned wisdom.

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Howard Kirschenbaum (Rochester)

The life and work of Carl Rogers

Twenty years after his death, PCCS Books celebrates the life and work of Carl Rogers with the long-awaited second edition of the much-acclaimed biography by Howard Kirschenbaum, On Becoming Carl Rogers. This completely re-written and re-titled edition extends to over 700 pages and includes a more detailed personal and professional history, an evaluation of the Wisconsin years and a full account of the last decade of Rogers' life.The years that followed the publication of the first edition of Carl Rogers' biography in 1979 turned out to be one of the most important periods of his career. Until now this work has not been widely known. Now, more than a quarter of a century after the first edition, Kirschenbaum has added deeper understanding of Rogers' contributions to psychology, the helping professions and society. On a personal level, access to recently revealed private papers tells us much more about Carl Rogers the man than was known to many of his closest associates.

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Lauren Levine

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

Note: I had planned to interview Dr. Levine about her book. Leading up to the date we had agreed on, I was struggling with what to talk to her about. Timothy Williamson notes the gladitorial or adversarial nature of philosophical discussion. I certainly had some critical commentary on Dr. Levine's book, but I also prefer to be reparative, as opposed to carpy-suspicious, as a reader (Sedgwick). And it was my sense that in Dr. Levine's particular intellectual culture, sharp-edged criticism can be considered inappropriate, and even lead to cancellation (cf. Jon Mills's criticism of relational psychoanalysis).

In an email to Dr. Levine, I indicated my dilemma as we approached the date. After mentioning that I did indeed have some potentially inappropriate (for some cultures) questions about her book, I realized there was a huge open question: she would probably want to know what they were. Not wanting to be patronizing--and hoping that perhaps she would actually say my questions were all perfectly fine--I listed them.

But soon thereafter, I got an email from Dr. Levine saying Dr. Levine she did not, in fact, want to participate in the podcast interview about her book.

It felt Karenesque of her and it felt like I was being canceled for daring to be critical, to engage in critique. As Jon Mills will testify, this seems to be a problem with Levine's intellectual community: a strategy of ostracizing or refusing to speak with people who want to ask challenging questions. Stephen Mitchell himself seemed never to criticize any psychoanalytic theorist. His mission was to affirm every psychoanalytic theorist, to show they they improved in some slight way on every previous theorist. {Although as Barry Farber has emphasized, his validating ways did not extend outside the rich, prestigious, supposedly intellectual faction which houses themselves in psychoanalytic institutes. Mitchell ignored Carl Rogers (probably because he never read him or certainly never took him seriously).

For "relational psychoanalysts" if you are in their group, they flatter each other; if you are outside or want to ask challenging questions, they shun and cancel. Contrast this with Judith Butler who stresses the importance of "checking in with other perspectives [and] responding thoroughly to reasonable questions."

So in an experiment, I did a podcast about her book, without her, without the author. I want to do these about books (for example, books in which the author is, say, deceased. Or the author is alive but in prioritizing their time, is unable to speak with me. This gave me my first opportunity. In this podcast, I review the negative, possibly out-of-bounds (as culturally defined) thoughts I had regarding Dr. Levine's book. I'm also re-producing the offending email:

BEGIN EMAIL On Tue, Mar 5, 2024 at 11:40 AM August Baker wrote: Thank you for sharing your thoughts. As for me, after sending my email and before getting your reply, I was feeling increasingly uncertain about whether we had enough overlap or shared reality to have a productive talk. Your email made me feel better about it, but I am still uncertain. My last list was based on impressions, prior to a final review of the book. I need to do a complete, close read of the book and propose a new list. I tried to distinguish between "practitioner" vs. "academic," but I now think those were the wrong labels. And anyway as you point out, you are an academic as well as a practitioner. I don't know how to label what I am talking about. Perhaps I can best express the difference by paraphrasing one of my prior interviewees, Timothy Williamson. He describes a particular cultural approach to how people should best talk to an author about a book. I do not think it is the same cultural approach you have ("cultural" here referring here not so much to "practitioner" but to the culture of the intellectual school or paradigm you are a part of. What to call that school? I don't know. Perhaps "early 21st century psychoanalysis.") In Williamson's cultural milieu, discussion of a book is, he admits, something like gladiatorial combat, or like the adversarial system in litigation. It is an interlocutor's role to give their most sharp-edged responses to an author. The interlocutor argues against the author. "A feel-good slogan is that discussion should be constructive, not destructive. It sounds like a platitude, but imagine telling city planners that they should always build houses and never knock them down." It's not about practitioner vs. academic. I was wrong in labeling it such. It's not about Left vs. Right either. I interview both Left and Right. It is one of the things I explicitly try to do: get a wide range of political standpoints. It's not about philosophy versus other fields either. I don't know a good label for it, but perhaps we could call it "critical" versus "reparative." Some authors have this "critical" approach. They expect me and want me to give my most sharp-edged criticisms. This is true whether I interview a Left-leaning philosopher like Martha Nussbaum or a Right-leaning economist like Deirdre McCloskey. On the other hand, when I interview a psychoanalyst such as yourself--or such as Christopher Bollas whom I interviewed recently--I get myself into a more reparative frame of mind. It just seems to me a matter of being culturally sensitive. The trouble is that with your book, I fear there is not enough overlap between us. Your strength is your clinical vignettes; yet I am not a clinician, and the one thing I know about clinical work is that I don't know enough to talk intelligently about it. On the other hand, there are many areas where you and I have a different worldview. Yet I don't see a way to discuss those issues in a culturally-appropriate-enough way. I can tell you a few of the ways that we are simply on different wavelengths. There are many, but four come to mind immediately. (1) politics. You write: "We are currently in the midst of a terrifying sociopolitical backlash by the radical right to suppress our stories, to silence and whitewash the white supremacy and racism embedded in our history and culture. We must face our legacy of chattel slavery and the slaughter of Indigenous people on which our country was founded." I discussed this with Peter Brooks in a podcast I am publishing online today. I simply don't agree with you here. In my fantasy, if I try to empathize with you, you (correctly) view yourself here as taking a strong, righteous political stance, and as a matter of personal integrity, you don't want to back down off of it. From my perspective, and I think you will find this offensive (and hence, I don't think it is productive to talk about it) there is much more to the story of the U.S. than slavery and the slaughter of indigenous people, and what you are doing is taking recourse in paranoia and splitting. For numbers 2 and 3, consider the following quotations: "Julia and I begin to weave together a shared narrative history about her early life, especially with her mother ..." "the rewriting of the family narrative seemed to open psychic space ..." "creating a share narrative of his traumatic history" "Coming to terms with the “lack” in parenting and the pain it caused is allowing ... "he needed me to feel the depths of his pain, to not abandon him like his parents when he pushed me to the brink, (2) Parenting. I appreciate your narrative of your personal struggle with your son. It gives me goosebump, and I admire and respect your parenting and your writing about it. On the other hand, I have a very different perspective, having worked much with parents who, to my understanding, were great parents but for whom their narratives did not turn out so well. Their children did not flourish, and they need to deal with that pain, as well as the stigma that I think is implicit in your own view. Namely, that if the parent does parenting right, the kid will turn out well and happy. This is the flip-side of the other psychoanalytic worldview, which I also bristle at, namely that if the adult is unhappy, look to the childhood and especially the parenting. (3) the importance of narrative. I personally think that narrative is over-emphasized. See my podcast with Peter Brooks. Essentially, summing up (2) and (3), when you write to a psychoanalytic audience, is it not true that you can simply assume as a default that psychoanalysis cures by re-parenting? That the basic story one learns in analysis is "I was a beautiful soul, but X was very bad."? All psychoanalysts will agree that that is not the whole story, but nonetheless it is the strongest current, and exceptions seem to me to be of the sort that prove the rule. That's fine, but many people outside of psychoanalysis do NOT share this view. And it seems suspicious that tales of cure so often follow the same path, especially when we know that we should be suspicious of narratives. (4) Regarding the relational school, I have two issues (again, neither of which seems suitable or appropriate for us to talk about), (a) there is an understandable but irksome tendency to write its own narrative in an self-serving and insular way. Barry Farber, for example, argues convincingly that much of the supposed revolutionary thoughts of relational psychoanalysis were anticipated by none other than Carl Rogers. Yet Rogers is never given his due. There is an intellectual arrogance to relational writing, as though Rogers were too much a lightweight to credit. (b) Relational writing seems to neglect analytic hate in Winnicott's sense. Relational analysts show a great deal of hate, but this doesn't seem to be talked about much. It is talked about a little, but again as the exception that proves the rule. I do not think that any of these four are appropriate for our conversation. They are what I would talk about perhaps if I were adopting Williamson's cultural approach. I will do a final read-through of your book to see if I can find some common ground for us for a productive conversation. --August END EMAIL ENDORSEMENTS As you can see below, others--indeed, those supposed to know--feel very differently than I: ‘In this exquisite new book, Lauren Levine captures the finely nuanced tapestry that emerges when an analytic dyad takes shape; the interweaving of two different narratives of self that come together, engage with each other, distance each other and ultimately form the subject matter of the analysis that unfolds. With brilliant clarity, and detailed and forthrightly honest clinical examples, Levine demonstrates how the collision of the patient’s and the analyst’s preferred life stories demands the analyst’s, at times painful emotional honesty, in re-opening dissociated pockets of enlivening engagement and creativity.’ Jody Messler Davies, NYU Postdoctoral Program, Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies

‘In this powerful and creative volume, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, Lauren Levine explores the healing power of stories as they touch our vulnerabilities, our strengths and resilience, intrapsychic and sociocultural traumas. Levine beautifully explores the transformative value of sharing our stories with a listening, witnessing other, bearing witness to our wounds, our shame, and our collective sins.’ Galit Atlas, author of Emotional Inheritance; NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis

‘Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis is a wonder, a collection of essays whose honesty, integrity and authenticity challenge us and teach us, making us more vulnerable and hence more alive than we were before reading. It provides a relational blueprint to the intricacies of our deepest fears and fantasies about the psychoanalytic process as well as an openness to the insidious impact of racism and sociopolitical trauma. It is extremely rare that such a broad range of the human experience is taken on by any author; it is a rarity indeed for it to be done with such brilliance, thoughtfulness and creative care. This is a most welcome book, which should be read and re-read for the often painful aliveness it brings to the therapeutic encounter.’ Steve Tuber, author of Attachment, Play and Authenticity: Winnicott in Clinical Context

‘In this moving and incisive work, Lauren Levine reminds us that storytelling has both dangerous and curative dimensions. We often use stories to evade our own traumas and hide from self-awareness the gaps in our personal narratives. This has also been true of the field, in terms of the stories psychoanalysts feel comfortable engaging in our various models of the psyche. With an emphasis on the sharing of stories as the key to transformative mental healing, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation offers a powerful introduction to the insights of a relational psychoanalysis that can address the racial and cultural traumas of the 21st century.’ --Michelle Stephens, founding executive director, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers University

‘Lauren Levine explores the creative potential of what might be called story living. She captures how shared stories build relational and political transformations. But only, as Levine carefully details, when patient and analyst together confront personal inhibitions and cultural prohibitions that render stories normotic and deadening. Levine theorizes and clinically animates the ways in which we not only “tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as per Didion, but also how we tell stories to change the order of living.’ Ken Corbett, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

‘Lauren Levine’s highly creative work, Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis, marks the evolution of relational theory as a space of increasingly wonderful complexity. Her clinical and theoretical approach stresses the role of imagination and novel forms of clinical interaction. In this work, weaving film, poetry and dance into compelling psychoanalytic stories, we see both clinical and theoretical movement and expansion.’ Adrienne Harris, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and New School for Social Research

BOOK BLURB

Risking Intimacy and Creative Transformation in Psychoanalysis

In this compelling book, Lauren Levine explores the transformative power of stories and storytelling in psychoanalysis to heal psychic wounds and create shared symbolic meaning and coherence out of ungrieved loss and trauma. Through evocative clinical stories, Levine considers the impact of trauma and creativity on the challenge of creating one’s own story, resonant with personal authenticity and a shared sense of culture and history. Levine sees creativity as an essential aspect of aliveness, and as transformative, emergent in the clinical process. She utilizes film, dance, poetry, literature, and dreams as creative frames to explore diverse aspects of psychoanalytic process. As a psychoanalyst and writer, Levine is interested in the stories we tell, individually and collectively, as well as what gets disavowed and dissociated by experiences of relational, intergenerational, and sociopolitical trauma. She is concerned too with whose stories get told and whose get erased, silenced, and marginalized. This crucial question, what gets left out of the narrative, and the potential for an intimate psychoanalytic process to help patients reclaim what has been lost, is at the heart of this volume. Attentive to the work of helping patients reclaim their memory and creative agency, this book will prove invaluable for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training.

AUTHOR BLURB

Lauren Levine is joint Editor-in-Chief of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She teaches and presents both nationally and internationally, and has published articles about sociocultural, racial and relational trauma, resilience, and creativity. Dr. Levine is faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, and the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center, where she is codirector of the One Year Program in Relational Studies. She is visiting faculty at the Institute for Relational and Group Psychotherapy in Athens, Greece, and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and supervisor at the Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia. Dr. Levine is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City.

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Thoughts on a degree-granting "program" at BU, called "Mental health counseling and behavioral medicine." I took some classes there but eventually quit because it was so ridiculous. What is "mental health counseling"? U.S. states wanted to regulate who could become a psychotherapist, and, given the incredible demand, a variety of academic departments wanted to be able to offer degrees that would pass legislative muster.

Medicine was first, but also nursing. Then schools of social work: the MSW degree suffices. Then psychology departments created something called a PsyD, different from a PhD. There is also pastoral counseling I believe. Finally, there was this little field called "counseling" which was essentially career counseling, then school counseling. Historically, it is part of the broad attempt by the middle class and managerial class to maintain order, and maintain their privileged status. Counseling attempted to get people into jobs. Then to keep students non-delinquent.

Well, career counseling departments wanted also to take advantage of the huge demand for psychotherapy. So they got legislative permission to create this new "mental health counseling" program. Soon, of course, mental health counseling dominated and over-ran career counseling. Career counseling now consists of one course in the BU program, and it is a course that is demeaned: take it in the summer, take it over some weekends. The BU MHCBM program apologizes for having to offer it.

What is "behavioral medicine"? Somehow "behavior medicine" became part of the title of BU's program, but it represents only one course in the curriculum too. A hypothesis is that it was thought that "behavioral medicine" would make the program seem more appropriately housed on the medical school campus. Behavioral medicine teaches how counselors can assist physicians: helping physicians by taking over the work of getting people to stay on their doctor-prescribed plans (adhere to the prescribed regimen).

At BU, there are two Mental-health counseling programs: this one in the medical school campus and the other in the Charles River campus.

The version at the medical school is scientistic and run by some limited individuals, philistines. The worldview is one of neoliberalism. It is more than just whether people have jobs or are non-delinquent. People are diseased if they do not cope with--are unhappy in--neoliberal society. People need to learn to submit to authority more happily; they need to learn to follow rules.

And the program itself embodies this worldview in parallel process. Faculty do not themselves set the curriculum; they defer to a higher power known as CACREP, which is an accreditation service. Whenever therer is a difficult choice, the reply is that "this is required for our accreditation." When accreditation is not specific enough, the faculty then bring in "consultants." When in doubt, hire a consultant to deflect any responsibility from yourself.

Students are treated like they are in the military. The program is more hierarchical than anything I have been a part of. The faculty members insist on being called "doctor," and it is forbidden to treat them as anything other than Gods. (It must be that some of the faculty have backgrounds in the military. Or they think that they are following a medical school model of trying to break people down arbitrarily, a sort of right of passage showing one's ability to tolerate BOHICA.)

Criticism is wholly discouraged. One should only find the positive in whatever one's classmates say. One should never challenge the faculty. Any failure is judged to be a lack of the "comportment" required to be a counselor. (The most important thing for becoming a psychotherapist in this neoliberal world is to be someone who will happily sacrifice their integrity for the sake of arbitrary rules. You can't say they are wrong: cf. the requirement to follow insurance rules).

Faculty teach and model a polite exterior ... comportment ... professionalism ... regulated narcissism and s/m hate. Plus there's the de rigeur "we are professional helpers; the problem with our profession is only that we tend to give too much; we have to mutually remind ourselves to remember to practice self-care!"

Laurie Craigen, Rachel Levy-Bell, Steve Brady, Thom Fields, Rory Berger-Greenstein, Navolta.

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Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Cato Institute)

Crossing: A Transgender Memoir

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year “I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I discovered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating pleasures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am.” Once a golden boy of conservative economics and a child of 1950s privilege, Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) had wanted to change genders from the age of eleven. But it was a different time, one hostile to any sort of straying from the path—against gays, socialists, women with professions, men without hats, and so on—and certainly against gender transition. Finally, in 1995, at the age of fifty-three, it was time for McCloskey to cross the gender line. Crossing is the story of McCloskey’s dramatic and poignant transformation from Donald to Dee to Deirdre. She chronicles the physical procedures and emotional evolution required and the legal and cultural roadblocks she faced in her journey to womanhood. By turns searing and humorous, this is the unflinching, unforgettable story of her transformation—what she lost, what she gained, and the women who lifted her up along the way.

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Alex Byrne (MIT) Trouble with gender: Sex facts, gender fictions

Sex used to rule. Now gender identity is on the throne. Sex survives as a cheap imitation of its former self: assigned at birth, on a spectrum, socially constructed, and definitely not binary. Apparently quite a few of us fall outside the categories ‘male’ and ‘female’. But gender identity is said to be universal – we all have one. Humanity used to be cleaved into two sexes, whereas now the crucial division depends on whether our gender identity aligns with our body. If it does, we are cisgender; if it does not, we are transgender. The dethroning of sex has meant the threat of execution for formerly noble words such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’.

In this provocative, bold, and humane book, the philosopher Alex Byrne pushes back against the new gender revolution. Drawing on evidence from biology, psychology, anthropology and sexology, Byrne exposes the flaws in the revolutionary manifesto. The book applies the tools of philosophy, accessibly and with flair, to gender, sex, transsexuality, patriarchy, our many identities, and our true or authentic selves.

The topics of Trouble with Gender are relevant to us all. This is a book for anyone who has wondered ‘Is sex binary?’, ‘Why are men and women different?’, ‘What is a woman?’ or, simply, ‘Where can I go to know more about these controversies?’

Revolutions devour their own children, and the gender revolution is no exception. Trouble with Gender joins the forefront of the counter-revolution, restoring sex to its rightful place, at the centre of what it means to be human.

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Slavoj Žižek (University of London, New York University, University of Ljubljana) Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

We are all afraid that new dangers pose a threat to our hard-won freedoms, so what deserves attention is precisely the notion of freedom.

The concept of freedom is deceptively simple. We think we understand it, but the moment we try and define it we encounter contradictions. In this new philosophical exploration, Slavoj Žižek argues that the experience of true, radical freedom is transient and fragile. Countering the idea of libertarian individualism, Žižek draws on philosophers Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, as well as the work of Kandinsky and Agatha Christie to examine the many facets of freedom and what we can learn from each of them. Today, with the latest advances in digital control, our social activity can be controlled and regulated to such a degree that the liberal notion of a free individual becomes obsolete and even meaningless. How will we be obliged to reinvent (or limit) the contours of our freedom? Tracing its connection to everything from capitalism and war to the state and environmental breakdown, Žižek takes us on an illuminating and entertaining journey that shows how a deeper understanding of freedom can offer hope in dark times.

Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Move your Buridan's Ass! Part I: Freedom As Such Chapter 1: Freedom and its Discontents i) Freedom versus Liberty ii) Regulating Violations iii) Freedom, Knowledge, Necessity iv) Freedom to say NO Chapter 2: Is There Such a Thing as Freedom of the Will? i) Determinism and its Ragaries ii) Rewriting the Past iii) Beyond the Transcendental iv) Pascalean Wager Chapter 3: Indivisible Remainder and the Death of Death i) The Standpoint of the Absolute ii) The Death of God iii) Suicide as a Political Act iv)The Failed Negation of Negation Appendices I 1 Potestas versus Superdeterminism 2 Sublation as Dislocation 3 Inventing Anna, Inventing Madeleine 4 The Political Implications of Non-Representational Art Part II: Human Freedom Chapter 4: Marx Invented not Only Symptom but Also Drive i) Instead of... ii) Progress and Apathy iii) Dialectical Materialism iv) Yes, but... v) How Marx Invented Drive Chapter 5: The Path to Anarcho-Feudalism i) The Blue Pill Called Metaverse ii) From Cultural Capitalism to Crypto-Currencies iii) Savage Verticality Versus Uncontrollable Horizontality Chapter 6: The State and Counter-Revolution i) When the Social Link Disintegrates ii) The Limit of the Spontaneous Order iii) The State is Here to Stay iv) Do not give up on your Communist Desire! Appendices II 5 “Generalized Foreclosure”? No, Thanks! 6 Shamelessly Ashamed 7 A Muddle Instead of a Movie 8 How to Love a Homeland in our Global Era Finale: The Four Riders of the Apocalypse i) De-Nazifying… Ukraine, Kosovo, Europe ii) The End of Nature iii) DON'T Be True to Yourself! iv) Whose Servant Is a Master?

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Bence Nanay (Antwerp) Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience is about mental imagery and the important work it does in our mental life. It plays a crucial role in the vast majority of our perceptual episodes. It also helps us understand many of the most puzzling features of perception (like the way it is influenced in a top-down manner and the way different sense-modalities interact). But mental imagery also plays a very important role in emotions, action execution, and even in our desires. In sum, there are very few mental phenomena that mental imagery doesn't show up in--in some way or other. The hope is that if we understand what mental imagery is, how it works and how it is related to other mental phenomena, we can make real progress on a number of important questions about the mind.

This book is written for an interdisciplinary audience. As it aims to combine philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand mental imagery, the author has not presupposed any prior knowledge in any of these disciplines, so any reader can follow the arguments.

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Clancy Martin (University of Missouri in Kansas City; Ashoka University in Delhi, India)

How not to kill yourself: A portrait of the suicidal mind.

FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • An intimate, insightful, at times even humorous blend of memoir and philosophy that examines why the thought of death is so compulsive for some while demonstrating that there’s always another solution—from the acclaimed writer and philosophy professor, based on his viral essay, “I’m Still Here.” “A deep meditation that searches through Martin’s past looking for answers about why he is the way he is, while also examining the role suicide has played in our culture for centuries, how it has evolved, and how philosophers have examined it.” —Esquire “A rock for people who’ve been troubled by suicidal ideation, or have someone in their lives who is.” —The New York Times “If you’re going to write a book about suicide, you have to be willing to say the true things, the scary things, the humiliating things. Because everybody who is being honest with themselves knows at least a little bit about the subject. If you lie or if you fudge, the reader will know.” The last time Clancy Martin tried to kill himself was in his basement with a dog leash. It was one of over ten attempts throughout the course of his life. But he didn’t die, and like many who consider taking their own lives, he hid the attempt from his wife, family, coworkers, and students, slipping back into his daily life with a hoarse voice, a raw neck, and series of vague explanations. In How Not to Kill Yourself, Martin chronicles his multiple suicide attempts in an intimate depiction of the mindset of someone obsessed with self-destruction. He argues that, for the vast majority of suicides, an attempt does not just come out of the blue, nor is it merely a violent reaction to a particular crisis or failure, but is the culmination of a host of long-standing issues. He also looks at the thinking of a number of great writers who have attempted suicide and detailed their experiences (such as David Foster Wallace, Yiyun Li, Akutagawa, Nelly Arcan, and others), at what the history of philosophy has to say both for and against suicide, and at the experiences of those who have reached out to him across the years to share their own struggles. The result combines memoir with critical inquiry to powerfully give voice to what for many has long been incomprehensible, while showing those presently grappling with suicidal thoughts that they are not alone, and that the desire to kill oneself—like other self-destructive desires—is almost always temporary and avoidable.

Clancy Martin, a Canadian, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and at Ashoka University in Delhi, India. He divides his time between Kansas City and India. He is married to the writer Amie Barrodale, and has five children: Zelly, Margaret, Portia Ratna and Kali, and an unruly labradoodle, Simha. A Guggenheim Fellow, his work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He writes fiction, nonfiction and philosophy. He is a contributing editor for Harper's magazine and Vice magazine, and has published academic and popular articles, essays and Op-Ed pieces in such diverse places as New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper's, New Republic, 1843/The Economist, Lapham's Quarterly, The Atlantic, Ethics, The Wall Street Journal, The Journal of the History of Philosophy, Elle, Details, Men's Journal, The London Times, The London Review of Books, De Repubblicca, and many others. He is a contributor to the Teaching Company's "Great Courses" series. His work has been optioned for television/film development by Sony, HBO, Anonymous Content and other production companies. His most recent work is on suicide, failed suicide and suicidal ideation. He is a recovering alcoholic, and has written and been interviewed extensively about alcoholism, addiction and suicide.

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Lorraine Daston (Committee on Social Thought U. Chicago, Max Planck Institute, Berlin Institute for Advanced Study)

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (The Lawrence Stone Lectures)

A panoramic history of rules in the Western world

Rules order almost every aspect of our lives. They set our work hours, dictate how we drive and set the table, tell us whether to offer an extended hand or cheek in greeting, and organize the rites of life, from birth through death. We may chafe under the rules we have, and yearn for ones we don’t, yet no culture could do without them. In Rules, historian Lorraine Daston traces their development in the Western tradition and shows how rules have evolved from ancient to modern times. Drawing on a rich trove of examples, including legal treatises, cookbooks, military manuals, traffic regulations, and game handbooks, Daston demonstrates that while the content of rules is dazzlingly diverse, the forms that they take are surprisingly few and long-lived.

Daston uncovers three enduring kinds of rules: the algorithms that calculate and measure, the laws that govern, and the models that teach. She vividly illustrates how rules can change―how supple rules stiffen, or vice versa, and how once bothersome regulations become everyday norms. Rules have been devised for almost every imaginable activity and range from meticulous regulations to the laws of nature. Daston probes beneath this variety to investigate when rules work and when they don’t, and why some philosophical problems about rules are as ancient as philosophy itself while others are as modern as calculating machines.

Rules offers a wide-angle view on the history of the constraints that guide us―whether we know it or not.

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Wendy Brown (Princeton)

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)

One of America’s leading political theorists analyzes the nihilism degrading―and confounding―political and academic life today. Through readings of Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, she proposes ways to counter nihilism’s devaluations of both knowledge and political responsibility.

How has politics become a playpen for vain demagogues? Why has the university become an ideological war zone? What has happened to Truth? Wendy Brown places nihilism at the center of these predicaments. Emerging from European modernity’s replacement of God and tradition with science and reason, nihilism removes the foundation on which values, including that of truth itself, stand. It hyperpoliticizes knowledge and reduces the political sphere to displays of narcissism and irresponsible power plays. It renders the profound trivial, the future unimportant, and corruption banal.

To consider remedies for this condition, Brown turns to Weber’s famous Vocation Lectures, delivered at the end of World War I. There, Weber himself decries the effects of nihilism on both scholarly and political life. He also spells out requirements for re-securing truth in the academy and integrity in politics. Famously opposing the two spheres to each other, he sought to restrict academic life to the pursuit of facts and reserve for the political realm the pursuit and legislation of values.

Without accepting Weber’s arch oppositions, Brown acknowledges the distinctions they aim to mark as she charts reparative strategies for our own times. She calls for retrieving knowledge from hyperpoliticization without expunging values from research or teaching, and reflects on ways to embed responsibility in radical political action. Above all, she challenges the left to make good on its commitment to critical thinking by submitting all values to scrutiny in the classroom and to make good on its ambition for political transformation by twinning a radical democratic vision with charismatic leadership.

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Timothy Williamson (Oxford, Yale)

Philosophical method: A very short introduction

From thought experiments, to deduction, to theories, this Very Short Introduction will cause you to totally rethink what philosophy is.

• Assuming no previous knowledge of philosophy, this is a highly accesible account of how modern philosophers think and work
• Presents a distinctive view of philosophy, arguing that it is far more scientific than many philosophers think
• Includes a wealth of examples from history charting the successes and failures of philosophical thinking
• Offers a timely and much needed intervention in the current hot debate on philosophical methodology

What are philosophers trying to achieve? How can they succeed? Does philosophy make progress? Is it in competition with science, or doing something completely different, or neither? Timothy Williamson tackles some of the key questions surrounding philosophy in new and provocative ways, showing how philosophy begins in common sense curiosity, and develops through our capacity to dispute rationally with each other. Discussing philosophy's ability to clarify our thoughts, he explains why such clarification depends on the development of philosophical theories, and how those theories can be tested by imaginative thought experiments, and compared against each other by standards similar to those used in the natural and social sciences. He also shows how logical rigour can be understood as a way of enhancing the explanatory power of philosophical theories. Drawing on the history of philosophy to provide a track record of philosophical thinking's successes and failures, Williams overturns widely held dogmas about the distinctive nature of philosophy in comparison to the sciences, demystifies its methods, and considers the future of the discipline. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. Previously published in hardback as Doing Philosophy

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Starting from common sense 3. Disputing 4. Clarifying terms 5. Doing thought experiments 6. Comparing theories 7. Deducing 8. Using the history of philosophy 9. Using other fields 10. Model-building 11. Conclusion: the future of philosophy References and Further Reading

Timothy Williamson is the Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, and A. Whitney Griswold Visiting Professor at Yale University. Previously he was the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh University. He has published books and articles on many branches of philosophy, some of which have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and other languages. He frequently writes on philosophy in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times blog The Stone, and newspapers in various countries.

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Clara E. Mattei (New School)

The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

“A must-read, with key lessons for the future.”—Thomas Piketty

A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins.

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal?

In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.

Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism.

Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power. 480 pages | 3 halftones, 8 line drawings, 3 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2022

Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--HISTORY, ECONOMICS--INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE

History: EUROPEAN HISTORY, HISTORY OF IDEAS

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction

Part I: War and Crisis 1 The Great War and the Economy 2 “A Wholly New School of Thought” 3 The Struggle for Economic Democracy 4 The New Order

Part II: The Meaning of Austerity 5 International Technocrats and the Making of Austerity 6 Austerity, a British Story 7 Austerity, an Italian Story 8 Italian Austerity and Fascism through British Eyes 9 Austerity and Its “Successes” 10 Austerity Forever Afterword Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html

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Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Cato Institute)

Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics

A penetrating analysis from one of the defining voices of contemporary economics.

In Beyond Positivism, Behaviorism, and Neoinstitutionalism in Economics, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey zeroes in on the authoritarian cast of recent economics, arguing for a re-focusing on the liberated human. The behaviorist positivism fashionable in the field since the 1930s treats people from the outside. It yielded in Williamson and North a manipulative neo-institutionalism. McCloskey argues that institutions as causes are mainly temporary and intermediate, not ultimate. They are human-made, depending on words, myth, ethics, ideology, history, identity, professionalism, gossip, movies, what your mother taught you. Humans create conversations as they go, in the economy as in the rest of life.

In engaging and erudite prose, McCloskey exhibits in detail the scientific failures of neo-institutionalism. She proposes a “humanomics,” an economics with the humans left in. Humanomics keeps theory, quantification, experiment, mathematics, econometrics, though insisting on more true rigor than is usual. It adds what can be learned about the economy from history, philosophy, literature, and all the sciences of humans. McCloskey reaffirms the durability of “market-tested innovation” against the imagined imperfections to be corrected by a perfect government. With her trademark zeal and incisive wit, she rebuilds the foundations of economics. REVIEWS

“A compact discussion of some crucial issues economists should be contemplating.” The Enlightened Economist.

"Beyond Positivism [presents] a criticism and reshaping of economic thought that departs from neoinstitutionalism and other non-‘humanomical’ movements, promoting the ethics of liberalism as the ideal foundation for an adequate economic science.” Journal of Economic Literature

“The manuscript is a collection of writings for various forums, many reviews of others and many replies to critics. One unifying theme is a critique of neoinstitutional economics. But yet another theme is a defense of the bourgeois trilogy against its critics. This book is well worth a read.” Richard Langlois, University of Connecticut

“This new book deepens the continuing conversation in Humanomics. It’s essentially about discovering Adam Smith and resuming a path that McCloskey has so magnificently helped to reinvigorate in the last half century.” Vernon Smith, Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction The Argument in Brief

Part I. Economics Is in Scientific Trouble Chapter 1. An Antique, Unethical, and Badly Measured Behaviorism Doesn’t Yield Good Economic Science or Good Politics Chapter 2. Economics Needs to Get Serious about Measuring the Economy Chapter 3. The Number of Unmeasured “Imperfections” Is Embarrassingly Long Chapter 4. Historical Economics Can Measure Them, Showing Them to Be Small Chapter 5. The Worst of Orthodox Positivism Lacks Ethics and Measurement

Part II. Neoinstitutionalism Shares in the Troubles Chapter 6. Even the Best of Neoinstitutionalism Lacks Measurement Chapter 7. And “Culture,” or Mistaken History, Will Not Repair It Chapter 8. That Is, Neoinstitutionalism, Like the Rest of Behavioral Positivism, Fails as History and as Economics Chapter 9. As It Fails in Logic and in Philosophy Chapter 10. Neoinstitutionalism, in Short, Is Not a Scientific Success

Part III. Humanomics Can Save the Science Chapter 11. But It’s Been Hard for Positivists to Understand Humanomics Chapter 12. Yet We Can Get a Humanomics Chapter 13. And Although We Can’t Save Private Max U Chapter 14. We Can Save an Ethical Humanomics

Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo145786166.html

192 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2022

Economics and Business: ECONOMICS--GENERAL THEORY AND PRINCIPLES

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Tommie Shelby (Harvard) The idea of prison abolition

An incisive and sympathetic examination of the case for ending the practice of imprisonment

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether? In The Idea of Prison Abolition, Tommie Shelby examines the abolitionist case against prisons and its formidable challenge to would-be prison reformers.

Philosophers have long theorized punishment and its justifications, but they haven’t paid enough attention to incarceration or its related problems in societies structured by racial and economic injustice. Taking up this urgent topic, Shelby argues that prisons, once reformed and under the right circumstances, can be legitimate and effective tools of crime control. Yet he draws on insights from black radicals and leading prison abolitionists, especially Angela Davis, to argue that we should dramatically decrease imprisonment and think beyond bars when responding to the problem of crime.

While a world without prisons might be utopian, The Idea of Prison Abolition makes the case that we can make meaningful progress toward this ideal by abolishing the structural injustices that too often lead to crime and its harmful consequences.

Review “In this sharp and provocative book, Tommie Shelby shines new light on the misguided logics and harmful practices that structure the entire criminal legal system in America. He engages the political philosophy of Angela Davis to advance our understanding of the legacy of slavery, the impact of racism, the morality of punishment, the limits of reform, the meaning of justice, and other important questions that have been central to Davis’s work and the growing movement to abolish prisons. No matter where you stand on the issue, The Idea of Prison Abolition is essential reading that will frame debates about the purpose and function of incarceration for decades to come.”―Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America “Should our manifestly unjust prison system be abolished or radically reformed? With characteristic philosophical acumen, and by way of a careful, nuanced engagement with Angela Davis’s powerful and influential defense of prison abolition, Tommie Shelby’s answer to this question is an indispensable contribution to ongoing debates about the function of incarceration within a racially stratified capitalist society. The Idea of Prison Abolition is worldly philosophy at its best, a book from which all parties to these debates stand to benefit, whether they agree with Shelby or not.”―Robert Gooding-Williams, author of In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America “With characteristic clarity and analytical precision, Tommie Shelby offers a probing discussion of the idea of prison abolition. Drawing on philosophy, intellectual history, and the social sciences, he zeroes in on the complex moral meaning of violence. Arguing for much more than incremental reform of the prison system, this indispensable book asks whether prisons must be abolished for justice to be served.”―Bruce Western, author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison About the Author Tommie Shelby is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform and We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity.

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Lewis R. Gordon (UCONN -Storrs) Fear of black consciousness

Lewis R. Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking account of Black consciousness by a leading philosopher In this original and penetrating work, Lewis R. Gordon, one of the leading scholars of Black existentialism and anti-Blackness, takes the reader on a journey through the historical development of racialized Blackness, the problems this kind of consciousness produces, and the many creative responses from Black and non-Black communities in contemporary struggles for dignity and freedom. Skillfully navigating a difficult and traumatic terrain, Gordon cuts through the mist of white narcissism and the versions of consciousness it perpetuates. He exposes the bad faith at the heart of many discussions about race and racism not only in America but across the globe, including those who think of themselves as "color blind." As Gordon reveals, these lies offer many white people an inherited sense of being extraordinary, a license to do as they please. But for many if not most Blacks, to live an ordinary life in a white-dominated society is an extraordinary achievement. Informed by Gordon's life growing up in Jamaica and the Bronx, and taking as a touchstone the pandemic and the uprisings against police violence, Fear of Black Consciousness is a groundbreaking work that positions Black consciousness as a political commitment and creative practice, richly layered through art, love, and revolutionary action.

Reviews

“Lewis Gordon’s expansive philosophical engagement with the current moment―its histories and globalities, its politics and protests, its visual and sonic cultures―reminds us that the ultimate aim of Black freedom quests is, indeed, universal liberation.” ―Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz

“Reading Fear of Black Consciousness had me nodding so often and so vigorously, I got a mild case of whiplash. With surgical precision, laser-sharp wit, and the eye of an artist, Lewis R. Gordon doesn’t just dissect race, racism, and racial thinking; he also offers a clarion call to embrace Black consciousness, to take political responsibility for decolonizing and transforming the world as it is.” ―Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

“Lewis R. Gordon is a thinker whose reflections on race have produced singular illuminations on our times. In Fear of Black Consciousness, he refines our conceptual understanding of how race consciousness is made and lived, and shows how reflection and survival are intertwined for all those who suffer from antiblack racism. Drawing on the history of philosophy and on a wide range of colonial histories, African popular culture, aboriginal histories, contemporary films, and stories, he shows the critical powers of creativity in dismantling racism and the making of a world where breath and love and existence become possible.” ―Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

“This striking text offers the first systematic examination that I’ve seen of the epistemic dimensions of the universal illness that encompasses neoconservatism and neoliberalism. We learn the differences between a first-level, naive black consciousness and a revised and refined ‘Black consciousness,’ which critically reflects on this world and is capable of radically transforming it. You will want this book among your primary intellectual road supplies for the future.” ―Hortense J. Spillers, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English Emerita at Vanderbilt University

"In Fear of Black Consciousness, we are invited to think through the deep racial contours of philosophical thought and notice how black ways of being animate new modes of living together. As atrocity, injury, white supremacy, and racial violence loom, Gordon holds steady a Fanonian outlook, theorizing black consciousness as the realization of possibility―that is, a sustained political commitment that recalculates the stakes of freedom." ―Katherine McKittrick, author of Demonic Grounds and Dear Science

"Fear of Black Consciousness deserves to be carefully studied . . . deeply engaging and captivating . . . [Lewis Gordon] is an ally of the revolutionary struggle for human freedom." ―Joel Wendland-Liu, People's World

About the Author

Lewis R. Gordon is an Afro-Jewish philosopher, political thinker, educator, and musician. He is Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at UCONN-Storrs. He has received accolades for his many influential books and articles, many of which have been reprinted and translated around the world. He is Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and a former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, for which he now serves as chairperson of awards and global collaborations. Gordon's previous works include Disciplinary Decadence, Her Majesty's Other Children, and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Of Divine Warning.

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Martha C. Nussbaum (University of Chicago) Justice for animals: Our collective responsibility

When I hear "justice" and "responsibility," my neck tightens, fight or flight is activated. When I see she will use a lot of recent science, my hopes dim. Prof. Nussbaum, however, is, as one of my previous interviewees said, "the most important living and active philosopher." I get it. Never have I marked-up the pages of a book like this one: this isn't a book you take in so much as work with. And having worked with it, I now see the world as less scientifically drab; it is now more shimmering and magical. And as for "justice," the physical effect is a backbone, a posture more fortified, more bowed back.

Justice for animals: Our collective responsibility

A revolutionary new theory and call to action on animal rights, ethics, and law from the renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum.

Animals are in trouble all over the world. Whether through the cruelties of the factory meat industry, poaching and game hunting, habitat destruction, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love, animals suffer injustice and horrors at our hands every day.

The world needs an ethical awakening, a consciousness-raising movement of international proportions. In Justice for Animals, one of the world’s most influential philosophers and humanists Martha C. Nussbaum provides a revolutionary approach to animal rights, ethics, and law.

From dolphins to crows, elephants to octopuses, Nussbaum examines the entire animal kingdom, showcasing the lives of animals with wonder, awe, and compassion to understand how we can create a world in which human beings are truly friends of animals, not exploiters or users. All animals should have a shot at flourishing in their own way. Humans have a collective duty to face and solve animal harm. An urgent call to action and a manual for change, Nussbaum’s groundbreaking theory directs politics and law to help us meet our ethical responsibilities as no book has done before.

Author

Martha C. Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics, appointed in the Philosophy Department and the Law School of the University of Chicago. She gave the 2016 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities and won the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy. The 2018 Berggruen Prize in Philosophy and Culture, and the 2020 Holberg Prize. These three prizes are regarded as the most prestigious awards available in fields not eligible for a Nobel. She has written more than twenty-two books, including Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions; Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice; Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities; and The Monarchy of Fear.

Reviews

“The most important book on animal ethics written to date, Justice for Animals is a brilliant and remarkably comprehensive exploration of the ethical issues connected with human treatment of nonhumans. a milestone in the field.”—Thomas I. White, author of In Defense of Dolphins “With urgent clarity, Martha Nussbaum explains why we must and how we can take responsibility for the multi-species world that is our reality. Justice For Animals is a celebration of the human potential for love and mutuality and a song of hope, as much as it is a steely-eyed analysis of our callous dominance of the nonhuman world.”—Amy Linch, Penn State University “Martha Nussbaum’s work has changed the humanities, but in this book her focus is startling, born of an ardent love for her late daughter and for all animals on Earth.”—Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Case Western Reserve University, and Senior Research Fellow, Earth System Governance Project

“Martha Nussbaum takes an honest look at how animals may survive in a human-dominated world, and lays out a plan of action to help creatures great and small in important and critical ways.”—Dr. Denise Herzing, Founder and Research Director of the Wild Dolphin Project “A provocative book. Nussbaum lays out a foundation for the political rights of animalsand asks what creating a world where animals could be our friends would look like. An essential read for anyone interested in what we owe to our fellow creatures.”—Nicolas Delon, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies, New College of Florida “The morality of the human-animal relation urgently needs updating. We can’t wish for a more insightful and compassionate guide than philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She urges us to look beyond pain and pleasure and to consider all animals, not just those that resemble us. Each species’ specific needs and capabilities offer a guide of how they should be treated.”—Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist "A thought-provoking guide to ethical coexistence with the diverse creatures of Earth." —Kirkus Reviews "This trenchant and masterful blend of political analysis, philosophical study, and call to action is a must-read.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

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Karin de Boer (University of Leuven, Belgium) Kant's reform of metaphysics: The Critique of Pure Reason reconsidered

Scholarly debates on the Critique of Pure Reason have largely been shaped by epistemological questions. Challenging this prevailing trend, Kant's Reform of Metaphysics is the first book-length study to interpret Kant's Critique in view of his efforts to turn Christian Wolff's highly influential metaphysics into a science. Karin de Boer situates Kant's pivotal work in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy, traces the development of Kant's conception of critique, and offers fresh and in-depth analyses of key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, including the Transcendental Deduction, the Schematism Chapter, the Appendix to the Transcendental Analytic, and the Architectonic. The book not only brings out the coherence of Kant's project, but also reconstructs the outline of the 'system of pure reason' for which the Critique was to pave the way, but that never saw the light.

Review 'De Boer has succeeded in writing a much-needed account of Kant's critical philosophy as the salvation - not the destruction - of metaphysics, correcting the epistemological focus of over a century of Kant scholarship. Her illuminating rereading in light of the metaphysics of Wolff and Baumgarten and her scrupulous reconstruction of the system of pure reason that Kant intended but never completed makes this book essential reading for anybody interested in Kant's philosophy.' -----Paul Franks, Yale University 'De Boer shows in detail how Kant's Critical aim was to reform metaphysics as a system, not to reject it altogether. An especially valuable feature of her discussion is its focus on Kant's concern with Wolff's philosophy and the meta-metaphysical question of how metaphysics as a science of pure reason is possible at all.' -----Karl Ameriks, University of Notre Dame 'By contextualizing Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason against the background of Wolffian philosophy, de Boer innovatively argues that Kant’s Critique should be interpreted as a reform (rather than simply a destruction) of traditional metaphysics. In the course of her overall argument, de Boer helps further our understanding of 18th-century figures like Wolff and Baumgarten, while also casting new light on aspects of Kant’s own thought. De Boer’s book should appeal both to scholars of Kant’s theoretical philosophy and historians of 18th-century philosophical thought more generally.' -----Reed Winegar, Fordham University Book Description This book reinterprets key parts of the Critique of Pure Reason in view of Kant's sustained engagement with Wolffian metaphysics. About the Author Karin de Boer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She is the author of Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel (2000) and On Hegel: The Sway of the Negative (2010), as well as of numerous articles on Kant, Hegel, classical German philosophy, and Heidegger. She also co-edited, with Tinca Prunea-Bretonnet, The Experiential Turn in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy (2020).

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Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do About It  by: Nancy Fraser

 A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism’s insatiable appetite—and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world

Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life–guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy.

What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital—and starve it to death. Editorial Reviews Review “Nancy Fraser is a legendary radical philosopher grounded in the best of the Marxist and feminist traditions yet whose genuine embrace and profound understanding of Black, ecological, immigrant and sexual freedom movements make her a unique figure on the contemporary scene! Cannibal Capitalism is not only a singular gem—it is an instant classic for our bleak times!”
—Cornel West, author of Race Matters

“A brilliant synthesis of Fraser’s many pathbreaking contributions to a Marxian theory of capitalism for the twenty-first century, beautifully written.”
—Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End?

“Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. With characteristically clear and inventive prose, Nancy Fraser unpacks capitalism’s historically shifting, interlaced dynamics, revealing the interrelations between seemingly disparate crises and social violences. Throughout, we see the powerful potential of an anti-racist, eco-social reproduction critique. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans.”
—Sue Ferguson, author of Women and Work

“Cannibal Capitalism conjures up a monster that voraciously consumes the very land, labor and natural world upon which it thrives. With characteristically clear and inventive prose, Nancy Fraser unpacks capitalism’s historically shifting, interlaced dynamics, revealing the interrelations between seemingly disparate crises and social violences. Throughout, we see the powerful potential of an anti-racist, eco-social reproduction critique. And we see why the future of the planet and humanity depend upon the socialist left building anti-capitalist struggles that reach across workplaces, streets, forests and oceans.”
—Sue Ferguson, author of Women and Work

“Nancy Fraser has produced the most elegant theory yet of capitalism in our age—capitalism not in the narrow economic sense, but capitalism in the sense of a total omnivore, a system that cannot stop devouring everything around it, destroying the lives of people and nature. This is Marxist theory for our age of crisis—and, we shall hope, of reckoning.”
—Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline About the Author Nancy Fraser is Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fortunes of Feminism and The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born, and co-author of Capitalism: A Conversation and Feminism for the 99%.

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Understanding and Enhancing Positive Regard in Psychotherapy: Carl Rogers and Beyond By Barry A. Farber [interviewee], Jessica Suzuki, and Daisy Ort

In philosophy, Carl Rogers is known for (1) his debates with B.F. Skinner; (2) his dialogues with Martin Buber; and (3) his independent development of phenomenology. (Only after developing his ideas did he learn that this approach--what he was doing--was in Europe called "phenomenology").

Rogers also developed what he called "positive regard," (PR) which grew out of John Dewey's work on valuation, especially Dewey's concept of "prizing."

In this podcast, I interview Barry A. Farber about his new book (co-authored with Jessica Suzuki, and Daisy Ort) which is an up-to-date and comprehensive presentation of PR, its history, theoretical underpinnings, interscholastic variations, empirical support, and practical applications. This book is primarily directed towards practitioners and theorists of psychotherapy, as the interview with Dr. Farber will show; it will be featured in our forthcoming series on psychotherapy podcasts.

For philosophers, however, the book and the interview may also be of interest, especially for philosophers interested in phenomenology, intersubjectivity, talk therapy, and valuation.

The remainder of this blog entry provides additional background for philosophers who may not be familiar with Rogers' work.

Rogers started his career with a doctorate from teacher's college and then practical work as a psychologist at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in Rochester, NY. Outside of his clinical work, he started writing books and then transferred to academic work at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago.

Although appreciative of Freud's writings, Rogers attacked the doctrinaire Freudians of the American Psychoanalytic Association who dominated American postwar psychotherapy. He was a committed empiricist who developed testable versions of his theories. His primary concern was: what works in talk therapy.

Rogers acknowledged that he learned the essence of his psychotherapeutic technique from two people primarily. First: Otto Rank, once one of Freud's inner circle who came to the United States and found significant influence in schools of social work. Rogers was completely UNinterested in Rank's theoretical work (regarding, e.g., birth trauma), but he was fascinated by Rank's ideas on psychoanalytic practice.

For example, Rank de-emphasized intellectual understanding, and instead emphasized the therapeutic use of empathy. Rank wrote, "What prevents us from a correct ... therapeutic understanding is the desire to understand intellectually. Correct understanding is one of empathy, ... whereas intellectual understanding is ... a compelling of the other to our own thought, our own interpretation." Also, he wanted to "put[] the whole emphasis of the process on emotional, instead of intellectual, experience."

Rank's name is also associated with "Will" therapy. He emphasized that in the therapeutic situation, the patient in some sense "willed" the illness (gained a "substititute satisfaction" from the illness [today we, might say, a "jouissance"], one that the patient would resist relinquishing. For example, Rank wrote that, "As a result of my experience, I found ... that the illness is nursed by the patient in order to withdraw from life ... [I]t is self-willed, a sort of [personal creativity that finds] expression only in this negative, destructive way."

Finally, Rank is well-known for flipping the hierarchy in the therapy situation. "The whole [traditional, "Freudian"] psychoanalytic approach is centered around the therapist, who is doing the research and the explaining on the basis of what he knows. Real therapy has to be centered around the client, his difficulties, his needs, his activities." And, succinctly, "The therapist must not take the part of authority of any kind, but must be satisfied with the role of an ego helper (assistant ego)."

The second primary influence on Rogers' technique was the philosopher Jessie Taft. Taft wrote one of the earliest dissertations on the feminist movement; her 1913 University of Chicago thesis (advised by George Mead) was The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness.

As a woman, Taft was unable to receive an academic position. She went to work in the "mental hygiene" movement with Virginia Robinson who would become her life partner and her career partner. As life partners, Taft and Robinson adopted two children and lived in a "Boston marriage." As career partners, they founded the school of social work at the University of Pennsylvania; they also are known as the founders of a school-of-thought within social work, the "functional" school.

In official versions of the history of American talk therapy, Taft is regularly overlooked (again, presumably because the link is made from male Rogers to male Rank), but Rogers acknowledged that his personal interaction with Rank was limited, and it was truly Taft and her team who actually taught their method hands-on.

There are, of course, many gifted therapists who never wrote down their method, or published their method as a book. Taft, however, was a professor, scholar, translator, and psychoanalyst. (She translated Ranks's major works, and she chose Rank as her training analyst).

A strong case could be made that the first book in the Rogerian tradition was Taft's 1933 The Dynamics of Therapy in a Controlled Relationship. Originally, the client-centered (Rogerian) approach was called either "nondirective" or "passive" therapy (meaning that the therapist was "passive" as in not active, not the center of attention in the therapy).

Taft originally attempted to work as a psychotherapist, but she felt her attempts were failures. Thus, she went to look for a training analyst (and chose Rank). Her description of her first session with Rank is telling:

"When I finally came to my first hour with Rank, while consciously submissive, afraid, and fully aware of my ignorance of psychoanalysis, my underlying attitude was far from humble. I was, after all, a psychologist. I had some knowledge of myself and my problems. I had achieved a point of view psychologically. If there was anything in my unconscious in terms of buried memories, I would have to be shown. And so the battle was joined; but I soon found that it was a battle with myself. I was deprived of a foe.

"It took only two weeks for me to yield to a new kind of relationship, in the experiencing of which the nature of my own therapeutic failures became suddenly clear. No verbal explanation was ever needed; my first experience of taking help for a need that had been denied was enough to give a basis for the years of learning to follow."

The Rank-Taft-Rogers approach has also been called "relationship" therapy--in that the therapy provides a new kind of (disciplined) relationship, one which serves as fertile soil for the client to grow from his/her own action.

Excerpts from Taft (1933)

"Therapy as it relates to the balance of forces in the organization of personality has always been of prime importance to me, but my concept of what such therapy involves has undergone a complete revolution in the past twenty-five years. It has developed from the notion of a reform of the 'other' through superior knowledge of life and psychology, a concept closely allied to that of scientific control in the field of emotions and behavior, to my present acceptance of therapy as presented in this volume, a therapy which is purely individual, non-moral, non-scientific, non-intellectual, which can take place only when divorced from all hint of control, unless it be the therapist's control of [herself] in the therapeutic situation."

"The word 'therapy' is used instead of 'treatment' because in its derivation and in my own feeling about the word, there is not so much implication of manipulation of one person by another. To treat, according to the dictionary is to apply a process to someone or something. The word 'therapy' has no verb in English, for which I am grateful; it cannot do anything to anybody, hence can better represent a process, going on, observed perhaps, understood perhaps, assisted perhaps, but not applied.

"The Greek noun from which therapy is derived means 'a servant'. The verb means 'to wait'. … No one wants another to apply any process to the inmost self, however desirable a change in personality and behavior may seem objectively."

"Over [the client's use or non-use of the therapeutic relationship,] I have no control beyond [1] the genuineness of my understanding of the difficulty with which anyone takes or seeks help, [2] my respect for the strength of the patient, however negatively expressed, and [3] the reality of my acceptance of my function as helper not ruler."

"As I conceive it, the therapeutic function involves the most intense activity but it is an activity of attention, of identification and understanding, of adaptation to the individual's need and pattern, combined with an unflagging preservation of one's own limitation and difference.

"[Any] preconceived idea of what the interview should sooner or later bring forth, tends just as much to control and domination of the client as if [the caseworker] had tried [deliberately] to reform [the client's] habits or his morals. Very few case workers ever realize [this], because if they did they would be greatly at a loss as to what function remains for them."

"One might fairly define relationship therapy as a process in which the individual finally learns to utilize the allotted hour from beginning to end without undue fear, resistance, resentment or greediness ... In so far [as] he has learned to live, to accept this fragment of time in and for itself, and strange as it may seem, if he can live this hour he has in his grasp the secret of all hours, he has conquered life and time for the moment and in principle."

"In the last analysis therapy as a qualitative affair must depend upon the personal development of the therapist and [her] ability to use consciously for the benefit of [her] client, the insight and self-discipline which [she] has achieved in [her] own struggle to accept self, life and time, as limited, and to be experience fully only at the cost of fear, pain, and loss. ... To make case work therapeutic, incidentally or deliberately, one must be a therapist and only to the extent that this is true are the relationships one sets up therapeutic … rests upon strength of will, freedom to feel, and an ability to lend oneself to the use of the other … in addition to skill. … [p. 22] to develop or accept the self which is required by her job, a self with real strength to be utilized therapeutically by the client.

"If I had followed out my own theoretical interest, I should have pursued some of the biological material introduced by John, his symbolic use of the rug in a birth struggle, his references to toilet functions and breast, his use of the tent, etc. But I am convinced that in so doing I should have lost sight of and interfered with the creative use of a present experience, which I had only to understand and respond to intuitively not to interpret or investigate in terms of my own intellectual curiosity. To pursue the symbol may be science. It is not therapy."

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Aristotle's Ethics
Nicomachean and Eudemian Themes

An examination of the philosophical themes presented in Aristotle's Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics. Topics include happiness, the voluntary and choice, the doctrine of the mean, particular virtues of character and temperamental means, virtues of thought, akrasia, pleasure, friendship, and luck. Special attention has been paid to Aristotle's treatment of virtues of character and thought and their relation to happiness, the reason why Aristotle is the quintessential virtue ethicist. The virtues of character have not received the attention they deserve in most discussions of the relationship between the two treatises.

AUTHOR: Paula Gottlieb,

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Happiness
2. Virtue of Character and the Doctrine of the Mean
3. The Voluntary and Choice
4. Virtues of Character and Temperamental Means
5. Justice
6. Virtues of Thought
7. Akrasia and Pleasure
8. Friendship
9. Sophistic Puzzles, the Kaloskagathos, and Luck
10. Happiness Revisited
Conclusion.

Glossary of Key Terms

References

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Thinking through object-oriented ontology—and the work of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid—to explore new concepts of the relationship between form and function

The first book on architecture by the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO), Architecture and Objects deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function.

"Graham Harman’s Architecture and Objects could very well be a new philosophical blueprint for how to build our emerging twenty-first-century world. By reconsidering the relationship between humanity, reality, and the built environment, he shows us, like a UV light at a crime scene, ways of understanding architecture that we’d never even considered but that are now, all of a sudden, glowing with brilliant potential." —Mark Foster Gage, Yale University and principal of Mark Foster Gage Architects

Full details.

Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects, the first book on architecture by the founder of object-oriented ontology (OOO), deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO’s influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function.

Graham Harman opens with a critique of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, the three philosophers whose ideas have left the deepest imprint on the field, highlighting the limits of their thinking for architecture. Instead, Harman contends, architecture can employ OOO to reconsider traditional notions of form and function that emphasize their relational characteristics—form with a building’s visual style, function with its stated purpose—and constrain architecture’s possibilities through literalism. Harman challenges these understandings by proposing de-relationalized versions of both (zero-form and zero-function) that together provide a convincing rejoinder to Immanuel Kant’s dismissal of architecture as “impure.”

Through critical engagement with the writings of Peter Eisenman and fresh assessments of buildings by Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid, Architecture and Objects forwards a bold vision of architecture. Overcoming the difficult task of “zeroing” function, Harman concludes, would place architecture at the forefront of a necessary revitalization of exhausted aesthetic paradigms.

About the author.

Graham Harman is distinguished professor of philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, and author of many books, including Speculative Realism: An Introduction and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.

raham Harman’s willingness—indeed, his pleasure—to immerse himself in the complexities of architectural history, theory, practice, and criticism results in a book that not only subtly translates between architecture and philosophy but, more provocatively, argues for architecture’s centrality in rethinking Kantian aesthetic formalism and its legacy in formalist art, criticism, and aesthetics. He offers us a compelling account of architecture as a drama of rifts and splits in the ‘zeroing’ of form, function, and time, while further elucidating the crucial role of aesthetics as ‘first philosophy’ in object-oriented ontology.

— Aron Vinegar, University of Oslo Table of contents* Contents

Introduction

1. Architects and Their Philosophers

2. I Know Not What

3. Object-Orientation

4. The Aesthetic Centrality of Architecture

5. The Architectural Cell

Concluding Maxims

Notes

Bibliography

Index

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/architecture-and-objects

August:
Welcome to Philosophy podcast, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. Today we're talking about the book Architecture and Objects: Art After Nature by Graham Harmon. The description is "Object-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural theorists and practitioners in recent years. Architecture and Objects," this book, "the first book on architecture by the founder of OOO, Object-Oriented Ontology, deepens the exchange between architecture and philosophy, providing a new roadmap to OOO's influence on the language and practice of contemporary architecture, and offering new conceptions of the relationship between form and function. Engaging with Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, writings of Peter Eisenman, and buildings by Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid, Graham Harmon forwards a bold vision of architecture, one that places architecture at the forefront of a necessary revitalization of exhausted aesthetic paradigms."

August:
A couple of the recommendations.

August:
Mark Foster Gage, Yale University. "Graham Harmon's Architecture and Objects could very well be a new philosophical blueprint for how to build our emerging 21st-century world. By reconsidering the relationship between humanity, reality, and built environment, he shows us, like a UV light at a crime scene, ways of understanding architecture that we'd never even considered, but that are now all of a sudden glowing with brilliant potential."

August:
Aron Vinegar of the University of Oslo. "Graham Harmon's willingness, indeed his pleasure, to immerse himself in the complexity of architectural history, theory, practice, and criticism, results in a book that not only subtly translates between architecture and philosophy, but more provocatively argues for architecture's centrality in rethinking Kantian aesthetic formalism. He offers us a compelling account of architecture as a drama of rifts and splits in the zeroing of form, function, and time."

August:
Graham Harmon is a distinguished professor of philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His books include Art and Objects, and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Welcome, Professor Harmon.

Graham Harmon:
Thank you very much, August. It's a pleasure to be here.

August:
You start off your book by saying "why a book on architecture, other than that I have recently been appointed to a architecture school." I think that's your opening joke. How do you answer that?

Graham Harmon:
I answer that by saying that this book is a continuation of my book Art and Objects from two years earlier, in which I was trying to express support for what's called Kantian formalism in the arts. The idea that an artwork is cut off from other things, and needs to be interpreted in its own rights, not in terms of its conceptual meaning, not in terms of its socio-historical surroundings, not in terms of how it personally makes us feel. I want to basically express support for that while also pointing to the limitations of Kantian formalism, which I did in that book, by pointing out that Kant and some of his modern heirs in art criticism such as Michael Fried, someone I admire very much, are two quick to dissociate the artwork from the human beholder. I argued in that book there's no way to do that, because artwork has to be seen as a composite or hybrid made of the physical work and the person who encounters it.

Graham Harmon:
Now, in Architecture and Objects I wanted to take up the fact that Kant is quite down on architecture, ranks it very low in the arts. The reason being that it's useful. If an artwork is useful, that's just as bad as an ethical act being useful. Because, of course, in Kant's ethics, ethical acts have to be performed for their own sake not because they lead to any good results, or lead to a better reputation for the person for being ethical, or lead to the person going to heaven instead of hell.

Graham Harmon:
All of those things ruin the purity of an ethical act for Kant, and likewise, for an artwork to be useful ruins the purity of the beauty. I realized that the conclusion I reached in Art and Objects allows us to rethink Kant's idea of architecture. Namely, since the entanglement of the human and the artwork is no longer a problem in my interpretation of visual art, that means that architecture is no longer suspect. Because that entanglement already occurs at the level of visual art, let alone at the level of architecture. It was a chance to rethink architecture in a post-Kantian way that nonetheless respects what Kant was seeing.

August:
Okay. I guess you clearly haven't gone through the other fields that have both art and practical application, fashion design to interior design to just being a hairdresser. I understand you make an argument about the difference between architecture and art, and you talk about the centrality of architecture. But it'll be another project to think about how those other fields might rank.

Graham Harmon:
Yes. I mean, I could write a book about anything if I put myself to it. Architecture just seemed more pressing both because Kant has bad things to say about it, and also because I am working in architecture school. I've been pressuring myself to learn a lot about architecture over the past 10 years, but especially the last 7 that I've been teaching at an architecture school.

August:
I see. One of your statements in the book is that when an architect makes a building, it's a tacit statement about the nature of reality, and that provides a overlap with philosophy. That's not clear to me why that would be true. Why, when an architect is building a building, it is a statement or it is an attempt to capture a deeper reality.

Graham Harmon:
My friend and colleague David Rue, I was undergraduate with him and now on his colleague at SCI-Arc, made a very interesting statement about 10 years ago in one of his articles, where he said that architecture gives us our first sense of reality. It's quite rare that any human is in the middle of raw nature. Even if you're in a national park, you're in an organized space, at least the entrance into the park has been arranged by civil engineers and landscape designers. All the moreso if you're in a city, you're in a town. Right now you're in a house, I'm in an apartment building. We are not in direct confrontation with nature. We are inhabiting a human-designed medium. Just as many animals primarily inhabit media that they create themselves, whether it's beehives or beaver dams.

Graham Harmon:
What this means is that our sense of reality is actually decided by the architect. The architect can decide whether we're in a soothing space or an ominous space, can decide whether we are in a space that allows in lots of sunlight or not much sunlight. In more recent architecture, the architecture can decide that the world is basically homogeneous and smooth and curves gently from one thing and another, or that there are abrupt cutoff points and different fashions have held sway at different times.

Graham Harmon:
This is the sense in which architecture makes a tacit statement about the nature of reality. On this basis, architects have picked up different philosophers at different times, especially in the last 60 years, to help guide their thinking. That itself is controversial in the architectural world now. There are some architects who think there's been too much philosophy and they want to get back to disciplinary craft.

Graham Harmon:
In my book, I make the case that, look, architecture is already involving all kinds of other disciplines. Why should you simply decide to exclude philosophy? Architects are some of the most omnivorous intellects I've encountered. They have to know about everything. They have to learn about whatever it is that their project is dedicated to. We'll always be a natural dialogue partner for architects.

August:
I would assume there's a lot of variety across architects, so that some architects would look for inspiration in philosophy and others wouldn't. They might find it somewhere else, or they're feel the muse is speaking through them. Is that true? A wide variety?

Graham Harmon:
Yes it is, and if you just look at recent architects, Peter Eisenman is as much a theorist as he is an architect. He drew first on Noam Chomsky, later on Derrida, later on Deleuze. He's picked up all kinds of things that are interesting to him he writes theoretical texts that I find interesting as a philosopher. I've debated with some of them in my book. Then you've got Zaha Hadid, the late lamented Zaha Hadid, who unfortunately died six years ago, too young, who was one of the preeminent architects of recent decades, but doesn't show much evidence of having been interested in theory on the philosophy [inaudible 00:09:35]. And yet, she fits very well within the Deleuzian current of architecture, even if I don't know how much Deleuze she read, if any. But the kind of design she does as a natural partner for Deleuze's philosophy. She was called the Queen of the Curve. Everything is continuous. They are very beautiful forms that she creates. They are also a statement about the nature of reality, even if she wouldn't have framed them that way.

August:
One of your concerns is clearly to, it seems that people have started using your theory, or the theory that's associated with you. Do you call it OOO?

Graham Harmon:
I pronounce it Triple O usually, but-

August:
Triple O? Okay. People have started to use that. You've seen it being referred to in texts about architecture or in discussions. It seems that one of your points was, "Okay, how do you do this in a way that is not too superficial, not too literal?"

Graham Harmon:
I think literalism is itself a philosophical problem. One of the themes of my book. Literalism you can define is the idea that a thing is nothing more than all of the qualities that it possesses. Philosophically, I guess the godfather of this idea is David Hume, who says "there are no objects, there are just bundles of qualities." There's not really any such thing as an apple. There's just red, round, juicy, hard, cold, sweet. All of these things go together so frequently that we form the habit of thinking of them as one thing we call it an apple. But apple itself is really nothing more for Hume and his followers than all of those things put together. Whereas phenomenology in the 20th century, with Husserl and beyond, Merleau-Ponty and others, says the opposite. That an object is always more than its qualities, because it vary, see different qualities of the thing at different times. Yet you never stop thinking of it as one and the same thing.

Graham Harmon:
So, the path to literalism, first of all, is seeing that the object is something distinct from its qualities, can change qualities and still be the same thing. It can be split from its qualities and still be the same thing. What interests me about aesthetics, which is usually considered a minor side annex to philosophy. While the big shots do metaphysics and epistemology and political theory. Aesthetics, for me, is not just about art that cultured humans find enjoyable. It's about a split between the object and its qualities. Which I think is the fundamental philosophical problem, because you can never pin down a thing in terms of definite qualities. Aesthetics helps remind us of this. Aesthetic language play a much larger role in Triple O than they do for other philosophies. Because I don't think literalism works. I don't think you can get the literal truth about the cosmos. Philosophy is not a knowledge.

Graham Harmon:
I think even science, in a sense, is not a knowledge. Science is, in large part, a knowledge. But we find in moments of what Kuhn called paradigm shifts, science comes into crisis, that we're not really sure anymore what the fundamental nature of reality is. Not just Kuhn. I would make the same statement about Popper and falsification, that science is, in many ways, a negative procedure rather than a positive one. Knowledge, in a way, is what deep thought opposes. Knowledge is a pragmatically useful thing. I wouldn't want to live in the world without knowledge. We rely on medical knowledge, we rely on engineering knowledge and so forth. But the frontiers of thought are always somewhere other than knowledge. They're at the place where we don't know something yet.

August:
I think one of the things you're doing is saying, "Let's not downplay something like metaphor." It's very insightful, actually. I don't know. You talk about non-rationalism. I think of it as a romantic current. Do you think of it that way?

Graham Harmon:
It could be. One difference from romanticism, which I admire a lot about romanticism, is this notion of the sublime, and Triple O's opposition to the sublime. Kant defines the sublime. He's talking about things like standing and looking out at the stormy sea, or looking up at the sky at night, maybe looking at these new photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, that, I agree, with those profound emotions unlocked by those moments. But Kant defines the sublime as the absolutely large or the absolutely powerful. I'm questioning the absolute part of it. Another Triple O theorist, Timothy Morton, wrote on his book Hyperobjects, that in a way, infinity is easily masterable. When you think about infinity, you think, "Wow, I can think the infinite." You feel proud of yourself. But Tim Morton says, "Try counting up to a hundred thousand." That's a finite number, but in some ways that's a more realistic threat than, say, infinity.

Graham Harmon:
And he primarily applied this to climate change, that it's somehow less threatening to say infinity than to say that the half-life of this material is 70,000 years or something. Because nobody in 70,000 years who's left, if anyone is left, I'm not going to have any meaningful connection with any of those people. It will be a totally different world. That's an idea I drew from Morton, to critique the sublime, that things can seem infinite, but they're actually all infinite in different ways and in different amounts. That would be the difference from romanticism, the idea that each, also the fact that in some ways romanticism fetishizes nature. Triple O does not want to do [inaudible 00:15:04]. For Triple O, technological objects are just as interesting as pine forests. That's another departure from romanticism.

August:
I understand. That's a good point. I notice you go through the book and you talk about how architects have used other philosophers and it's Heidegger, Derrida, DeLeuze. It strikes the reader that these are so-called continental philosophers. Even when you describe how architects might want to look at/to philosophers for maybe a new way of seeing things, that seems like more of a role for a continental philosopher, to inspire provoke, rather than the, as I understand the more analytic, let's be very clear and careful just inscribing things, not trying to provoke or astonish. Would you agree with that?

Graham Harmon:
I would, and this doesn't reflect even a value judgment on my part. It's just the description of what architects are doing. Architects are not really reading analytic philosophers. I'm not even sure what analytic philosopher they might read to inspire new architecture. Obviously Wittgenstein is of interest to everybody on some level, and was also a fine architect himself. I had the chance to tour his-

August:
I didn't know that.

Graham Harmon:
... house behind in Vienna. Which it's not generally accessible to the public. It's the Bulgarian cultural attache's office or something now in Vienna. But we had an architectural contact who enabled us to make a tour of that house. I was with an architect friend who said he thinks AR V Stein could have been one of the great architects [inaudible 00:16:42] decided to be. It's a remarkable piece of work. You'd think that Wittgenstein might appear more in architectural discourse, but that hasn't really happened the way it has in the visual arts with people like Kossoth, who was very influenced by Wittgenstein. Stanley Cavel is another person who writes well on the creation and has obviously had some influence on arts and our criticism through his friend, Michael fried. But I don't hear, Cavel mentioned by architects. I hear the big continental names. Heidegger, [inaudible 00:17:10] Deleuze, to a lesser extent Latour, Peter Sloterdijk has some growing interest, though he hasn't really spawned a school yet.

Graham Harmon:
We could ask why that is. I think part of this analytic philosophy made a decision early on. It is what it is. It made a decision to constitute itself as a science. It emulates specialized scientific disciplines. They take pride in this, in having very precise terminology, in referring mostly to recent work by other analytic philosophers, in dominating the departments of philosophy in the Anglo-American world. At least the prestigious ones. If you want to do continental philosophy like me, you end up going to small Catholic universities or maybe a few state schools such as Penn State or Memphis, Stony Brook, that do that kind of thing. But it's largely a Catholic-

August:
Interesting.

Graham Harmon:
Because continental philosophy fits well, I think, with the Catholic church's admirable support of the history of philosophy. Even though most of the graduate students at these places are not themselves Catholics. The Catholic universities support this very nicely.

Graham Harmon:
The problem that analytic philosophy has created for itself, there's two sides to every coin, is that it's not as accessible to the general public. Indeed, I think it takes pride in that, that we are a scientific discourse and just like the average person can't read quantum theory articles in a journal, the average person shouldn't expect to read analytic philosophy journals with ease.

Graham Harmon:
All right, but there's a sense in which philosophy also needs to be readable by the average intelligent person. This is something continental philosophy, in principle, does better. In practice, a lot of the professors in continental philosophy become just as narrow in their writing, and also tend to be more commentary-oriented sometimes. Rather than putting forth theories of their own, they tend to comment on Heidegger or Kant [inaudible 00:18:55] their own theories. But people like Zizek are always going to be more easily readable and perhaps more interesting for the general public than, say, Timothy Williamson at Oxford, who's one of the leading philosophers at Oxford, analytic philosophers, or David Lewis. The deceased David Lewis, one of their great meta-physicians. These are always going to be hard for the average person to read. I think that's the issue with architecture.

August:
Some would say, well, I guess there's the famous Nusbaum article on Butler where she says that some in the continental tradition cultivate a mystique around being obscure. Do you see any merit in that also? In some of the writing is very obscure.

Graham Harmon:
Sometimes. For example, I'm not an admirer of Derrida's style at all. I find it to be a headache to read Derrida most of the time. He gets into a groove once in a while, where he is got 8 or 10 pages that get right to the point. But that's usually preceded and followed by lots of dancing that I find tedious. Judith Butler is an interesting case. I just have to say this in defense of Butler. I don't like how she writes. She writes very technically. She's not as accessible as she could be. I think no spam made some fair points about that in her article. Then I had the chance to meet Judith Butler. She came over to Cairo, Egypt, as a guest speaker at the university when I was there. She's really disarming. Because, first of all, she's incredibly intelligent. There are certain people you're just in their presence and you have the sense immediately, "This is a very smart person."

Graham Harmon:
Second, she's an incredible listener. She looks you right in the eye and listens to everything you say. It's unnerving in a way. [inaudible 00:20:41] Judith Butler's listening to every word I say. It's rare to meet people like that. I didn't get the sense she's someone who cherishes obscurity as a person. Also, in the talk she gave, which was simply on Palestinian-Israeli politics, she was very clear. She didn't try to dither. She told us exactly what she thought should be done, to this audience. Obviously pro-Palestinian audience primarily in Egypt. I'm not sure why she chooses to write that way. I don't like the excuses that are sometimes made for that. They'll sometimes say, "Well, nobody complains that quantum theory is hard to understand." The difference there, Michelle Serres pointed this out, that in science, technical language is a shortcut. It's a way of saying more using fewer words. Whereas sometimes in the humanities, it's a way of saying less using more words. I think Serres is right about that. This is why I think it's very important to write clearly.

Graham Harmon:
I think one of the things about my generation in continental philosophy is if you look at someone like Meillassoux, he's very clear, very easy to read. I've talked to him about this. He said that that was his explicit goal. He didn't like the way Derridans wrote, he didn't like the way phenomenologists wrote even, and simply wanted to be as clear as possible. I think all of us in speculative realism made an effort to write clearly, to a greater or lesser extent I think this was an excess of the, let's say, post-structuralist generation of continental philosophy.

August:
We imitate our teachers, so something like a style can perpetuate like that.

Graham Harmon:
Yes.

August:
Let's talk about Triple O. All right. This was the first time I saw it. I actually just found your name by looking up leaving philosophers.

Graham Harmon:
All right.

August:
Yeah. Object-Oriented Ontology. I think if someone asked me to explain my understanding of it, in my words, I would say the idea is basically we want to go against what you hear. Currently. You hear this a lot in psychoanalysis, for example, about there is no such thing as a person. There's just a bunch of connections with other people. It's relationships come before the person, and there's a big problem with thinking about a person as a unit that goes through time. Triple O wants to talk about objects. That's the first word. It wants to have a very broad view of objects.

August:
I think it's very much in the line of Socrates in the sense of saying there's a lot that we don't know. It's also in line with Kant saying there is this noumena behind reality that we can't really access. I think it addresses the traditional problem in philosophy, which is this idea that there's what we interact with, then there's what things really are. That all our interactions are mediated. Then there's this question about what is real, what is underlying and real? It seems to me that Triple O addresses that. Then I would say, addresses that basic question, but it doesn't say, "Let's have a divide between consciousness and world, or mind and world." It says, essentially, as I understand it, "we're going to talk about objects, but we're not really going to put a subject in the center. We're going to make the subject another object. We're going to recognize an underlying or a deeper level, which is real and a higher level, which we'll call sensual, which includes much more than just sense perception."

August:
Then I think the other thing that it does is it says we're also going to put some structure on this real realm. Which is to say that there are, in this real realm, both objects and qualities. That would be my take after reading this book, but feel free to tell me I got it totally wrong.

Graham Harmon:
You got it totally right.

August:
Okay. Great.

Graham Harmon:
Nice summary. Very nice summary. Yes. You made a couple of important points there that I need to respond to. First of all, yes, we shouldn't reduce the thing either downward to its pieces or upward to its effects that's a common ... First of all, let me say that's what knowledge is. There are really only two kinds of knowledge that humans can have. If I ask you what something is, you can either tell me what it's made of or tell me what it does. There are subcategories of each of these. You can tell me the history of a thing, you can tell me its physical composition. These are all ways of telling me what it's made of.

Graham Harmon:
Or you can tell me what it does. You can say that oxygen allows living creatures to breathe, it causes fire to combust, things like this. And all forms of knowledge involve explaining a thing in terms of something else. That's fine. We need knowledge to survive as a species.

Graham Harmon:
But knowledge does not exhaust human cognition. There is also a human cognition that does a kind of mute justice, or tries to do a kind of mute justice to things that goes beyond that. It's commonly known, accepted by any philosophers if not all, that a thing is an emergent thing beyond its components. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, and it's great that we've known that since Lavoisier' chemistry in the late 1700s. But obviously oxygen has properties not found in either hydrogen or oxygen. It puts out fire, whereas both hydrogen and oxygen combust fire, and so on. You need hydrogen and oxygen to make fire, and you can even predict the properties of water using quantum chemistry once you know what hydrogen and oxygen are. But it's not a question of predictability. It's a question of the thing, having an independent reality.

Graham Harmon:
The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team is something over and above each of the individual members, right? It has obviously not had the same members for the whole 60 years. Players keep leaving, new players come in, so the Dodgers are something over and above their pieces. They're also something, I would say, under and beneath their relations. Because new teams have been added to the league since the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise relocated from Brooklyn to Los Angele.s they have to play now the Colorado Rockies and the Marlins who did not exist when the Dodgers first existed. The Dodgers, they play in different stadiums than they used to. New stadiums are being opened. So, the Dodgers, and obviously the American society around the Dodgers and Los Angeles, these are all changing. And yet the Dodgers, in some sense, remain the Dodgers. You can't reduce them upward. Some kernel remains always there, though never perfectly expressed in any given Dodgers game or any given season.

Graham Harmon:
Those are what I call critiques of undermining and overmining. You can undermine a thing by going downward, overmine it by going upward, then those combine in what I call dual mining. Normal scientific materialism, for example, is a dual mining gesture. Because on the one hand, it says things are reducible to their tiniest particles or the fields, whatever the smallest stuff is. But then it also wants to say, "Yes, but this is all mathematizable," which we can know. Therefore reducing it upward to its knowledge. We're not taking account of any residue in the things that's non-mathematizable, ever since Galileo and Descartes.

Graham Harmon:
Object is something in between those two extremes, and you can't know it by definition because any knowledge involves an undermining or an overmining. So how do we get at it? Well, aesthetics is the obvious answer, because when you're experiencing an artwork, you're not telling the beholders what it's made of. I mean, you might as some kind of dadaist gesture, but we're not primarily interested in what an artwork is made of the way we are interested in what a rock is made of in science. You're also not interested only in how this artwork makes me feel, or how this artwork comments on contemporary politics, because those things all change, and an artwork is supposed to challenge me to perceive it differently. The better it is, the more I'm going to have to go back to it and find things in it that I didn't find first.

Graham Harmon:
An artwork's an obvious example, but then there's also philosophy, which I think is closer to the arts than the sciences. Something analytic philosophy would never like. Because philosophy is, of course, philosophia. Possibly from Pythagoras onwards. Philosophia means the love of wisdom, not wisdom. Philosophy is not a knowledge. You get some analytic philosophers referring to what they do as scientific philosophy or exact philosophy. I see those as a contradiction in terms. That's like saying exact art, what would exact art be? It misses the point.

Graham Harmon:
Socrates asks a lot about the definitions of things, but he never gets any definitions. Every dialogue ends in further perplexity. He always says, or at least a few times says, "The only thing I know is I know nothing. I've never been anyone's teacher." So we shouldn't see Socrates as a wise man or as a scientist. He's not. He's a philosopher, and philosophy is something a little closer to the arts than to science. I'll give one quote supporting this that's often overlooked. Last great philosopher before the analytic continental split was Franz Brentano, the teacher of Husserl. He gave a very interesting lecture about philosophy in the 1890s in Vienna. He made this point that's not been commented on often, where he said, "In some senses, philosophy is like science. It makes progress. Every generation should see things in philosophy that the previous generation didn't. But in another sense, it's like the fine arts. It has periods of ripeness and periods of decline."

Graham Harmon:
You wouldn't necessarily say, even in analytic philosophy, that analytic philosophy knows more in 2022 than it knew in the time of Russell and Wittgenstein. In some sense, yes, because we have critiques to Russell and Wittgenstein now. But in some sense, that was a riper era. That was a more celebrated era of analytic philosophy than 2022, I would say .just like you have in the arts. 2022 art is not necessarily better than high cubism, which was considered a great period in modern art.

Graham Harmon:
Now, the question is how you reconcile those two. In many ways, this was also the question that guided Thomas Kuhn in discussing the history of science, the difference between normal science and revolutionary science. What is the relation between those two? Because normal science is cumulative. Then from time to time, it's completely disrupted by paradigm shifts. This hasn't been applied to philosophy enough, this idea that there are paradigm-shifting periods in philosophy. German idealism remains one of the most revered periods in the history of philosophy by scholars [inaudible 00:31:41] between Kant and Hegel that seems to embody philosophy to an eminent degree. Lots of stuff was happening every year. That isn't happening right now, as far as the public eye can see. Right?

August:
Right.

Graham Harmon:
This seems like a fairly normal period in philosophy by comparison.

August:
Well, take Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. There's three, they were [inaudible 00:32:02] teachers.

Graham Harmon:
In Western philosophy this happens a lot. You also had Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. In the UK you had Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and you had Husserl, Heidegger, and-

August:
Brentano. Yeah. Okay.

Graham Harmon:
Yeah. I would add Brentano. I might add Scheler. You could [inaudible 00:32:20] decrease the groups of. Oh, even in the Medieval time you had Aquinas, Scotus, Occam. This seems to be a common phenomenon in Western philosophy. I should say European philosophy. If you go to Islamic philosophy, what jumps out at you is that their lifetimes don't overlap. If you look at Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Averroes, I don't think any of their lifetimes overlap. There's small gaps between each of them.

August:
Interesting.

Graham Harmon:
I'm not sure what that means. I've been puzzling [inaudible 00:32:49] that for years, that they were spread out in time. I think that gives a different topology to Islamic philosophy. Whereas, yeah, in the European tradition, it's always bang, bang, bang. Three or four people in a row. Often they knew each other personally, at least some of them.

August:
And sometimes they were the student of the professor

Graham Harmon:
Quite often. That's right. Or at least met each other. Leibniz went and met Spinoza for example.

August:
Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, clearly.

Graham Harmon:
Exactly. Exactly. That's an interesting phenomenon. You see that in the history of art as well, that the artists are grouped together usually, in great periods, as though one unlocks the possibilities of the next.

Graham Harmon:
Another interesting thing about those clusters, is that the first person in the cluster always starts older, or almost always starts older. It's as though it's harder for someone like Kant to dream up the new principles of a new way of looking at philosophy. But then once someone's put it out there, younger people can take it and improve it or revolutionize it in some way. Hegel started much younger than Kant. The Phenomenology of Spirit, he was in his, I think, mid-thirties. [inaudible 00:34:00] wrote that. Whereas Kant was in his late 50s, publishing the First Critique. Same with Husserl and Heidegger.

August:
That's right. I imagine that, and you talk about this and I can tell that you have gotten, this must be a common response to the object-oriented ontology. It sounds like you're going to miss change over time. You're going to miss flows. It sounds like it's going to be static.

Graham Harmon:
That's been the most common criticism ever since my doctoral dissertation from some committee members. Here's what I would say. Constant change, in a way, ends up not giving you much of an explanation of change.

August:
Sure. That's a good point.

Graham Harmon:
Yeah. Because if everything's changing all the time, why should you then be interested in revolutions or periods where science changes? Because a hair falling from my head is also radical change according to this.

August:
Right. In fact, you could take, say, the economy and say if the inflation rate is the constant through time, prizes are increasing all the time, but there's no change really. The [inaudible 00:35:08] would say there's no change there because it's continuous. Yeah.

Graham Harmon:
Right. Is economics your-

August:
It was, yeah. Yeah.

Graham Harmon:
All right. Great. Yeah. Yes, and you also have, in paleontology, which is called punctuated equilibrium of Gould and Eldredge, opposed to Darwinian gradualism. but it turns out in their eyes to be a better explanation of evolution that it happens quickly followed by long periods of stability. That's more my own view as well. That if you're saying everything's changing all the time, you miss the punctuated aspect of history, that not equally interesting things are happening at every moment in time.

Graham Harmon:
For example, right now, if I were going into the sciences, I were a young person, I think I would choose astronomy. Physics, maybe not. Even though you think of physics as fundamental. That's what you want to go into. But Lee Smolin lamented in one of his books that he's part of the first generation of physicists in 500 years that hasn't made fundamental forward progress. He was quite depressed about it. Since the standard model in the early '70s, okay. We've discovered the Higgs-Boson, but that's just fulfilling a prediction of the standard model. There hasn't really been a huge breakthrough since then. But if you look at astronomy, well, first of all, astronomy discovered dark matter and dark energy, so that's coming from outside physics.

Graham Harmon:
There's also major discoveries happening in astronomy literally every day. Just open any news website you're probably going to find an astronomical discovery even before the Webb telescope, which is just accelerating it. Astronomy is really in a revolutionary phase, just like physics was in the early 20th century where Rutherford said, "We live in the heroic age of physics," and he was right. New discoveries all the time. At any given moment, there are certain fields where that's happening and others that are a little more devoted to consolidating what's already known, or to polishing our understanding. There's different rhythms in different fields, the different [inaudible 00:36:57].

August:
So the point would be that these points of disruption are become objects themselves, or that the objects change from one to another?

Graham Harmon:
I think points of disruption, such as Kuhn's paradigm shifts or Alain Badiou's events, are points when we no longer can think of a thing in terms of its qualities. Because the qualities are no longer internally consistent, they no longer make sense, so we have to theorize what's deeper than these qualities? That's the object. What is it that's lying behind this? We're redefining the object. Einstein essentially redefined what space and time are in his [inaudible 00:37:37] and general theories of relativity. Some people try to make the case that, "Oh, Newton's theory is still true as a special case of Einstein's." I don't think that's right. I think that Newton's theory is refuted. I agree with Kuhn on this. Because says that, "Look at something like mass." Both Newton and Einstein use the concept of mass, but you can't say they're the same concept. Because in Newton, mass is conserved. In Einstein, mass is convertible with energy. So they're not really the same thing, sense. Einstein redefined an object. It might have the same name, mass, that Newton's hard physical stuff did, but it's not the same thing. You're redefining the referent of the term.

Graham Harmon:
I'm more on the side that these moments of crisis can lead to actual different conceptions of the world in terms of the objects that populate them.

August:
I understand. And the other idea, I think where there's some tension or I'm not clear how it's handled, is in relationships between real objects, or in relationships. Because it seems so, Winnicott said, "There's no such a thing as a baby. There's a nursing couple before there's a baby." The idea is there's a relationship that's a real thing in between two objects. My understanding would be that relationship becomes an object. Or I'm not sure about that.

Graham Harmon:
Yes. Any real relation will become a new object. The reason for that is, what defines an object for Triple O is that it has a reality deeper than our understanding of it, that no understanding can exhaust. There are certain objects that are false objects. I can name six random things and say that they comprise an object, but that object probably doesn't exist outside my thinking of it.

August:
[inaudible 00:39:31] once you name it does.

Graham Harmon:
It becomes a sensual object at least, then the question [inaudible 00:39:35].

August:
I understand. Yeah.

Graham Harmon:
The question is, at what point does a sensual object become a real one? Because-

August:
I gotcha.

Graham Harmon:
Sherlock Holmes began as a sensual object in the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle. But now, in a sense, Sherlock Holmes is a real object. Because if somebody did a Sherlock Holmes movie where the Holmes character was not at all convincing, we would say that wasn't really Sherlock Holmes.

August:
Yeah. That's really good point.

Graham Harmon:
Which some people said about Danny DeVito's Penguin in one of those Batman movies. It was an interesting character, but it wasn't the Penguin. [inaudible 00:40:02] critics say that. How can you say it wasn't the Penguin when the Penguin doesn't exist? Well, because the [inaudible 00:40:06] does exist in a sense.

August:
Yeah. Right.

Graham Harmon:
You brought up the relation between real objects, and that brings us back to the second point I forgot to answer about your excellent summary of Triple O. Which is you talk about the Kantian noumena, which are things humans can think about but never directly contact. There is a lot of that in Triple O, and also Heidegger's withdrawn reality, withdrawn being, that can never be known directly. Some people accuse Triple O of just rehashing that. But there's a huge difference, which is that objects are impenetrable to each other. Also for Triple O. The usual tendency is to say, "Oh, we poor humans can't reach the in itself. It's our special burden." No. For Triple O, any relation has that aspect. So, in physical causation, is not a direct impact. It's an indirect impact. This brings us into contact with the occasionalist tradition in philosophy, the idea that nothing can affect anything else directly.

Graham Harmon:
Traditionally, it was thought that God has to bring those things together, which is not part of the Triple O theory. Because, for Triple O, no privileged object can be the locus of relation between all other objects, whether it's God or the human mind. Kant and Hume simply secularize their occasionalism by saying, "Ah, it's not God. It's the human mind. All causation's really happening in the human mind." Either through habit for Hume, or through a category of the mind for Kant. Whereas, for Triple O, no. It has to be local in each case. The way we handle that is with the difference between real and sensual objects. That two real objects can only be mediated by a sensual object. Because things only encounter the images of each other.

August:
I see.

Graham Harmon:
[inaudible 00:41:41] itself. Then two sensual objects are only mediated by a real object. Because on my table now there's my sensual scotch tape and my sensual book on the Huns. But they're both connected only through my mind. That's how we get around it.

August:
We're running out of time. But I thought that was very interesting. Yeah. You talked about the hard problem, mental life and consciousness, and you said that's a problem more broadly. Consciousness in the world, that's a much more broadly than that. Just to give the listeners a sense of the work that one does, there's this diagram with the real object and the real qualities, the sensual object and the sensual qualities. It wouldn't make sense to try to do this in a podcast. But basically you can look at the tensions between these and try to capture them through art or architecture or metaphor. Then there's another concept of a cell, which is, I understand it would be to take three of these and think of it as a milieu, or no?

Graham Harmon:
Well, you take two, which combine to a third. Yes. There are three in that sense. The idea there is that an architectural cell requires that we not see the human beholder and the artwork as two separate things. Kant [inaudible 00:43:09] wanted to purify the two of each other. For Kant, art is really about our minds. But then Kant's followers in the 20th century, implicit followers like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, did it the other way. For them, it was the artwork that was important, not the human beholder. This is why they hated all the post-1960s stuff like performance art and conceptual art. They thought it was humanizing the artwork too much. Fried would call it "being too theatrical about the artwork". Whereas, I would say that art is inherently theatrical. It requires a beholder. If all humans are extinct, we don't have any art. We just have a bunch of pieces of canvas hanging in derelict museums.

Graham Harmon:
Because in order to have art, you need to create that rift between the object and its qualities, which you don't have, unless there's some creature capable of apprehending it. I mean, obviously some animals have aesthetic experience. I don't think there's any evidence of animals appreciating our artworks are artworks yet. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe certain primates understand that paintings are paintings and can appreciate them on some level. I don't know with dolphins. I'd be happy to hear that, but I don't personally know any evidence of that. Certain artworks are made for the human scale and are not intelligible to non-humans, let's say. Maybe all artworks. Maybe most. I don't know the exact percentage.

August:
I sense that another aspect of this theory is that it's not so human-centric.

Graham Harmon:
Yes.

August:
Which is certainly annoying when you look at other theories, and the human capacity is so much different than anyone else's, than any other creature's.

Graham Harmon:
Right.

August:
Well, Graham. Professor. It's been great talking to you. I could talk to you for a few hours. What a large amount of work to do to grasp architecture. I realize you've been teaching it and that's helped you say it out loud and get it. But that was quite an adventure to learn all this stuff, I would think

Graham Harmon:
It is. I would like to always encourage people to realize they can, if not master a field, they can get up to speed in a few years.

August:
That's what I was really thinking about when I read this. I was like, "I would never think about taking this on because how many library floors are devoted to architecture? And how can one come in, having a PhD in philosophy, and then come in and do that?" Yeah, no. You have a sort of optimism about that, which then becomes real.

Graham Harmon:
Way to stay young is keep learning new things. Whether it's new languages, or new fields. Keeps your brain active, keeps giving you resistance. And yes, there are endless floors of architecture books I haven't read them all and neither have the professionals in the field. But there are certain key joints in the history of any [inaudible 00:45:53] and you go right for those. Then that creates a space in which you can learn more details all the time, so I'm still checking out. I wrote a book on architecture, yes. But I'm still checking out new architecture books every week from our library trying to learn them.

August:
Yeah. I thought that your discussion of that show. I guess it was partly Phillip Johnson and someone else who put together that-

Graham Harmon:
Mark McGee.

August:
Right. That was, yeah. You could tell that was a real key point, and it really did open everything up. Okay. Great. Well, it's a great book. Congratulations on it. Architecture and Objects: Art After Nature. 2022, I think.

Graham Harmon:
Yeah. Just published in July.

August:
Great. Well, it was great talking to you. Appreciate your time very much.

Graham Harmon:
Thanks, August. I see you have a lot of interesting podcasts on your site.

August:
I hope so.

Graham Harmon:
Look forward to catching up on those.

August:
Okay. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Graham Harmon:
Sure.

August:
I'll talk to you later. Bye.

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Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century.

John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes’s lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins.

Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes’s intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand.

Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes’s message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest two percent serves no useful purpose.

Fleshing out Keynes’s intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

Stephen A. Marglin is the Walter Barker Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His books include The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community and Growth, Distribution, and Prices. He is a past Guggenheim Fellow and member of the Harvard Society of Fellows.

“Marglin has taken 80 years of neoclassical distortions of Keynes, presented them with great clarity in their own language, and then pounded them into dust, pushing the detritus back into the faces of the high priests of the neoclassical synthesis, the New Keynesians, and the New Classical Economists. Raising Keynes issues a challenge that they would be cowardly to refuse—which is not to suggest that they won’t do their best to ignore it.”—James K. Galbraith, Project Syndicate

“Stephen Marglin’s magnum opus makes a powerful case that we cannot expect the economy to solve its own problems, and that instead economists and policymakers need to put persistent unemployment at the center of their thinking in order to both better understand the economy and to make a stronger case for using fiscal and monetary policy to change it for the better.”—Jason Furman, Harvard University, former Chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers

“This is a thought-stimulating reconstruction of John Maynard Keynes’s insight that market economies do not automatically gravitate to full-employment equilibrium even if prices are flexible. Stephen Marglin shows, with modern analytical tools and (yet) in an often entertaining style, how normal signal processing leads to real-time adjustments to shocks that can move a competitive economy out of equilibrium in the short run and into a different equilibrium in the long. He succeeds in demonstrating this without invoking all those frictions and imperfections so indispensable to New Keynesians. The book opens a wide array of unorthodox, but well-founded perspectives on past and current issues of economic policy. It is the fruit of life-long research, and it deserves a wide readership.”—Hans-Michael Trautwein, University of Oldenburg, Germany

“Raising Keynes is a work of great significance that anyone seriously interested in how capitalism functions and malfunctions should read carefully. Stephen Marglin succeeds in clarifying the central ideas in John Maynard Keynes’s revolutionary macroeconomic framework, while also extending and deepening those ideas in important ways, applying the ideas to our contemporary conditions, and also delivering devastating critiques of orthodox macroeconomic theory and practice. The book is also highly accessible for a work of this nature, without skimping at all on technical details—an almost impossible combination to pull off.”—Robert Pollin, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Table of Contents

• Notation
• Prologue: What Is This Book About?

• I. Background: The Rise and Fall

  • 1. Introduction: Is This Resurrection Necessary?
  • 1. What Were They Thinking? Economics before The General Theory

  • II. Keynes Defeated: Static Models and the Critics

  • 1. The Determination of Output and Employment: First and Second Passes at Equilibrium

    2. Appendix 1: Keynes’s Definition(s) of Unemployment

    3. Appendix 2: Do Interest Rates Adjust Saving and Investment?

    4. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. Equilibrium with a Given Money Supply: Critical Perspectives on the Second-Pass Model

    5. Mathematical Appendix

    6. III. Keynes Vindicated: A Theory of Real-Time Changes

  • 1. The Price Mechanism: Gospels According to Marshall and Walras

    2. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. The General Theory without Rigid Prices and Wages

    3. Appendix: A Brief History of Stationary Real-Price Equilibria

    4. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. Dynamics vs. Statics: Can the Economy Get from the Here of Unemployment to the There of Full Employment?

    5. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. A Dose of Reality: The Evidence of the Great Depression

    6. Appendix: Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz on What Made the Depression Great

    7. Mathematical Appendix
    8. IV. Building Blocks

  • 1. Consumption and Saving

    2. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. Investment

    3. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. The Theory of Interest, I: Liquidity Preference in a World of Money and Bonds

    4. Appendix: Bond Coupons as Insurance against Price Declines

    5. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. The Theory of Interest, II: Liquidity Preference as a Theory of Spreads

    6. Mathematical Appendix

    7. Empirical Appendix: What Do the Data Say?

       • 1. Taking Money Seriously

    8. Mathematical Appendix

    9. V. Fiscal Policy in Theory and Practice
  • 1. Functional Finance and the Stabilization of Aggregate Demand

  • 1. Did the Obama Stimulus Work?

    2. Empirical Appendix: Regressions and Their Discontents

       • 1. Functional Finance and the Composition of Aggregate Demand

    3. Appendix 1: Sound Finance as Starving the Beast

    4. Appendix 2: The Empirics of Debt Sustainability
    5. Appendix 3: Are Government Bonds Private Wealth? And What Difference Does It Make for the Sustainability of the Debt?
    6. Mathematical Appendix
    7. VI. Keynes in the Long Run

  • 1. First Steps into the Long Run: Harrod, Domar, Solow, and Robinson

    2. Appendix: Inventory Accumulation as a Brake on Output

       • 1. Keynes in the Long Run: A Theory of Wages, Prices, and Employment

    3. Mathematical Appendix

       • 1. Inflation and Employment Empirics in the Keynesian Long Run
    4. Epilogue: Attack Them in Their Citadel
    5. Notes
    6. References
    7. Acknowledgments
    8. Index

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Practice, Power, and Forms of Life:

Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx

Terry Pinkard

Philosopher Terry Pinkard revisits Sartre’s later work, illuminating a pivotal stance in Sartre’s understanding of freedom and communal action.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, released to great fanfare in 1960, has since then receded in philosophical visibility. As Sartre’s reputation is now making a comeback, it is time for a reappraisal of his later work. In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre’s late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier ideas, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible.

Pinkard reveals how Sartre was drawn back to Hegel, a move that was itself incited by Sartre’s newfound interest in Marxism. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and analyzed within philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as key debates on action and freedom.

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We interview Owen Flanagan (James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University) about his recent book How to things with emotions: The morality of anger and shame across cultures. (Princeton University Press). An expansive look at how culture shapes our emotions—and how we can benefit, as individuals and a society, from less anger and more shame

The world today is full of anger. Everywhere we look, we see values clashing and tempers rising, in ways that seem frenzied, aimless, and cruel. At the same time, we witness political leaders and others who lack any sense of shame, even as they display carelessness with the truth and the common good. In How to Do Things with Emotions, Owen Flanagan explains that emotions are things we do, and he reminds us that those like anger and shame involve cultural norms and scripts. The ways we do these emotions offer no guarantee of emotionally or ethically balanced lives—but still we can control and change how such emotions are done. Flanagan makes a passionate case for tuning down anger and tuning up shame, and he observes how cultures around the world can show us how to perform these emotions better.

Through comparative insights from anthropology, psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy, Flanagan reveals an incredible range in the expression of anger and shame across societies. He establishes that certain types of anger—such as those that lead to revenge or passing hurt on to others—are more destructive than we imagine. Certain forms of shame, on the other hand, can protect positive values, including courage, kindness, and honesty. Flanagan proposes that we should embrace shame as a uniquely socializing emotion, one that can promote moral progress where undisciplined anger cannot.

How to Do Things with Emotions celebrates the plasticity of our emotional responses—and our freedom to recalibrate them in the pursuit of more fulfilling lives.

"*How to Do Things with Emotions* is a welcome corrective to Anglophone philosophy’s tendency to frame Western presumptions as universal. And it presents an appealingly sensible moral program."**—Becca Rothfeld, *New Yorker***

“This is no ordinary book on emotion. Flanagan sees society as ailing, and believes that two emotions, anger and shame, are the problem. He takes us on a tour of philosophical thinking about, and cultural difference in understanding of, emotions, all in the service of convincing us that emotions are things we do. If so, he says, we can learn to do anger and shame differently, and be better off for it. Reading this engaging and well-crafted book gave me hope. What a gift from an author.”—Joseph LeDoux, author of The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains

“This is an urgent book for our times, both inspiring and provocative. Flanagan invites us to work on our emotional style, to tamp down our anger, and to develop a mature and responsible shame. His argument involves a subtle theory of what emotions do and why we can intervene, and considers what culture and anthropology can teach us. We can learn to be different. And we must.”—T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God

“In this state-of-the-art account, Flanagan examines the multilevel constitution and cultural diversity of emotions. He builds on the anthropological observation that shame and anger are complex moral emotions—not only felt, but also enacted and performed. In the West, and particularly in post-Trump America, Flanagan contends, ‘we can do shame better.’ Likewise, our ubiquitous rage can be channeled into reasoned, constructive anger. This forcefully argued book takes philosophy into the field.”—Andrew Beatty, author of Emotional Worlds: Beyond an Anthropology of Emotion

“How to Do Things with Emotions offers a fascinating commentary on contemporary American culture, a thorough social and cultural analysis of the emotions anger and shame, and a critique of the current state of moral philosophy. Taking us on a tour of how anger and shame are done across different times and places, Flanagan provides broader horizons of possibility and practice. This is an important and overdue update of the moral philosophy of emotions in a multicultural world" —Batja Mesquita, professor of psychology and director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology, University of Leuven

“This fine and important book is driven by a genuine passion for reforming the misuse of anger and shame in our WEIRD culture. It is nourished by Flanagan’s exceptional mastery of scientific and philosophical thought as well as of the writings of the wisdom tradition—Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. Personal, clear, and occasionally pleasingly epigrammatic, How to Do Things with Emotions is both powerfully argued and politically timely.”—Ronald de Sousa, author of Emotional Truth

“How to Do Things with Emotions is a breath of fresh air. With delightful, insightful, and witty prose, Flanagan describes North American views of anger and shame, and introduces us to these emotions in other cultural contexts through a philosophical lens. He asks how we might learn from these ‘varieties of moral possibility’ to improve our own ways of experiencing and expressing anger and shame in contemporary times. A must-read for all who wonder about non-Western ethical systems and their importance for emotional life.”—Jeanne L. Tsai, Stanford University

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We interview Pamela Hieronymi (professor of philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles) about Freedom, resentment, and the metaphysics of morals. An innovative reassessment of philosopher P. F. Strawson’s influential “Freedom and Resentment.”

P. F. Strawson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 1962 paper “Freedom and Resentment” is one of the most influential in modern moral philosophy, prompting responses across multiple disciplines, from psychology to sociology. In Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals, Pamela Hieronymi closely reexamines Strawson’s paper and concludes that his argument has been underestimated and misunderstood.

Line by line, Hieronymi carefully untangles the complex strands of Strawson’s ideas. After elucidating his conception of moral responsibility and his division between “reactive” and “objective” responses to the actions and attitudes of others, Hieronymi turns to his central argument. Strawson argues that, because determinism is an entirely general thesis, true of everyone at all times, its truth does not undermine moral responsibility. Hieronymi finds the two common interpretations of this argument, “the simple Humean interpretation” and “the broadly Wittgensteinian interpretation,” both deficient. Drawing on Strawson’s wider work in logic, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, Hieronymi concludes that his argument rests on an implicit, and previously overlooked, metaphysics of morals, one grounded in Strawson’s “social naturalism.” In the final chapter, she defends this naturalistic picture against objections.

Rigorous, concise, and insightful, Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals sheds new light on Strawson’s thinking and has profound implications for future work on free will, moral responsibility, and metaethics.

The book also features the complete text of Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.”

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We interview Prof. David Charles (Harold H. Newman Professor of Philosophy at Yale University) about The undivided self: Aristotle and the 'mind-body' problem.

x. A landmark work bringing together Aristotle and contemporary philosophy
x. Charles argues that study of Aristotle can offer a persuasive alternative to modern thinking about the mind
x. Accessible to readers with no background in ancient Greek philosophy

Aristotle initiated the systematic investigation of perception, the emotions, memory, desire and action, developing his own account of these phenomena and their interconnection. The aim of this book is to gain a philosophical understanding of his views and to examine how far they withstand critical scrutiny. Aristotle's account, it is argued, constitutes a philosophically live alternative to conventional post-Cartesian thinking about psychological phenomena and their place in a material world. It offers a way to dissolve, rather than solve, the mind-body problem we have inherited.

David Charles, Professor of Philosophy, Yale University

Professor David Charles was a Fellow of Philosophy in Oriel College from 1978 before moving to Yale in 2014 and was a Research Professor in Oxford from 2008 to 2014. He has held Visiting Professorships at Rutgers, UCLA, Brown, Tokyo Metropolitan, Taiwan National and Venice Universities. He was a co-founder of the European Society of Ancient Philosophy and is an Honorary Fellow of the National Technical University of Athens.

"This important and challenging book is the fruit of many years of engagement with Aristotle's thinking about the soul-body relation by one of the most distinguished experts in the field. David Charles does what many have tried to do during the past fifty years, but he does it with more radicalism and ingenuity than, as far as I can see, anyone has done before. . . . The Undivided Self confronts us with important questions about the fundaments of our thinking about mind and nature.It presents a serious challenge to modern interpreters of Aristotle and demands attention from contemporary philosophers of mind." -- Klaus Corcilius, Mind

"This book best shows its brilliance in its subtle analysis of Aristotle's remarks on emotion, desire, perception, and imagination, its grand systematizing ambition, and its spirited defense of the credibility of an Aristotelian approach to philosophical psychology. Charles succeeds in laying a simple, elegant theoretical foundation upon which he is then able to erect an intricate edifice of nuanced observations. This achievement is the culmination of decades of thought about some of the most important issues in Aristotle's philosophical psychology and will be indispensable for those interested in carrying discussion of such issues forward." -- Bryan Reece, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"the book strikes the reader as an example of how a line of interpretation can be developed into a compelling reading at the hands of a perspicacious scholar. . . . [Charles] offers, in the introduction, different paths of reading his book through its chapters, which makes it all the more appealing to specialists, and to non-specialists as well, in philosophy of mind and ancient philosophy. The range of issues addressed in the volume and its unflagging engagement with these issues will be a source of inspiration to its readers as an example of intellectual courage." -- Refik Güremen, The Classical Review