We are pleased to release the June 2008 Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy

The journal website: http://www.kritike.org
Current issue: http://www.kritike.org/Current_Issue.html
Call for papers: http://www.kritike.org/Call_for_Papers.html

KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2008)

1. Editorial: Marking the First Year of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy - The Editor

Articles:

2. Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality - Mark W. Westmoreland

3. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell: Tragedy, Love, and Religion - Kenneth Masong

4. ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die?’ - Saitya Brata Das

5. A Comparative Study on the Theme of Human Existence in the Novels of Albert Camus and F. Sionil Jose - F. P. A. Demeterio

6. The War on Concepts: The Thought of Jan Patocka and the War on Terror - Katy Scrogin

7. Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism - Saladdin Said Ahmed

8. The Causal Relevance and Heterogeneity of Program Explanations in the Face of Explanatory Exclusion - Wilson Cooper

9. A Freewheeling Defense of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy - Todd D. Janke

10. The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective - Michael James Braund

Book Reviews :

11. Powell, Jason, Jacques Derrida: A Biography - Marko Zlomislic

12. Evans, C. Stephen, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays - Robert C. Cheeks

13. Drake, David, Sartre and Bernasconi, Robert, How to Read Sartre - Marella Ada Mancenido

TOC

Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization — Ihab Hassan

The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy — Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman’s The Narrative Corpse — Brian Boyd

Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will? — Don Levi

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida — David Hillman

Literature, Politics, and Character — Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality — Jon Adams

How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? — Amihud Gilead

“A little throat cutting in the meantime”: Seneca’s Violent Imagery — Amy Olberding

Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses — Patrick Colm Hogan

And more

This blog has a number of texts on religion (including philosophy of religion). Its motto: "freely you have received; freely give"

Joel Buxton pointed out that there are two Derrida lectures on Religion (Link)

Some  other interesting links, including the ones provided by Alex by Badiou, one on Hobbes, etc. (Link)

TOC

Critical theory and the traps of conspiracy thinking — Volker Heins

What’s wrong with hypergoods — Charles Blattberg

Marx and the gendered structure of capitalism — Claudia Leeb

Tragedy and politics — Neal Curtis

Rawls and Habermas on religion in the public sphere — Melissa Yates

Open Court, publisher of the philosophy and contemporary culture series, has a number of podcasts that could be of interest to some. Here is the link.

Avax forum has posts on Rorty and Vatimo’s The Future of Religion and Gadamer’s Reason in the Age of Science

Emergent Village Podcast

* Jack Caputo
* Richard Kearney
* 50 minutes

Here’s the mp3 file for download

(H/t: Michael O’Rourk)

Gianni Vattimo, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty are in no need of an introduction. They are three of the world’s most discussed philosophers, leading in the fields of hermeneutics, pragmatism, and moral philosophy. They are also influential public intellectuals commanding a broad audience throughout North America and Europe. This roundtable discussion on globalization was conducted in Italy in 2001 months after the inauguration of George W. Bush for his first term as president and months before the events of September 11. While it primarily concerns the economics of globalization, each of the interlocutors also identify some worrying trends they see in the early months of the Bush administration such as the unquestioned faith in the neo-liberal economic policies of free trade, the disregard for world opinion, and the inordinate influence of the military-industrial complex. Their conversation stands as a reminder of an earlier promise from then candidate Bush that he would conduct foreign affairs with a greater sense of humility. Since September 11th, however, he and his administration have harnessed and manipulated the politics of fright to tremendous effect by waging a perpetual war on terror in the name of democracy. With the possible exception of various regimes in Latin America, the Left has been unable to mount any meaningful political response. Vattimo, Rorty, and Taylor indicate here how the seeming impotence of the Left was and remains a cause for great concern and a matter demanding the most rigorous political debate and philosophical scrutiny. It is with that challenge in mind that the JCRT proudly offers up this important and still timely exchange for our readers.

Link (pdf)

Source: Via 

Philosophy at the End of the World
The gospel according to Slavoj Zizek.
by Ashley Woodiwiss (via PTDR)

And so it has come to this. Philosophy is now in the hands of a Slovenian madman. Slavoj Zizek has been thought of as one part Groucho, one part Karl Marx, an idiot savant, a Shakespearean fool, or maybe Dylan's Jokerman.1 A self-declared "fighting atheist" who claims the Christian legacy is worth fighting for. A Leninist who seeks wisdom in Chesterton's Orthodoxy. A leftist accused of being authoritarian, anti-feminist, and anti-Semitic. A critic of the worst excesses of capitalism who himself so over-produces books and articles that critics despair of ever being able to pin him down before he's off on his next tangent. So full of apparent contradictions is Zizek that to some critics it appears that while it is true Zizek exists, nevertheless we may well have created him.2

When writing about Zizek, one must decide (finally) to plant the flag somewhere. For the purposes of this article, I limit the discussion to Zizek's political-religious thought.3 And in order to provide anything like a coherent account even of this more narrowed focus, I will do so by discussing Zizek's concept of "the act." Although Zizek gives his most sustained philosophic analysis of the act in two earlier works, The Indivisible Remainder (1996) and The Ticklish Subject (1999), in the five books under discussion here, Zizek's invoking of the act serves as one link between his three works on Christianity and his accounts of the two defining moments of our contemporary political world, 9/11 and the war in Iraq. While there are some signs that his red-hot status may be cooling a bit, there is still enough going on in his rants against the Bush Administration and his riffs on St. Paul to give readers pause before judging him to be a signifier of nothing. There is method to his madness, wisdom in his foolishness.

The rest

"Derrida offered extended audio comments regarding his unique, somewhat Kierkegaardian notion of prayer (as recounted in his 1991 work 'Circumfession') at the 2002 Toronto conference, 'Other Testaments'… Prayer, Derrida contends, is an 'absolutely secret' act though it also involves 'common ritual (and) coded gestures' … it is fundamentally 'childish' and God is regarded as both a 'harsh, just' father and a 'forgiving' mother… prayer must also embody a sceptical 'suspension of belief and certainty' as epitomized by Kierkegaard and, in another way, by Nietzsche; the realization that the object of prayer is indeterminable is another key notion in this unusual position…"

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three: