Titles I’ve read include Dermot Moran’s Introduction to phenomenology (Routledge, 2000), which is wider than it’s title suggests, very good but stops just short of the contemporary scene; Andrew Cutrofello’s Introduction to continental philosophy (Taylor & Francis, 2005), which is good for the historical connection of presentday continental philosophy to Kant’s four questions, but which gets too tangled up with the passage from Kant to today to be suitable for beginners.

I’ve also read through the following general overviews (who all share the common problem of a plurality of writers, which good as this may be means that a single, comprehensive perspective is given up): The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy (Solomon & Sherman, 2003); Blackwell’s Compantion to continental philosophy (Critchley & Schröder,1998); Leiter & Rosen’s The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (Oxford 2007); Kenny’s Philosophy in the Modern World: A New History of Western Philosophy, Volume 4; Jones & Fogelin’s A History of Western Philosophy: The Twentieth Century of Quine and Derrida, Volume V (Wadsworth, 1996).

Then there are more specialized studies (that don’t give a sufficiently broad overview)
such as: Bowie’s Introduction to German Philosophy. From Kant to Habermas (Polity Press, 2003); Descombes’ Modern French philosophy (Cambridge, 1981); Gutting’s French philosophy in the 20th century (Cambridge, 2001); Wick’s Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism; Schrift’s Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Blackwell, 2006) etc.
If you have any clues, please give me a holler!
Nicholas Smith, teacher at Södertörn University, Stockholm Sweden.

“Particularity, Exemplarity, Singularity”

Featuring keynote speaker Ian Balfour (York University)

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
April 17th-18th, 2009

The place of the particular, the exemplary, or the singular in contemporary philosophical practice has yet to be decided. While much of the critical thought of the last fifty years has focused on affirming the rights of ephemeral experience or the singular instance by refusing grand narratives or universal systems, more recent years have seen the rebirth of a rationalism that, at least in one of its forms, again relegates particularity to the debased realm of illusion, solipsism, and doxa. At stake in the tension between these two positions is the possibility that there exists some form of specifically artistic or empirical truth, or even a non- phenomenalizable reality of the singular, even if this truth or this reality are not of the order of propositional knowledge.

This conference is guided by the following question: what is the role of the particular, the exemplary, or the singular in critical thought today? Alternatively, how might these terms mark an impasse within systematic knowledge? We understand these questions to accommodate and encourage original reflection on a wide range of topics within philosophy, aesthetics, and literary theory. We invite participants to consider such issues as the relation between literature and philosophy, the status of history or materiality with regard to aesthetic objects, and the contemporary inheritance of the critique of representation as it has been elaborated in continental philosophy since Kant.

Suggested paper topics include (but are not limited to):

Singularity and Event
Literature and its Outside
The Persistence of the Dialectic: Particularity and Universality
The Sublime Limits of Representation
Rhetoric and Philosophy
The Rebirth of Rationalism
The Future of the Linguistic Turn
Taste and Community
Poetics and Aesthetics
Literature and Epistemology, Literary Ways of Knowing
The Literary Absolute
Example, Instance, Case, Sample
Genre, Archetype, Paradigm
Origin, Originality
The Concept of Criticism
Literature and Disenchantment
The Transcendental and the Empirical
The Literal and the Figurative
Problems of Inscription
Symptomatic Reading
Bad Examples
The Genesis of the Singular

Please limit the length of abstracts to no more than 250 words. The deadline for submission of 250-word abstracts for 20-minute presentations is February 28, 2009. Please include your name, e-mail address, and phone number. Abstracts should be e-mailed to theory@cornell.edu. Notices of acceptance will be sent no later than March 5, 2009. For more information about the Cornell Theory Reading Group, visit http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg.

Week 1 January 26 – 30
11am – 1pm: Foucault and Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life (Ashley Woodward)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy, Part 2 (Late Medieval Era) (Ian Weeks)

Week 2 February 2 – 6
11am – 1pm: Environmental Political Theory from Spinoza to Negri (Kate Noble)
2pm – 4pm: History of Philosophy V: Rationalism (Jon Roffe)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 3 February 9 – 13
11am – 1pm: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction (James Williams)
2pm – 4pm: Heidegger’s Being and Time (James Garrett)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 4 February 16 – 20
11am – 1pm: On Slavoj Zizek’s Political Theory, or: Would You Like A Politics With That? (Matthew Sharpe)
2pm – 4pm: Dialectics of Enlightenment (Bryan Cooke)?
Monday and Wednesday, 6 – 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

For further information and enrollment please visit our website: http://www.mscp.org.au

Regards,
James Garrett,
MSCP Publicity Officer.

“Obama’s victory marks a symbolically powerful moment in American history, defined as it is by the stain of slavery and the fact of racism. It will have hugely beneficial consequences for how the United States is seen throughout the world. His victory was also strategically brilliant and his campaign transformed those disillusioned with and disenfranchised by the Bush administration into a highly motivated and organized popular force. But I dispute that Obama’s victory is about change in any significant sense.”

Read the rest:

Critchley on Obama

first, thank you for running this site, i enjoy it a great deal.

i came across a series of youtube videos of deleuze interviews, and thought i would offer them to you in case you had not posted them yet. they are in french. they are organized by letter of the alphabet.

the first one is here, you can follow the youtube links for the rest (there are quite a few) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxcdrid0Rsw&mode=related&search

if you’ve already posted this, sorry.

s.

Special issue devoted to the work of Jean-Claude Milner

Perhaps best known now in the English-speaking world for his bitter dispute with Alain Badiou over the status of the signifier Jew, Jean-Claude Milner’s influence on the emerging shape of Lacanian psychoanalysis is recorded in his interventions in the closed sessions of the seminars of the 1960s and 70s. An integral member of the circle around Jacques Lacan and the École freudienne de Paris (EFP), Milner has authored a remarkable series of works intersecting philosophy, politics, literature and linguistics, including L’Œuvre claire: Lacan, la science et la philosophie, Le Juif de savoir, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Constats, Le Pas philosophique de Roland Barthes, Le triple du plaisir and many others, the majority of which have yet to be translated into English.

For this special issue, we invite contributions that bring out the theoretical, political, philosophical and artistic stakes of the Milner/Badiou debate as a key site of collision between the all and not-all (pas-tout), as well as essays that serve to situate and frame Milner’s own ‘œuvre claire’ as it relates to and bears on the concerns of psychoanalysis.

We also welcome essays on topics unrelated to the special issue.

Send enquiries to Sigi Jottkandt or Justin Clemens
editors [at] lineofbeauty.org

S is the new open access journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. We publish peer-reviewed essays on Lacanian and related topics from the fields of art, film and literary criticism, political, philosophical and ideological critique.

For our list of upcoming events, visit

http://clic.janvaneyck.nl/