218 research outputs found

    Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy

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    'Modernism and Religion' argues that modernism participated in broader processes of religious change in the twentieth century. The new prominence accorded to immanence and immediacy in religious discourse is carried over into the modernist epiphany. Modernism became mystical. The emergence of Catholic theological modernism, human rights, Christian sociology, and philosophical personalism, which are explored here in relation to the work of David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and H.D., represented a strategic attempt on the part of diverse religious authorities to meet the challenge posed by new mysticism. Orthodoxy was itself made new in ways that resisted the secular demand that religion remain a private undertaking. Modernism and Religion presents the mechanical form and clashing registers of long poems by each of the aforementioned writers as an alternative to epiphanic modernism. Their wavering orthodoxy brings matters from which the secular had previously separated religion back once more into its purview

    Parameters 2023-24 Full Issue

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    Le mal et la symbolique

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    This book outlines the trajectory from Paul Ricœur’s The Symbolism of Evil to his writings devoted to psychoanalysis, the common thread being the residue left by the subject of evil, which guided Ricœur to Freud. This book is a collection following two Fonds Ricœur summer workshops co-organized with the Society for Ricœur Studies at the Ricœur Archive in Paris. It is a groundbreaking work for those interested in Ricœur, Freud and religion

    Rassismusforschung I: Theoretische und interdisziplinäre Perspektiven

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    Rassismus ist Realität - auch in der pluralen Gesellschaft Deutschlands. Doch was braucht es, um Rassismus zu erfassen, zu erforschen und politische sowie zivilgesellschaftliche Antworten auf ihn zu finden? Die Beiträger*innen liefern einen interdisziplinären Überblick zu grundlegenden Perspektiven, Theorien und Forschungsansätzen für eine zeitgemäße Rassismusforschung. Die im Rahmen des Nationalen Diskriminierungs- und Rassismusmonitors (NaDiRa) entstandenen Analysen bieten unverzichtbare und einzigartige Erkenntnisse zu Ursachen, Ausmaß und Folgen des Rassismus in Deutschland

    Soul as Paraphrase: The Formalism and Minority of Prayer

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    Philosophical and theological treatments of Christian prayer regularly overlook its formal stakes. As a type of limit-speech, prayer can be thought alongside the class of logical dilemmas generated whenever an element of a total set refers to the very totality of which it is a part. These dilemmas are grouped together in what Graham Priest calls the “inclosure schema” and, moreover, exhibit a non-self-identical structure that is also the hallmark of robust metaphysical materialisms (i.e., the structure by which matter constitutively fails to coincide with itself). This dissertation sketches an immanent materialist account of Christian prayer by bringing these two things together: (1) the formal inclosure paradox in which prayer participates and (2) the non-self-identity that characterizes materialist ontologies. The dissertation begins with an Introduction that briefly sketches the gaps in the literature and the challenges facing a materialist account of prayer. Chapter 1, “God and Inclosure,” then introduces Graham Priest’s schematic for limit paradoxes and shows how Anselm and Pseudo-Dionysius’s accounts of prayer fit this schema. Chapter 2, “Form-of-Life in Prayer,” outlines a rather different approach to inclosure represented by Giorgio Agamben. Prayer is here treated as a devotional practice that scales life into an indivisible whole and inhabits the site of time’s failure to coincide with itself. In this way, prayer resists the biopolitical excesses risked by inclosure, answers certain Foucauldian critiques of Christian devotion, and challenges theories of prayer that understand it to be primarily a mental or dialogic practice. Chapter 3, “Prayer as Quantum Chamber,” puts prayer in conversation with François Laruelle’s particle collider—a prepared space in which the world takes on a minimal appearance and registers the effects of the real. On this reading, prayer is like a physicist’s construction of a state vector; it gathers up a disciple’s material occasions in order to present them to a kind of immanent vision. Finally, the project concludes with a brief fourth chapter that articulates a jointly Agambenian and Laruellian reading of the Lord’s Prayer

    Bringing Down The House: Gambling, Speculation And The Making Of The Small Investor In Colonial India, 1867-1943

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    BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE: GAMBLING, SPECULATION AND THE MAKING OF THE SMALL INVESTOR IN COLONIAL INDIA, 1867-1943Baishakh Chakrabarti Projit Mukharji Daud Ali My dissertation uses the history of gambling and speculation to narrate the growth of commodity exchanges and markets that emerged in colonial India during the early twentieth century and the clientele they attracted. My project intervenes in a number of major existing debates in the histories of law and governmentality, finance and political economy and ‘vernacular’ knowledge and networks of circulation in South Asia. Existing works in these fields have tended to depict state engagements with practices such as ‘commodity speculation’ and ‘gambling’ within a framework of ‘colonial governmentality’, ‘market rationality’ and the ‘legal standardization’ of market behavior. By closely following the anti-gaming laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this dissertation moves beyond the regulative ideals of colonial policing and interrogates the actual operations of colonial laws, their anxieties and the inconsistent categories they generated. In the process, I historicize the shifting definitions regarding native gambling, which passed through multiple regimes of legal classifications during this period. I show how the practice of gambling, which earlier corresponded to precise legal definitions became undefined when commercial actors and native business communities became its major practitioners. Additionally, the project reveals the impact of extra-legal, normative discourses that transformed the once criminalized ‘petty gambler’ into the ‘useful’ ‘small investor’. While the histories of twentieth century Indian capitalism have focused largely on the contributions of large business houses and post-colonial state planning, my dissertation accounts for the tactics that helped liberate petty capital away from ‘savings’ and redirected them towards risky speculation. I do so by showing how the prognostic literature of astro-meteorological weather manuals that predicted the chances of rainfall, reoriented themselves to predict the future prices of commodities like cotton, jute and grain. In doing so, they were able to turn a section of working class gamblers off the ‘rain betting’ houses of Calcutta, Delhi and Bombay and onto options and derivative markets in commodities

    Tiny Probabilities of Vast Value

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    The topic of this thesis is how we should treat tiny probabilities of vast value. This thesis consists of six independent papers. Chapter 1 discusses the idea that utilities are bounded. It shows that bounded decision theories prescribe prospects that are better for no one and worse for some if combined with an additive axiology. Chapter 2, in turn, points out that standard axiomatizations of Expected Utility Theory violate dominance in cases that involve possible states of zero probability. Chapters 3–6 discuss the idea that we should ignore tiny probabilities in practical decision-making. Chapter 3 argues that discounting small probabilities solves the ‘Intrapersonal Addition Paradox’ and thus helps avoid the Repugnant Conclusion. Chapter 4 explores what the most plausible version of this view might look like and what problems the different versions have. Chapter 5 focuses on one type of problem, namely, money pumps. The Independence Money Pump, in particular, presents a difficult challenge for those who wish to discount small probabilities. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the implications of discounting small probabilities for the value of the far future

    The Material Theory of Induction

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    The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it.The content of that logic and where it can be applied are determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference

    Foucault Studies No. 31

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