Some of you will remember Colin Koopman’s 2009 Pragmatism as Transition, which treats the usual pragmatist suspects old and new (Dewey and James, Rorty and Putnam), but with the help of some perhaps-unlikely figures (Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell). The text labors to reconcile select conflicts within the tradition, as well as to rescue certain pragmatist insights for the sake of a forward-looking critical-philosophical project.  His second book, just out from Indiana University Press, takes that forward-looking critical-philosophical project as both its object of inquiry and aim. More information about the text can be found here, and below.

Description
Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.

Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Genealogy Does
1. Critical Historiography: Politics, Philosophy & Problematization
2. Three Uses of Genealogy: Subversion, Vindication & Problematization
3. What Problematization Is: Contingency, Complexity & Critique
4. What Problematization Does: Aims, Sources & Implications
5. Foucault’s Problematization of Modernity: The Reciprocal Incompatibility of Discipline and Liberation
6. Foucault’s Reconstruction of Modern Moralities: An Ethics of Self-Transformation
7. Problematization plus Reconstruction: Genealogy, Pragmatism & Critical Theory

Colin Koopman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon and author of Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty.

For those of you interested in Foucault studies, Clare O’Farrell does an exemplary job administering Foucault News.  I’ve also heard rumor of a conference in Paris this June on Foucault and Wittgenstein, but can’t seem to find an announcement online.  I hope you’ll contact me with any leads!

CL

NDPR has just published a review — written by Stanley Bates (Middlebury College) — of the recently published essay collection Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups (Fordham University Press), edited by Naoko Saito and Paul Standish.

To access the whole review online, please click here.

Here is how it begins:

Stanley Cavell’s influence on a variety of contemporary fields continues to grow. It has been marked, in the past decade or so, by a number of distinguished anthologies in a wide range of disciplines including politics and literature. It is heartening for those of us who think that this influence is overwhelmingly (though, perhaps, not universally) positive to have witnessed the continuing (re)discovery of his work, and its significance for American Studies, Film Studies, Shakespeare studies and, of course, for what should be its home country, philosophy. (Whether academic philosophy as presently constituted in American and British universities is home country for Cavell is a continuing topic in much of this literature and in much of Cavell’s own writing.)

The relevance of Cavell’s thought to reflection on education should be obvious, since it is implicit in all of his writing including his interpretations of the opening of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and his discussion of, e.g., the “scene of instruction.” Moreover the title of the work under review is drawn from Cavell’s explicit characterization of philosophy as the education of grownups in the concluding paragraphs of Part I of The Claim of Reason. Perhaps the lack of interest in thinking of Cavell on this topic is related to the negligible place of philosophy of education in most departments of philosophy. Philosophy of education has been primarily pursued in departments, programs, and schools of education, and in those places it also has a somewhat tenuous position. Academic programs in education tend to be primarily concerned with issues about schooling, and the preparation of teachers who will operate in schools. Though schooling is almost always an important part of someone’s education (sometimes negatively) Cavell’s characterization of philosophy as the education of grownups is mostly about what happens out of school. Nonetheless reflections on his line of thought might have implications for how we think about the characterizations of education in some contemporary discussions.

NDPR has just published a review — written by Megan J. Laverty (Teachers College, Columbia University) — of the 2012 essay collection Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays, edited by Justin Broackes (Oxford University Press). To access the whole review online, please click here.

Here is how it begins:

This collection is a milestone in the history of Murdoch scholarship. It seeks to establish “that Murdoch is of importance and interest to the same people as read the moral philosophy of Kant and Plato or Philippa Foot and John McDowell” (p. v). The volume stems from a conference (held in 2001) that brought together celebrated Murdoch scholars — including Maria Antonacio, Carla Bagnoli, A. E Denham, Lawrence Blum, Peter J. Conradi, Margaret Holland and Martha C. Nussbaum — and relative newcomers — including Justin Broackes (the volume’s editor and the conference’s organizer), Bridget Clarke, Roger Crisp, Julia Driver and Richard Moran. The contributors’ major publications on Murdoch are listed at the end of this review. Iris Murdoch, Philosopher comprises eleven original essays, an edited extract from Murdoch’s unpublished manuscript on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, a personal vignette by John Bayley and a comprehensive introduction by Broackes.

The extract from Murdoch’s abandoned book-length manuscript on Heidegger is invaluable for Murdoch scholars. Until now the manuscript had been available only at the Murdoch archives at Kingston University, London. Murdoch is a lucid expositor of Heidegger’s ideas. In so doing she develops themes integral to her own philosophy including the character of perception, truth as an achievement and the relationship of philosophy and literature. The extract serves as the perfect companion piece to Murdoch’s other writings on Continental thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, Romantic Rationalist) and Jacques Derrida (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Chapter 7).

Broackes’ introduction is so thorough that it threatens to overshadow the essays it is meant to support. It offers a meticulously researched and detailed historical overview of Murdoch’s philosophical career that positions her arguments in relation to the philosophical debates of postwar Britain. Broackes usefully distills Murdoch’s ten “largest ideas for academic moral philosophy” (p. 8). Many of the ideas will be familiar to readers of Murdoch, including her anti-scientism (2), anti-reductionism about value (9), and anti-Humean psychology (3). Together, these provide the basis for a form of moral realism (1) that emphasizes moral perception, the reliance of moral perception on moral concepts, and the inevitability of moral disagreement (6). More surprising is Broackes’ identification of G. W. F. Hegel as the source of Murdoch’s realism (10) which is usually tied to the philosophers that she explicitly draws upon, most notably Plato and Simone Weil. Yet, Broackes provides detailed textual support for Murdoch’s study of idealism, esteem for Hegel and recognition of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843) as one of only three philosophical texts to have greatly influenced her (p. 17, fn. 42). Broackes completes the introduction with a finely calibrated treatment of Murdoch’s scholarly output from her earliest papers of the 1950s to The Sovereignty of Good (1970). He acknowledges the importance of her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals although he admits that its argument still proves elusive. Broackes is preparing a commentary on The Sovereignty of Good which is much anticipated.

NDPR has just published a review — written by Sari Nusseibeh (al-Quds University) – of Avner Baz’s recently published book, When Words Are Called For: A Defense of Ordinary Language Philosophy (Harvard University Press). To access the review online, click here.

Here is how it begins:

In order to appreciate the radical thesis of this work and the case Baz defends — that Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) has been fundamentally misunderstood and therefore unfairly put to rest in the analytic tradition when in fact it still constitutes a ‘best-practice’ for doing philosophy — it is necessary from the outset to make clear that for OLP, a word’s meaning remains ‘in limbo’ (for all intents and purposes) until it is determined by context. Until then, it better be looked upon as a variable and not as a given. What Baz reveals in his new book is the astonishing fact that, even in eulogizing OLP as it is being pronounced dead, many of its half-way sympathizers suffer precisely from continuing to hold on to a semanticist/pragmatist distinction in meanings when, for OLP, there is none.

The ‘decline’ of the interest in OLP as an approach is vouched for by the fact that, among other things, not a single book in English on the one person who first tried to articulate this approach, J. L. Austin, has been published in the last thirty years or so (the exception, this year, is a volume edited by Martin Gustafsson and Richard Sorli, published by Oxford University Press, to which Avner Baz contributed versions of his third chapter in the book under review). A biography of Austin — the professional impact of whose sudden and premature death in 1960 at the age of 48 on OLP’s founding early years and his colleagues cannot be underestimated — is also now in the works, and will hopefully shed more light on a region of under-exploited intellectual wealth that has long been kept in the dark.

The Spring 2012 issue of the Wallace Steven Journal, a special issue devoted to the topic of “Stevens and the Everyday,” includes a review by Rachel Malkin (Cambridge University) of the essay collection, Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (Continuum), which I co-edited with Richard Eldridge. It’s the first published review I am aware of (though I’ve heard that more are in the works), so I thought I’d post a link to it here. I don’t know Prof. Malkin personally, so I’ll just say here that I’m grateful for her generous assessment of the volume. I hope her review piques the interest of Stevens scholars who might not otherwise think to pick the collection up. To access the full review online, please click here.

Here is a preview of its first page (click on it to enlarge):

NDPR has just published a review — written by Hans-Johann Glock (University of Zurich) — of Michael Dummet’s The Nature and Future of Philosophy (Columbia University Press). To access the review online, click here.

Here is how it begins:

Sir Michael Dummett, who died on 27 December 2011, was one of the most important analytic philosophers of the last 60 years. Indeed, he was one of the last great heroes of that movement. Although analytic philosophy is triumphing institutionally around the globe, its development has stagnated; and the last 20 years have not witnessed the rise of new luminaries of the same stature as Dummett, Davidson, Hempel, Strawson, Lewis, von Wright, Rawls, Hare and Hart, to say nothing of giants like Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein and Quine.

It is entirely fitting, therefore, that Dummett’s last book to appear in his lifetime is not just a reflection on the aims, methods and prospects of philosophy in general, but also a thoughtful defence of analytic philosophy, one which culminates in a plea for overcoming the chasms between analytic and so-called “continental philosophy”. The book also addresses a wider audience than Dummett’s previous philosophical writings, and it is written in a much more accessible and occasionally colloquial prose. Finally, in contrast to most of Dummett’s writings, it abounds with examples, many of them illuminating.