After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy.CharityScribner -2014 - Cambridge University Press.detailsMasterminded by women, the Red Army Faction terrorized West Germany from the 1970s to the 1990s. Afterimages of its leaders persist in the works of pivotal artists and writers, including Gerhard Richter, Elfriede Jelinek, and Slavoj iek. Why were women so prominent in the RAF? What does the continuing cultural response to the German armed struggle tell us about the representation of violence, power, and gender today? Engaging critical theory,CharityScribner addresses these questions and analyzes signal works (...) that point beyond militancy and terrorism. This literature and art discloses the failures of the Far Left and registers the radical potential that RAF women actually forfeited. _After the Red Army Faction_ maps out a cultural history of militancy and introduces "postmilitancy" as a new critical term. AsScribner demonstrates, the most compelling examples of postmilitant culture don't just repudiate militancy: these works investigate its horizons of possibility, particularly on the front of sexual politics. Objects of analysis include as-yet untranslated essays by Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, as well as novels by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Judith Kuckart, Johann Kresnik's _Tanztheaterstück Ulrike Meinhof_, and the blockbuster exhibition _Regarding Terror_ at the Berlin Kunst-Werke.Scribner focuses on German cinema, offering incisive interpretations of films by Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, and Fatih Akin, as well as the international box-office success _The Baader-Meinhof Complex_. These readings disclose dynamic junctures among several fields of inquiry: national and sexual identity, the disciplining of the militant body, and the relationship between mass media and the arts. (shrink)
Spare the rod: punishment and the moral community of schools.Campbell F.Scribner -2021 - London: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Bryan R. Warnick.detailsIn Spare the Rod, historian Campbell F.Scribner and philosopher Bryan R. Warnick think deeply about punishment and discipline practices in American schooling. To delve into this controversial subject, the authors carefully consider two major issues. The first involves questions of meaning. How have concepts of discipline and punishment in schools changed overtime? What purposes are they supposed to serve? And what can they tell us about our assumptions about education? The second issue involves the justification of punishment and (...) discipline in schools. Are public school educators ever justified in punishing or disciplining students? Are these things important for moral education? Or, are they fundamentally opposed to education? If some form of punishment is justified in schools, what ethical guidelines should direct its administration? The authors argue that as schools have grown increasingly bureaucratic over the past century, formalizing disciplinary systems and shifting from physical punishments to forms of spatial or structural punishment (such as suspension), school discipline has not only come to resemble the operation of prisons or policing but has grown increasingly integrated with those institutions. These changes, they argue, disregard the unique status of schools as spaces of moral growth and community oversight, and are incompatible with the developmental ethos of education. What we need is a view of discipline and punishment that fits with the sort of moral community that schools should be. (shrink)
Matters of Spirit: J. G. Fichte and the Technological Imagination.F. ScottScribner -2010 - Pennsylvania State University Press.detailsThis book offers a radically new interpretation of the entire philosophy of J. G. Fichte by showing the impact of nineteenth-century psychological techniques and technologies on the formation of his theory of the imagination—the very centerpiece of his philosophical system. By situating Fichte’s philosophy within the context of nineteenth-century German science and culture, the book establishes a new genealogy, one that shows the extent to which German idealism’s transcendental account of the social remains dependent upon the scientific origins of psychoanalysis (...) in the material techniques of Mesmerism. The book makes it clear that the rational, transcendental account of spirit, imagination, and the social has its source in the psychological phenomena of affective rapport. Specifically, the imagination undergoes a double displacement in which it is ultimately subject to external influence, the influence of a material technique, or, in short, a technology. (shrink)
Oral culture and the diffusion of reformation ideas.RobertScribner -1984 -History of European Ideas 5 (3):237-256.detailsThis article is a revised and considerably expanded version of a short paper first delivered to the Past and Present Annual Conference 1979 on ‘The Transmission of Ideas in Early Modern Europe c. 1350–1700’. A slightly different version in German was presented to the Tübingen Symposium on ‘Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformationszeit’ in 1980, which has been published in the conference proceedings . I have repeated a few paragraphs of this German version here.
The challenge of boredom in education: Kevin Hood Gary’sWhy Boredom Matters.Campbell F.Scribner -forthcoming -Journal of Philosophy of Education.detailsThis essay explores the relationship between boredom, leisure, selfhood, and education in Kevin Hood Gary’s book, Why Boredom Matters, paying particular attention to connections between Aristotelian and existentialist approaches to the subject. Following Gary, the essay argues that schools force students to endure boredom or try to stimulate them with distractions, rather than helping them focus on enduring sources of meaning or cultivate stronger senses of self.
Divine hiddenness: An evidential argument.Charity Anderson -2021 -Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):5-22.detailsThis paper presents and examines the argument from divine hiddenness as an evidential argument. It argues that a key thought that motivates the argument, namely, that it's surprising that God's existence is not more obvious, does not alone secure the conclusion that divine hiddenness is evidence against God. The evidential problem of divine hiddenness is illustrated using Bayesian models.
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Affectivity, Transparency, Rapport.F. ScottScribner -2002 -Idealistic Studies 32 (2):159-170.detailsAt last scholars are recognizing that the great generative architectonics of idealism’s account of self-consciousness would demand or imply, from a genealogical perspective, an unconscious. Yet, between Foucaultian inspired analyses of madness in Hegel, and Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian readings of the unconscious in the work of F. W. J. Schelling, there has been essentially no mention of J. G. Fichte. As an attempt to redress this failure, I will begin to sketch Fichte’s own unique articulation of an unconscious (Unbewusst) by (...) highlighting three unique aspects or perspectives: (a) the idea of a pre-conscious, self-affective self; (b) the notion of the self-seeing eye; and (c) his own first hand involvement with dynamic psychiatry’s phenomena of magnetic rapport. This exposition of the unconscious in Fichte has two distinct ends. First, it stands as one of the first sustained expositions of the unconscious in the work of Fichte. This analysis which places Fichte’s work in the broader genealogy of dynamic psychiatry, however, also stands as a critique of the Freudian psychoanalytic model of the unconscious. (shrink)
Spirit in the Age of Technology: The Fichtean Imagination and the Medium of the Social.F. ScottScribner -2000 - Dissertation, State University of New York at BinghamtondetailsBy offering an original reading of J. G. Fichte's central philosophic work, The Science of Knowledge , through the prism of his much over looked "Journal of Animal Magnetism" this dissertation situates Fichte's later metaphysics of the image within the concerns of contemporary media theory. It does so by taking seriously the political consequences of the historical transformation of the faculty of imagination in age of materialism. Such a reading is made possible by approaching German Idealism through the critical apparatus (...) of 20th century Continental Philosophy . ;In the 19th century, Post-Kantian idealism's designation of the imagination as a faculty was called into question. For instance, with the appearance of Mesmerism and the rise of magnetic psychology, the very validity of the transcendental subject was rendered suspect. The subject's imagination was shown to be transparent to external influence. In his own search for a physical instantiation of idealism Fichte realized that the imagination and its power of imaging was no longer limited to the transcendental subject, but was shown to be a function of material technique. Such a transformation would have far reaching political consequences. Specifically, if Fichte articulated spirit---which defined social wholeness---in terms of the imagination, then the appropriation of the imagination by technological materialism demanded a fundamental rethinking of the communicative ground of the social. (shrink)
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Reading Fichte.F. ScottScribner -2023 - In Tilottama Rajan & Daniel Whistler,The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 25-36.detailsFichte’s project has much to offer contemporary continental philosophy and Laruelle’s project is an inspiring example of the continuing creative power and possibility latent in Fichte’s work. In a well-known ad hominem flourish, Fichte famously asserts that the choice between founding foundational philosophical first principles, between freedom and dogmatism (idealism and realism), cannot itself, in turn, be justified by philosophy alone. Yet what if the philosophical decision itself, the decision of and for philosophy is itself an ad hominem choice that, (...) as Laruelle contends, is little more than a narcissistic game? Indeed, Laruelle radicalizes such stakes by suggesting it is not merely the dogmatism of realism that is the problem, but that all philosophy is a narcissistic dogmatism. And it is this very decision for philosophy that remains our oldest dogmatic prejudice. (shrink)
Knowledge, Practical Adequacy, and Stakes.Charity Anderson &John Hawthorne -2019 -Oxford Studies in Epistemology 6.detailsDefenses of pragmatic encroachment commonly rely on two thoughts: first, that the gap between one’s strength of epistemic position on p and perfect strength sometimes makes a difference to what one is justified in doing, and second, that the higher the stakes, the harder it is to know. It is often assumed that these ideas complement each other. This chapter shows that these ideas are far from complementary. Along the way, a variety of strategies for regimenting the somewhat inchoate notion (...) of stakes are indicated, and some troubling cases for pragmatic encroachment raised. (shrink)
Troubled Bodies: Metaxu, Suffering and the Encounter With the Divine.Charity K. M. Hamilton -2013 -Feminist Theology 22 (1):88-97.detailsThe body is the canvas on which the female experience is painted and through which female identity is often understood. The female body is a slate on which a patriarchal story has been written, scarred onto the flesh. For Simone Weil metaxu was simultaneously that which separated and connected, so for instance the wall between two prison cells cuts off the prisoners but was also the means by which they communicated by knocking on that wall. Could the body be that (...) metaxu all at once separating us and connecting us to the Divine? The nature of metaxu is that it offers a route not just for the individual soul but for the souls of others to travel. If all peoples renounce their outer shell – and by this I do not mean their bodies but rather the bodies or clothes or ideals written upon those people by patriarchy or capitalism or colonialism – if those real bodies come to the broken body of Christ [which is stripped and scarred] standing in solidarity with and mimicking this broken body, without the things which have been put upon their bodies but with scarred flesh showing, then this is where metaxu is possible for here we see a renouncing of ‘self’ as created by patriarchy and all that is left is a space that is the place where we are authentically self and God dwells. (shrink)
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Extending Spinoza… For the Love of God!: Spinoza, Lévinas, and the Inadequacy of the Body.F. ScottScribner -2002 -International Philosophical Quarterly 42 (2):151-160.detailsIn his Ethics, Spinoza maintains that God’s essence is expressed as both thought and extension. Despite this claim, however, Spinoza’s very definition of truth, understood as adequation, would seem to reduce the aspect of extension to an exclusively intellectual paradigm. I question the extent to which a body remains a body throughout the Ethics in the transition from the first knowledge of the imagination to the highest know ledge of adequate ideas. As a way to think beyond the totality of (...) adequation, I tum to Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between totality and infinity. I reference Levinas in order to highlight certain impasses within Spinoza’s system and to serve as a possible alternative articulation of an extensional love of God. (shrink)
Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation Reconsidered ed. by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore.F. ScottScribner -2017 -Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3):548-549.detailsInterpretation always takes place in the present tense. It is worth reminding ourselves of this, because few philosophical texts or treatises have suffered the rise and fall of the vagaries of their own contemporary Weltanschauung as Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation. Few texts in history have been simultaneously so overestimated and underestimated in their impact and importance as Fichte's Addresses; and therefore few texts can be said to be so misunderstood—and so need in of reassessment. This collection, Fichte's Addresses (...) to the German Nation Reconsidered, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, precisely seeks to fill this lacuna. The interpretative fate of the Addresses has always hinged on the... (shrink)
Idealism’s Corpse or the Prosthetics of Suicide.F. ScottScribner -2011 -Idealistic Studies 41 (1-2):55-67.detailsThis paper uses Maurice Blanchot’s image of the corpse as a trope by which to offer a unique quasi-material reading of the German Idealist notion of speculative suicide. And its method of interpretative retrieval, like these idealists, works to think the relevance of idealism today by affirming the spirit against the letter. The paradox of suicide—that we aspire to be witness to our own death—presents itself as a double, as interpreted in works of Fichte and Schelling. This double, the very (...) core of speculative aspiration, is essentially a temporal other whose prosthetic character suggests that the speculative power of spirit is simultaneously technological, and that the limit-condition of suicide be found not in an ethereal speculative unity but rather in the intractable materiality of our own corporeal remains. (shrink)
On What We Owe in Attention.Charity Anderson -2022 -Journal of Philosophical Research 47:219-228.detailsA central aim of Sandy Goldberg’s project is to defend a fundamentally epistemic source of normative conversational pressure—one which does not reduce to the interpersonal dimension. A second core aim is to provide an explanation of how expectations are generated by the performances within a conversation. This essay raises several challenges for chapter 2 of his book, ‘Your Attention Please!.’ From various angles, the essay challenges the central idea of that chapter: namely, that by the act of address, a speaker (...) generates an obligation for a hearer to attend to the speaker. (shrink)
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On the intimate relationship of knowledge and action.Charity Anderson -2015 -Episteme 12 (3):343-353.detailsPragmatic encroachment offers a picture of knowledge whereby knowledge is unstable. This paper argues that pragmatic encroachment is committed to more instability than has been hitherto noted. One surprising result of the arguments in this paper is that pragmatic encroachment is not merely about changes in stakes. All sorts of practical factors can make for the presence or absence of knowledge on this picture stakes-sensitivity’ is misleading. Furthermore, insufficient attention has been paid to the variety of ways in which on (...) this view pragmatic factors affect knowledge: pragmatic factors are not merely knowledge-depriving but are also knowledge-inducing. (shrink)
An Aristotelian Defence of Affirmative Action: Alasdair MacIntyre, Sandra Day O'Connor and Grutter v. Bollinger.Neil Dhingra &CampbellScribner -2021 -Journal of Philosophy of Education 55 (1):83-98.detailsJournal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 55, Issue 1, Page 83-98, February 2021.
Fallibilism and the flexibility of epistemic modals.Charity Anderson -2014 -Philosophical Studies 167 (3):597-606.detailsIt is widely acknowledged that epistemic modals admit of inter-subjective flexibility. This paper introduces intra-subjective flexibility for epistemic modals and draws on this flexibility to argue that fallibilism is consistent with the standard account of epistemic modals.
Divine Hiddenness and Other Evidence.Charity Anderson &Jeffrey Sanford Russell -2013 - In L. Kvanvig Jonathan,Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. Oxford University Press.detailsMany people do not know or believe there is a God, and many experience a sense of divine absence. Are these (and other) “divine hiddenness” facts evidence against the existence of God? Using Bayesian tools, we investigate *evidential arguments from divine hiddenness*, and respond to two objections to such arguments. The first objection says that the problem of hiddenness is just a special case of the problem of evil, and so if one has responded to the problem of evil then (...) hiddenness has no additional bite. The second objection says that, while hiddenness may be evidence against generic theism, it is not evidence against more specific conceptions of God, and thus hiddenness poses no epistemic challenge to a theist who holds one of these more specific conceptions. Our investigation leaves open just how strong the evidence from hiddenness really is, but we aim to clear away some important reasons for thinking hiddenness is of no evidential significance at all. (shrink)