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Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector Semantics
Read more: Updating Roman Jakobson’s ‘Poetic Function’ with Vector SemanticsKurzynski discusses how poetry extends beyond sound and rhythm and taps into a deeper network of meanings.
Understanding the Maghreb Before and After the Arab Spring
By J.N.C Hill The start of the Arab Spring has raised numerous searching questions about the study of the Maghreb. Scholars of the region are grappling with an intriguing and largely unacknowledged paradox: that the theory that arguably did most…
What is to Be Done, with Theory?
By Gabriel Rockhill Theory is a particular type of practice, with its own set of rules, rituals and sanctions. To participate in its more institutionalised and prominent forms, it is necessary to engage with these norms and to negotiate one’s…
Jean-Luc Nancy and the Harlem Tiger
By Carrie Giunta Daily life in New York City has its many challenges. In the concrete jungle, it’s a struggle to survive. But when one Harlem resident kept a 500-pound tiger and a seven-foot alligator as roommates, it raised philosophical…
What do Monks and Friars have in common?
By Eva Pascal What do Buddhist monks and Christian friars have in common? Quite a bit, in fact. While travelling widely across Asia in the late sixteenth century, Franciscans had rich encounters and exchanges with Buddhist monks that led them…
On Wasting Time
By Claire White In France, the turn of the millennium ushered in a bold, and controversial, act of legal reform that sought to reshape the French citizen’s working life: the introduction of a 35-hour working week. For many, the law…
Images of Islam
By Deanna Ferree Womack Images of Islam abound these days, and many of them are troubling. Those who speak loudly and most forcefully define Islam in the narrowest of terms, making one image – the militant extremist – into a…
Behind Red Doors – Signs, Process and the Political
In January 2016, a scandal broke out in the UK when the Times reported that asylum seekers’ homes could be identified by distinctive red doors, making them vulnerable to attacks. Coincidentally – but not where signs and the political are concerned – A Process Philosophy of Signs opens with an account of threatening identification on doors.
Alfred North Whitehead and the Edinburgh Connection
By Leemon B. McHenry. 15 February is the birthday of British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, born in 1841 – he would have been 155 today. Whitehead delivered his masterpiece of metaphysics, Process and Reality, at the Gifford Lectures…
Nancy in Love
‘It is possible that one day I will no longer love you, and this possibility cannot be taken away from love – it belongs to it. It is against this possibility, but also with it, that the promise is made, the word given.’ – Jean-Luc Nancy