This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. Yet reli…[Read more]

There is a traditional narrative within information studies regarding precision and recall measures. Precision and recall have been the most commonly used retrieval metrics and are the basis for more complicated and accurate information retrieval evaluations. Relevance, which is the criterion by which both recall and precision are judged, is…[Read more]

Completed in early 1944, Robert Desnos’s militant series of 25 poems in Contrée evokes memories of a lost peace and calls for the defeat of the German occupiers. Suggesting the desecration of the human body by the occupiers, Picasso cut his cubist–surrealist frontispiece etching of Dora Marr to produce severed heads and dismembered body part…[Read more]

Library and information center services are at risk during times of extensive budget reductions. Publicly funded institutions labeled as inessential or as auxiliary departments may lose the revenue necessary to maintain full staffing. Financial circumstances of recent years highlight the importance of strategic planning in library and information…[Read more]

A traditional expectation for publicly funded libraries is that they should be institutions where patron records are kept confidential and a standard of privacy is maintained. After the events of 911, methods increasing search and surveillance powers and reducing legal protections were drafted into law as the “Patriot Act”. Searching patron rec…[Read more]

In response to a lack of funding during the 2007–2009 recession, many library systems reduced or eliminated professional and library support positions. Traditional outcome measurements were not sufficient to convince tax-depleted legislatures to allocate more funds to libraries. In response to the crisis authors recommended cost-saving measures a…[Read more]

Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation — and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin A…[Read more]

In “Real Patterns” Daniel Dennett developed an argument about the reality of beliefs on the basis of an analogy with patterns and noise. Here I develop Dennett’s analogy into an argument for descriptivism, the view that belief reports do no specify belief contents but merely describe what someone believes, and show that this view is also supported…[Read more]

India has been the seat of deep philosophical engagements since the Vedic period. However, Indian philosophical wisdom, albeit different from Western philosophical in many respects, was not widely known to the rest of the world before colonial thinkers started their dialogue with Indian philosophy through their translations and academic exegeses.…[Read more]

This is a recording of a reading of Aristotle’s De Anima by Richard Lee and Christopher P. Long that was originally presented at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Citta di Castello, Umbria, Italy, on July 10, 2018. The theme of the 2018 Collegium was Aristotle: Physis, Psyche, Anthropos, and Kristi Sweet read Chris Long’s part at the conference…[Read more]

In addition to the enigmatic The Codomas, Henri Matisse distinguished three other images with a name, Icarus, Monsieur Loyal and Pierrot’s Funeral for his landmark livre d’artiste Jazz. While the characters Loyal, Pierrot and Icarus were readily identifiable and the images could be interpreted within the context of the difficulties of the Ger…[Read more]

Henri Matisse’s images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily r…[Read more]

Repair has visibly come to the fore in recent academic and policy debates, to the point that ‘repair studies’ is now emerging as a novel focus of research. Through the lens of repair, scholars with diverse backgrounds are coming together to rethink our relationships with the human-made matters, tools and objects that are the material mesh in whi…[Read more]

Borges made a habit of differing from himself. “El otro” and “Borges y yo” are only the most overt examples from a corpus that constantly played with his biography, his beliefs, and his proper name. In his “non-fiction,” this Auseinselbstsetzung takes the form of self-contradiction, asserting opposed theses in his own name, celebrating…[Read more]

Borges made a habit of differing from himself. “El otro” and “Borges y yo” are only the most overt examples from a corpus that constantly played with his biography, his beliefs, and his proper name. In his “non-fiction,” this Auseinselbstsetzung takes the form of self-contradiction, asserting opposed theses in his own name, celebrating…[Read more]

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

Review of THE CHENWEI RIDDLE: TIME, STARS, AND HEROES IN THE APOCRYPHA. By Licia Di Giacinto. (Deutsche Ostasienstudien, vol. 13). Gossenberg: Ostasien Verlag, 2013. Pp. xi + 332. 25 Figures, 40 Tables, 4 Appendices, List of Illustrations, Bibliography.

By way of the autobiographical writings of Bruno Schulz and the “resurrection” paintings of Stanley Spencer, this talk sketches out some of the ways in which literature and the fine arts situate themselves within the division, or series of breaks, that Michel de Certeau argued Western historiography inscribes between past and present, between the…[Read more]

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled “here”: the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility,…[Read more]

Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves,” this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the…[Read more]