From the early nineteenth century up until the first half of the twentieth century, many leading scholars in the emerging field of linguistics were occupied with what would today be considered a kind of linguistic typology. The various classifications of languages they proposed were generally intertwined with speculation about the “racial” tra…[Read more]

The thirteenth century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia held Hebrew to be the divine language, designed by God as an ontological aspect of reality. Through meditating on and deconstructing names into their letters, one could then engage in the process of reunifying reality into the primordial Name of God, the Tetragrammaton. This paper offers an…[Read more]

The attempts of Mordecai Kaplan and Ludwig Wittgenstein at reforming Jewish theology and analytic philosophy respectively share some important traits. While Kaplan’s scientifically respectable “atheistic” Judaism sought to reinterpret theological principles in line with a modern-day materialist vision of the cosmos, Wittgenstein’s reducti…[Read more]

In the summer of 1704, Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), the preeminent Italian physician and natural philosopher of his time, traveled with a “daring soul” and “trembling feet” across the “silent horrors” of the northern Apennines: down the hills south of Reggio Emilia to northern Tuscany and the western edge of his native land, the Province of G…[Read more]

An exercise for a course on deconstructive criticism, with Jacques deconstructing himself and acknowledging that he partakes of Jean-Jacques’s logocentrism.

in: Nel nome di Lazzaro. Saggi di storia della scienza e delle istituzioni scientifiche tra il XVII e il XVIII secolo, edited by Centro Studi Lazzaro Spallanzani, Bologna, Edizioni Pendragon, 2014, pp. 207-220.

This note criticises some equivocations and ambivalent notions in the writings of Derrida, especially ‘Limited Inc’ and ‘De la grammatologie’, as regards the notions of norm, intention, system, center, consciousness, writing, speech act and literal meaning. Derrida is shown to both have his cake and eat it, using his own text as a paradoxical…[Read more]

This note criticises some equivocations and ambivalent notions in the writings of Derrida, especially ‘Limited Inc’ and ‘De la grammatologie’, as regards the notions of norm, intention, system, center, consciousness, writing, speech act and literal meaning. Derrida is shown to both have his cake and eat it, using his own text as a paradoxical…[Read more]

Politics seems bound up with questions of the ordinary and everyday as opposed to the extraordinary. This may be a Cavellian way of articulating the problem of political praxis, i.e., the point at which theory “becomes” action, but notice, at least in Cavell-speak, which way the trajectory flows. The Wittgensteinian charge to bring language bac…[Read more]

This is a brief note criticising some anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist semiotic assumptions in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, from the standpoint of a classical structuralist perspective which (following Saussure) sees the play of differences as crucially constitutive of a system of positive terms.

This is a brief note criticising some anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist semiotic assumptions in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, from the standpoint of a classical structuralist perspective which (following Saussure) sees the play of differences as crucially constitutive of a system of positive terms.

The fourth issue of “Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies”, which explores Cavell’s philosophic interest in literature, an oft-repeated and rehashed thematic prism and vantage point from which to address Cavell’s work. However, it is our feeling that, at times anyhow, Cavell’s interest in Wittgenstein and film dwarfs slightly his liter…[Read more]

For the inaugural issue of “Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies”, we solicited papers discussing Stanley’s autobiographical writings. To mirror types of conversations, we asked for both short and long (though we received mostly the latter).

Annotations on V. N. Voloshinov’s study “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language” (1929), on topics such as reflexion vs. refraction, consciousness and signs, language and ideology, Saussurean structuralism, verbal interaction, and theme vs. meaning.

This is a note on Walter Benjamin’s essay on collecting, “Unpacking My Library” (orig. published in German in 1931). Benjamin’s reflections on collecting are analyzed with reference to Modernist themes in Baudelaire and Proust, and to the Modernist concern with memory in the structuring of the self. The essay is held to be a half-ironic…[Read more]

Book of Abstracts of the International Conference “Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0”

This article gives an overview of the conditional and its functions in the
South Siberian Turkic languages Altay Turkic, Shor, Khakas, Tuvan and Tofan.

This article deals with the global copy of a bound morpheme in Gagauz. The feminine marker -(y)ka, copied from Slavic, is used to build female forms of denominations for persons.

Slides for an Introduction to Philosophy course at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada. These give an introduction to Mill’s utilitarianism as well as to consequentialism generally. Then they discuss intellectual and sensual pleasures, the argument Mill gives for why the Greatest Happiness Principle should be how we…[Read more]

Preprint to appear in a special issue of Cultural Analytics on “Identity.” The article explores the paradox that the representation of gender in fiction became more flexible while the sheer balance of attention between fictional men and women was growing more unequal. We measure the rigidity of gendered roles by asking how easy it is to infer…[Read more]