In this relatively short book, Johns, in the style of Derrida, looks over the absence or spectre of the signifier “dialectic” in both Martin Heidegger and Graham Harman’s work, arguing that such a negation of the term turns out to be more of an intentional repression than any passive act of neglection. Johns insists that such repression finds its way into their writing as an alternative interpretation of their core concepts altogether. Less a Hegelian critique of such thinkers and more a Heideggerian and Harmanian resuscitation of the dialectic in Hegel as a realist method capable of integration into contemporary philosophy, this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the crossroads of contemporary strands of idealism, materialism and realism and the place of the dialectical method today.

One hundred years after the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, his oeuvre might best be described as “une pensée”, as a meandering thought-provoking thought, to quote Jean-Luc Godard’s exceptional comment on Pasolini in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Pasolini scholarship has certainly increased in recent years, but mainly from the perspective of Italian Studies and with a particular focus on his poetry, prose and film. The proposed volume instead highlights the interest of his work for the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It therefore compiles key writings by philosophers who are relatively unknown even within the context of contemporary French and Italian thought. By collecting little known or newly translated essays from these philosophers, the volume aims to foster a contemporary discussion about the (in-)actuality of Pasolini’s work.

The tradition of Kant's critical philosophy developed the concept of imagination in a rigorous and productive way. It also allows us to develop an aesthetic approach suitable to explaining and understanding the relationship between sensitivity and technology. In this book, Montani defends the reasons to place this concept in a paleo-anthropological framework, linking it to the imaginative practices that preceded and prepared the advent of articulated discourse. This event involved a profound reorganization of the technical performances that can be traced back to imagination and related internalization processes. Furthermore, the emergence of an articulated language inaugurated a singular story, that of the relationship between word and image. In this study, that story is followed through particular attention to developments in cinema and digital image formats.

The volume tries to offer a comparison between two philosophers who belong to two different philosophical traditions and who have thus been rarely discussed together: Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Despite these thinkers’ many distinctions, the contributions to the current volume try to reconstruct not only how the ‘second’ Wittgenstein was influenced by the Marxist tradition, but also – and above all – the theoretical affinities between the two philosophers. In this way, the book underlines the potential that Marx’s political thought holds for philosophers of language as well as the social implications of Wittgenstein’s thought and the political potential of some of his central topics, such as his critique of the private language argument and his theory of language games.

The book deals with the complex notion of process worked out by Alfred N. Whitehead, a notion that includes his deep revision of the concepts of time and space. Throughout his whole career, Whitehead emphasized the importance of process for the account of reality. The book discusses Whitehead's concept of process starting from his works in mathematics, logic and epistemology of the natural sciences, in order to pave the way for a better understanding of Whitehead's speculative philosophy. The focus is on the relationship between concrescence and transition, seen as deeply correlated and reciprocally determined. In this perspective, the book offers a reinterpretation of Whitehead's most enigmatic proposal: the event of subjectivity interpreted as a process of subjectivation. This poses the problem of the endurance of subjectivity. The book suggests that this problem is solved by Whitehead through is appropriation of Plato's notion of chora, seen as the "place" of a processual subject.

In 1956, together with his research group, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson published a theory that was to revolutionize the way of conceiving mental illness. Over the years, the central concept of this theory, the double bind, proved effective in an increasing number of fields of knowledge: from the theory of communication to epistemology, from sociology to pedagogy, from literature to philosophy. Through an examination of the inception and development of this concept, the book retraces the main themes, connections and critical points that mark the whole of Bateson’s multifaceted research: from the early ethnographic surveys in New Guinea through to the ecological ideas of his later years, including the cybernetic reflections, his studies of human and animal communication, his work in the psychiatric field. This analysis of the double bind theory, originally formulated as a hypothesis to explain schizophrenia, is not only a guide to the work of one of the most unpredictable and original thinkers of the last century, but also gives access to essential theoretical tools for bringing into focus a number of increasingly persistent contemporary problems.

What can we learn from the way artists live and operate in the world? This is one of the questions that Nietzsche asks himself throughout the course of his work, although it is not one for which he is most famous. In its answer, the question functions as a swinging incessant movement that oscillates between a highly critical analysis of dogmas and prejudices of the Western philosophical tradition and an equally profound recognition of how important it is for each of us to cling to a system of certainties and truths that are but illusions necessary to life. Art speaks to us of this perpetual transit from the brutality of the real to the enchantment of an invented world and teaches us how to move between both extremes. Beyond stereotypes and false myths, the crucial nodes of Nietzsche’s thought are shown in a different light, demonstrating once again the complexity of a philosophy that resists all simplifications.

Revolutionary Gnosticism is a movement common to a great deal of modern and contemporary revolutionary phenomena such as Nazism, Bolshevism and Jacobinism. However no one has studied Salafi- Jihadism yet, the latest existing revolutionary ideology, in gnostic terms. If Salafi-Jihadism were a gnostic phenomenon, it would reveal its Promethean and atheist conception of the world that stands in the forgetfulness of a pure transcendent dimension, notwithstanding the apparently spiritual framework and religious justification that jihadists provide. A similar study, hence, would reveal Salafi-Jihadis’ will of redeeming humankind from Evil (with capital letter) and building the perfect society, leaving God without a clear possibility of intervening in human affairs.

Long before scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, American developmental biologist and aspiring cancer researcher Robert Briggs successfully performed the technique of nuclear transplantation by cloning frog nuclei in 1952. Although the history of cloning is often associated with contemporary ethical controversies, The Forgotten Clones revisits the influential work of scientists like Briggs, Thomas King, and Marie DiBerardino, before the possibility of human cloning and its ethical implications first registered as a concern in public consciousness, and when many thought the very idea of cloning was experimentally impossible. By focusing instead on new laboratory techniques and practices and their place in Anglo-American science and society in the mid-twentieth century, Nathan Crowe demonstrates how embryos constructed in the lab were only later reconstructed as ethical problems. His book illuminates the importance of the early history of cloning for the biosciences and their institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual contexts, as well as the changing relationship between science and society after the Second World War.

Beyond the Lab and the Field analyzes infrastructures as intense sites of knowledge production in the Americas, Europe, and Asia since the late nineteenth century. Moving beyond classical places known for yielding scientific knowledge, chapters in this volume explore how the construction and maintenance of canals, highways, dams, irrigation schemes, the oil industry, and logistic networks intersected with the creation of know-how and expertise. Referred to by the authors as "scientific bonanzas," such intersections reveal opportunities for great wealth, but also distress and misfortune. This volume explores how innovative technologies provided research opportunities for scientists and engineers, as they relied on expertise to operate, which resulted in enormous profits for some. But, like the history of any gold rush, the history of infrastructure also reveals how technologies of modernity transformed nature, disrupting communities and destroying the local environment. Focusing not on the victory march of science and technology but on ambivalent change, contributors consider the role of infrastructures for ecology, geology, archaeology, soil science, engineering, ethnography, heritage, and polar exploration. Together, they also examine largely overlooked perspectives on modernity: the reliance of infrastructure on knowledge, and infrastructures as places and occasions that inspired a greater understanding of the natural world and the technologically made environment.

In-Between: Exploring Small Cracks of Everyday Life is an anthology comprising contributions from a group of social scientists all preoccupied with the possibilities and potentials of working ethnographically. The chapters of the book investigates a range of small everyday life ‘cracks’ – a notion covering unnoticed, withdrawn and overlooked phenomena alike, and which designate the metaphorical interstices and in-betweens that influence and affect most aspects of everyday experience, the comprehensive field also subject to ethnographic inquiry. The chapters in the anthology are all based on original fieldwork and explore different cracks occurring in-between humans as well as in-between humans and non-human entities. A distinct element of the book as a whole is that it comprises experiments in terms of both ethnographic writing approaches as well as with the construction of analytical objects. The argument consistently going through the separate chapters, as well as through the volume in entirety, is that the many wondrous, mysterious, odd and puzzling phenomena encountered in everyday life are not necessarily grasped best by the application of strictly rational and rigorous academic approaches. To the contrary, and as the authors all demonstrate in their own manner, social science can also seek to fathom these sides of human existence with analytical explorations that are both sensitive, bold and infused with responsive and creative intensity.

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution and sexual selection, deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges. Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science - and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media, from photography to oil painting. This volume reminds us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences, but rather fields that shared forms - manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries - and invest in the idea of the evolution of form.

Science is usually known by its most successful figures and resource-rich institutions. In stark contrast, Creativity from the Periphery draws our attention to unknown figures in science - those who remain marginalized, even neglected, within its practices. Researchers in early twentieth-century colonial India, for example, have made significant contributions to the stock of scientific knowledge and have provided science with new breakthroughs and novel ideas, but to little acclaim. As Deepanwita Dasgupta argues, sometimes the best ideas in science are born from difficult and resource-poor conditions. In this study, she turns our attention to these peripheral actors, shedding new light on how scientific creativity operates in lesser-known, marginalized contexts, and how the work of self-trained researchers, though largely ignored, has contributed to important conceptual shifts. Her book presents a new philosophical framework for understanding this peripheral creativity in science through the lens of trading zones - where knowledge is exchanged between two unequal communities - and explores the implications for the future diversity of transnational science.

The historiography of feminist rhetorical research raises ethical questions about whose stories are told and how. Women and other marginalized people have been excluded historically from many formal institutions, and researchers in this field often turn to alternative archives to explore how women have used writing and rhetoric to participate in civic life, share their lived experiences, and effect change. Such methods may lead to innovation in documenting practices that took place in local, grass-roots settings. The chapters in this volume present a frank conversation about the ways in which feminist scholars engage in the work of recovering hidden rhetorics, and grapple with the ethical challenges raised by this recovery work.

Ingenuity in the Making explores the myriad ways in which ingenuity shaped the experience, discourse and conceptualization of materials and their manipulation in early modern Europe. Contributions range widely across the arts and sciences, examining objects and texts, professions and performances, concepts and practices. The book considers subjects such as spirited matter, the conceits of nature, and crafty devices, investigating the ways in which wit acted in and upon the material world through skill and technique. Contributors ask how ingenuity informed the “maker’s knowledge” tradition, where the perilous borderline between the genius of invention and disingenuous fraud was drawn, and what were the ambitions of material ingenuity in a rapidly globalizing world.

In the steam-powered mechanical age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the work of late Georgian and early Victorian mathematicians came to depend on far more than the properties of number. British mathematicians came to rely on industrialized paper and pen manufacture, railways and mail, and the print industries of the book, disciplinary journal, magazine, and newspaper. Although not always physically present with one another, the characters central to this book—from George Green to William Rowan Hamilton—relied heavily on communication technologies as they developed their theories in consort with colleagues. The letters they exchanged, together with the equations, diagrams, tables, or pictures that filled their manuscripts and publications, were all tangible traces of abstract ideas that extended mathematicians into their social and material environment. Each chapter of this book explores a thing, or assembling of things, needed by mathematicians to do their work—whether a textbook, museum, journal, library, diagram, notebook, or letter—all characteristic of the mid-nineteenth-century British taskscape, but also representative of great change to a discipline brought about by an industrialized world in motion.