Todd Mei

Are Reasons Enough? Sen and Ricoeur on the Idea of Impartiality

Amartya Sen argues that a conception of impartiality built upon “trans-positional objectivity” provides a potential remedy to conflicts of distributive justice by securing the most “reasonable reasons” in a debate. This article undertakes a critical analysis of Sen’s theory by contrasting it with Paul Ricoeur’s claim that impartiality is a normative concept and therefore that the demand faced within the arena of competing distributive claims is not one of providing the most reasonable reasons but of exposing and understanding the role of convictions that underwrite normative frameworks, or ethical orders.

An Economic Turn: A Hermeneutical Reinterpretation of Political Economy with Respect to the Question of Land

The philosophy of economics has been largely guided by analytic philosophy. Even Marx has been appropriated without much scandal by economists who separate his scientific contributions from his politics. In this article, I place philosophical hermeneutics (i.e., Heidegger and Ricoeur) in dialogue with the conventional understanding of land as a factor of production. The history of political economy misunderstands land as an entity classifiable as property and capital. I argue instead that land’s ontological role, deriving from Heidegger’s concept of earth, suggests that economics needs to account for it in a new way according to David Ricardo’s notion of land rent.

The poetics of meaningful work: An analogy to speech acts

Meaningful work refers to the idea that human work is an integral part of the way we think of our lives as going well. The concept is prevalent in sociology and business studies. In philosophy, its discussion tends to revolve around matters of justice and whether the State should take steps to eradicate meaningless work. However, despite the breadth of the recent, general literature, there is little to no discussion about how it is in fact the case that work is meaningful. There is a basic assumption that certain facts about work make it meaningful. After noting the shortcomings in the literature, this essay argues that we can better understand the production of meaning in work by an analogy to speech acts. Using Paul Ricoeur’s theory of action as discourse, one can see how meaning is predicated in the performance of work in ways that are locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary.

Constructing Ricoeur’s Hermeneutical Theory of Truth

While there are several moments throughout his career when Ricoeur devotes attention to the problem of truth—for example, in History and Truth, his conception of manifestation in his biblical hermeneutics, and when discussing convictions and non-epistemological beliefs in Oneself as Another—a more unified theory is never formulated. This can be seen as a somewhat odd omission given the emphasis he places on a hermeneutical form of reasoning. What is a theory of reasoning without a theory of truth? The aim of this chapter is to construct a theory of truth from various texts that span Ricoeur’s career. I begin by situating Ricoeur between Heidegger’s notion of truth as disclosure and MacIntyre’s view that truth is monolithic. I examine how fragility acts as the founding concept for a Ricoeurian theory of truth, which I describe as a kind of “holistic fallibilism.” The core of his theory is ethically grounded as opposed to emphasizing ontological disclosure, consistency of beliefs with a metaphysical principle, or the analysis of the reasonableness of statements/propositions.

Review of Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought

In Chapter 1, Martin-Jones argues that Deleuze’s dismissal of early cinema is predicated on his readings of Bergsonian duration rather than a close engagement with early cinema itself. Considering the cinema of attractions discussed by film historian Tom Gunning, and the genre of the spaghetti western, Martin-Jones puts forward a new post-Deleuzian taxonomy of the ‘attraction-image’, combining elements of Deleuze’s time-image and action-image in its appeal to spectacle. In Chapters 2 and 3, he shifts to an interrogation of national history, witnessing and the ‘thinking-image’ (p. 72), first through the figure of Deleuze’s child-seer as witness to the present. His reading of the recent Argentinian melodrama Kamchtka (2002) revises this child-seer as reconstructing a past that has been hidden by years of military rule. Second, Martin-Jones examines the folding and unfolding of time in contemporary South Korean time travel movies, to deconstruct Deleuze’s conception of national cinema, and to ‘rethink history cinematically’ (p. 130). Chapters 4 and 5 critically revise Deleuze’s action-image in the light of action thrillers from Hong Kong (Jackie Chan’s Police Story (1985) in particular) and LA (Michael Mann’s blockbuster films Heat (1995) and Collateral (2004)). Martin-Jones reappraises the genre’s capacity to rethink its own ideologies, particularly with reference to the ‘any-space-whatever’ and the ‘crystal-image’ – taxonomies more usually associated with Deleuze’s time-image. Chapter 6 returns to the notion of a cinema of spectacle, this time specific to popular Indian cinema, to which MartinJones attributes the category of the masala-image. This fluid, spectacular cinema elides, integrates and slips between forms of the action-image and cyclical temporalities of interruption and repair. Using notions of the dharmic, rather than the Bergsonian whole, Martin-Jones offers a penetrating revisualization of Deleuzian categories, critiquing both their Eurocentric philosophical bases and their assumptions about temporality and subjectivity. Martin-Jones’s evaluation of the limitations of Deleuze’s cinema books via their dialogue with Bergson is consistent throughout, yet his deeply contextual rereadings of Deleuze and new analyses of a selection of world cinemas, neither condemn nor sanctify Deleuze’s categories. Moreover, Martin-Jones’ attentiveness to the perspectival positioning of the film scholar, and the complex positioning of world cinemas and globalized cinematic production, reveal Deleuze’s work itself as both persistently fruitful and socio-historically contextualized. Martin-Jones’s book demonstrates admirable scholarly restraint, responding to the changing patterns of Deleuzian research in film studies, while putting forward cogent and persuasive arguments for continuing to pick up Deleuze’s cinema books.