Faculty of Arts

For close to three decades, since , philosophers of mind sensitive to the complexity of explaining phenomenality (experientiality, qualia) from within a materialist or physicalist position have argued that what Chalmers (1995/1997) called the Hard Problem of Consciousness is virtually unsolvable, largely because explaining qualia from within a physicalist position requires that we "stop knowing" what the physical is. This paper offers a rather convoluted solution to the problem, through the version of the liar paradox Oscar Wilde offers in his 1891 philosophical dialogue "The Decay of Lying." Rather than being merely clever in a wittily iconoclastic but philosophically indefensible way, the position Wilde offers in the dialogue actually models a complex monism that the paper calls "liar paradox monism," which embraces the rhetorical tensions of the communicative situation in which the Hard Problem of Consciousness is experienced and putatively solved.

"Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture is Douglas Robinson’s study of postcolonial affect—specifically, of the breakdown of the normative (regulatory) circulation of affect in the refugee experience and the colonial encounter, the restructuring of that regulatory circulation in colonization, and the persistence of that restructuring in decolonization and intergenerational trauma. Robinson defines “somatics” as a cultural construction of “reality” and “identity” through the regulatory circulation of evaluative affect.
This book is divided into three essays covering the refugee experience, colonization and decolonization, and intergenerational trauma. Each essay contains a review of empirical studies of its main topic, a study of literary representations of that topic, and a study of postcolonial theoretical spins. The literary representations in the refugee essay are a novel and short story by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat; in the colonization essay a short film by Javier Fesser and a novella by Mahasweta Devi (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); and in the intergenerational trauma essay novels by James Welch and Toni Morrison and a short story by Percival Everett. The first essay’s theoretical spins include Deleuze and Guattari on nomad thought and Iain Chambers on migrancy; the second’s, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and theories of postcolonial affect in Bhabha and Spivak; the third’s, work on historical trauma by Cathy Caruth and Dominic LaCapra.
Douglas Robinson is Dean of Arts and Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University."

"The book has two aims: (a) to provide a comprehensive commentary on Schleiermacher’s 1813 Academy address, “Ueber die verschiedene Methoden des Uebersetzens,” on the occasion of its bicentennial; and (b) to tease out of its images, tropes, and analogies an extension or expansion of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics that incorporates the “icoses” of the title: a communal organization of understanding that is channeled mainly through Gefühlen/feelings.
More generally, the book’s aim is to offer a commentary that is both critical and corrective, but that is also in the end celebratory, showing Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic innovations in the strongest possible light.
Following a “commentary” chapter (1) consisting of fifty numbered passages (covering the entire lecture) with questions directing the attention, the book offers two “critique” chapters focusing on problems: the “bad” analogical reasoning (2) and the patriotism, moralism, and mysticism (3). Chapter 4 explores the parallels between Schleiermacher’s foreignism and the “other” German Romantic foreignism, namely Novalis’s Befremdung, which issues into modernist theories of estrangement (Shklovsky’s ostranenie, Brecht’s Verfremdung)—parallels at which Schleiermacher hints, but so vaguely as to raise the question of whether he was even aware of doing so. Chapters 5 and 6 read a series of specific passages closely in terms of icotic theory, the analogies in Chapter 5 and Schleiermacher’s general understanding of language, literature, translation, and society in Chapter 6. "

Drawing on Henri Meschonnic's notion of an "inscient ethics," and putting "inscience" into dialogue with the old ideal of a "science" of translation, the article explores the collective socio-affective ecologies that organize and regulate social and professional norms and values of translation below the level of conscious awareness-as the true underlying structure not only of "subjectivity" (somatics) but also of "objectivity" ("desomatized science"). Two models are developed for this dual structuring, the first circular or cyclical, with "objectification/desomatization" down one side and "subjectification/somatization" up the other; the other based on Gregory Bateson's theorization of the double-bind, with both sides recursively intertwined. The circular model is developed in dialogue with Shoshana Felman; the double-bind model in dialogue with Juliane House's model of Translation Quality Assessment. Both point us further to a retheorization of socio-affective ecologies in terms of ecosis/icosis.

This paper explores the creation of (a sense of) reality in Richard Powers’ 2006 novel The Echo Maker and Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, especially as that latter is applied by Kevin Casper to the 2010 movie Jackass 3D. The focus is on neurology, or perhaps neurophilosophy, rather than literary criticism or film studies, or even Baudrillard’s cultural theory: the various cultural texts are interrogated for what their explicit and implicit neurological theories can tell us about how we “realize” (organize, make real) our selves and/in the world. Key in this process, the paper shows, are “fiction” for Powers (as it arises out of ubiquitous human “confabulation” as an attempt to impose coherence on the self and the world) and “simulacra” for Baudrillard; both become primary channels of social construction. The Capgras Delusion, which Powers places at the center of his novel, is especially useful in its tracking of the effects damage to our emotional circuits has on the creation of a sense of reality; Powers even seeks to universalize Capgras as a general human failure to accept the kinship of all living things, or what Arne Naess calls “the Self-realization of the ecological self.” This universalized deficit is close enough to Baudrillard’s (faux?-)apocalyptic conception of simulacra subsuming reality into virtuality in postmodernity to make it a useful test for Baudrillard’s jeremiads. Ultimately the paper moves in the direction of icosis as the somatic group plausibilization of normative opinion.

A brief introduction to the ancient Roman foundations of translation theory, moving from a consideration of what an ancient Greek theory of translation might have looked like, through Cicero's De oratore (55 BCE) and De optimo genera oratorum (52 BCE), Pliny the Younger and Quintilian's adaptations of Cicero, Horace's famous remarks on writing original works rather than transposing word for word like some translator in the Art of Poetry (20 BCE?), to book 9 of Aulus Gellius's Attic nights (100 CE?).