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In his practice of intellectual history Ian Hunter has highlighted the productivity of a contextual approach to the institutions and discourses of philosophy, religion, law, and government. Deploying such an approach, his essay for this journal on the humanities in post-1960s Australia invites us to reconsider the terms in which the contemporary humanities have accounted for the world around us and in us. In drawing attention to some other examples of the way in which Hunter has applied this method, this paper explores the implications of a contextualisation of legal judgements that express ethical preferences which efface their historical conditioning. The paper suggests that such an approach might be productively applied in the work of understanding other kinds of legal judgements and policy settings that are commonly marked by a high degree of political agitation, such as contemporary immigration policy and border controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schelling's philosophy of art between 1801 and 1807 can be defined as metaphysics of art. The object of that metaphysics is to deploy the absolute as the being of art and of the arts. Schelling has been criticized on the basis that this metaphysics of art represses the infinite diversity of existing works of art, while overlooking concrete aesthetic experience. Based on Schelling's definition of the 'philosophical construction' of art as an inseparably speculative and historical construction, the aim of this paper is to challenge such assertions. It will show that 'historical construction' has to be understood in a twofold manner: first, as a transcendental history of the absolute's artistic individuation and second, as a cultural history of both the ancient and modern worlds of art. Working within this twofold setting the paper argues that Schelling's systematic approach, while exhibiting a unifying force, still remains open to the otherness of the real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the rise of programs in television instruction in the USA during broadcasting’s postwar expansion period. Beginning in professional schools, television training entered the university first through extension school courses, then in full degree programs. This transition to institutions of higher learning entailed key shifts in demographics, pedagogical orientation, and legitimation strategies, while embroiling television in larger struggles over the shifting boundaries of the postwar humanities. Studying the education of early television workers, I argue, raises key questions about processes of worker professionalization vital for developing research on media industries and media labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is not yet, and perhaps never could be, a clear canonical history that makes sense of Charles Sanders Peirce. In this sense, despite the best efforts of Peirce scholarship, Peirce is not 'an author'. A highly technical philosopher who worked on several fronts, he appears to espouse positions that the standard traditions of philosophical debate find difficult to hold together. Partly because of the fragmentary nature of his oeuvre, and partly because of the diversity of his interests, he is often appropriated into projects, these appropriations contributing further to the difficulty of telling a single sense-making story. In this paper, I sketch five stories: 1. Peirce as sui generis, the founder of pragmatism; 2. Peirce as not sui generis - the influences in his work and the conversations of the philosophers in which he participated; 3. Peirce as a philosopher of science, and hence, not compatible with projects in the human sciences and the humanities; 4. Peirce as he was appropriated into the human sciences and the humanities, in the form of semiology and following that, into Derrida's critique of semiology; 5. Peirce retrieved by neo-pragmatism as a weapon against 'French theory'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes a new approach to the study of Natsume Soseki's Bungakuron (Theory of literature, 1907) by examining it in the context of the formation of 'literature' in late-Meiji Japan, with a specific focus on the development of national literary history (kokubungakushi) and rhetoric (bijigaku). The dialogue between Bungakuron and the context in which Soseki published the text is particularly important because it was a time in which the institution of 'literature' was beginning to take form in Japan. My paper examines Bungakuron's contribution to the realm of 'literature' and identifies how Bungakuron functioned as a criticism of how 'literature' was being conceived in Japan. The ultimate goal of my project is thus double: situating Bungakuron within the movement of literary formation and identifying how the text becomes a theory that critiques the trend itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the philosophical significance of 'September 11' by relating it to attempts that have been made throughout the history of philosophy to read particular events as symbols of conceptual change. It draws especially on Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought and Giovanna Borradori's dialogues with Derrida and Habermas, in her Philosophy in a Time of Terror, to relate 'September 11' to Kant's versions of Progress, Providence and Cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to recent work in the study of letters and to work in the histories of geography and of science, the paper examines the role played by correspondence in the making of George Chalmers' Caledonia, a book aimed at the historical and geographical description of Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]