by Harry Redner
Section I. The origin of the natural sciences in music and painting.
Western achievements in the arts and sciences began with the Greeks. During the great age of Classical civilization, that of the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, the basis was laid for all the later achievements in the development of the arts and sciences in the West…
by Harry Redner
The history of Theorybabble is now well-known to everyone and is an often-told story that need not preoccupy us unduly. It arose in the hothouse atmosphere of the avant gardist intellectual circles of the Paris of the 1960s and 70s. But it only really flourished in the American elite universities of the 1980s and 90s. Since then, it has become much more widespread, though not in Paris itself, where it has more or less petered out.
by Harry Redner
We are now undergoing a historic transformation in the destiny of mankind that is in many ways as decisive as any of those in the historic past, perhaps as far back as the Neolithic Revolution. For the very first time in history mankind has come together in a global society that some have called a technological civilization.
This is the first part of a lecture delivered by Agnes Heller at the 2018 International Conference on Marxist Critical Theory in Eastern Europe hosted by Sichuan University and co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven. Heller discusses the life and work of her mentor and teacher György Lukács.
This special section is the result of a online workshop called ‘Living in Crisis’ hosted by the TASA Social Theory thematic group and Thesis Eleven in 2020. Attendees were invited to think about the relationship between social theory and crisis in two ways. First, how can social theory be utilised to unpack what is happening in the world today? Second, do social theorists offer legitimate ways of understanding and responding to this crisis?
Stuart Macintyre was an eminent figure within the world of Australian history scholarship for 45 years. This collection of essays and responses revisits and extends this extraordinary life of achievement and engagement. Leading scholars write here of Macintyre’s contribution to understanding radicalism and communism, postwar reconstruction, education and civics, universities, liberalism, historiography and the history wars. They also tell us about collegiality and friendship.
The essays in this thematic issue reflect on late 20th- and 21st-century figurations of ‘upheaval’ to measure the affective and emotional dimensions of some of the most complex challenges of our times. In exploring the discursive potency of the term ‘upheaval’ itself they attend collectively to an ‘optics’ of upheaval – that is, to the ways in which upheaval’s forms are rendered visible or invisible in a variety of contexts.
Contributors: Peter Baehr, Jim Berryman, Christopher Houston, Anthony Lloyd, Mark Horsley, Henry Maher, Silvia Pierosara, Alice Bloch
Reviews: Zak Kizer, Shannon Brincat, Franciszek Chwałczyk, Nico Buitendag
by Matthew Barker
Alfonso Lingis asks the reader in the opening paragraph of Bodies That Touch Us: “are the bodies we touch really the bodies described by phenomenology?” (p.159). His question probes the limits of the possibilities of description vis a vis the actual body described. To answer the question, Lingis wanders through selected phenomenological texts and writers, pulling attention to moments of significance. His approach is meditative rather than calculative (see Heidegger, 1966) and his overture to Maurice Merleau-Ponty is as noticeable as his silence on Emmanuel Levinas.
by Howard Prosser
“Carnivals in History” (1981) is the only article Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie published in Thesis Eleven. The piece’s appearance, then and now, arguably says more about the journal than it does the esteemed historian. Having him appear in its early pages was a coup for the new publication. Other big names followed. And, mercifully, some lesser ones. To include his piece in the Top 40 offers a marker of the journal’s prestige as well as the persistence of critical thought among its many pages.
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