Common Knowledge

Chamberlain, L.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732638

This guest column marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. The journal in which it appears, Common Knowledge , was not especially receptive to deconstruction during Derrida's lifetime, but Lesley Chamberlain in retrospect sees reasons to reconsider his role in intellectual history now. The delicacy of Derrida's mission, she argues, has been misunderstood. He is best placed in the company not of the “deconstructionists” who thought to follow in his footsteps but, rather, in the company of the moralistic and theologically minded German philosophers and thinkers who inspired him, from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. A personal fear of being pinned down, coupled with his tragic Jewish witness to a philosophical quest for certainty gone astray, led the “Sad Rider,” one of many possible Derridas, to want to “erase” as much as he wanted to write — despite which, he was not spared being turned into an industry.

Babich, B.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732650

This essay claims that, despite the explicit opposition to Darwin in his writings, Nietzsche is regarded as a Darwinist both by the educated public and, increasingly, by Anglo analytic philosophers. In part, the problem is that, while scholars correctly observe the influence on Nietzsche's thinking of Spencer and Malthus, Roux and Haeckel — names commonly associated with Darwin — they pay no attention to the greater impact on Nietzsche's thought of Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche mounted a cogent condemnation of Darwin's views, moreover, on the empirical insight that there is more calm and abundance in the natural world than civilized humanity supposes, with its fantasies of nature red in tooth and claw. Nietzsche continues to be associated with Darwin owing to Darwin's class-based racism, but Nietzsche's argument was that slave morality inexorably works against the triumph of the master in favor of the average (rather than of the exceptional) man. This insight drives Nietzsche's view of the “last man,” or slavishly moral human being, and of what he called the Übermensch , which, it is inadequately recognized, was is a concept drawn from Lucian (second century) and used satirically to contrast Dionysian abundance with vapid social values that promote ruthless competition for supposedly limited resources.

Perl, J. M.;van der Dennen, J. M. G.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732686

In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor questions the assumptions that underwrite standard approaches in the social sciences to the issue of how non-state, tribal societies have dealt with matters of war and peace. He in particular examines and finds wanting the approach that Jared Diamond takes in The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012). Whereas Diamond's theme is that modern states can learn much about many things from traditional hunter-gatherer societies, with respect to peacemaking and peace-keeping he finds traditional societies distinctly inferior, and the arguments by which he reaches this conclusion are tautological and also beg the question. This prefatory essay explains that “Peace by Other Means” will analyze and detail non-Western and premodern European means of keeping peace that modern theorists of conflict resolution are reluctant to credit or incompetent to assess.

van der Dennen, J. M. G.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732698

This monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” reviews and assesses the state of ethnographic and political scholarship concerning how nonstate, tribal societies deal with peacemaking and peacekeeping. A central argument is that the condition among nonstate societies was and is neither one of permanent war nor one of permanent peace but one of permanent peacelessness . Nonstate societies recognize the danger of warfare and take measures to reduce its likelihood, or at least try to mitigate its destructiveness. This article treats the politics, strategies, and practices of peacemaking in tribal societies throughout the world, as well as the full spectrum of attempts at war mitigation.

Netz, R.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732760

Smith, B. H.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732820

Bellos, D.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732832

Bok, S.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732868

Hollinger, D. A.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732880

Clooney, F. X.;

2014 Common Knowledge

doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732892