I FIRST ENCOUNTERED what literary critics call “literary theory,” “critical theory,” or just plain “theory” in a class titled “Contemporary Literary Theory” taught by what must have been the world’s most patient professor. Each week we studied a different approach to reading, moving from formalism t...

The solution lies, it seems to me, in this promising word gathering that Heidegger had introduced to account for the “thingness of the thing.” Now, I know very well that Heidegger and Whitehead would have nothing to say to one another, and, yet, the word the latter used in Process and Reality to des...

Is it not time for some progress? To the fact position, to the fairy position, why not add a third position, a fair position? Is it really asking too much from our collective intellectual life to devise, at least once a century, some new critical tools? Should we not be thoroughly humiliated to see ...

Is it so surprising, after all, that with such positions given to the object, the humanities have lost the hearts of their fellow citizens, that they had to retreat year after year, entrenching themselves always further in the narrow barracks left to them by more and more stingy deans? The Zeus of C...

Several years ago another philosopher, much closer to the history of science, namely Michel Serres, also French, but this time as foreign to critique as one can get, meditated on what it would mean to take objects of science in a serious anthropological and ontological fashion. It is interesting to ...