Intellectual Friendship Research Articles

“There Is a Real Generational Problem in This Country”: Haitian Intellectual Exile and Academic Diaspora Returns

AbstractBased on a series of life‐history interviews conducted between 2013 and 2018, this article examines the generational aspects of homecomings, or how location and temporality affect intellectual return and reintegration. The article specifically explores the returns of Haitian intellectual exiles (jenerasyon 86) and the young academic diaspora (jenn doktè) at two would‐be moments of social transformation in Haiti: post‐Duvalier (after 1986) and post‐earthquake (after 2010). First, it discusses how populism and political uprooting (dechoukaj) led to the internal exile or social displacement of jenerasyon 86. Next, it examines academic diaspora returns in the era of the neoliberal university and outlines the intergenerational struggles that emerged between jenerasyon 86 and the jenn doktè. This article argues that generation as both social position and sociohistorical context created divergent experiences of placelessness for returnees and that the lack of intellectual friendship among returnees contributed to their inability to realize their aspirations of social change.

Geometrization vs. unification: the Reichenbach–Einstein quarrel about the Fernparallelismus field theory

This study reconstructs the 1928–1929 correspondence between Reichenbach and Einstein about the latter’s latest distant parallelism-unified field theory, which attracted considerable public attention at the end of the 1920s. Reichenbach, who had recently become a Professor in Berlin, had the opportunity to discuss the theory with Einstein and therefore sent him a manuscript with some comments for feedback. The document has been preserved among Einstein’s papers. However, the subsequent correspondence took an unpleasant turn after Reichenbach published a popular article on distant parallelism in a newspaper. Einstein directly wrote to the Editorial Board complaining about Reichenbach’s unfair use of off-the-record information. While Reichenbach’s reply demonstrates a sense of personal betrayal at Einstein’s behavior, his published writings of that period point to a sense of intellectual betrayal of their shared philosophical ideals. In his attempts to unify both electricity and gravitation, Einstein had abandoned the physical heuristic that guided him to the relativity theory, to embrace a more speculative, mathematical heuristic that he and Reichenbach had both previously condemned. A decade-long personal and intellectual friendship grew fainter and then never recovered. This study, relying on archival material, aims to revisit the Reichenbach–Einstein relationship in the late 1920s in light of Reichenbach’s neglected contributions to the epistemology of the unified field theory program. Thereby, it hopes to provide a richer account of Reichenbach’s philosophy of space and time.

Thomas More: First and Best Apologist for Erasmus

Contrary to the legend that evolved in late sixteenth century Recusant More hagiography, of a distancing or even a breach in the spiritual and intellectual friendship between Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the primary texts point to the persistence of an intimate bond between them. Even More's late letter to Erasmus informing him of his resignation addresses the matter of Erasmus's churchmanship and doctrinal reliability. Here we find More defending and praising the writings of Erasmus, and not merely against the rabid and ill-willed scholastic ignoramuses who had attacked his New Testament translation, but even against morally upright and well-meaning ecclesiastical scholars, who had failed to remove the beam from their own eyes before hypocritically endeavoring to pluck the speck out of Erasmus's. Thomas More adhered to the commendation of Erasmus published by Pope Leo X, and whether More's modern admirers like it or not, Thomas More remained for two decades Erasmus's first and best apologist.

Editors’ Letter

Editors’ Letter

Wittgenstein and Piccoli

AbstractIn 1929 Ludwig Wittgenstein met Raffaello Piccoli, the Serena Professor of Italian, with whom he arranged several meetings in the following terms. For a long time their intellectual friendship was suggested only by the occurrences of Piccoli’s name in Wittgenstein’s Cambridge Pocket Diaries, then a paper about Piccoli including hypothesis on his meetings with Wittgenstein was published (Marjanović 2005), and more recently, the diaries of a student of both Piccoli and Wittgenstein in 1929 – 1930 were discovered. The new material, on the background of data now available about Piccoli’s life and works, throws new light onto his relationship with Wittgenstein, and hypothesis on the topics of their conversations are also advanced. Piccoli’s perspective on the difference between ethics, religion and philosophy on the one hand and science on the other was in tune with Wittgenstein’s view and similar was also their aversion towards scientism; furthermore, Piccoli had read many of the authors for which Wittgenstein showed an interest in 1930 – 1931 – Freud, Spengler, Frazer, Augustine, and also James.

Gustav Landauer und Constantin Brunner. Umrisse einer Begegnung

Abstract In 1904, Constantin Brunner called Gustav Landauer the »most important exponent of anarchism in Germany«. In 1911, Landauer admired Brunner as »one of the most powerful thinkers« he knew. From 1903 until 1911 the two of them developed an intense intellectual friendship, sharing an interest in epistemology, mysticism and the philosophy of Spinoza. Their practical philosophies diverged quite substantially however. While Brunner believed in an anthropological divide within humankind, Landauer strove to integrate humankind on the basis of a spiritual renewal. The article attempts to outline their relationship and provide some clues as to what was at stake in the conflict that ended it.

Adolescents' Agentic Work on Developing Personal Pedagogies on Social Media

AbstractWhile current research points out that young people are developing emerging culture of learning in informal spaces, less is known about such digital literacy practices in the Asian contexts where the notion of literacy tends to refer to school literacy. Research on young people's online participatory culture continues to suggest that social media offer affinity spaces where extensive knowledge is acquired, constructed and produced outside of schools. In this paper, we use two case studies on social media as illustrative examples to understand how adolescents shape their learning online. We aim to contribute to the ongoing dialectics on social media and learning by examining how adolescents exhibit agency online. We argue that social media such as Facebook offer high learner agency environments for adolescents to participate in self‐initiated enterprise and allow them to develop personal trajectories for learning. The case studies presented in this paper suggested that the adolescents' pursuit of their passions on online affinity spaces gave rise to intellectual friendships and the development of personal pedagogies.

The other “Sch,” or When Damisch Met Schapiro

French art-historian/philosopher Hubert Damisch and American art-historian Meyer Schapiro maintained an intellectual friendship of rare intensity for nearly forty years. Their many letters bear witness to this: From art history to psychoanalysis, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and literature, they exchanged ideas in almost every field of the humanities and social sciences. The special issue which this text introduces focuses on the years 1972 and 1973, a period during which Damisch spent much time in the United States and met, in addition to Schapiro, Michel Foucault, Max Black, M. H. Abrams, and Norman Malcolm. “The Other ‘sch,’ or When Damisch Met Schapiro” seeks to put into perspective the forty-four letters gathered here as well as the several essays devoted to the Freud-Signorelli case.

The Early Developments of Black Women’s Studies in the Lives of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde

This article explores the pedagogical foundations of three U.S. Black women writers—Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde—widely recognized as among the most influential and prolific writers of 20th century cultures of emancipation. Their distinct yet entwined legacies—as socialist feminists, people’s poets and novelists, community organizers, and innovative educators—altered the landscapes of multiple liberation movements from the late 1960s to the present, and offer a striking example of the possibilities of radical women’s intellectual friendships. The internationalist reverberations of Bambara, Jordan, and Lorde are alive and ubiquitous, even if to some readers today in the Caribbean and Latin America, their names may be unfamiliar.[Bambara’s fiction centered Black and Third World women and children absorbing vibrant life lessons within societies structured to harm them. Her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, posed the question - “are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” -to conjoin healing and resistance for a new embattled generation under President Reagan’s neoliberal shock doctrines that were felt worldwide. June Jordan’s salvos of essays, fiction, and poetry -including Things That I Do in the Dark, On Call, and Affirmative Acts - intervened in struggles around Black English, community control, police violence, sexual assault, and youth empowerment. Audre Lorde’s words are suffused across U.S. movements (and, increasingly, in the Caribbean and Latin America)- on signs, shirts, and memes, at #BlackLivesMatter and International Women’s Strike marches. Your silence will not protect you. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Revolution is not a one-time event. However, her voluminous legacy may risk becoming a series of slogans, “the Audre Lorde that reads like a bumper sticker.”

The Mower, The Sower, and The Mayor: Thomas Hardy and Hamo Thornycroft, encounters and affinities

This article explores the intellectual and creative friendship between Thomas Hardy and Hamo Thornycroft, who met in 1883 when they were engaged upon works that were to define their respective careers. Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Thornycroft’s The Mower (1884) testify to the concern of both artists to dignify with the permanence of art fleeting moments of collision between the old world and the new, whilst striving to balance the desire to idealize with the imperatives of the real.

David Maria Turoldo. La vita, la testimonianza (1916-1992) by Mariangela Maraviglia

David Maria Turoldo. La vita, la testimonianza (1916-1992). By Mariangela Maraviglia. [Storia, vol. 74.] (Brescia: Morcelliana. 2016. Pp. 464. €30,00 paperback. ISBN 978-88-372-2956-6.)David Maria Turoldo was one of the most influential Italian Catholics of the twentieth century, and Mariangela Maraviglia has written an incredibly detailed and complete biography that covers his whole life. A priest of the Order of Friar Servants of Mary (Servites), Turoldo lived the most important moments of Italian church history, in the most important places in Italy. He is a key figure for those who try to understand the complex relations between religion, culture, and politics in the last century in Italy.The first chapter discusses the origins of Giuseppe (David Maria was his monastic name), born into a poor family of sharecroppers in northeastern Italy during World War I, not far from the frontline with Austria. His first experiences of clerical formation (beginning in 1929-30) in the institute of the Servite order were shaped by the legacy of the anti-Modernist purge of 1907 and an environment suspicious of intellectualism that Turoldo would have to deal with his whole life. Maraviglia delves also into Turoldo's early fascination, that he shared with many Italian catholics, with the Fascist regime. The second chapter sees Turoldo as one of the members of the catholic resistance against Fascism during World War II, after his arrival at the convent of San Carlo in Milan in 1941, disabused of the illusion of a restoration of catholicism thanks to Fascism. In Milan Turoldo got in touch with important figures of Italian Catholicism, thanks to his enrollment at the Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (1942), which began to work as the cradle of the post-World War II Italian Catholic political leaders: there he read French nouvelle theologie, but also Jacques Maritain, Romano Guardini, Gilbert K. Chesterton, and, in 1946, the pastoral letter of Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard of Paris, deciding afterward to publish an Italian translation (chapter three).Chapter four follows Turoldo in the effervescent postwar Italian Catholicism: Turoldo moved from Milan to the small college town of urbino to teach philosophy (1947), and wrote for the journal Cronache Sociali edited by Giuseppe Dossetti. In this period, Turoldo began to publish poetry, an activity that was to make him known to a large audience in Italy. His relations with the leadership of the Servite order continued to be complicated, if not difficult, because of his intellectual and political contacts (Christian-Democrats but also Communists) and friendships (for example, Father Primo Mazzolari), contacts considered unorthodox and lacking prudence. Between 1949 and 1951 (chapter five) Turoldo was at the community of Nomadelfia, one of the most famous experiments of Christian community in Italian modern Catholicism, but also an occasion of divisions between the Servites and their superiors: Turoldo was forced to leave the community, in a decade when the pontificate of Pius XII intervened to suppress many different kinds of pastoral experiments, not only in Italy. …

The Missionary and the Anthropologist: The Intellectual Friendship and Scientific Collaboration of the Reverend John Roscoe (CMS) and James G. Frazer, 1896–1932

A rapidly expanding field, the study of the interactions between missions and sciences, and most notably missions and anthropology, has opened up new ways of examining the scholarly work of missionaries and their extra-apostolic activities. Historians of missions are drawn to archival materials that had been previously overlooked, such as the contributions of missionaries to scientific journals, or their correspondence with figures that worked outside of missionary circles. This article focuses on one such correspondence between the social anthropologist James George Frazer and the Revd John Roscoe, who worked for the Church Missionary Society in Uganda between 1889 and 1911. Not only was Roscoe a mine of information on Central African tribes for Frazer, he was also, after he retired from the CMS, a keen student of anthropology who devoted the second part of his life to anthropological ventures: he wrote the first ethnological account on the Baganda, contributed to enriching the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's collections of Central African relics and artefacts, helped set up training courses in anthropology for prospective missionaries and led an anthropological expedition. His work, and his long correspondence with Frazer, bears the mark of the renowned anthropologist's theories on totemism, a notion that was at the core of the international anthropological scene in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period.

Hao Wang’s Logical Journey

Hao Wang, a prolific philosopher and researcher, was known for his close intellectual friendship with Kurt Gödel, his advocacy for the study of logic at Oxford, and for his path-breaking contributions to logic and automated theorem proving. Yet in a memorial volume published sixteen years after Wang’s passing, the editors Charles Parsons and Montgomery Link noted “rather little has been published on Wang’s considerable body of work or on the man’s personality and unusual personal history.” The goal of this article is to see what light Wang’s logical journey in life sheds on Chinese philosophy and the Western analytic tradition.

Scripting History: The Genre of Desegregation Stories

This article argues that desegregation stories form a subset of the school story genre. In drawing upon school story traditions, desegregation stories offer some unexpected and politically contentious solutions to the problems of segregated schooling, including queer friendships and critiques of classroom pedagogy. Nevertheless, the resolution of the school story requires that the protagonist be absorbed into an authorized institution and thus that she must relinquish some of the unconventional intellectual pursuits and friendships she has been pursuing. Thus, the desegregation story first opens up a variety of possibilities for critiquing the supposedly “superior” white-dominated school, and then often tames these possibilities through its generic format. The article draws upon three girls’ desegregation stories as exemplars of how this sub-genre comments upon the traditions of the school story novel.

Full circle: the Manning–Gladstone correspondence

In his famous portrayal of the eminent Victorian Henry Manning, Lytton Strachey commented thus: ‘It was as if the Fates had laid a wager that they would daunt him; and in the end they lost their bet.’ As one of the high-profile British converts to Roman Catholicism (1851), archbishop of Westminster (1865), cardinal (1875) and candidate for the papacy (1878), Manning was one of the most formidable and influential churchmen of his day. Throughout his adult life, he shared an intellectual, respectful and fractious friendship with William Gladstone who, as Liberal party leader and four-time British prime minister (1868–74, 1880–5, 1886, 1892–4), was the most successful and prolific politician of his generation. The relationship between Manning and Gladstone is significant because in his political career the latter paid great attention to the former. Throughout, Gladstone was fascinated by religious polemics, while his views on constitutional government were shaped very much by his own religious convictions.

Socialism, Antifascism and Anti-Totalitarianism: The Intellectual Dialogue (and Discord) between Andrea Caffi and Nicola Chiaromonte (1932–1955)

SummaryThis article reconstructs the personal and intellectual friendship between two cosmopolitan intellectuals: Andrea Caffi (1887–1955) and Nicola Chiaromonte (1905–1972), who met while in exile in Paris in 1932. After a brief recapitulation of their previous biographies, and an overall presentation of their participation in the revolutionary antifascist group ‘Giustizia e Libertà’ (GL) in the thirties, this article provides a detailed analysis of their dialogues and disagreements in the forties and fifties on the topics of socialism and revolution, antifascism and anti-totalitarianism, utopia and history. Particular attention is devoted to their contribution to the debates in the antifascist journal of GL (published in Paris, 1932–1935) and in the radical journal of Politics (published in New York, 1944–1950). Examined closely, the friendship between Caffi and Chiaromonte appears as a sequence of convergences and divergences, understandings and ruptures, which reflect the tensions and lacerations of the European civil war and its post-war legacy (intertwined with and overlapping the cultural Cold War). Looked at again from a distance, however, it reveals a fundamental intellectual unity—a profound apolitical affinity in a century of radical politics which had fed wars, revolutions and totalitarian regimes.

The Company They Keep

The Company They Keep Paul Sheehan (bio) Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011. Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee, eds. Viking. http://www.us.penguingroup.com. 256pages; cloth, $27.95, paper, $16.00, eBook, $11.99. “Friendship,” declared Maurice Blanchot, is “this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters.” Written to commemorate his 22-year personal and philosophical comradeship with Georges Bataille—an alliance based more on letters than on physical contact—Blanchot’s essay pays tribute to an intellectual friendship made possible through the intercession of the word. It also provides a model of sorts for the project that J.M. Coetzee initiated in 2008. After meeting Paul Auster at a literary festival in Adelaide, Coetzee’s adoptive hometown, he sensed that there was more between them than just a shared love for the writings of Beckett and Kafka. He saw Auster as a potential collaborator, and so suggested to him a two-year experiment: an exchange of letters that could function as a kind of workshop for ideas, observations, and reflections. The two years became three, and the fruits of that suggestion are now available for all to see in Here and Now: Letters 2008–2011 (2013). But if the Blanchot-Bataille precedent stops there—when death approached, in 1962, Bataille made a pact with his friend to destroy the bulk of their correspondence—the Auster-Coetzee “experiment” gets underway with not dissimilar thoughts about the nature of friendship. “[U]nlike love or politics, which are never what they seem to be,” writes Coetzee, “friendship is what it seems to be. Friendship is transparent.” Auster’s reply sets the tone for the rest of the book. He does not think that friendship is transparent (or only on rare occasions), but is rather a matter of “good manners, kindness, steadiness of affect.” Where Coetzee is philosophical, speculative, and often more than a little abstract, Auster invariably comes up with a down-to-earth, observational response. He also cites examples from his own published work, something that Coetzee almost never does. Part of the fascination of Here and Now, then, is this interaction (“clash” is too strong a word) of temperaments, which tends to redeem even the less-interesting colloquies. One topic of discussion begets the next and so, after a detour through the recent financial crisis, friendship leads to sport, one of the book’s cardinal topics. Both men avidly watch sporting broadcasts (cricket, tennis, and rugby, in Coetzee’s case, baseball and American football in Auster’s); and both lament the countless hours it has taken, and continues to take, from their lives. But if spectatorship is, as Auster puts it, “a useless activity, an utter waste a time,” sport itself possesses for both an unassailable cultural significance. Pinpointing the reasons for that significance occasions one of the liveliest exchanges of opinion. Is it because of the undeniable aesthetic pleasures that sport inculcates? Or is it the ethical demands that it makes of its participants, in the guise of grace, conscience, and heroism? Is a sporting competition a kind of disguised warfare, or an arena for unbridled play? There are more than a few moments when the two writers seem to be engaged in an uncanny dialogue with Steven Connor’s A Philosophy of Sport (2011), which eerily anticipates (or echoes) many of the historical and theoretical questions raised in these letters. Other works “haunt” Here and Now. The most visible of these is the first volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters, which Coetzee has been invited to review. A request for information about Wilfred Bion, Beckett’s analyst in the 1930s, leads to an intriguing exchange about (in Auster’s words) the “somewhat crotchety behavior” of Edward Beckett, Samuel’s nephew and executor of his estate, and what his possible motives might be. A more implicit intertextual haunting is Coetzee’s 2007 “novel,” Diary of a Bad Year. At least fifty percent of this work is devoted to protagonist J.C.’s “Strong Opinions” and “Second Diary.” There are passages from Coetzee in Here and Now that seem to have escaped from Diary and found a new home. A...

Response to Pavel Zgaga’s Review of Being a University

It is difficult to respond to such a generous review of one’s work as Pavel Zgaga has given to my book, Being a University. And for two reasons. Such a review should just be accorded its own space. It is, after all, in its subtlety, a work in its own right; and deserves to be afforded a clear sighting, and not occluded by an accompanying text. Secondly, the actual text that Zgaga offers us works at different levels, at once a commentary (on Being a University) and gently opening up vistas and considerations. It calls for attention being paid to it. The careful and nuanced exegisis of Being a University that it offers holds sophistications within sophistications. As such, it barely ever resorts to an explicit critique of Being a University. It holds itself within itself. There are few points, accordingly, where a response (to Zgaga’s offering) can itself grip. And yet the Editor has opened this space to me; and—if I may say so—Zgaga has himself also opened this space to me, in our own intellectual friendship and in sharing his thoughts with me directly. And so one feels a double obligation to respond; to feel one’s way into this space for responding; and to find a way of doing some justice to this double invitation. Perhaps, therefore, I can find a way of responding to Zgaga’s review somewhat obliquely, which at the same time does some justice to his carefulness. There is here an invitation to open again the covers of a manuscript that one had left behind, for one is always onto the next book (or two or three). Currently, I am completing a new book on ‘Imagining the University’. This book takes up ‘a line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2007) prompted by Being a University. In Being a University, I tried to show that there were possibilities in front of the university; that, as Heidegger put it, true being is always ‘being-possible’. I was particularly concerned to show that the idea of the entrepreneurial university—which currently dominates policy framing in the field—need not be the end-game. It need not be the end-point of the history of the university. On the contrary, the university has undergone several phases of significant change—both as idea and as institution—and it is important, therefore, to gain a sense that there are possibilities ahead of the university; and that any sense that the idea of the entrepreneurial university is a final

Ferdinand Tönnies and Friedrich Paulsen: Conciliatory Iconoclasts

Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work of global import and condensate of the history of ideas, was much influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Paulsen. The study of their friendship shows how these intellectuals chose to adopt and adapt paradigms of the European legacy—rationalism and empiricism on the one hand, rationalism and romantic historicism on the other—in achieving creative idiosyncratic syntheses of idealistic monism. Beyond the shared scientific agenda of monism, they were convinced of the vocation of intellectuals in social legislation, which Paulsen pursued through pedagogy, while Tönnies became a social activist. Their interest in forms of socialism, romanticism and pessimism had varying consequences due to the differences in temperament between the political realist Paulsen, whose choices were more expedient for career advancement, and the political idealist Tönnies. Their relationship is an instance of the specific rapport that Tönnies characterises as intellectual friendship.

IMAGES MUST TRAVEL FURTHER: Bataille and Blanchot Read Beckett

Perhaps the most prescient of Beckett's early critics were the French writers Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot in their analyses of (respectively) and . In this paper I argue that the essence of the intellectual friendship that the two critics shared – one of the great tacit 'partnerships' of the last century, which has yet to be fully unravelled – can be discerned through their writings on Beckett. His novels are thus treated as a kind of 'border' across which their own ideas continue to emerge and evolve, which in turn has implications for the development of French theory.