Showing papers in "Critical Inquiry in 2019"

The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies

Abstract: 1 This essay works at the empirical level to isolate a series of technical problems, logical fallacies, and conceptual flaws in an increasingly popular subfield in literary studies variously known as cultural analytics, literary data mining, quantitative formalism, literary text mining, computational textual analysis, computational criticism, algorithmic literary studies, social computing for literary studies, and computational literary studies (the phrase I use here). In a nutshell the problem with computational literary analysis as it stands is that what is robust is obvious (in the empirical sense) and what is not obvious is not robust, a situation not easily overcome given the nature of literary data and the nature of statistical inquiry. There is a fundamental mismatch between the statistical tools that are used and the objects to which they are applied. Digital humanities (DH), a field of study which can encompass subjects as diverse as histories of media and early computational practices, the digitization of texts for open access, digital inscription and mediation, and computational linguistics and lexicology, and technical papers on data mining, is not the object of my critique. Rather, I am addressing specifically the project of running computer programs on large (or usually not so large) corpora of literary texts to yield quantitative results which are then mapped, graphed, and tested for statistical significance and used

The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category

Abstract: Earth System Science (ESS), the science that among other things explains planetary warming and cooling, gives humans a very long, multilayered, and heterotemporal past by placing them at the conjuncture of three (and now variously interdependent) histories whose events are defined by very different timescales: the history of the planet, the history of life on the planet, and the history of the globe made by the logics of empires, capital, and technology. One can therefore read Earth system scientists as historians writing within an emergent regime of historicity. We could call it the planetary or Anthropocenic regime of historicity to distinguish it from the global regime of historicity that has enabled many humanist and socialscience historians to deal with the theme of climate change and the idea of the Anthropocene. In the latter regime, however, historians try to relate the Anthropocene to histories of modern empires and colonies, the expansion of Europe and the development of navigation and other communication

Extending the domain of freedom, or why gaia is so hard to understand

Abstract: Ever since Dipesh Chakrabarty opened a Pandora’s box on the definition of humanity during the Anthropocene, the question of establishing a new continuity between the domain of necessity (nature) and the domain of freedom (society) has been raised. In this paper we claim that freedom, understood as the capacity to obey one’s own laws—that is, autonomy—could offer a common ground for ecological politics, on the condition of revising some of the commonly held views of what the concept of Gaia consists of. To do so, we wish to look in a new way at Gaia as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have proposed it, thanks to research done in natural and social science since the inception of this concept.

On the Political Ontology of the Dispositif

Abstract: At an otherwise unnoteworthy moment during his 18 January 1978 lecture at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault stumbles just when he is about to resume his discussion of the “apparatuses of security” (dispositifs de sécurité). In both the English and French edition of the lecture, the interruption is footnoted in the text. Apparently, Foucault had bumped into the microphone of the device recording his lecture. As he recovers and before resuming his discussion he says this: “I am not against any apparatuses [les appareils], but I don’t know—forgive me for saying so—I’m just a bit allergic.” The English doesn’t render what’s notable in the comment because English is unable to mark the lexical shift, given that the

Can Computers Create Meanings? A Cyber/Bio/Semiotic Perspective

Abstract: Biological evolution, having proceeded for a few million years and produced humans, has now entered a new stage. I adapt a useful phrase from Terrence Deacon, “complexity catastrophe,” to denote the limits of human biological cognition in which further increases in capacity are constrained by the neuronal system’s processing speed and memory storage. The solution has been to invent computational media to extend and amplify human abilities. The result is biotechnoevolution, a hybrid process in which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate through flexible interactive human-computational collectivities or, in my terminology, cognitive assemblages. Our understanding of how cognitive assemblages work has been impeded by views of computational media that position them as mere calculators without the ability to create, disseminate, or participate inmeaning-making activities. This view, widely shared among philosophers and even some computer scientists, is undergirded by questionable assumptions that make humans the sole possessors of agency, value, and cognition. In addition to reinforcing a worldview in which humans have sole dominion over the earth, this perspective badly distorts the actual effects of cognitive assemblages in developed societies and obscures the ways in which biotechnoevolution presents us with urgent issues about our collective futures, human and nonhuman. Articulating a better framework through which to understand cognitive assemblages is this essay’s work.

The Emergence of Desire: Notes Toward a Political History of the Will

Abstract: Versions of this essay were given as talks at the International Conference “Foucault and Religion” at the University of Chicago (10–11 March 2017), the International Conference “Religion(s) et Politique(s)” at the Royal Academy of Science, Letters, and Fine Arts of Belgium (14–16 September 2017), and the Research Seminar in Post-Kantian European Philosophy at the University of Warwick (6 February 2018). I am indebted to Miguel de Beistegui, Steven Collins, David Halperin, Dawn Herrera Helphand, Stephen Houlgate, Jean Leclercq, and Sabina Vaccarino Bremner for their generous and helpful comments. This essay is dedicated to Arnold Davidson, without whom the scholar and person that I am today would have never existed. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Arnold I. Davidson, L’émergence de la sexualité: Épistémologie historique et formation des concepts, trans. Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat (Paris, 2005), p. 9. 2. See Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978). 3. Foucault, “Introduction,” in Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memories of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (1980; New York, 2010), p. ix.

Judgment and Equality

Abstract: The restoration of the aesthetic to a central position in the study of the arts has been among the most exciting critical developments of recent years. Critics have made diverse claims on behalf of aesthetics, among which we might discern two widely shared themes. First, aesthetic education constitutes not a retreat from politics but a means of contesting the neoliberal hegemony of the market. Second, critics’ emphasis on aesthetics’ political potential is matched by an unprecedented refusal of aesthetic judgment. On the surface these two tendencies appear complementary: the internal refusal of a hierarchy of aesthetic valuematches the external refusal ofmarket value. And it is true that for our political imagination, animated by themaster value of equality, aesthetic hierarchy has become indefensible. I will argue, however, that the elision of judgment—which I understand minimally as the claim that a given work has aesthetic value not just for me but for everyone—disables aesthetic education’s political potential.

The Coup d’Oeil: On a Mode of Understanding

Abstract: In the study of reliable processes for arriving at belief, philosophers will become technologically obsolescent. They will be replaced by cognitive and computer scientists, workers in artificial intelligence, and others. Our understanding thereby will progress, but the nature of this understanding will change: computer simulations will replace (a theory presenting) structurally revealing rules with a face validity that people can appreciate and apply. This will be useful to us—machines will be produced to do intricate tasks—but it will not be what philosophers earlier had hoped for: rules and procedures that we ourselves could apply to better our own beliefs, surveyable rules and procedures—I take the term from Ludwig Wittgenstein—that we can take in and understand as a whole and that give us a structurally revealing description of the nature of rationality.

Ebola, the Spanish Flu, and the Memory of Disease

Abstract: The recent epidemics of Ebola triggered epidemics of therapeutic nihilism. These latter outbreaks are recognized when health authorities and pundits proclaim that the primary task is to contain the spread of disease, rather than care for the stricken, because there’s not much to be done for them—the disease held to be “untreatable” in Africa. And an additional dose of nihilism has been administered by the US administration’s decision to rescind funding designed to prepare for future outbreaks. Such nihilism is nothing new in the former colonies where Ebola strikes. Coming, as well, a few years short of the hundredth anniversary of the socalled Spanish flu, a pandemic that killed more humans than the “war to end all wars” that fueled its spread, the 2014–16 Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—and the current one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—replayed a drama of ineffective but strong-armed containment measures inflicted on unwilling populations. Interlocking biological, technological, social, and political factors underpin every occurrence of epidemic disease. War, hunger, the extractive trades, and unequal sharing of the benefits of modern medicine enabled the disastrous spread of Spanish flu through Africa and are doing the same for Ebola today.

Not Kant, but Bentham: On Taste

Abstract: 1. Kant avec Bentham The history of modern aesthetic thought is usually traced to Immanuel Kant and his Critique of the Power of Judgment, with an obligatory nod to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who had first used the term “aesthetics” in 1735 to identify judgments of taste. Kant’s place in modern aesthetic thought is so secure that it commands acknowledgment: even writers who oppose it root and branch feel the need to frame their work as a response to it. Jeremy Bentham, by contrast, has scarcely figured in discussions of aesthetics, in spite of his avowed interest in measuring actions and objects by their ability to generate pleasure and losses to it. Kant’s account of aesthetics revolved around individual autonomy, and he treated aesthetic judgment as an emblem of the freedom of individuals, their ability to form judgments even when others did not share them. Bentham’s first-personal stance, by contrast, was seen to be mired, on one hand, in sensory experience that could not move past its commitment to number one and, on the other, to strategic thinking that was all too oriented to outcomes. Kantian aesthetics aimed to achieve a first-personal experience that was at the same time disinterested—that is, unconcerned with the actual existence of the aesthetic object and detached from immediate

Bitcoin: A Reader’s Guide (The Beauty of the Very Idea)

Abstract: There are many accounts of the history of Bitcoin and many predictions of its future. Some commentators report its imminent demise—others point to its latest uptick in price. The writing I read on Bitcoin, excellent though much of it is, increased my desire to understand it. This essay is a report on my effort to puzzle out this financial innovation, the extent to which it is an innovation, and the extent to which it has political implications. Most accounts of money talk about it as a byproduct of social interactions that have become highly elaborated over time, elaborated enough formoney to be so efficient as a token of trust that we accept paper currency from strangers and temporarily hand over credit cards to other strangers without interrogating them or being interrogated. The blockchain-Bitcoin combination, by contrast, is an attempt to launch a monetary system that sees itself as replacing older mechanisms for storing societal trust. It aims to build a language from the ground up. For that reason Bitcoin can seem too large a project to comprehend. It can be a surrogate for a committed embrace of an increasingly technologized future. It can look, as it does to Paul Krugman and Nuriel Roubini, like smoke and mirrors.

I. A. Richards and Raymond Williams: Reading Poetry, Reading Society

Abstract: If I begin by saying that this is an essay about Raymond Williams’s relation to the institution of Cambridge English, I risk losing two groups of readers I wish to reach. One group, the insiders, may think that the story has all been told before.Williams—author of a dozen and a half wide-ranging books in literary, cultural, and media studies over a thirty-five-year period—is a major figure in late twentieth-century criticism. Much commentary on Williams since well before his death in 1988 has situated his work in relation to the powerful formation of literary studies at the university he attended before and after his military service in World War II. Surely, some will say, all that can be said on this topic has already been said. The other group, the outsiders, simply may not care. Even if they know and admire Williams, even if they grant the continued relevance of his most important books in contemporary criticism, they may not have much interest in Cambridge English. I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, the two leading figures in shaping it, are not the household names they once were when, between them, they set the terms for Anglophone criticism in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Yet interest in Richards has revived in recent years, and Leavis’s students, or his students’ students, have until recently held important academic positions throughout the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The effects of programmatic Leavisism—an ambitious academic initiative that grounded its resistance to modern commercialism both in close attention to literature and in strongly held judgments about such questions as “the great tradition” in the English novel—can still be

Disciplines of Attention in a Secular Age

Abstract: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things,”Henry David Thoreau writes inWalden (1854). In the century and a half since Thoreau withdrew to the Massachusetts woods, his thinking about modernity and mental life has become our common sense. Newmachines of work and play, so the story goes, are destroying our capacity to pay attention.We are always in touch but never really intimate, always moving but never in a natural rhythm. “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” (W, p. 90). In his makeshift hermitage, Thoreau devised a therapy for himself, a secular asceticism to cultivate a higher wakefulness. When he walked in the countryside, he practiced what he called “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” (W, p. 108). When he read the classics, he devoted himself to “a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object” (W, p. 99). Like him, the distracted today turn to disciplines of attention, adapting the religious practices of older or distant societies to new situations that seem to have little to do with ritual or faith. Mindfulness training, transcendental meditation, regimens to sharpen our focus and extend our concentration—these are the spiritual exercises of our secular age. In the far-reaching program for the diagnosis and treatment of distraction, the critical humanities play their special part. After the triumphof newer media, under the empire of spectacle, the mode of attention associated with the study of paintings and books is said to enter a crisis. “This destruction of attention is disindividuation,” Bernard Stiegler writes, thinking of the

Listening for Freedom with Arnold Davidson

Abstract: I met Arnold I. Davidson in July 2007 at the conference “Ruptures: Music, Philosophy, Science, and Modernity,” co-organized by Davidson and the composer Martin Brody and held at the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Davidson’s lecture, “Exemplarity and the Aesthetics of Difference: From Michel Foucault to Cecil Taylor,” particularly the sections on my former mentors Muhal Richard Abrams and Steve Lacy, exercised a strong, even emotional impact on me.

Re-Assemblage (Theory, Practice, Mode)

Abstract: So, having written a lot of stuff about things, I was pretty much bent on leaving things behind. I started picking them back up again, though. Not one by one, but in curious clusters . . . batches and bundles, aggregations and agglomerations, compilations and constellations. You get the point. Still, insofar as famous philosophers and anthropologists are wont to remind us that the etymology of thing (þing, ting, Ding, chose) discloses the gathering—an assembly—you might say that I’m finally picking up the thing—in its thingness—for the first time—in the mode of assemblage. Gathering things up in an assemblage mode—it’s part of an experiment that began with the urge to figure out how the material object world, more specifically the world of human artefacts, might contribute to what gets called, these days, “assemblage theory”—a theory most often derived from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux (1980). It thus depends for its coinage on the translation of their French agencement as assemblage (rather than, say, layout or arrangement or configuration, as in un agencement de meubles, a pleasant arrangement of furniture). Quite reasonably, then, the theory has paid no mind to physical assemblages within, say, the fields of geology or archaeology or art history: this isn’t a translation of assemblage (assembla[h]ge), which enters the French art idiom most forcefully via Jean Dubuffet’s Assemblages d’empreintes (1956), the exhibition and catalogue of twenty-six butterfly collages (“impressions”)

“Better to Die by Them than for Them”: Carl Schmitt Reads “Benito Cereno”

Abstract: The legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt is now probably best known for such aphorisms as the one he placed at the opening of Political Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides about the state of exception.” After Schmitt joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, he contributed quite actively to the radicalization of Nazi positions: in “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (The Führer Protects the Law), he justified the Adolf Hitler-orderedmurder of SA members in the so-called Röhm-Putsch; in “Die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jüdischen Geist,” he advocated excluding Jews from scholarly citations; and in “Die Verfassung der Freiheit,” he praised the legal ban on interracial (“Aryan”-Jewish) marriages enacted by the Nuremberg Laws. But in 1936, he found himself attacked in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps. He was then put under surveillance of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence agency of the SS) and was forced

Structuralism and literary analysis

Abstract: Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe we’re here mainly to have a discussion, which means that I shouldn’t be talking at all; but, after all, I suppose that in order for you to be able to exercise your right to pose questions, which will be a right to examine and a right to critique, it’s necessary that I expose myself to your blows. So I’m going to present some slightly untidy remarks, on the basis of which I hope you yourselves will have an occasion to express your opinions. I’ve chosen my subject basically without knowing beforehand to whom I’d be speaking—luckily, as it happens, because if I had known, I think I’d have given up speaking altogether! On the one hand, the audience is comprised of extremely intimidating people who are my colleagues and who, consequently, knowmore than I do. On the other, there are many students who knowme already and who have already seenme go throughmy paces. So all this is a little intimidating and embarrassing forme. Anyway, without knowing too much about my audience, I thought that I could speak about the problem of the relations between structuralism and literary analysis.

Communicationism: Cold war humanism

Abstract: It is said that the dialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. . . . To approach, in this way, “what has been” means to treat it not historiographically, as heretofore, but politically, in political categories. —Walter Benjamin

Reasoning with the exclusionary Other: classical scenes for a postradical horizon

Abstract: Thanks to Michel Foucault, one might say it has become possible to conceive that the political relevance of humanity in modern thought does not have to do with its “philosophical essence” but rather with its “nonessence.” Yet this very idea surfaced earlier in Western thought, at the time of the revolutionary turn towards a politicized humanitarianism, and helped to shape some crucial political strategies making up modern liberal democracy. Its potential eluded even Foucault. I contend that tracing the contours of this classical, if long unthinkable idea, can inform our response to the other of social critique. Against the grain of Enlightenment historiography, my suggestion will be that it was not Jean-Jacques Rousseau but Denis Diderot who managed to convey the self-evidence of humanity as a political question for the first time and in a way that was far from inconsequential. From his authoritative editorial position, Diderot helped to make the European sense of humanity into an actual reform movement rather than just a moral value, symbol of civility, religious quality, or philosophical debate. But as

Critical Hardware: The Circuit of Image and Data

Abstract: Critical studies has come to sing a chorus of collective disavowal of the computer’s visuality. Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, for instance, that computers are not “inherently visual tools,” and Jacob Gaboury has made the case recently evenmore emphatically: “The computer is not a visual medium.” The reasons for these statements seem relatively straightforward when taking into account the authors’ subsequent explanations. Mirzoeff goes on to say: “The machines process data using a binary system of ones and zeros, while the software makes the results comprehensible to a human user.” Gaboury refines his point by arguing that the computer is “primarilymathematical, or perhaps electrical, but it is not in the first instance concerned with questions of vision or image.” Indeed, given these explanations, there would appear to be no surer illustration of W. J. T. Mitchell’s argument that “there are no visual media”—that all media are instead “‘mixed media,’” comprising multiple sensory modalities—than computer hardware,

Colonial Exceptionalism on Native Grounds: American Literature before American Literature

Abstract: Everyone knows that “practical letters” as opposed to “fine arts” or literature shaped “the earliest phase of [American] national life.” That utile focus prevailed from the first years of colonial settlement to the founding years of the republic and “perhaps,” as Constance Rourke once surmised, further beyond into “later phases” of American history as well. Indeed, given the length and complexity of colonial history and culture, it is difficult to think otherwise. The colonial feeding source of what would become “classic American literature” and a library of America was a corpus of functional writings firmly oriented to the world of social, religious, and economic purpose. In such a context one comes to understand how artfulness is not the prerogative of belles lettres or imaginative literature. I say “how” because the perspective entails notable consequences for critical and interpretive method. Engaging with practical letters shifts the theoretical framework

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

Abstract: In March of 2013 a group of historians hacked the German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum or DHM) in Berlin. The members of the group Kolonialismus im Kasten? (Colonialism in the Box?) reimagined those parts of the permanent exhibition that dealt with or, according to them, ought to have dealt with Germany’s colonial past. Initially, they organized alternative museum tours. Later they provided an app with which visitors could call up alternative texts about the DHM’s showpieces. These texts reminded the visitors of events such as the series of medical tests that Robert Koch performed on people from Africa or the sensationalist Völkerschauen (Ethnographic Zoos) of the world fairs of the 1900s. This guerrilla campaign in the DHM exemplifies the newest turn in the German culture of remembrance with its exemplary place, subject matter, and battlefield: Berlin, (post)colonialism, and the museum. After the turn of the millennium, a postcolonial dynamic slowly began to appear in the public sphere that has become highly conspicuous today. Germany’s colonial history—a topic that for a long time interested merely a few specialists—seems ready to be consumed by the masses. I will argue that this shift is representative of a new German culture of remembrance that I identify as

About the Term Exile

Abstract: I always found the name false which they gave us: Emigrants. That means those who leave their country. But we Did not leave, of our own free will Choosing another land. Nor did we enter Into a land, to stay there, if possible for ever. Merely, we fled. We are driven out, banned. Not a home, but an exile, shall the land be that took us in. Restlessly we wait thus, as near as we can to the frontier Awaiting the day of return, every smallest alteration Observing beyond the boundary, zealously asking Every arrival, forgetting nothing and giving up nothing And also not forgiving anything which happened, forgiving nothing. Ah, the silence of the Sound does not decieve us! We hear the shrieks From their camp even here. Yes, we ourselves Are almost like rumours of crimes, which escaped Over the frontier. Every one of us Who with torn shoes walks through the crowd

Unpacking My Library: An Experiment in the Technique of Awakening

Abstract: These notes, which deal with the Paris arcades, were begun under the open sky—a cloudless blue which arced over the foliage—and yet are covered with centuries of dust from millions of leaves through which have blown the fresh breeze of diligence, the measured breath of the researcher, the squalls of youthful zeal, and the idle gusts of curiosity. For the painted summer sky that peers down from arcades in the reading room of the Paris National Library has stretched its dreamy, unlit ceiling over them. —Walter Benjamin

Socrates Represented: Why Does He Look Like a Satyr?

Abstract: 1 The Swiss pastor Johann Caspar Lavater promoted the discipline of physiognomics in the 1770s as a scientific method to gain a better understanding of humankind. He considered the case of Socrates the physiognomic scandal: Why did this philosopher, the wisest and noblest of men, look like a satyr and thus subhuman? Today not many would consider physiognomics a scientific approach; still, what Lavater considered a scandal remains a puzzle, even though his question should be asked in slightly different terms. The physiognomy of Socrates—as both described in Plato’s and Xenophon’s works each titled Symposium and depicted in Socrates’s sculptured portraits—is an artifact, not a product of nature; therefore, the pertinent question is not why Socrates looked like a satyr but rather why he was made to look like one. From this perspective further questions arise: who made this choice (because it must have been a deliberate choice)? Under what circumstances and with what purpose? These questions are precisely what we will try to answer in this paper. Our primary evidence is certainly first rate: we have two very famous and highly influential texts written by two eminent personalities,

21 July 1773: Disputation, Poetry, Slavery

Abstract: 1. Reasoned and Spiritual Exercises On Wednesday, 21 July 1773, Eliphalet Pearson and Theodore Parsons, two graduating students from Harvard College, publicly disputed whether the enslavement of Africans was compatible with natural law. The political tension of the moment did not spare the college. In 1768–69, British troops stationed in King Street (now State Street) leveled their cannons at the State House door, no doubt concentrating the minds of the legislators (“we have a right to deliberate, consult, and determine” they protested), before the lawmakers decamped to Harvard, where they met several times in 1768–70. Matters deteriorated further after British soldiers killed five

Judgement and Beyond

Abstract: One way Arnold Davidson breaks the mold is to give philosophical significance to the question of improvisation. In particular, in his enduring dialogue withGeorge Lewis, Davidson has developed a very original take on this issue, dealing with improvisation not only as aesthetic in the narrow sense but as a global and existential phenomenon. In “Spiritual Exercises, Improvisation, and Moral Perfectionism,” he builds a connection between the kind of improvisation to be found in the practice of jazz by Sonny Rollins and the philosophical tradition of spiritual exercises, in which he is personally interested. He finds the same kind of “concern for the self” on both sides. In a very convincing analysis, Davidson shows how improvisation—as soon as it ceases to be interpreted as the mere performance of something that already exists—is a practice of the self in which the self is involved in its capacity to form and transform itself. It is no longer as much an aesthetic as it is an ethic—or, to put it more correctly, it is an aesthetic insofar as a real aesthetic is itself an ethic. Such an erasure of the border between the two is exactly what can be heard inMichel Foucault’s late motto of an “aesthetics of existence.” In order to make sense, then, of the shift made in the sense of ethic, it is helpful to remember the contrast drawn by Foucault between “a morality

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Western Culture: An Enigmatic Dialogue

Abstract: In recent years, Arnold Davidson has developed a passion for the thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993). Rabbi Soloveitchik had the dual distinction of having been both one of the most renowned Talmudists of the twentieth century and one of the most significant Jewish philosophers of that period—though this latter recognition emerged posthumously. In his lifetime, Rabbi Soloveitchik’s primary reputation among the public was that of a preeminent teacher of Talmud based in the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary at Yeshiva University in New York. But he was also a community rabbi in Boston, where he founded a Jewish day school, and he commuted between the two cities for four decades. Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote many philosophical essays in the course of his life; a large number were published after he turned sixty, and hundreds more manuscripts were discovered after his death. Many of these texts were used in his public lectures, and many have now been published. Interest in his thought among academic scholars has spiked enormously since his passing.