Fred Evans- Doctor of Philosophy
- Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University
Fred Evans
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Professor Emeritus at Duquesne University
Working on a book tentatively titled Cosmopolitan Mind: A Political Ethics of World and Cosmic Togetherness.
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39
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Introduction
Fred Evans is Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator for the Center of Interpretive and Qualitative Research at Duquesne University. He is the author of Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2019); The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (Columbia University Press, 2009, 2011), Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind (SUNY, 1993), and co-editor (with Leonard Lawlor) of Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Flesh (SUNY, 2000). Evans has published numerous articles and book chapters on continental thinkers in relation to issues concerning psychology, politics, and technology. He is currently working on a book addressing cosmopolitanism.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (39)
Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics
Fred Evans
Public space is political space. When a work of public art is put up or taken down, it is an inherently political statement, and the work’s aesthetics are inextricably entwined with its political valences. Democracy’s openness allows public art to explore its va...
In an age where diversity is increasingly accepted as a value as well as a fact, ethico-political cosmopolitanism should propose a notion of global unity that is composed of rather than imposed on difference. Jacques Derrida and Walter Mignolo offer different versions of this view of cosmopolitanism. Derrida’s version is based on his notion of “dem...
The cosmology of Deleuze and Guattari emphasises the new. I raise the question of whether this emphasis cancels out two other political virtues, solidarity and heterogeneity, and thereby amounts to a fascism of the new. I reply that what Deleuze and Guattari say about cosmological unity and difference suggests that they can avoid this negative desi...
Derrida argues that the idea of democracy suffers from a fatal "autoimmunity": its freedom and equality requirements cancel each other out. But he also feels that because of this malady democracy can enjoy a form of "reasonableness" and "possibility as impossible" that favors it over all other kinds of polity. In particular, recognition of the inhe...
Cosmopolitanism has ancient roots in the West and the East. A view that appeals to a quasi-transcendental basis for cosmopolitan democracy can seem unacceptably ephemeral; yet a conditional view may amount to no more than a worldwide modus vivendi despite its claims to moral bonds of unity. This chapter shows how Jacques Derrida's notion of democra...
In 1893 Chicago put on the World’s Columbian Exposition. The aim of its chief designer, Daniel Burnham, was to outshine the earlier French World’s Fair and its crowning glory, the newly built Eiffel Tower.1 Burnham also hoped to overcome the taunts of New Yorkers and other easterners that the City of the Big Shoulders could “produce only a country...
The relation between us and our surroundings is paradoxical. On the one hand, we sometimes feel that we and the things around us are part of a seamless whole. Thus mystics speak of experiences in which they meld into the background. On the other hand, things often resist our efforts to assimilate them to our purposes. We then experience them as sep...
I argue that an icon in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the “circle of candles” represents an alternative to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilization” thesis. But I also put forward a public policy that initially may seem to contradict this alternative: group or cultural rights, beyond, and even sometimes conflic...
A pesar de sus diferentes orígenes geográficos y culturales, el pensador ruso Mijaíl Bajtín2 y el movimiento zapatista en Chiapas poseen mucho en común. Ambos responden al incumplimiento de las promesas de revolución en sus respectivos países;3 ambos hablan de la sociedad en términos de "voces" díalógicamente relacionadas entre sí; y, más aún, ambo...
This paper pursues two goals. The first concerns clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and the Russian linguist and culturologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only does Deleuze refer to Bakhtin as a primary source for his emphasis on voice and indirect discourse, both thinkers valorise heterogeneity and creativity. I argue Deleuze's notions of ‘dete...
À partir d’une analyse issue de la théorie du discours de Mikhaïl Bakhtine, on reconnaît une problématique à caractère dialogique dans le contexte du soulèvement déclenché par le mouvement zapatiste au Mexique. Bakhtine a en effet développé une conception du dialogisme où sont définies les notions de plurilinguisme, d’hybridation et de compréhensio...
Genealogy is a critical method employed most notably by Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. Although he does not explicitly acknowledge it, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian linguist and philosopher of language, also uses this method. I examine the way these three thinkers construe both the critical and the affirmative roles of genealogy. The ‘affi...
We often speak of democracy as a mere decision-making procedure rather than as a "form of life." Part of the reason for this formalism is the difficulty of revealing the aspects of individual and social existence that provide the impetus toward democracy and that democratic practices should reflect and augment. I argue that the Internet's status as...
Both Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty repudiate the mirror view of perception and embrace what Nietzsche refers to as solar love or creative perception. I argue that Merleau-Ponty thinks of this type of perception primarily in terms of convergence and Nietzsche in terms of divergence. I then show how, contrary to their own emphases, Merleau-Ponty's noti...
Thesis (M.A.)--University of Regina, 1977. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-175). Microfiche of typescript.
