Sad news from home…

This is the terrible news from back home:

“Dr. James Bradley, head of the Faculty of Arts’ philosophy department, passed away on Thursday May 17, 2012 after a long illness. 

Originally from Liverpool, Dr. Bradley was educated at Cambridge University where he received his PhD in 1983. He was a Humboldt Fellow in philosophy at the University of Munich and also taught in Cambridge’s faculties of divinity and philosophy prior to arriving at Memorial as a visiting professor in 1986.

His areas of specialization were Idealism, Process Philosophy, Hermeneutics, Time, and Kant.

Dr. Bradley joined the Faculty of Arts full time in 1988 and had been head of the philosophy department since 2003.

His social nature and passionate belief in the value of a liberal arts education will be sorely missed by students, staff and fellow faculty members.”

That last part can’t capture the full it: I have met few, if any colleagues, in academia with his kind of intellect and passion that people had for discussion with him. His diagnosis of cancer this past December had shaken the department and our university.

But until the end, Jim was doing what he loved best: having nearly nightly soirees and philosophical discussions, even hosting our weekly Jockeys at his house.

He was the center of our department for so long; he will be terribly missed. But the legacy he leaves academically–a posthumous collection of his papers (which are some of the best stuff you’ll read in metaphysics) is planned–as well as the wide influence in our intellectual community will abide.

A funeral will take place at the Basilica on Monday at 9:30 am in St. John’s.

Trending on the on NYTimes web site

#1 most emailed article: Can a nine year old be a psychopath?
#3 most emailed article: Capitalists and Other Psychopaths.

Combining them, I guess, and you get warning signs for psychopathology such as your child reading Ayn Rand, refusing to do a lemonade stand since the “opportunity costs are too high,” and preferring cash gifts over toys for “greater liquidity.

Review of Sharp’s Politics of Renaturalization

Is on the Society and Space open site here. (It’s a longer review–near 3,000 words):

What Sharp argues for is a “politics of renaturalization”. This surely is her most controversial claim, given the ways in which, throughout the era of the regimes of the biopolitical, nature has been used as the nom de guerre of the pernicious splits in society along racial, nationalistic, and patriarchal lines. But in true Spinozistic fashion, Sharp makes her points in ways that do less to anger her discursive partners than to build alliances by showing how the “denaturalizing” claims of feminists and critical race theorists are anything but anathema to her own project, though they need to be attenuated in terms of their “social constructivism” (page 8). In what follows, I set out the stakes of this project, first by summarizing the book, then situating Sharp’s own interventions in light of the recent rise in Continental realisms and materialisms. In this way, I hope to show its import for those thinking the relation of society and spatialization.