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"Bergson introduced the idea of élan vital because he became convinced that Darwinism was a dead-end. Schematically his argument is as follows. Darwinism is the strongest version of biological mechanism since Democritus; therefore, the refutation of Darwinism delivers the coup de grâce to mechanical biology. As for the refutation, in thinking about evolution we must not forget time's irreversible, anisotropic quality, which as an event or process biological evolution inherits and which excludes mechanical causation. Mechanical causation is reversible, life and evolution are not, and nothing irreversible can be the effect of a reversible cause. With biological mechanism a dead letter, Bergson unfolds the rest of his argument. The evolution of terrestrial life is a single movement, understanding movement as an indivisible, qualitatively singular duration. This movement began some four billion years ago and remains ongoing, a movement that has yet to reach its end. This movement is vital because it begins with the origin of terrestrial life and has evolved to the present, and Bergson describes it as an élan because this ancient and still vital event has the impetuous, tendentious quality of a tendency, striving to become all that it can be. The originating impetus of the event that is life "is finite and it has been given once for all." (CE 254) Life at the origin already has all the tendency ever to be expressed in terrestrial evolution"--

"Empiricisms reassesses the values of experience and experiment in European philosophy and comparatively. It traces the history of empirical philosophy from its birth in Greek medicine to its emergence as a philosophy of modern science. A richly detailed account in Part I of history's empiricisms establishes a context in Part II for reconsidering the work of the so-called radical empiricists-William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Gilles Deleuze, each treated in a dedicated chapter. What is "radical" about their work is to return empiricism from epistemology to the ontology and natural philosophy where it began. Empiricisms also sets empirical philosophy in conversation with Chinese tradition, considering technological, scientific, medical, and alchemical sources, as well as selected Confucian, Daoist, and Mohist classics. The work shows how philosophical reflection on experience and a profound experimental practice coexist in traditional China with no interaction or even awareness of each other. Empiricism is more multi-textured than philosophers tend to assume when we explain it to ourselves and to students. One purpose of Empiricisms is to recover the neglected context. A complementary purpose is to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism"--

Abstract
We see new technologies changing how we live, and seemingly set to do so at a rising pace. How should we describe these changes, and what exactly is changing? I discuss the theory of technical change in Simondon, On the Modes of Existence of the Technical Object. Once we understand precisely what sort of change qualifies as "technical," we see that the changes in question today have little to do with technology as such, more with a new infrastructure for its deployment.

The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, discursive, logocentric presumptions. I interpret knowledge as a quality of artifacts. A surgical operation or a bridge may be as good examples of knowledge as any true scientific proposition or theory. I define the quality that marks an artifact as a work of knowledge as superlative artifactual performance. To explain knowledge in these terms is not to offer a metaphysical or epistemological theory of its essence or concept. Instead, I am explaining knowledge in terms of its good, its value, the human point of caring to know.

The last half of the 20th century has witnessed the globalization of the economy, the weakening of the nation-state, the erosion of the welfare state, greater interconnections between science & the state, intensified administrative control, the demise of the political life, the end of imperialism, & the appearance of new social movements, which together have produced a new form of politics. Michel Foucault's analysis of the micropower, disciplinary dimensions of politics, & the close connection between knowledge & power make signal contributions in this context, because they are targeted precisely at the question of how disciplinary powers become legitimate. Moreover, Foucault's conception of government as the capacity to conduct is a more useful tool for investigating the modern condition than any other tool that the social sciences have produced. It is conceded that Foucault's notion of the ethical life as a work on the self is not very helpful, but if this conclusion seems muddled, it is only because the contemporary moment itself is muddled on the possibilities of individuality in the late 20th century. D. Ryfe

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I - Chinese and American Pragmatisms -- Chapter 1 - John Dewey: Exemplar of the Democratic Public Intellectual -- Chapter 2 - The Core of Pragmatism and Its Echo in Chinese Philosophy -- Chapter 3 - Pragmatism and Confucian Empiricism -- Chapter 4 - Harmony in the Arts: The Sense of Communication in Confucian and Deweyan Aesthetics -- Chapter 5 - Hu Shi, Pragmatism, and Confucianism -- Chapter 6 - Confucianism and Pragmatism: The Intrinsic Philosophical Themes and Their Diverse Developments -- Chapter 7 - Toward a Social Philosophy: Dewey's Newly Restored China Lectures -- Part II - Confucianism, Deweyan Pragmatism, and a New Geopolitical Order -- Chapter 8 - Pragmatist Political Economy: Toward a Deweyan Paradigm of Deep Democracy for Times of Global Crisis -- Chapter 9 - On the Cusp of a New World Order? A Dialogue between Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism -- Chapter 10 - Takeuchi Yoshimi and Deweyan Democracy in Postwar Japan -- Chapter 11 - The Intrinsic Values of Confucian Democracy and Dewey's Pragmatist Method -- Chapter 12 - A Democratic Research University with Chinese Characteristics: John Dewey and the Confucian Educational Tradition -- Chapter 13 - Governing as Predicament Resolution: Enhancing Equity and Diversity as Relational Values and Public Goods -- Chapter 14 - To Be Humane (Ren 仁) Is to Humanize: Being and Becoming in the Digital Age.