1. In 1929, a few months before his death, Aby Warburg wrote an introduction to his last intellectual project: the ‘Picture Atlas’ (Bilderatlas) which he dedicated to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, whose name was inscribed on the front door of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek he had founded. The opening sentences of Warburg's introduction, first published 70 years after his death in Italian translation, read: ‘The conscious creation of distance between the self and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’

This essay focuses on the danger of complicity. American philosophers, given their country's hegemonic position, exert global influence; what form should it take? Comparison is made with the situation of France when it still controlled Algeria. French philosophers, until near the time of Algerian independence, generally accepted and sometimes profited from this extremely unjust situation. An important exception was Sartre, particularly in his Preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It is argued that elements of complicity with American global dominance, some of the more unjust aspects of which are listed, are to be found in such widely read philosophers as Rawls and Rorty. It is suggested that a rethinking of the problem of evil, in its political and not just its religious aspects, is in order. Finally, a broader view of what ‘American philosophy’ means, including, for instance, the voices of African American and Native American philosophers, is urged.

The editors asked me to contribute to the Benin symposium on the ‘Encounter Between Rationalities’ from the particular perspective of my research experience in ethnomathematics - the study of mathematical ideas and practices as embedded in their cultural contexts.

The author presents Simone Weil's theory that force, an inherent part of the human condition, generates and regenerates its own existence. She examines three essays by Weil: ‘The Iliad or a Poem of Force’, ‘Reflections on War’, and ‘The Power of Words’. Doering situates the essays historically: their publication in French journals, as World War Two was looming, and again in the mid-1940s when translations of the essays appeared in Dwight Macdonald's New York journal: politics. She applies to modern times Weil's conviction that the escalation of war preparations on grounds of national security inexorably undermines the belief in the supreme value of the individual. Major issues include the hyping of war as an act of interior politics, fear as a means of social control, freedom of thought in a permanent war economy, Dorothy Day on violence, the media in a democracy and the Greek concept of nemesis.

Hegel is the great denier of the meeting and dialogue between civilizations and, contrary to every idea of hybridization as the very spirit of culture, he carefully undertook a thorough ethnic cleansing of history: from the Greek beginning to the European ending the circle is continuous even when it went through other spiritual universes. They could scarcely have the breadth to confront the movement of Reason carried along by the idea of its goal. So it mattered little to the making of its history that philosophy spoke Syriac then Arabic.

The war America waged in Vietnam, the first to be witnessed day after day by television cameras, introduced the home front to a new intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. Creating a perch for a particular conflict in the consciousness of viewers exposed to dramas from everywhere requires the daily diffusion and rediffusion of snippets of footage about the conflict. The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images.

Relativism has been a central topic of philosophical discussion for almost twentyfive hundred years. This is because the very idea of philosophy was a product of Plato's reaction to Protagoras’ claim that man is the measure of all things. The Platonic distinction between mere sophists and true philosophers incorporates the conviction that there is something beyond humanity that sets a standard which human beings are obliged to respect. Plato did his best to make ‘relativist philosophy’ a contradiction in terms.

In the short decade between 1985 and 1995, the dominant cultural movement of our time, hip-hop culture, has become, seemingly overnight, mainstream American popular culture. This centering of hip-hop art, most specifically rap music, in American popular culture has given young African Americans unprecedented national and international visibility, at a historical time when images via the 21st century's public square of television, film and the internet are more critical to identity than ever. This visibility, and most certainly the often anti-Black and stereotypical images that accompany it, forces distinctions to be drawn between today's Black popular culture and traditional ideas of Black culture, including what is art and what's at stake in cultural commodification.

Several years before the recent French-American diplomatic squabble, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, arguably America's two greatest novelists, wrote major works of a markedly anti-French tenor. Indeed, both Ravelstein and The Human Stain, with their disparate griefs against the French, share a remarkably similar plot: against a backdrop of Gallic treachery, a courageously conservative academic, condemned to death by his sexual excesses, asks, before dying, a novelist friend to write the story of his life. Framed by a consideration of an idiosyncratic work of American sculpture that appears to depict the sexual servicing of Abraham Lincoln and an evocation of the career of William Bullitt, Freud's collaborator on a study of Woodrow Wilson and America's ambassador to Paris during the fall of France, this essay offers a reading of both novels and raises the question of American sanctimony and the price France may be expected to pay for it.

The philosopher Giulio Preti belongs to that generation of young intellectuals who, in 1930s Italy, called for a profound regeneration of philosophy, arts and culture. Known by the name of ‘critical rationalism’, the movement formed in Milan around the philosopher Antonio Banfi (1886-1957). Luciano Anceschi, Vittorio Sereni, Enzo Paci, Antonia Pozzi, Remo Cantoni, as well as painters like Aligi Sassu and Ernesto Treccani were the young people who, under the banner of an anti-fascism that was at first cultural then openly militant (several of them were thrown into prison by the regime), aroused an intellectual fervour that was the marker of a thorough-going renewal of Italian culture. Journals such as Corrente di vita giovanile attracted eminent figures like Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Elio Vittorini or Carlo Emilio Gadda and linked up with other intellectual groupings, like the circle of hermetic poets in Florence (Mario Luzi, Piero Bigongiari, Carlo Bo, Oreste Macrì, Alessandro Parronchi) and the painters from the Rome School (Scipione, Guttuso, Mafai, Afro …). Young film-makers like Alberto Lattuada and Luigi Comencini also made their debut with the movement.

Like most liberal Democrats in the USA, I am alarmed and embarrassed by my country's current presidential administration: its heavy-handed unilateralism; its rejection of such progressive international treaties as the Kyoto protocols to reduce global warming, the international criminal court, the anti-ABM and anti-landmine treaties, etc.; its inclination to curtail civil rights in the name of Security; its general tendency away from democracy toward oligarchy. Nevertheless, I love the USA much more than not, and I hope to be more proud of it in the future, as I've been in the past.

One can make the case that we have lost the capacity for abstract thought. When we read or listen to the radio, the mind forms images in response to the suggestion. The same thing can be said to occur when an illustration provokes the viewer by its symbolic relationship to reality. Abstraction encourages the mind to bridge the distance from suggestion to reality. Art is the most benign and fundamental way of creating community that our species has discovered.