The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism. Arthur O.
Lovejoy argued nearly a century ago that the word "Romanticism" has been used in so many ways that we do best to drop its singular generic usage and speak instead of a plurality of Romanticisms. If Lovejoy lived today, one imagines him also noting the plurality of what we might call "metaromanticisms," that is, of different views about the cultural functions and meanings of things Romantic and of uses of the word in the service of various humanistic and post-humanistic projects. One particularly charged parting of the metaromantic ways in recent years has been over the issue of whether, to recall a famous comment of Friedrich Schlegel's, human thought might ever attain the unity of a system or whether it is fated always to be a set of fragments.
Louis Dupré, a philosopher and Catholic theologian, is not, it is safe to say, a fan of postmodern fragmentation. A power that, though dwelling in mind and nature, transcends both. . . . Reviews. Haim O.
Rechnitzer. Prophecy and the Perfect Political Order: The Political Theology of Leo Strauss. In Hebrew. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2012. 319 pp. $30.28 (cloth), ISBN 978-965-536-074-5. Reviewed by Shmuel Lederman (The Open University of Israel)Published on H-Judaic (September, 2013)Commissioned by Jason Kalman. Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present. Rainer Forst is one of the outstanding political philosophers of his generation, and Toleration in Conflict is simply the most impressive philosophical work specifically on toleration that I have ever read (and over the years I have read rather a lot of such books).
It is an immensely long and thorough work, and it is hard to resist a smile when reading in the Preface that it is actually an abridged version of the German edition, originally over 800 pages, although Forst generously reassures us that the English-language edition 'contains everything essential' (p. xiii). One reason for this length is that it is almost two books in one. (Given the cost, though, I resist any tendency to write "two books for the price of one".) The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental. Zdravko Radman has put together a fascinating collection of nineteen interdisciplinary essays that view the hand from philosophical, cognitive-developmental, medical, and evolutionary perspectives.
The book is unique in highlighting the crucial role of the hand in virtually all areas pertaining to our mental life. Roughly half of the essays offer a distinctively philosophical approach, combining two recent approaches in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. One is the revival of classical phenomenology, especially Maurice Mereleau-Ponty's work on bodily experience. The second approach is non-classical cognitive science (embodied and extended cognition). Talk with me. In 1913 the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein fled the interruptions and distractions of Cambridge to live as a hermit in Norway.
No one knew him there, and he could focus on his work on logic in isolation. Daniel Dennett's Faustian bargain. Slavoj Žižek Publishes a Very Clearly Written Essay-Length Response to Chomsky’s “Brutal” Criticisms. Fur has flown, claws and teeth were bared, and folding chairs were thrown!
But of course I refer to the bristly exchange between those two stars of the academic left, Slavoj Žižek and Noam Chomsky. And yes, I’m poking fun at the way we—and the blogosphere du jour—have turned their shots at one another into some kind of celebrity slapfight or epic rap battle grudge match. We aim to entertain as well as inform, it’s true, and it’s hard to take any of this too seriously, since partisans of either thinker will tend to walk away with their previous assumptions confirmed once everyone goes back to their corners.
But despite the seeming cattiness of Chomsky and Žižek’s highly mediated exchanges (perhaps we’re drumming it up because a simple face-to-face debate has yet to occur, and probably won’t), there is a great deal of substance to their volleys and ripostes, as they butt up against critical questions about what philosophy is and what role it can and should play in political struggle. The New French Philosophy. Ian James's book is a tour de force.
He presents an immense amount of extremely difficult material in strikingly clear prose and with consistent conceptual precision. The book's most interesting aspect is arguably not the material itself, though, but the institutional and cultural work the text very consciously performs through its construction and naming of a new constellation of new French philosophers. Like John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy (Continuum, 2006) and Alexander Galloway's Les nouveaux réalistes (Léo Scheer, 2010), James surveys a set of thinkers who have been translated and cited in conjunction with one another over the past fifteen years.
But Mullarkey never raised the question of whether his four post-continental thinkers might constitute a canon. Galloway actively resisted this gesture. John Searle on Foucault and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy. It is sometimes noted–typically with admiration–that France is a place where a philosopher can still be a celebrity.
It sounds laudable. But celebrity culture can be corrosive, both to the culture at large and to the celebrities themselves. So it’s worth asking: What price have French philosophy and its devotees (on the European continent and elsewhere) paid for the glamour? Perhaps one casualty is clarity. A Lecture on Ethics. Home ＞ Ludwig Wittgenstein ＞ A Lecture on Ethics Before I begin to speak about my subject proper let me make a few introductory remarks.
I feel I shall have great difficulties in communicating my thoughts to you and I think some of them may be diminished by mentioning them to you beforehand. The first one, which almost I need not mention, is that English is not my native tongue and my expression therefore often lacks that precision and subtlety which would be desirable if one talks about a difficult subject. All I can do is to ask you to make my task easier by trying to get at my meaning in spite of the faults which I will constantly be committing against the English grammar.
Julian Baggini — I still love Kierkegaard. I fell for Søren Kierkegaard as a teenager, and he has accompanied me on my intellectual travels ever since, not so much side by side as always a few steps ahead or lurking out of sight just behind me.
Perhaps that’s because he does not mix well with the other companions I’ve kept. I studied in the Anglo-American analytic tradition of philosophy, where the literary flourishes and wilful paradoxes of continental existentialists are viewed with anything from suspicion to outright disdain. Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal. THE STONE - Opinionator. This is the second in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Louise Antony, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the editor of the essay collection “Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life.” Gary Gutting: You’ve taken a strong stand as an atheist, so you obviously don’t think there are any good reasons to believe in God.
But I imagine there are philosophers whose rational abilities you respect who are theists. How do you explain their disagreement with you? Are they just not thinking clearly on this topic? Louise Antony: I’m not sure what you mean by saying that I’ve taken a “strong stand as an atheist.” The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. Risser's book is a collection of seven articles, four previously published. Each article comes up with new ways to express Heideggerian and Gadamerian insights but it is far from a rehash of old ground.
The book makes new forays into die Sache selbst; often has implicit reservations about Gadamer's emphasis, at the very least; addresses many recurrent philosophical chestnuts; and richly juxtaposes Gadamer to Nietzsche, Vattimo, Schleiermacher, Derrida, Agamben, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Stoicism, Jabès, Rilke, and Hegel among, in passing, many others. Plato's Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death. Essays on Anscombe's Intention. This publication marks a new stage in the reception of Anscombe's thought. In the decades following the publication of Intention, readers saw Anscombe's philosophy of action largely through a Davidsonian lens. Davidson's selective reconstruction was more accessible and less Wittgensteinian than the original. It also encouraged the hope of absorbing Anscombe's insights within a comfortable causalism about the mental. This hope could be sustained as long as relatively few philosophers made a serious study of Anscombe's book.
As the present volume shows, those days are over. The Self and Self-Knowledge. Perry Anderson reviews ‘Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays’ by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller · LRB 24 September 1992. Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller Liberty, 556 pp, $24.00, October 1991, ISBN 0 86597 094 7. Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz.
The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance. Physics, Mathematics and Skepticism. In his address to the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at Bologna in 1911, Henri Bergson noted that "a philosopher worthy of the name has never said more than a single thing: and even then it is something he has tried to say, rather than actually said". This single thing, he added, being "a thought which brings something new into the world", "is of course obliged to manifest itself through the ready-made ideas it comes across and draws into its movement".
Carlos Fraenkel: Citizen Philosophers.