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 Between Political Philosophy and Political Theology The thought of Leo Strauss, widely regarded as one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, is little known in Israel. The theological-political problem is at the center of Rechnitzer’s interpretation of Strauss. The theological-political problem, as Rechnitzer succinctly puts it, “arises in the encounter of two radical claims: theology’s claim in the name of godly revelation to give political law ... and against it--the claim of philosophy to establish political law based on human reason alone.”
In the first chapter, Rechnitzer deals with Strauss’s critique of Carl Schmitt. Note [1] . [2]. 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".)
About three quarters of the text consists of a history of toleration in Western thought (and to some extent practice) from antiquity to the twentieth century, while in the last quarter of the book Forst develops his own theory of toleration. Furthermore, unlike J. 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). The essays' common thread is the attempt to persuade the reader that classical phenomenology and non-classical cognitive science can be successfully applied to the hand, enriching these areas and offering new insights.
Part I. Andrew Bremner and Dorothy Cowie focus on several issues in developmental psychology. Part II. Part III. 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. It worked. He lodged for a while with the postmaster in Skjolden, a remote village 200 miles north of the city of Bergen, and later had a hut built overlooking the fjord.
Alone, he wrestled with the ideas that would metamorphose into his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Wittgenstein ensconced in his Norwegian ‘hut’ (really, a two-storey wooden house with a balcony) is for many the model of a philosopher at work. Yet this stereotype of the genius at work in complete isolation is misleading, even for Wittgenstein, Boethius, Machiavelli, Descartes, and Rousseau. The smile in someone’s voice, a moment of impatience, a pause (of doubt perhaps?) Socrates started the conversation about philosophical conversation. Besides, why would a thinker cast seeds on barren soil?
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. James, however, embraces it. From the perspective of these three texts, that new canon would consist of some combination of the following thinkers:
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. The writings of the French postmodernist philosophers (and those inspired by them) are notoriously abstruse.
In a scathing critique of theorist Judith Butler, an American who writes in the French poststructuralist style, philosopher Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago suggests that the abstruseness is calculated to inspire admiration: Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. 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. The second difficulty I will mention is this, that probably many of you come up to this lecture of mine with slightly wrong expectations. I will now begin. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1929. 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. In Paris, Roland Barthes might have proclaimed the death of the author, but in London the philosopher had been lifeless for years, as anonymous as possible so that the arguments could speak for themselves. Discovering that your childhood idols are now virtually ancient is usually a disturbing reminder of your own mortality. But for me, realising that 5th May 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of Søren Kierkegaard's birth was more of a reminder of his immortality.
Explore Aeon General Philosophy. Third Person: Politics of Life and Philosophy of the Impersonal. Roberto Esposito puts forth a radical and provocative thesis: the triumph of the category of "the person" that, since the end of World War II has accompanied the discourse on human rights, is not the source of its success, but rather of its failure. The notion of the person, which has, since the days of Roman law and even more pointedly in its Christian elaboration, indicated the transcendent value of a human being, is incapable of bridging the gap between humanity and the logic of citizenship, precisely because it is what creates such a gap.
By opposing the person, as something artificial and endowed with moral and political significance, to mere humanity in its naturalness, Roman law gave rise to the "dispositif" of the person (p. 9), that is, to a notion that has, throughout its various Western morphologies, always been able to produce very real and tangible effects. In Roman law, such an opposition clearly emerges in the condition of the slave, which shows. 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.” I don’t consider myself an agnostic; I claim to know that God doesn’t exist, if that’s what you mean. G.G.: That is what I mean. L.A.: O.K. I say ‘there is no God’ with the same confidence I say ‘there are no ghosts’ or ‘there is no magic.’ 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.
The brevity of the book as a whole and the shortness of each piece (the first three are twenty pages each, the next four only ten) and the fact that they are only loosely connected is one of its great strengths. All things being equal, short books are better than long ones, as such eminent yet diverse thinkers as David Hume and William James each discovered the hard way.
The second essay is divided into four parts. Plato's Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death. Jill Gordon examines the role of eros in the fictive world of Plato's dialogues. By exploring dialogues not typically recognized as 'erotic', she aims to show that Plato consistently presents eros as a central and inextricable feature of human existence from beginning to end, one which, if properly directed, provides the foundation of a well-lived life. The book has many merits, but also some notable shortcomings, both of which are discussed below. Gordon begins with her analysis of the Timaeus, which provides the basis for the rest of the book's arguments. Eros, she contends, is present in the demiurge's original mixing of the human soul. It is not, therefore, an incidental feature of embodied existence, but rather an essential, divine component of the human soul from its very creation.
In Chapters 2 through 5 Gordon treats the role of eros in human life and identifies the kinds of practices, attitudes, and relationships required to make proper, philosophical use of it. 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. We now have a critical mass of authors with the scholarly skill and the philosophical acumen to put us in direct contact with Intention. The editors go out of their way to facilitate the introduction. What have we hitherto missed in Intention? Moran and Stone conclude that the general use covers all three of Anscombe's divisions of intention. Four of the ten papers are about practical knowledge. 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.
Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz. The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance. Physics, Mathematics and Skepticism. Carlos Fraenkel: Citizen Philosophers.