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Couloubaritsis, Lambros. La proximité et la question de la souffrance humaine: En quête de nouveaux rapports de l'homme avec soi-même, les autres, les choses et le monde. Bruxelles: Ousia, 2005.
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Onapito-Ekomoloit. Yoweri Museveni in his own words: 1986-2005 : presidential, philosophical, readable and quotable quotes. [Kampala: s.n., 2005.
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Museveni, Yoweri. Yoweri Museveni in his own words: 1986-2005 : presidential, philosophical, readable and quotable quotes. [Kampala: s.n., 2005.
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Onapito-Ekomoloit. Yoweri Museveni in his own words: 1986-2005 : presidential, philosophical, readable and quotable quotes. [Kampala: s.n., 2005.
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Perron, Paul. Quête identitaire et subjectivité dans la prose québécoise du dix-neuvième siècle. Jhong-Li, Taiwan: National Central University Press, 2006.
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Paoli, Anne. Personnages en quête de leur identité dans l'oeuvre romanesque de Carmen Martín Gaite. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l'Université de Provence, 2000.
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Uche, Anibueze George, ed. An anthology of philosophical quotes. [Enugu: Jones Communications, 1997.
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Kriegel, Uriah. Brentano's Philosophical System. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198791485.001.0001.
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This is a book about the late-nineteenth-century/early-twentieth-century Austro-German philosopher Franz Brentano. It attempts to present Brentano’s philosophical system, especially as it pertains to the connection between mind and reality, in terms that would be natural to contemporary analytic philosophers; to develop Brentano’s central ideas where they are overly programmatic or do not take into account philosophical developments that have taken place since Brentano’s death a century ago; and to offer a partial defense of Brentano’s system as quite plausible and in any case extraordinarily creative and thought-provoking.
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Mundt, Christoph. The Philosophical Roots of Karl Jaspers’. Edited by K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard G. T. Gipps, George Graham, John Z. Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini, and Tim Thornton. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199579563.013.0007.
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This chapter provides an overview of the philosophers who influenced Jaspers when he tackled the conception of General Psychopathology. The introductory remark informs about how the systematic screening of Jaspers' philosophical quotes were gained and evaluated. The first section then deals with the methodological split between the humanities and natural sciences when approaching psychiatric patients. The influence of Dilthey, Weber and other philosophers on Jaspers' emerging position is laid out. The argument of his position that the methodological split is intrinsic to the nature of man is pointed out. The second passage describes Jaspers' polemic critique of Freud and his contrasting high appreciation of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as those philosophers who were genuine in uncovering unconscious feelings and motives. Furthermore this chapter contains some statements of Jaspers against the establishment of psychoanalysis at Universities. Furthermore his contention is mentioned that the psychotherapeutic relationship is asymmetric and not resting with a hermeneutic process between patient and psychiatrist. The following section mentions Jaspers' critical stance towards and relationship with Heidegger. His judgement on Heidegger's existential philosophy as a closed therefore sterile system is pointed out. The political aspect of their relationship is briefly touched upon. The section on phenomenology reports on Jaspers' critique of Husserl's epoché. Instead of Husserl Hegel and his dialectics gain appreciation in Jaspers' discourse on phenomenology. Jaspers' critical view on the writings of some of the most prominent psychiatrist phenomenologists is discussed. In particular the metaphorical character of phenomenologists' writings is reported with examples. The section on Greek philosophers is briefly mentioned here. They were quoted by Jaspers in a non-systematic use according to reasons of utility. The concluding part deals with Jaspers thoughts about transcendence, i. e. thinking about the "encompassing" beyond existence of the individual person. This part is conceived by Jaspers as out of reach for scientific endeavors.
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Johnson, Aaron P. Early Christianity and the Classical Tradition. Edited by Daniel S. Richter and William A. Johnson. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199837472.013.43.
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Although frequently treated as a separate phenomenon in the Roman Mediterranean, the literary work produced by Christian intellectuals (especially Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Tatian, and Theophilus) in the first centuries of our era is best appreciated within the literary, philosophical, and performative contexts of the Second Sophistic. Their adoption of a stance of free speech toward those in power was formulated as an extension of philosophical modes of self-presentation. Furthermore, the Christian explorations of middle Platonist notions of the Demiurge’s possession or use of logos coalesced with their impulse to quote and further proliferate logoi as part of Christian intellectual and textual culture. Of great importance was likewise the concern of many Christian apologists to combat the Hellenocentric assumptions of their day and to begin producing world chronological investigations that sought to remove the Greek identity from its position of cultural superiority.
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Mesing, Dave. Guy Debord. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423632.003.0004.
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Posing the question of the Debord–Agamben relation immediately presents us with a series of problems, particular to Debord as well as Agamben. In terms of Debord, we must decide how to position ourselves towards his work in order to understand its place on Agamben’s philosophical path. Such a decision has to be taken in several senses. As Agamben himself reports in a lecture on Debord’s films, ‘Once, when I was tempted (as I still am) to consider Guy Debord a philosopher,he told me: I’m not a philosopher, I’m a strategist.’1 Bracketing the Holzweg of the disciplinary specificity of philosophy, what this quote opens up is the occasional rather than systematic character of Debord’s interventions, insofar as the stakes for Debord, and with them the marshalling of his own philosophical lineage, are bound up with a certain political and aesthetic practice and not the production of thoughts that will stand the test of time.
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Feldman, David, Meenakshi Balaraman, and Craig Anderson. Hope and Meaning-in-Life. Edited by Matthew W. Gallagher and Shane J. Lopez. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399314.013.21.
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Freidrich Nietzsche famously said, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” a quote that pioneering existential psychiatrist Viktor Frankl cited often. This chapter argues that it is through the whys in people’s lives—their goals—that they establish a sense of meaning. The chapter makes both an empirical and a theoretical case that, linked by an emphasis on goals, hope and meaning in life are closely connected. It begins by defining the meaning-in-life construct, continues with a discussion of the empirical relationships between hope and meaning, and concludes with a theoretical exploration of hope in the context of existential philosophical systems.
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Albertus, Frater. Praxis Spagyrica Philosophica Ot Plain and Honest Directions on How to Make the Stone: & from "One" To "Ten". Red Wheel/Weiser, 1998.
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This Book Will Make You Think: Philosophical Quotes and What They Mean. O'Mara Books, Limited, Michael, 2016.
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Stephen, Alain. This Book Will Make You Think: Philosophical Quotes and What They Mean. O'Mara Books, Limited, Michael, 2013.
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Machery, Edouard. Postscript. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807520.003.0009.
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Debates about the limits of philosophical knowledge go way back, and philosophers fall roughly into two distinct traditions. Some, like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz, are optimistic about the reach of philosophizing; others, like Hume, Dewey, and James, incline toward thinking that philosophical knowledge is limited and emphasize the critical role of philosophy: On their view, philosophy corrects erroneous, empty, or misleading ideas. Each tradition is of course quite diverse, but each is also unified by its optimism or pessimism about philosophical knowledge. ...
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Fraenkel, Carlos. Spinoza’s Philosophy of Religion. Edited by Michael Della Rocca. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195335828.013.002.
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This chapter proposes a new interpretation of Spinoza’s approach to religion. The main thesis is that Spinoza is primarily concerned with a philosophical reinterpretation of Christ and Christianity. His celebrated critique of religion, by contrast, is a secondary project. It is not necessary to attain the goals of TTP, accounts for some of the main flaws in TTP’s argument and quite possibly was not part of TTP’s original plan. This chapter first shows that, in the writings prior to TTP, Spinoza consistently claims that the true content of Biblical religion agrees with the doctrines demonstrated in philosophy while the literal content of Biblical religion ensures that imperfectly rational citizens follow the prescriptions of reason. Then it gives an account of the philosophical interpretation of Christianity set forth along the same lines in his later writings. Finally, it discusses Spinoza’s critique of religion and proposes an explanation for why he chose to undermine his philosophical interpretation of Christianity.
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Schmidtke, Sabine. Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī (d. after 1491) and his. Edited by Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199917389.013.20.
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This chapter discusses Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī (d. after 906/1501), the first Imāmī scholar to amalgamate, in his magnum opus, KitābMujlī mirʾāt al-munjī fī l-kalām wa-l-ḥikmatayn wa-l-taṣawwuf, Muʿtazilite and Ashʿarite kalām, Peripatetic and Illuminationist philosophy, and philosophical mysticism. Ibn Abī Jumhūr’s work—an autocommentary on the Kitāb al-Nūr al-munjī min al-ẓalām, which in turn was a commentary on the author’s Kitāb Maslak—was written at a later stage of the author’s life. Among later thinkers, it was in particular Shaykh Aḥmad al-Aḥsāʾī (d. 1241/1826) who quotes the Mujlī extensively. The author employs ideas originating with the Peripatetic and Illuminationist traditions, philosophical mysticism, and kalām throughout, and the chapter discusses the ways in which the work relates to Ibn Abī Jumhūr’s thought as expressed in his earlier works as well as in his commentary on al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī’s al-Bāb al-ḥādī ʿashar, which he composed after the completion of the Mujlī.
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Solymar, L., D. Walsh, and R. R. A. Syms. The electron. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198829942.003.0003.
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Discusses with some rigour the properties of electrons, based on the Schrodinger equation. Introduces the concepts of wave function, quantum-mechanical operators, and wave packets. Examples cover the electron meeting an infinitely long potential barrier and the passage of electrons through a finite barrier (which leads to the phenomenon of tunnelling).The electron in a potential well is also discussed, solving the problem both for a finite and for an infinite well, and finding the permissible energy levels. The chapter is concluded with the philosophical implications that arise from the quantum-mechanical approach. Two limericks relevant to the subject are quoted.
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Muratori, Cecilia. Animals in the Renaissance*. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199375967.003.0012.
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This chapter examines the philosophical implications of Renaissance discussions of cannibalism, and more generally the pressure put on conceptions of human and animal in the wake of the discovery of the New World. Drawing on the medical tradition, Renaissance thinkers discussed the relationship between the diet, physical constitution, and rationality of various beings, including humans. One result of reflection on these issues was a blurring of the boundary line between human and animal; another was the development of the idea that human character depends to some extent on diet, so that, quite literally, you are what you eat.
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Hannon, Michael. What's the Point of Knowledge? Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190914721.001.0001.
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This book is about knowledge and its value. At the heart of this book is a simple idea: we can answer many interesting and difficult questions in epistemology by reflecting on the role of epistemic evaluation in human life. Hannon calls this “function-first epistemology.” The core hypothesis is that the concept of knowledge is used to identify reliable informants. This practice is necessary, or at least deeply important, because it plays a vital role in human survival, cooperation, and flourishing. While this idea is quite simple, it has wide-reaching implications. Hannon uses it to cast new light on the nature and value of knowledge, the differences between knowledge and understanding, the relationship between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning, and the semantics of knowledge claims. This book also makes headway on some classic philosophical puzzles, including the Gettier problem, epistemic relativism, and philosophical skepticism. Hannon shows that some major issues in epistemology can be resolved by taking a function-first approach, thereby illustrating the significant role that this method can play in contemporary philosophy.
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Boyle, Deborah. The Well-Ordered Universe. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190234805.001.0001.
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The prolific Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) published books on natural philosophy as well as stories, plays, poems, orations, allegories, and letters. Her mature philosophical system offered a unique vitalist materialist theory of Nature as composed of a continuous, non-atomistic, perceiving, knowing matter. In contrast to the dominant philosophical thinking of her day, Cavendish argued that all matter has free will and can choose whether or not to follow Nature’s rules. The Well-Ordered Universe explores the development of Cavendish’s natural philosophy from the atomism of her 1653 Poems, and Fancies to the vitalist materialism of her 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy and argues that her natural philosophy, her medical theories, and her social and political philosophy are all informed by an underlying concern with order, regularity, and rule-following. This focus on order reveals interesting connections among apparently disparate elements of Cavendish’s philosophical program, including her views on gender, on animals and the environment, and on sickness and health. Focusing on the role of order in Cavendish’s philosophy also helps reveal some key differences between her natural philosophy and her social and political philosophy, where Cavendish tended to be quite conservative. Cavendish thought that humans’ special desire for public recognition often leads to an unruly ambition, causing humans to disrupt society in ways not seen in the rest of Nature. The Well-Ordered Universe thus defends reading Cavendish as a royalist who endorsed absolute monarchy and a rigid social hierarchy for maintaining order in human society.
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Pouillaude, Frédéric. Unworking Choreography. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199314645.001.0001.
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There is no archive or museum of human movement where choreographies can be collected and conserved in pristine form. The central consequence of this is the incapacity of philosophy and aesthetics to think of dance as a positive and empirical art. In the eyes of philosophers, dance refers to a space other than art, considered both more frivolous and more fundamental than the artwork without ever quite attaining the status of a work. This book develops this idea and postulates a désoeuvrement (unworking) as evidenced by a conspicuous absence of references to actual choreographic works within philosophical accounts of dance; the late development and partial dominance of the notion of the work in dance in contrast to other art forms such as painting, music, and theatre; the difficulties in identifying dance works (and developing a philosophical theory of dance identity) given a lack of scores and an apparent resistance within the art form to the possibility of notation; and the questioning of “ends” of dance in contemporary practice and the relativization of the very idea that dance artistic or choreographic processes aim at work production.
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Möllers, Christoph. The Possibility of Norms. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198827399.001.0001.
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This book elaborates on a concept of the normative. It aims to explicate what is meant when norms are spoken of as such. Hence, this book is only concerned with developing a concept of the normative; it seeks to crystallize that which makes a norm a norm. In doing so, the focus is limited to a concept of social norms, of norms that have arisen out of a social context. Questions with which every practice of social norms sees itself confronted are compared and contrasted with philosophical theories of the morally appropriate. What implication does it have for the value and accuracy of philosophical theories of morally right action that social norms need a location, a time, and a form of illustration, that one has to be able to perceive them? Along such a line of inquiry, moral norms represent an important reference, though frequently they are only used as a contrast. Social norms such as religious commandments, legal prescriptions, or rules of etiquette operate quite differently from norms that are typically debated in practical philosophy. The commonalities of social norms are thus the object of this book.
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Kapstein, Matthew. Interpreting Indian Philosophy. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri. Oxford University Press, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199314621.013.44.
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This chapter explores some of the challenges of interpreting Indian philosophy by examining three exemplary puzzles: the manner in which philosophical authors employed the idea of the Cārvāka system, a school of thought said to be at once skeptical, hedonistic, and materialist; the meaning of “freedom” in classical India; and the limits of reason as suggested in the work of the notable Vedānta philosopher Śaṅkara. The essay seeks to demonstrate that even in areas such as these, which are assumed to be relatively well known, matters may be not quite so clear as people are wont to believe. The field remains open to, and in need of, revised and improved interpretation of the familiar no less than of topics that seem more obscure.
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Goodman, Charles. Śāntideva’s Impartialist Ethics. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199314621.013.23.
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Of all the Buddhist teachers whose writings have come down to us, only Śāntideva has yet been shown to have engaged in sustained, general theoretical reflection about ethics. Śāntideva offers a radical critique of the rationality of most emotions, similar in some ways to that of the Stoics. His overall view has important similarities with utilitarianism; and he offers philosophical arguments for a distinctively utilitarian form of impartiality. Śāntideva quotes scriptures that make hyperbolic and implausible claims about the relative value of different practices; it may be possible to interpret these passages in terms of the lexical priority of some values over others. He also tells us that the various Buddhist virtues reinforce and sustain each other. These claims could be used to construct a homeostatic cluster view of well-being.
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Bennett, Karen. Causing. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199682683.003.0004.
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It is common to sharply distinguish between causal and noncausal determination, and to assume that building or grounding only involves the latter. That is a mistake; the line between causal and noncausal determination is not nearly as clear as it is usually taken to be. This chapter defends the claim that building is causally tainted in two quite distinct senses. First, it is useful to count causation itself as a building relation. That is, the class that includes both causation and other putatively noncausal building relations is reasonably natural and philosophically important. Second, some particular building relations other than causation hold in virtue of causal facts.
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Normore, Calvin. The Methodology of the History of Philosophy. Edited by Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668779.013.17.
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What are the methodological consequences of the fact that Philosophy has a history and that Philosophy incorporates the products of the history of Philosophy into its current practice? Is an internal ‘philosophical’ history of Philosophy possible and desirable or is the history of Philosophy best approached as a branch of Intellectual History and/or Cultural History. This chapter first sketches some of the history of the study of philosophy’s past and contrasts some widely employed ‘doxological’, ‘anthropological’, and sociological approaches to that study with the approaches employed in a particular, historically recent discipline, History of Philosophy. It argues that History of Philosophy has a distinctive methodological structure which poises it interestingly between the disciplines of History and Philosophy and which can be usefully compared with, but is quite distinct from, that of the History of Science.
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Callard, Agnes. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190639488.003.0001.
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In addition to reasoning from the valuational condition we are already in, it is possible to reason toward value. This form of value-learning is aspiration. Its neglect in the philosophical literature on rationality, moral psychology, and responsibility is visible in certain subtle ways in which the space of possibility has been narrowed in each area. But aspiration must be possible, since it is actual. We see it in Alcibiades’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. Plato shows us the tortured condition of someone who can almost see what it would be like to see things differently: Alcibiades’ conventional honor-loving values move him to flee from and hate Socrates, even as he struggles to recognize that the honor-loving life is not worth living. He can almost see his values as bankrupt—but he can’t quite, because they won’t go away.
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Renz, Ursula. The Concept of the Individual and Its Scope. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199350162.003.0004.
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This chapter discusses the implications of Spinoza’s concept of individual bodies, as introduced in the definition of individuum in the physical digression. It begins by showing that this definition allows for an extremely wide application of the term; accordingly, very different sorts of physical entities can be described as Spinozistic individuals. Given the quite distinct use of the terms divisibilis and indivisibilis in his metaphysics, however, the chapter argues that the physical concept of individuality is not universally applied in the Ethics but reserved for physical or natural-philosophical considerations. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the problem of collective individuals. It is argued that, while societies or states are described as individual bodies, they do not constitute individual group minds in the strict sense of the term for Spinoza. This in turn indicates that minds are not individuated in the same way as bodies.
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Ruin, Hans. Historicity and the Hermeneutic Predicament. Edited by Dan Zahavi. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198755340.013.28.
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The chapter presents the topic of “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit) as a core concern for phenomenological thinking in the intersection with hermeneutics. It is first coined as a philosophical term by Dilthey and Yorck von Wartenburg as a way to capture the unique way in which humans exist historically and belong to history. Through their correspondence published posthumously in 1923 it enters the orbit of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, as he quotes extensively from these letters in Being in Time. For Heidegger, historicity was the key to transforming Husserlian phenomenology into hermeneutical ontology. In his reappraisal of hermeneutic thinking, Gadamer also locates historicity at the center of his magnum opus Truth and Method. The chapter also shows how Husserl was a thinker of historicity. This is brought out in particular in Derrida’s early interpretations of Husserl, where the deconstructive approach emerges literally from the problem of the historicity of ideal objects.
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Stuart-Buttle, Tim. From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198835585.001.0001.
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The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represent a period of remarkable intellectual vitality in British philosophy, as figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith attempted to explain the origins and sustaining mechanisms of civil society. Their insights continue to inform how political and moral theorists think about the world in which we live. The aim of this book is to reconstruct a debate which preoccupied contemporaries, but which seems arcane to us today. This concerned the relationship between reason and revelation as the two sources of mankind’s knowledge, particularly in the ethical realm: to what extent, they asked, could reason alone discover the content and obligatory character of morality? This was held to be a historical, rather than merely a theoretical question: had the philosophers of pre-Christian antiquity, ignorant of Christ, been able satisfactorily to explain the moral universe? What role did natural theology play in their ethical theories—and was it consistent with the teachings delivered by revelation? Much recent scholarship has drawn attention to the early-modern interest in two late Hellenistic philosophical traditions—Stoicism and Epicureanism. Yet in the English context, three figures above all—John Locke, Conyers Middleton, and David Hume—quite deliberately and explicitly identified their approaches with Cicero as the representative of an alternative philosophical tradition, critical of both the Stoic and the Epicurean: academic scepticism. All argued that Cicero provided a means of addressing what they considered to be the most pressing question facing contemporary philosophy: the relationship between moral theology and moral philosophy.
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Anderson, Greg. The Anomalous Foundations of Modern Being. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190886646.003.0008.
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To better understand this anomalous modern ontology and how it shapes our historical practice, the chapter continues its ethical case by exploring the uniquely modern metaphysical commitments which sustain that ontology, determining for us what can and cannot be really there in the world. Elaborating on arguments made by the anthropologist Philippe Descola for the existence of a metaphysical “Great Divide” between modern and non-modern worlds, it contends that our capitalist way of life, our mainstream sciences, and our conventional historical practice are all premised upon historically anomalous metaphysical commitments to materialism, secularism, anthropocentrism, and individualism. Citing influential works by theorists in the classical liberal tradition, from John Locke to Herbert Spencer, it shows quite precisely how these peculiarly modern metaphysical commitments have shaped the form and contents of the universal template of social being that is taken for granted by our conventional historicist practice. The application of this model to all non-modern experiences by historians is ethically questionable, in that it denies past peoples their rightful power to determine the ultimate truths of their own existence. Yet modern philosophical orthodoxies ensure the model’s continuing use.
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Sinclair, Mark. Being Inclined. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001.
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This is the first book-length study in English of the work of Félix Ravaisson, France’s most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book shows how in his 1838 Of Habit, Ravaisson understands habit as tendency and inclination in a way that provides the basis for a philosophy of nature and a general metaphysics. In examining Ravaisson’s ideas against the background of the history of philosophy, and in the light of later developments in French thought, the book shows how Ravaisson accounts for the nature of habit as inclination in an original manner, and within a metaphysical framework quite different from those of his predecessors in the philosophical tradition. The book sheds new light on the history of modern French philosophy, and argues for the importance of the neglected nineteenth-century French spiritualist tradition. It also shows that Ravaisson’s philosophy of inclination, of being inclined, is of great import for contemporary philosophy, and particularly for the contemporary metaphysics of powers, given that ideas about tendency have recently come to prominence in discussions concerning dispositions, laws, and the nature of causation. The book offers a detailed and faithful contextualist study of Ravaisson’s short masterpiece, but it does so in demonstrating its importance for contemporary thought.
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Salzani, Carlo. Walter Benjamin. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474423632.003.0003.
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In a 1985 interview with Adriano Sofri, Agamben says of his encounter with Benjamin: I read him for the first time in the 1960s, in the Italian translation of the Angelus Novus edited by Renato Solmi. He immediately made the strongest impression on me: for no other author have I felt such an unsettling affinity. To me happened what Benjamin narrates about his own encounter with Aragon’s Paysan de Paris: that after a very short while he had to close the book because it made his heart thump. For Agamben, this encounter with Benjamin proved to be ‘decisive’2 and would mark his entire career, as much as meeting Heidegger in person at the end of the 1960s. Of these two first philosophical ‘masters’ he would often say, quite enigmatically, that for him the two philosophers worked ‘each one as antidote for the other’,3 or more precisely: ‘Every great work contains a shadowy and poisonous part, against which it does not provide the antidote. Benjamin has been for me this antidote, which helped me to survive Heidegger.’4 The nature of Heidegger’s poison and of Benjamin’s antidote is not very clear; what is clear, however, is that this early encounter with Benjamin shaped Agamben’s own encounter with philosophy itself, and would exert an enduring influence (perhaps ‘the single most important influence’)5 on his entire oeuvre.
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Bennington, Geoffrey. Scatter 2. Fordham University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823289929.001.0001.
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Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.
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Hyman, Wendy Beth. Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198837510.001.0001.
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Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers’ anticipated decline, and—quite stunningly given the Reformation context—humanity’s relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian “desert of vast Eternity.” In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poetry invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric’s own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, made it uniquely situated to conceptualize such “impossible” metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, Impossible Desire also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyric mode. Carpe diem’s revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.
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Okasha, Samir. Agents and Goals in Evolution. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198815082.001.0001.
Full textAbstract:
In evolutionary biology, there is a mode of thinking which is quite common, and philosophically significant. This is ‘agential thinking’. In its paradigm case, agential thinking involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival and reproduction, and treating its phenotypic traits, including its behaviours, as strategies for achieving this goal. Less commonly, the entities that are treated as agent-like are genes or groups, rather than individual organisms. Agential thinking is related to the familiar Darwinian point that organisms’ evolved traits are often adaptive, but it goes beyond this. For it involves deliberately transposing a set of concepts—goals, interests, strategies—whose original application is to rational human agents, to the biological world at large. There are two possible attitudes towards agential thinking in biology. The first sees it as mere anthropomorphism, an instance of the psychological bias which leads humans to see intention and purpose in places where they do not exist. The second sees agential thinking as a natural and justifiable way of describing or reasoning about Darwinian evolution and its products. The truth turns out to lie in between these extremes, for agential thinking is not a monolithic whole. Some forms of agential thinking are problematic, but others admit of a solid justification, and when used carefully, can be a source of insight.