Continental Philosophy

The following text looks at certain philosophical points of convergence and divergence between Novalis and Fichte with respect to their theories of nature. Somewhat notoriously, Fichte places nature in opposition to the I (Ich) of the human being, designating the natural world using the abstract formula “Not-I”. Yet Fichte also insists that this abstraction should be made concrete and particular, as both an “it” and as a “you”. This chapter argues that Novalis did not reject Fichte’s theory of nature as (...) a Not-I — as is often claimed in the research. Rather, the inverse is actually the case: Novalis positively adopted and expanded on the Fichtean conception of nature as a “you”. (shrink)

This special volume 6 of "Symphilosophie: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" celebrates and engages with Immanuel Kant’s legacy and indelible influence on the romantics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In recognition of Kant’s enduring importance, we have invited authors to mark his 300th birth year with articles, translations, and reviews that take up Kantian themes present in romantic thinkers. Despite the contrast in styles between Kant and the romantics, the importance of Kant’s critical system for the core ideas of (...) romanticism is undeniable and inex- tricable. This year’s issue 6 of Symphilosophie therefore examines the crucial residual influence of Kant on romantic philosophy. (shrink)

Comentário Crítico. Referência do artigo comentado: LOPES, Marcelo Vieira. Para além da dúvida corporal: a dúvida como problema existencial e sua relevância para a psiquiatria. Trans/form/ação: Revista de Filosofia da Unesp, Marília, v. 47, n. 6, e02400329, 2024.

This paper presents an interview carried out with Maria Aparecida Viggiani Bicudo. Its main topic is the Philosophy of Mathematics Education. Other issues are linked to this central theme, such the interviewed’s experience in university management, the movement from her initial formation in Education till her studies in Philosophy, the creation of a recognized and well regarded PostGraduate Programm in Mathematics Education in Brazil, and the perspective of being woman and mother working in the academic world.

This text is an interview given by Prof. Dr. Alfredo Pereira Jr. to Leonardo Ferreira Almada, on the occasion of the call for publication of interviews with different Brazilian philosophers. In response to the goal of the Trans/Form/Ação journal call, we sought to carry out an interview in which a PhD professor with an established career presents some elements of his personal and academic stories, as well as clarifies important points of his research, some of his theses and vision of (...) the world based on questions asked by another professor, a historical research partner, and in-depth knowledge of the interviewee’s career. (shrink)

There is a theoretical difficulty in the economy of argument of The Prince’s, notably in chapter IX, when it deals with the fortunate astuteness necessary for the new prince. In the period that opens this central chapter in the economy of the work, we have the mobilization of important notions of Machiavellian political thought, such as virtù, fortune, private citizen, and, also, astuteness figures as an important attribute. Now, Machiavelli talks little about the fortunate astuteness, on the contrary, it does (...) not receive any expository attention, despite its importance in the list of political qualities necessary for the prince. Hence the question of how to think about the new prince’s fortunate astuteness. In order to better understand this Machiavellian concept, we intend to bring it closer, firstly, to the Greek métis, which allows us to better understand what this quality is that is required of the new prince. Then, based on the argumentative economy of the work, extract an understanding of this political quality. (shrink)

The article analyzes a variation in the conditions of production of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thought based on joint production with Félix Guattari. The article is divided into three parts: firstly, we analyze the influence of structuralism on Deleuze’s work, mainly through the author’s own text on this current of thought and its influence on the construction of the notion of “idea” in Difference and Repetition. In a second movement, we analyze the appearance of the notion of “machines” in Guattari’s work (...) Psychoanalysis and Transversality and its protagonism in the authors’ first joint work, Anti-Oedipus. Finally, we analyze the role that machines play in defining concepts, in the authors’ latest joint work. In addition to methodological aspects, we argue that the variation from structuralism to machinism has epistemological and ontological ramifications, which are decisive for the authors’ reading. (shrink)

This paper discusses gender, sexuality and race through the analysis of Ann Walker, who is a character in the Tv show Gentleman Jack (2019). It aims to focus on the encounter and on the latent desire between Ann and the series’ protagonist to then explore the tensions and established pacts within the limits of femininity, heterossexuality and whiteness, through an elusive gaze to the paranoid reading. Therefore, desire emerges as a theoretical-analytical category by the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (1997; (...) 1995) and Deleuze and Parnet (1998). Lugones’ theory (2014; 2007; 1994) on the coloniality of gender, purity and creativity also contributes to operating a racially aware analysis. Through her desire for the protagonist, Ann constitutes a pact with the demon, in Deleuzo-Gauttarian terms, which ambivalently culminates in the expropriation of herself and in the production of another self, elusive to the expectations of gender and sexuality, however sustained by the limits and possibilities of whiteness. (shrink)

This essay problematizes some reflections on the negative affective machinery proposed by Sianne Ngai and Theodor Adorno in the formulation of an aesthetic politics of negative emotions as a critical response to cultural emotional scripts. Against the backdrop of the aestheticization of capitalism and contemporary aesthetic politics, negative emotions emerge as a fertile approach to understanding power dynamics in contemporary society, as well as to questioning traditional forms of aesthetic and political analysis. Ultimately, it is suggested that the aesthetic politics (...) of negative emotions represent a pathway to challenging certain figuration structures and a potential route for a materialist analysis of emotions. (shrink)

The article addresses Innerarity’s thesis that major democratic theories are still excessively tied to the Newtonian paradigm, which limits their ability to understand the complexity of social orders and current political problems. The text is divided into three parts: the first examines the recent resurgence of the notion of a crisis in democracy, highlighting Innerarity’s approach to “simplicity” and “complexity”. The second part compares Newtonian science with the sciences of complexity, exploring what the latter can contribute to contemporary political thought. (...) Finally, the article argues that despite its limitations, democracy remains the most suitable regime for dealing with the increasing complexity of contemporary societies. (shrink)

This paper explores the interrelations between a wide variety of strategies being deployed to take away the political power of the fossil fuel industry. This paper explains why challenging the political power of the industry is a crucial part of work to address the climate crisis. It explains the logics underlying a variety of strategies to challenge that political power. It explores the ways these disparate strategies, even when not coordinated, can undermine the variety of “pillars of support” which prop (...) up the industry’s political power. Activists are working on multiple fronts to undermine the fossil fuel industry’s political power. As a participant in this movement myself, I wrote this paper as a way of clarifying the strategic objectives of our movement. I hope that those outside the movement will find its approach to challenging entrenched destructive political agents helpful for understanding this and other struggles. (shrink)

The second volume in the Homo Mimeticus mini-series advances the emerging transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies. After the linguistic and the affective turns, the new materialist and the performative turns, the cognitive and the posthuman turns, it is now time to re-turn to the ancient, yet also modern and still contemporary realization that humans are mimetic creatures. In this second installment of the Homo Mimeticus series, international scholars working in philosophy, literary theory, classics, cultural studies, sociology, political theory, and the (...) neurosciences engage creatively with Nidesh Lawtoo's Homo Mimeticus: A New Theory of Imitation to further the transdisciplinary field of mimetic studies. Agonistic critical engagements with precursors like Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Bataille, Irigaray, and Girard, involving contributions by leading international thinkers such as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, William E. Connolly, Henry Staten, and Vittorio Gallese, among many others, reveal the urgency to rethink mimesis beyond realism. From imitation to identification, mimicry to affective contagion, techne to simulation, mirror neurons to biomimicry, homo mimeticus casts a shadow—but also a light—on the present and future, from social media to the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Heidegger’s philosophy has influenced largely the humanities and arts and has also been a source of interest in architecture. Although Heidegger has written on architecture, this paper will argue that one of the key topics in his philosophy, intertwined with architecture, is the concept of home (das Heim). In Heidegger’s philosophy, the homely (das Heimische) was intertwined with its opposition, the uncanny (das Unheimliche). This paper discusses the different understandings of home in Heidegger’s seminal works. The paradoxical structure of home (...) in Heidegger’s philosophy is discussed, as home in Heidegger’s philosophy is impossible for modern man with his horrifying nature, perpetuated by the uncanny. (shrink)

This article engages in a dialogue between the African philosophy of Ubuntu (humanity bound up in the other) and the Korean philosophy of Samae (love bound up in the other) to advocate for the emergence of a philosophy of agapeic humanism. Some structures (laws, standards, conventions, protocol and institutions), ideologies, ethics and socio-cultural practices of indigenous African communities have particularistic, exclusive, egocentric and discriminatory strains that are in contradiction to communalism and its principles upon which the traditional African world-view is (...) claimed to be founded. For instance, in indigenous Igbo communities in Africa, double standards are applied in their treatment of in-groups and out-groups, and their religious and moral codes cannot be invoked for an offence committed by an in-group member against an outsider (an out-group member), thus making such ethics and practices trans-communally/racially inapplicable and therefore non-universalisable. The article employs analytical, critical and comparative fusion methods to approach particularism in traditional Africa communities. While the analytical method facilitates the theorisation of Ubuntu and Samae, the critical approach critiques prevailing, narrowly defined conceptions of humanism prevalent among the Igbo people of Nigeria. Through the method of comparative fusion, the article integrates elements of Ubuntu and Samae to propose the concept of agapeic humanism. It concludes that the interchange between African and Asian philosophies holds the promise of transcending particularistic limitations within the current humanistic paradigm, thereby fostering new perspectives on shared humanity rooted in practical agape love. (shrink)

In January 1902, Joseph Mokuʻōhai Poepoe began publishing a monthly journal titled Ke Kanawai (the law). As an attorney, author, and editor, Poepoe endeavored to provide resources in ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian language) for Kanaka (Hawaiians) living in a world now governed by American law. The three extant issues (January through March) contain a column titled “Kakaolelo—Logika,” a transliteration of “logic” paired with the term “kākāʻōlelo,” commonly glossed as “oration,” “counsel,” or “debate,” but traditionally referring to cultural specialists that (...) advised leaders and were known for being adept in speaking. This column is likely the earliest prolonged engagement with western philosophy by a Kanaka writing in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. The purpose of this article is to lay the groundwork for further discussing questions of comparative philosophy in a Hawaiian context. Thus, the article proceeds in two parts. First, I contextualize the column within its historical setting; then, I translate the column. This will set the stage for future work of interpretation and comparison. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss whether the truth of causal statements depends on factors from the context of assessment. I use MacFarlane's New Relativism and his discussion of taste statements and knowledge statements as a model and explain how to extend this to causal statements. I argue that causal statements can depend on assessor factors. My argument depends on examining one medical example in extensive detail, from the point of view of different speaker contexts and different assessor contexts.

Not only is freedom a shared concern of Sartre and Schelling, which would not be anything particularly unique, but for both philosophers, freedom must be articulated out of an ontological ground, or within the confines of an ontological system. A contradiction nevertheless appears to arise regarding the “orientation” of Sartre and Schelling’s respective “ontologies of freedom”: the freedom of Sartre, reflecting a contemporary stoic-inspired doctrine, is directed toward the future, while for Schelling, with affinities to the temporal logic of psychoanalysis, (...) freedom is oriented toward the past. This article presents both Sartre and Schelling’s ontological reasoning out of which either a progressively oriented freedom (the freedom to negate the present in the name of future “possibles”) or a retrogressively oriented freedom (the freedom to determine the ground of the present out of an indefinite, a-temporal becoming), before attempting to resolve this contradiction in the temporality of freedom by examining the position and role of the negative (of negation, contradiction, or nothingness), as either secondary or primary, within the ontology of each respective philosopher. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The following article highlights post-Kantian philosophical moments in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Post-Kantian is less a temporal designation and more a conceptual category indicating the absence of a unified Critical system. This article focuses on three specific areas where conceptual commitments in the first two Critiques are questioned and undermined in the third Critique leading to an incomplete system. The purpose of this article is to move away from a reading of Kant that simultaneously privileges the Critique of Pure (...) Reason (over and above the other two critiques) and that uses the Critique of Pure Reason as a lens through which to read the critical system. This shift toward the third critique is to specify the nonunified aspect of the Critical system and to highlight significant moments of the Critique of Judgment. This article concludes by specifying the precise moments where Kant’s third Critique moves beyond the boundaries of the first two. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article critically examines Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s concept of the Absolute Spirit, Mexican philosopher José Revueltas’s reinterpretation of Hegelian dialectics, and Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s phenomenological analysis of undocumented immigrant reason. This article argues that fixed narratives, epitomized by Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, obscure the authentic experiences of undocumented immigrants. By synthesizing Hegel, Revueltas, and Sánchez, the article proposes the concept of Espíritu de Muerte, or Spirit of Death, reminiscent of the Holy Death as a counter to the Absolute Spirit, (...) advocating for a historiographical shift that acknowledges and liberates forgotten memories as a canonical history of undocumented reason. Taking Revueltas’s emphasis on unseen histories offers a means to surpass Hegelian limitations and reveals a notable inconsistency in Sánchez’s observations regarding the undocumented experience: namely, that undocumented reason inherently serves as a counternarrative always. (shrink)

Performativity plays a significant role avant la lettre in Classical German Philosophy. It is, among other things, a central component of original interpretations of the Absolute, the Subject, and Knowledge. Since the 2010s, there has been an increasing number of studies examining the performative in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schliermacher, and Schlegel. This anthology picks up on this development. Through interdisciplinary contributions, performativity within Classical German Philosophy is explained and discussed, highlighting the hermeneutic and systematic insights gained (...) from performative interpretations. [In German: Performativität spielt avant la lettre in der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie eine bedeutende Rolle. Sie ist u.a. ein zentraler Bestandteil originärer Interpretationen des Absoluten, des Subjekts oder auch des Wissens. Seit den 2010er Jahren mehren sich daher Untersuchungen, die dem Performativen bei Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schliermacher, und Schlegel. Dieser Sammelband greift diese Entwicklung auf. Anhand interdisziplinärer Beiträge wird Performativität innerhalb der Klassischen Deutschen Philosophie erläutert und diskutiert. Dabei wird der hermeneutische und systematische Ertrag performativer Interpretationen dargestellt.]. (shrink)

This article argues that Plato’s Sophist can be understood as promoting a rudimentary version of the medieval notion of the “convertibility of the transcendentals,” that is, that there are certain properties of being, such as unity and truth, that have the same extension as being but add conceptual content to being. Histories of the doctrine of the transcendentals tend to trace transcendental thought back no earlier than Aristotle and thus ignore the relevance of Plato generally and the Sophist specifically. This (...) article argues that the Eleatic Stranger’s discourse on the five “greatest kinds” (megista genē) indicates that Sameness and Otherness fulfill the criteria of transcendentality. The article uses this analysis to provide an avenue for further study of Platonic metaphysics in the hope that the notion of “convertibility of the transcendentals” will aid interpreters in understanding how to bring together Plato’s various accounts of what is metaphysically ultimate. This article suggests that, in addition to sameness and otherness, unity, goodness, truth, and beauty are also transcendentals within Platonic metaphysics. The article concludes by implying that difference (i.e., Otherness) must be ontologically good in Platonic thought, contrary to the common criticism that Platonism both denigrates difference and subordinates it to sameness. (shrink)

By disentangling the history of free indirect style from the history of the novel, we can see the narratorial complexity of prose fiction at a revealingly early stage, when the channeling of other minds and other experiences seemed less like a generic affordance than a problem of etiquette, moral judgment, and simple intelligibility. Lacking novelistic conventions (for example, quotation marks), the Elizabethan writer George Gascoigne experimented with a range of techniques for representing the voices and thoughts of his characters. In (...) The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), he does not consistently or clearly mark particular expressions as belonging to either character or narrator. The effect of this is a wandering or mobile point of view, a protoform of free indirect style—not as a deliberate aesthetic effect but rather as the product of experimentation with a not yet fully articulated set of formal conventions. Gascoigne’s use of this emergent free indirect style centers on a key scene of sexual assault and its aftermath. This, I argue, is no accident as sexual consent foregrounds with particular urgency the moral stakes of attributing thoughts, desires, and motives to other people. In the early days of prose fiction, Master F.J. thus shows us the potentially disturbing entanglement between sexual nonconsent and one of the central tools and methods of literary narrative: its practice of channeling the voices of others. (shrink)

The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser was best known for his technical image trilogy, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Into the Universe of Technical Images (1985), and Does Writing Have a Future? (1987), which expanded photography theory into a radically inclusive philosophy of still and moving images for the digital age. However, he was also fascinated by concurrent developments in biology and biotechnology that were changing notions of nature, materialism, and humans. This essay will look at Flusser’s writing around these (...) ideas, particularly his para-biological fable Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (1987), his “Curie’s Children” column for Artforum (1986–1992), and his collaborations and correspondences with artists impacted by his ideas. (shrink)

Might design education be, at its heart, a form of occupational therapy? This is the question that this article grapples with, taking László Moholy-Nagy’s repurposing of the Bauhaus pedagogy for use with disabled veterans as its starting point. In exploring his work at the School of Design in Chicago (as well as an uncharacteristically activist period at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which instituted a Veterans Art Center), this article seeks out the shared foundations of rehabilitory thought (...) and the underpinnings of the Bauhaus Vorkurs by taking stock of Moholy-Nagy’s long-standing engagement with the field of psychotechnics. (shrink)

This article explores the phenomenon of object performance in the US and France in the late 1970s and early 1980s, variously described as tabletop spectacles, ready-made puppetry, and théâtre d’objets. It focuses on the late-1970s work of three artists: Stuart Sherman, Paul Zaloom, and Christian Carrignon (of Théâtre de Cuisine), whose work in this “minor genre” has been widely influential. Examining the shared and diverging formal aspects of their object work, this article argues that their performances are marked by an (...) implied or explicit ecological consciousness and a connection to childhood and play. Situating the emergence of tabletop object performance within the end of the postwar economic boom, the article claims that these artists working in affluent economies invented a playful and incisive response to the growing crisis of the accumulation of waste. Drawing on Michael Marder’s Dump Philosophy, the essay argues that these object performances intervene in the epistemological and material dump of postwar consumer capitalism, offering playful strategies of navigating a world of refuse. The article suggests that these performances continue to resonate in the present day, with object play remaining a viable mode of grappling with the material and psychological overwhelm of our current ecological crises. (shrink)

Music, literature, history. These things are not quite alike. But in Europe, before the advent of recording machines that made it possible for sounds to be recorded and played back, the three activities relied on the same technology of preservation. They were kept in/as books. Bookishness, in European and colonial imaginaries, was an often-idealized, powerful means of keeping things from slipping away. An understanding of bookish things as a repository can be evinced in laws that required preserving a copy of (...) newly published literary works and music for the benefit of posterity; or in popular novels where a book featured as the chronicler (both recorder and narrator) of its own adventures, beyond the lifespans of individual users. Scholars have paid specialist attention to the ontological differences among music, literature, and history when they are kept as books. Discipline-specific trainings and conversations tend to emphasize how different these objects and practices are. Yet focusing on their shared mode of bookish preservation offers other rewards. Our multi-authored article is a creative experiment in bringing together musicologists, literary scholars, and historians to test the potential, for our own fields and with implications for other humanities disciplines, of foregrounding this technological convergence. We propose the more capacious categories of bookkeepers (people who keep things as books) and cultures of note-taking (whether glossing a textbook or notating music) as fruitful avenues to avoid writing the artificially separate histories of creation versus consumption, public versus personal, authoritative versus amateurish, or artistic versus documentary practices. Music, broadly conceived, and the nineteenth-century album (a book of blank pages to keep verses, music, memories, and many more things) serve as the starting point for our reflections. Both exhibit a tangential connection to the normative codes of what Roger Chartier called “the order of books.” In considering actors/artifacts/acts at the very margins of textuality, or existing in a perverse relationship with bookishness, our aim is to redraw the knowledge-making structures we use to investigate our objects of study, calling attention to the intermedial and social practices, and cultures of remembrance, in which they are historically imbricated. (shrink)

Since 2015, two influential American authors and military consultants have sought to leverage imaginative literature for the cause of national security. On the basis of concepts such as useful fiction and FICINT, a shorthand for fictional intelligence, they have sought to develop a new genre—the national security novel—which blends nonfictional research and predictive threat scenarios with the creative inventions and emotional appeal of fiction. In this article, I trace how the national security novel developed through a process of securitization, which (...) has gradually merged the realm of literature with that of policy and military strategy, and I assess the genre’s current and future impact on national and global security. (shrink)

This article puts forth a theory and history of the experiential moment of romance, traced from Homer’s Odyssey to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Differing from other forms of the moment that have been bequeathed by Western tradition—such as kairos, conversio, the Aristotelian pair peripeteia and anagnorisis, or the Romantic Augenblick—the experiential moment foregrounds experientiality within a self-enclosed and atelic temporality: a time that goes nowhere. Building on previous theories of epic and romance that see them as conflicting temporal forms, the first part (...) of the article demonstrates how the experiential moment in traditional romance always exists in tension with the temporality of the epic project of the collective. The second part proposes a new reading of Rousseau by showing how his three works, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Les Confessions, and Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire not only continue this conflict into the modern period but also begin to reverse the old hierarchical relationship between epic and romance or the temporality of the collective and that of the experiencing individual in her individual consciousness. It is argued that Rousseau in his final work the Rêveries strives to liberate the experiential moment from epic temporality altogether and thereby lays the foundation for a wholly new way of approaching the moment in literary modernity. (shrink)