In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Author, AuthorBernard KnoxThe title of this essay is not a reference to that enthusiastic but misguided shout from his friends in the audience at the St. James Theatre in 1895 that brought a reluctant Henry James to the stage at the end of his play Guy Domville, only to be greeted by whistles, shouts, and insults from the irate denizens of the gallery, one of whom had somewhat spoiled (...) the dramatic effect of the actor’s climactic line—“I am the last of the Domvilles”—by shouting: “And a bloody good thing y’are!” My title is the rubric of an infuriating competition that appears every week in the pages of the London Times Literary Supplement; it offers three quotations, all dealing more or less with the same subject, and defies the reader to identify the authors. Since the fiends who concoct these puzzles have carefully avoided passages likely to turn up in anthologies, having, in fact, ransacked their authors’ lesser-known works for texts innocent of such clues as proper names, dates, or allusions to historical events, the reader unwise enough to take a hand in the game has to rely on indications of the personality of the author.Not, obviously, the historical, biographical personality, but the literary personality: the characteristic attitudes and concerns, the rhythms, tones, and levels of discourse, the literary individuality that enables us to distinguish a paragraph of Jane Austen from one of Henry James, and either of them from one of Ernest Hemingway, or the epic blank verse of Milton from that of Keats or Tennyson. This literary identity is now the target of academic assaults from many quarters, of which I propose to single out two in particular—the Roland Barthes-Derrida denial of authors’ identity or even of their existence, and the New [End Page 76] Historicism, which confines that identity to the stringent limitations of the author’s time and place.The first aberration treats the author’s work as a “text,” material for the discovery of intertextuality, subtext, and—a word that I have not seen in print but that, if not yet born, is surely close to delivery from the womb of the goddess Terminologia—metatext, which, on the analogy of “metatheater,” would denote a text discussing its own textuality. In the deconstruction of the text the author disappears; Barthes in fact proclaimed the “death of the author.” But though such theories are usually thought of as French products of the Sixties and Seventies, their origins can be discerned in much earlier work done by Americans in the Forties, the years that saw the birth of that New Criticism which Norman Fruman recalls in his short history of our association, reasserting its basic principle: that “there should be a primary focus on literature as literature and not as something else.” I am myself a child—an aging child—of the New Criticism; the first article I ever published had a title that sounds like a parody of the typical New Critical title—“The Serpent and the Flame.” The editors of the American Journal of Philology, who reluctantly accepted the article after several unsuccessful attempts to get me to tone it down, felt constrained to add to the title: “Patterns of Imagery in the Second Book of the Aeneid.”But there was one aspect of the New Criticism that disturbed me: the influential idea, expounded by a formidable member of the Yale English department, William Wimsatt, called the Intentional Fallacy, which proclaimed that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” Though this pronouncement was hedged about with many limitations and provisos it still seemed to me to give rein to freewheeling interpretations that eased the acceptance of the radical hijacking of the author’s work by Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, and hoc genus omne.I was especially disturbed by this doctrine because, as a classical scholar, I had been very much concerned, as is every member of our discipline, with authorial intention at the basic level—the often vexed question not of what impression the author sought to make on the... (shrink)

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière has influenced disciplines from history and philosophy to political theory, literature, art history, and film studies. His research into nineteenth-century workers’ archives, reflections on political equality, critique of the traditional division between intellectual and manual labor, and analysis of the place of literature, film, and art in modern society have all constituted major contributions to contemporary thought. In this collection, leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism engage (...) Rancière’s work, illuminating its originality, breadth, and rigor, as well as its place in current debates. They also explore the relationships between Rancière and the various authors and artists he has analyzed, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Flaubert, Rossellini, Auerbach, Bourdieu, and Deleuze. The contributors to this collection do not simply elucidate Rancière’s project; they also critically respond to it from their own perspectives. They consider the theorist’s engagement with the writing of history, with institutional and narrative constructions of time, and with the ways that individuals and communities can disturb or reconfigure what he has called the “distribution of the sensible.” They examine his unique conception of politics as the disruption of the established distribution of bodies and roles in the social order, and they elucidate his novel account of the relationship between aesthetics and politics by exploring his astute analyses of literature and the visual arts. In the collection’s final essay, Rancière addresses some of the questions raised by the other contributors and returns to his early work to provide a retrospective account of the fundamental stakes of his project. _Contributors_. Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Yves Citton, Tom Conley, Solange Guénoun, Peter Hallward, Todd May, Eric Méchoulan, Giuseppina Mecchia, Jean-Luc Nancy, Andrew Parker, Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Kristin Ross, James Swenson, Rajeshwari Vallury, Philip Watts. (shrink)

Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an embarrassment. One resists labeling as a “psychoanalytic critic” because the kind of criticism evoked by the term mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, (...) I think we need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least since 1908, when Freud published his essay on “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,” and if the enterprise has recently been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched bedfellows—or perhaps I should say playmates.The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis: the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom’s psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to show how the represented female psyche refuses and problematizes the dominant concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the “situational-thematic”: studies of Oedipal triangles in fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth. It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions, since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic study of readers’ responses willingly brackets the impossible notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may concern real readers or the reader as psychological everyman . But like the other traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic structure—a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and should be textual and rhetorical. Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, which has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling. (shrink)

This article explains why its author has spent much of the past decade rediscovering the history of political thought (rather than enter into the fray of political philosophy as it has been practised since Rawls). The article is only an illustration; but its virtue is that it summarizes in a short space the thesis developed in my book The Primacy of the Political: A History of Political Thought from the Greeks to the American and French Revolutions. It (...) lays out a general theory of the political, demonstrates that there exists an inherent anti-political tendency within all politics (as seen in the rise of 20 th -century totalitarianism), and tries to suggest how this difficulty can be confronted. (shrink)

All disciplines have their histories in addition to their theories. In general, the history of a set of problems is treated separately from the nature of the problems themselves. The axioms of a given discipline may be the object of external inquiry but are not usually subject to historical examination. In this way, psychoanalysis has been investigated, even challenged, by a variety of other disciplines: biology, linguistics, history, philosophy, literature, and so forth. One may ask whether psychoanalysis can (...) also become its own object, effectively distancing itself from itself. Will historical scrutiny provide criticism from within and thereby alter the nature of psychoanalysis?It has been our observation that the history of the creation of psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalytic movement suggests deficiencies and omissions within psychoanalytic theory. This implies something far beyond the simple idea that no serious examination of theoretical problems can occur without an understanding of their history. Not only the past but the future of psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a clinical practice, may well depend on the conscious assessment and assimilation of its own history. “The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads Theory” is intended in part as an introduction to Nicolas Abraham’s “Notes on the Phantom” which will, in turn, illuminate the theoretical and practical scope of this essay.A history of Freudian psychoanalysis could be written based on the voices of dissenting insiders, without including schismatics such as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and others who eventually developed independent systems of thought. The detailed interpretation of such firsts is already a consecrated approach to psychoanalytic history. But much remains to be learned from the internal criticism of those who have participated in Freud’s movement or have sought sympathetically to understand the birth and progress of Freudian psychoanalysis. Most of the disagreements concern theoretical and clinical issues or the clocked access to documents that are essential to the history assessment of psychoanalysis. This is Ludwig Marcuse’s case as he writes to Ernest Jones on 10 October 1957.1 1. Ludwig Marcuse is the author of Freud und sein Bild vom Menschen [Freud and his image of man] . Nicholas Rand, assistant professor of French at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, is completing a book on the notion of hiding in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Maria Torok is the author of The Wolf Man’s Magic Word , recently published in translation. “The Secret of Psychoanalysis” is part of a book-length study Rand and Torok are writing on Freud and psychoanalytic theory. (shrink)

Contemporary Perspectives on the History of Philosophy was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The authors of the 27 appears in Volume 8, Midwest Studies in Philosophy,have established reputations as historians of philosophy, but their vantage point, here, is from "contemporary perspectives" - they use contemporary analytic skills to examine problems and issues considered by past philosophers. (...) The papers, arranged in historical order, fall into six groups: ancient philosophy (the Pythagoreans, Plato, and Aristotle); the seventeenth-century rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza); the empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume); Kant; the nineteenth century (Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Mill); and, in conclusion, an essay on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and two broad, retrospective papers entitled "Old Analyses of the Physical World and new Philosophies of Language" and "Moral Crisis and the History of Ethics.". (shrink)

Philologus, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest and most respected periodicals in the field of Classics. It publishes articles on Greek and Latin literature, historiography, philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, reception, and the history of scholarship. The journal aims to contribute to our understanding of Greco-Roman culture and its lasting influence on European civilization. The journal Philologus, conceived as a forum for discussion among different methodological approaches to the study of ancient texts and their reception, publishes (...) original scholarly contributions with a strong international focus. Publications languages are: German, English, Italian, French. As of 2014 the publication of supplementary volumes will be resumed. The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes will publish monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a special focus on topics concerning literary theory, philosophy and the history of scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

The first two volumes of a four-volume study, destined surely to become the standard work in its field. Literary criticism in the broadest sense is the book's subject, but the author tries to avoid purely philosophical aesthetics at one extreme--Kant is given 3 pages to Schiller's 24--as well as unsubstantiated judgments of taste at the other. Since he tries to see the past as bearing upon and productive of the literary theory of the present, the book might be said to (...) be more an account of the sources and growth of contemporary thinking about literature and criticism than a "history" in the usual sense. Professor Wellek has a rich store of scholarly knowledge at his disposal, and his interpretive generalizations are well supported by references and texts; yet the argument moves easily and clearly. A fine piece of creative scholarship.--V. C. C. (shrink)

This e-book written in Hungarian seeks to reconstruct “the aesthetic” in the modern sense of the word, from the mid-17th century to the 1730s, through the texts of mainly British authors such as John Dennis, Lord Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Francis Hutcheson, George Berkeley, sometimes using their Spanish and French predecessors for contextualization. It assumes that “the aesthetic” is an unprecedented type of experience that had to be discovered, or rather invented; it is therefore more than a discussion (...) of some old, always existing quality or sensibility in a new theoretical guise. If the words “(school) philosophy”, “art” and “criticism” can be associated with the mostly systematic theories of aesthetics that emerged in the wake of Alexander G. Baumgarten as a loose characterisation, then the words “(popular) theology”, “nature” and “exercise” are even more so with the earlier texts that are on the table here, which played a role in the formation of “the aesthetic”. It seems that in this period, “the aesthetic” is understood above all as a new and intimate link between the sensual and the supernatural or spiritual, in which the former is not just an apropos or disposable means to the latter, but an indispensable and ever-present component that provides a constitutive framework for experience. Its unprecedented modernity lies in its nisus to capture the divine in the sensual and to make it present as sensual. In this new experiential form, both the “nature” of the transcendence and the spiritual economics of the beholder are reconfigured. The new “aesthetic” is connected to and associated with the full experience of life, the joy of existence, the openness to the transcendent through the sensuality of the natural or everyday world, the interplay of external determination and internal spontaneity, the enchanted state of mind experienced in a waking dream, the reinterpretation of the relationship between reality and fiction, the intense existential experience of spiritual and emotional movement provided by walking, wandering, boating or cheerful imagination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950Eva L. CorredorA History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Volume 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900–1950, by René Wellek; xvii & 458 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, $42.50.The seventh volume of René Wellek’s history of modern criticism may well be the most interesting of his eight-volume monumental oeuvre. (...) Devoted to German, Russian, and Eastern European criticism between 1900 and 1950, it exemplifies most strikingly Wellek’s personal battles with critics who were roughly his contemporaries and closest to his own European background. “I should like to think of my History as ‘elucidatory,’ as not ‘argumentative’ or ‘polemical’” (v, xxi), Wellek writes, but he does not shrink from expressing his own critical perspective usually in a gentlemanly humorous or ironical, but occasionally also quite harsh and stubborn fashion. He insists on the importance of individual value judgments in critical analysis, particularly when they are his own: “I do not believe that... my views and those of my contemporaries will be replaced by completely different assumptions” (“Reflections on my History,” The Attack on Literature, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p. 145).Since Wellek rejects the idea of a historical determinism and thinks that “an evolutionary history of criticism must fail” (The Attack, p. 144), he provides less a history than a collection of essays in which he offers succinct appraisals of writers, thinkers and critics both as individuals and as participants in the broader literary movements of the century. He presents “portraits” (p. xv), which he also calls “doxographies” (The Attack, p. 143), containing a vast amount of quotations carefully selected to support the authority of his own views or to let them speak for themselves when he would rather not comment.More than any previous work, this volume embodies Wellek’s will and determination to carry on against all odds even when he can no longer do so on his own. An accident in 1986 left him bedridden and dependent on students and secretaries to help him with his research and writing. He was able to draw on a wealth of previously published essays, some of which had been written more than three decades ago. There are some arguable inaccuracies and shortcomings (his canon includes obscure writers but not Adorno and [End Page 259] again no women writers), and problems with his bibliographies and references. Yet Wellek’s unique talent to assemble in one volume half a century of critical commentary on the literatures of half a dozen different cultures appears intact. So do his well-known critical positions.Among his most interesting essays are those on Spitzer, Auerbach, Ingarden, Bakhtin, and Benjamin, highly erudite men in whose company Wellek enjoys moving. On the other hand, some extraordinarily fertile minds and their enormous influence on the post-1950 critical discourse are often quickly dismissed or treated with unnecessary condescension. Young Roman Jakobson “should be forgotten” (p. 372). Freud’s psychoanalysis “seems forced and mistaken” (p. 79). Heidegger “often ascribes a meaning which seems to me absent in the text itself” (p. 89). Wellek’s low tolerance of any but his own interpretation of Dostoevsky appears repeatedly in this volume: Thomas Mann’s views are called “strange” and “distorted” (p. 12), Freud’s “deeply flawed” (p. 79), Bakhtin’s “simply wrong” (p. 357), and Lukács’s “simply... [those] of Communism” (p. 232). Wellek’s anti-historicism is dramatized in essays on Auerbach and his “historical perspectivism” (p. 132), vs. Spitzer who “always saw that there is a point at which historicism must fail” (p. 144). The vacuum of German criticism during the Nazi period is hauntingly demonstrated. The essays on Walter Benjamin, Bertholt Brecht, and in particular György Lukács reveal best Wellek’s notorious feuds with Marxists. Wellek indulges in a sarcastic critique of the Marxist Lukács’s “doctrinaire limitations” (p. 245) and attempts, wrongfully, to “prove” the Hungarian philosopher’s “exaltation of Socialist Realism” (p. 244). When in the mid-eighties and after much encouragement Wellek finally writes an essay on the early Lukács, he... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Steven Fuller A FRENCH SCIENCE (WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES) It is of no news to anyone with even a passing interest in the theoretical wranglings of literary critics that deconstruction is on the defensive. This is of special interest to an historian and philosopher of science such as myself because (with the notable exception of Frank Lentricchia's revisionist history of contemporary critical trends) ] most of the recent (...) salvos launched against deconstruction have been supplied by analytic philosophy.2 Indeed, some analytic philosophers have felt bold enough to enter the fray themselves. And as with other Anglo-American incursions into theoretical debates of continental origin, whatever is lost in subtlety and sheer ingenuity is made up for in clarity and commonsense. If there is one theme common to adi analytically inspired attacks on deconstruction, it is that critical method ought to be a systematic articulation of the intuitions of the average reflective reader. To be a literary critic is not to achieve esoteric insight into the uncommunicative nature of texts; rather, it is to become more fully aware of the many ways in which texts do communicate. While such advice may be reassuring, it is certainly not very "philosophical" in the sense of "deeply problematic" that deconstructionists would claim for the nature of texts. And the deconstructionists are right — so I believe. At least, I will try to show that the case for deconstruction, in all its radicalness, can be made with something of the clarity desired by analytic philosophers. A contentious critic might wonder, at this point, why the deconstructionists were not clear in the first place (thereby rendering this article superfluous). The reason, contrary to what certain "friends of deconstruction" in the analytic tradition would have us believe, is that there are few precedents in the recent history of philosophy for claims made by deconstructionists.3 It would indeed be faint praise to find, as Hacking and Rorty have maintained, that the theses of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida were anticipated in the limpid prose style of a Quine, a Goodman, or a Kuhn.4 Why is the latter set of writers so clear, while the former set is so obscure? Our contentious critic might conclude diat clarity of style reflects a clarity of thought, and likewise for obscurity of style. In any case, both friends 2 Philosophy and Literature and foes of deconstruction tend to agree diat whatever is of value in the French texts may be derived with less effort by reading the American ones. The friends want to place deconstruction among several strains oftwentieth-century thought that would dissolve classical philosophy into a critical history of ideas, while the foes (more ingenuously perhaps) want to resume the business of practical criticism as usual and its attendant function (à la F. R. Leavis) of preserving Western Culture. Since the analytic devil can (and will) cite deconstructionist scripture for his own purposes, it is not clear that explicating Derrida will settle matters, especially since deconstruction gives an ironic twist to the search for what an author "had in mind" when he composed a particular text. It is, however, interesting to note that when one analytic philosopher recently presented a paradigm of literary criticism that allegedly compensated for the excesses of deconstruction, he resorted to Kantian talk about the intentions of the author being a "regulative ideal" toward which all responsible practical criticism aspires.5 This paradigm claims to owe to deconstruction the idea that, once an author is separated from his text, die reader becomes unable to verify any hypotheses about what the author meant by what he wrote. However, the evidence surrounding the text's composition (as well as the text itself) may be reconstructed so as to suggest a model of the audioes intentions. In that case, the explanatory adequacy of such a model would be relative to the evidence and methods available to the critic. And so, while the text certainly had a real audior who possessed a set of determinate intentions at the time ofwriting, mere is no reason to think that the most plausible model of the currendy available evidence picks out those intentions. What we have here is the first of two species of... (shrink)

Philologus, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest and most respected periodicals in the field of Classics. It publishes articles on Greek and Latin literature, historiography, philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, reception, and the history of scholarship. The journal aims to contribute to our understanding of Greco-Roman culture and its lasting influence on European civilization. The journal Philologus, conceived as a forum for discussion among different methodological approaches to the study of ancient texts and their reception, publishes (...) original scholarly contributions with a strong international focus. Publications languages are: German, English, Italian, French. As of 2014 the publication of supplementary volumes will be resumed. The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes will publish monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a special focus on topics concerning literary theory, philosophy and the history of scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

Philologus, founded in 1846, is one of the oldest and most respected periodicals in the field of Classics. It publishes articles on Greek and Latin literature, historiography, philosophy, history of religion, linguistics, reception, and the history of scholarship. The journal aims to contribute to our understanding of Greco-Roman culture and its lasting influence on European civilization. The journal Philologus, conceived as a forum for discussion among different methodological approaches to the study of ancient texts and their reception, publishes (...) original scholarly contributions with a strong international focus. Publications languages are: German, English, Italian, French. As of 2014 the publication of supplementary volumes will be resumed. The series Philologus. Supplemente / Philologus. Supplementary Volumes will publish monographs and edited volumes pertaining to all aspects of the study of ancient literature and its reception, with a special focus on topics concerning literary theory, philosophy and the history of scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective. (shrink)

As new ideas arose during the Enlightenment, many political thinkers published their own versions of popular early modern "absolutist" texts and transformed them into manuals of political resistance. As a result, these works never achieved a fixed and stable edition. Publishing The Prince illustrates how Abraham-Nicolas Amelot de La Houssaye created the most popular late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century version of Machiavelli's masterpiece. In the process of translating, Amelot also transformed the work, altering its form and meaning, and his ideas spread (...) through later editions. Revising the orthodox schema of the public sphere in which political authority shifted away from the crown with the rise of bourgeois civil society in the eighteenth century, Soll uses the example of Amelot to show for the first time how the public sphere in fact grew out of the learned and even royal libraries of erudite scholars and the bookshops of subversive, not-so-polite publicists of the republic of letters. Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Cover art courtesy of Annenberg Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania Jacket Design: Stephanie Milanowski "Jacob Soll traces the origins of Enlightenment criticism to the practices of learned humanists and hard-pressed literary entrepreneurs. This learned and lively book is also a tour de force of historical research and interpretation." ---Anthony Grafton, author of Cardano's Cosmos and Bring Out Your Dead "Brilliant. How the printed page changed political philosophy into investigative reporting, and reason of state into the unmasking of power." ---J. G. A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment "Soll's path-breaking study is a 'must read' for all those interested in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history." ---Barbara Shapiro, University of California Berkeley "Soll has done [Amelot] and his context justice, writing as he does with a clear, singular, and welcome voice." ---Margaret C. Jacobs, American Historical Review. (shrink)

The authors aptly describe their work as a narrative. The protagonists are sometimes great thinkers, sometimes ideas about literary criticism, sometimes different approaches to literature whose intermingling histories are here described. At the same time the authors are in quest of a varied and many-sided presentation of the nature and writing of literature. Accordingly the insights of philosophers and literary men are stressed more than the consistency of their opinions; understanding is valued more highly than the certainty of systems. In (...) this way classical texts are placed in an interesting new light and lesser known episodes of this history are brought to life.--R. G. S. (shrink)

What role have experiments played, and should they play, in physics? How does one come to believe rationally in experimental results? The Neglect of Experiment attempts to provide answers to both of these questions. Professor Franklin's approach combines the detailed study of four episodes in the history of twentieth century physics with an examination of some of the philosophical issues involved. The episodes are the discovery of parity nonconservation in the 1950s; the nondiscovery of parity nonconservation in the 1930s, (...) when the results of experiments indicated, at least in retrospect, the symmetry violation, but the significance of those results was not realized; the discovery and acceptance of CP symmetry; and Millikan's oil-drop experiment. Franklin examines the various roles that experiment plays, including its role in deciding between competing theories, confirming theories, and calling fo new theories. The author argues that one can provide a philosophical justification for these roles. He contends that if experiment plays such important roles, then one must have good reason to believe in experimental results. He then deals with deveral problems concerning such reslults, including the epistemology of experiment, how one comes to believe rationally in experimental results, the question of the influence of theoretical presuppositions on results, and the problem of scientific fruad. This original and important contribution to the study of the philosophy of experimental science is an outgrowth of many years of research. Franklin brings to this work more than a decade of experience as an experimental high-energy physicist, along with his significant contributions to the history and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Sensationism, a philosophy that gained momentum in the French Enlightenment as a response to Lockean empiricism, was acclaimed by Hippolyte Taine as "the doctrine of the most lucid, methodical, and French minds to have honored France." The first major general study in English of eighteenth-century French sensationism, _The Authority of Experience_ presents the history of a complex set of ideas and explores their important ramifications for literature, education, and moral theory. The study begins by presenting the (...) main ideas of sensationist philosophers Condillac, Bonnet, and Helvétius, who held that all of our ideas come to us through the senses. The experience of the body in seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching enabled individuals, as John C. O'Neal points out, to challenge the sometimes arbitrary authority of institutions and people in positions of power. After a general introduction to sensationism, the author develops a theory of sensationist aesthetics that not only reveals the interconnections of the period's philosophy and literature but also enhances our awareness of the forces at work in the French novel. He goes on to examine the relations between sensationism and eighteenth-century French educational theory, materialism, and _idéologie_. Ultimately, O'Neal opens a discussion of the implications of sensationist thought for issues of particular concern to society today. (shrink)

Oscar Kenshur’s “Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism” should go a long way toward convincing most readers that the cure for “ideological” criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the “more-historical-than-thou” offensive against Marxists and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1 There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about the nature of (...) ideological analysis that should be debated. However, he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur’s argument is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants to tile—most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a “corrective” to overzealous claims for the significance of ideological criticism that has the effect not of “sav[ing history] from its friends” but of returning it to the status of “background” or “context” that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The terms in which he casts his argument—epistemology and/or ideology—redefine “ideological criticism” in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save “history” from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth-century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length study of the various discourses in which and against which their works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur’s argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for ideological analysis. 1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama,” PMLA 102 : 292-303. Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He is the author of Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the Discourses of Natural Philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French ThoughtVirginia A. La CharitéDowncast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, by Martin Jay; xi & 632 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00.The book jacket flyleaf for Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes proclaims in exuberant and laudatory terms that this study has a double agenda: one is to show that vision is by no (...) means the dominant sense in ordering Western culture and the other is to posit instead a “plurality of ‘scopic regimes, particularly in the climate of postmodernism. Indeed, antiocularcentrism provides the unifying thread of Jay’s work, which reviews the theory of vision from Plato to Bergson in the first three chapters and concentrates on “the culture of modernity” in chapters four through eight; the ninth chapter interestingly and curiously places Derrida and feminist criticism side by side under the aegis of “phallogocularcentrism” and presents Derrida and Irigaray if not as the high points of modernism, then at least as the center of the poststructuralist discourse, which argues for the elevation of the word over the eye and so offers downcast eyes as the new logo for what is now identified as postmodernism. Jay’s last chapter addresses postmodernism as a foreclosure on visual practice or the ocularcentric. The short seven-page conclusion attempts to place a positive note on the author’s admitted denigration of the notion of visuality in modern French intellectual thought and culture by calling for a plural or multiple—“polyscopic”—visual experience. Hence, Jay concludes that his notion of downcast eyes or disillusionment is “no solution” (p. 592) to the problem. Certainly, Broodthaer’s “L’Oeil” on the jacket cover does not present [End Page 162] downcast eyes but rather the very feminine alluring eye of a seductress. In this sense, the real message of Jay’s work is reader, beware! His provocative title and even more provocative subtitle initiate from the outset a critique of one of the long-held and cherished myths about the dominance and prominence of the visual sense in Western culture, especially in modern French thought. It is the unsettling of the comfortableness of this notion which Jay’s work successfully undertakes.The study is well-organized and lucidly written. It forcefully argues the author’s case. Unfortunately, there is no bibliography. The omission of a bibliography undercuts the project and casts scholarly suspicion on the entire venture. In all truth, the inclusion of a bibliography would dramatically call attention to serious lacunae in the scholarship. The French thinkers presented and analyzed, such as Bataille, Barthes, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, Irigaray, and Lyotard, have been studied in depth—at times brilliantly—but Jay ignores this rich corpus of critical material. In particular, his treatment of important French poets such as Rimbaud, the surrealists, Ponge, and others is so skewed in order to reinforce his denigration of the dominant role of vision in twentieth-century French writing that the reader in the field of French studies questions the quality of the basic research undertaken for the project and the author’s skill at reading with understanding and sensitivity hermetic material in the original French. Once these questions are raised, the very nature of Jay’s study itself becomes suspect.As the reader progresses through the volume, it seems that most of Jay’s analyses of the primary texts are based on English translations and are in fact limited to those works available in translation. While this may not be the actual case, the lack of a bibliography reinforces such a suspicion and contributes to the steady erosion of the credibility of the study. Even worse, it poses a troubling if not invidious question: who is the audience for Downcast Eyes? Surely, the audience is not humanists who specialize in twentieth-century French studies. If the intended audience is one of scholars and their students in cultural history and the social sciences with little grounding in contemporary French intellectual thought as manifested in its literature and literary criticism, this audience needs to begin its reading with Jay’s conclusion which is a masterfully subtle denigration of his own work on... (shrink)

Although Eddington's philosophy of physics has been subjected to critical re-evaluation in recent years, neither the exact nature of his structuralist views nor his response to criticism by the likes of Braithwaite have been made clear. In this paper I trace, in particular, the incorporation into Eddington's structuralism of the non-classical indistinguishability of quantum objects. His metaphysical view of such objects as the product of group-theoretical analysis is crucial for understanding his response to Braithwaite's criticisms of the whole structuralist endeavor. (...) These criticisms closely resemble more recent attacks on structural realism in the philosophy of science. I conclude with a brief comparison between these more modern forms of structuralism and Eddington's. (shrink)

Dilemma one, Between the theoretical concepts and authorial intention -- Dilemma two, Good manners and eristic -- Dilemma three, Between strangeness and familiarity -- Dilemma four, Between scholarly research and faith.

Given how thoroughly the history of quantum physics has been excavated, it might be wondered what these two hefty volumes by a physicist (Duncan) and a historian (Janssen) bring to the table. Aside from their inclusion of a wide range of recent work in this area, including some notable publications by themselves, the answer is twofold: first, as they state explicitly in the preface to the first volume, derivations of the key results are presented ‘at a level that a (...) reader with a command of physics and mathematics comparable to that of an undergraduate in physics should be able to follow without having to take out pencil and paper’ (vol. 1, p. vi). In response to those who might raise Whiggish eyebrows, I shall simply play the ‘you-try-reading-Pascual-Jordan's-groundbreaking-work-in-the-original’ card. As the authors suggest, by using modern notation and streamlining derivations whilst also, they maintain, remaining conceptually faithful to the original sources (ibid.), the book is rendered suitable for classroom use, albeit at the higher undergraduate or graduate levels. (shrink)

In this opinion piece, the authors offer their personal and idiosyncratic views of the future of the philosophy of science, focusing on its relationship with the history of science and metaphysics, respectively. With regard to the former, they suggest that the Kantian tradition might be drawn upon both to render the history and philosophy of science more relevant to philosophy as a whole and to overcome the challenges posed by naturalism. When it comes to the latter, they suggest (...) both that metaphysics has much to learn from the philosophy of science and that it offers an array of tools that philosophers of science can themselves appropriate. (shrink)

The article seeks to refute the popular idea in Russian-language scientific literature of French personalism as a homogeneous and monolithic movement, briefly pointing out the existence of three of its internal movements: Esprit, Ordre Nouveau and Jeune Droite. Focusing on the figure of D. de Rougemont, this study nevertheless shows the close connection between these three groups and the commonality of ideological quests. Dwelling in detail on the confessional context of the differences between Esprit and Ordre Nouveau, the author (...) demonstrates that both groups are still united in the perception of the concept of “personality” as a spiritual imperative for a person in the 1930s (albeit not agreeing on some details of its definition) and criticism of contemporary political regimes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading History: On Jacob Burckhardt as Source-ReaderJürgen GroßeThere is a gap between the reputation Jacob Burckhardt (1818–97) has enjoyed among the educated public and among professional historians—a discrepancy that has become commonplace in the century-long reception of the Swiss cultural historian’s work. 1 Nevertheless, in the light of recent appraisals of Burckhardt as an ancestor of a different—perhaps a new—cultural history, and with the rediscovery of his (...) contributions to the history of art, aesthetics, and historical anthropology, the gap seems to be ever-narrowing. 2 However, let us keep it open in the following few pages.The chasm between assessments of Burckhardt as an historian-writer and as an historian-researcher appears roughly analogous to his above-mentioned respective reputations among laymen and professional scholars. As a historian Burckhardt did not want to be a scientific researcher. From the time he began writing history he admitted that he felt little commitment to the predominating concept of scientific progress as a continuous accumulation of facts and theories. Thus, as an outsider to the profession he had only one option, which was to [End Page 525] attain a place of honor as an esteemed writer of historical books for the educated public—a “master historian.” Yet it is precisely this characterization of Burckhardt that makes a curious fact appear all the more baffling: the act of writing books made Burckhardt feel thoroughly tormented. Throughout his career, he lamented historical authorship as a thankless occupation—a form of “slavery.” Just four years after finishing Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) Burckhardt wrote to his friend Paul Heyse:I now consider my modest literary career as finally closed, and feel much better and content reading sources, as I only study and make notes for teaching and not for possible book-making. The historical market is tremendously overcrowded as things are, and it will be worse if peace lasts. 3Books like Die Zeit Constantins des Großen, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, and Der Cicerone—works that gained the Basler historian fame that has endured to the present day—were either not prepared by the author for further editions or abandoned for colleagues to revise. Thus, Burckhardt seemed to regard himself neither as a researcher nor as a writer but rather as a reader of history. His dislike of research and authorship deserves our attention not only because it stands in sharp contrast to the mores of the scientific community, both in his and our times; for it might also elucidate yet another interesting paradox: Burckhardt, who celebrated the “reading of sources” and “the insights accessible from sources” as no other nineteenth-century historian, was soon to be charged with failing to meet the accepted standards of source-criticism. This essay examines these problems in terms of a series of questions concerning Burckhardt’s reading of history.Why Burckhardt Prefers ReadingBurckhardt clearly abhorred what he called the “history of the events.” Already as a student, he felt himself confronted with a barrage of events, not so much as matters of real history as rather as products of historical science—the ever-increasing facts that historians produced in relation to actual events. Unlike the humanistic and enlightenment paradigms of history, mainstream nineteenth-century scholarship no longer relied on the eyewitness to guarantee authenticity. The focus had shifted from remembrance to reconstruction; events were now narrated in terms of newly conceived abstractions like “development,” “process,” “spirit of an age,” and “spirit of a nation.” This increasing detachment from eyewitnessed experience paved the way for an endless production of information, [End Page 526] which had become an occupation in its own right. Every newcomer to the study of history now encountered a huge mass of mere historical facts, largely devoid of content—“a desperate prospect at the beginning of the study of history,” according to Burckhardt. Furthermore, the dynamism of modern history itself continued to produce more and more “events,” which were then to be reproduced as “facts.” This mire of facts burdened the reader of historiography even more than the student of history. “Even the most well-meaning of contemporary historians,” Burckhardt... (shrink)

Urban studies understandably dominate the historiography and our comprehension of the French Wars of Religion. Social, religious and, more recently, political issues have all been in vogue in studies of the wars and, therefore, in the histories of towns. Confessional conflict and coexistence, relations between royal and municipal authorities, affiliation to Protestantism or the Catholic League, have all exercised urban histories. Key moments during the wars highlight the importance of the towns and the trauma they experienced. Yet, despite tension (...) and division, urban communities had a shared concern in the maintenance of civic order and the defence of local integrity. (shrink)

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions (...) of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scriptural AuthorityA Buddhist PerspectiveShi ZhiruLike gold that is melted, cut, and polished, So should monks and scholars Analyze my words [before] accepting them; They should not do so out of respect.1As other papers in this volume have already noted, there is a crisis of authority in modern religion, particularly in the West. One defining characteristic of modernity is a deep sense of rupture from the old, from the traditional, (...) which is compounded by a heightened awareness of the subjectivity of self.2 Therefore, in the age of modernity, or postmodernity, critical and skeptical questioning of forms of religious authority is almost inevitable. While the crisis of religious authority is certainly enhanced in modernity, I would argue that the crisis of authority has always been part and parcel of religious innovation and transmission in Buddhist history. Critical self-reflection and skepticism of scriptural authority were present already in early Buddhism; at various junctures throughout Buddhist history, attitudes toward scriptural authority were often renegotiated in connection with major religious changes that in turn were usually prompted by larger social and historical changes. As the critical theorist Jürgen Habermas points out, “the term ‘modern’ again and again expresses the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new.” 3 Defined in this manner, the bridging of the “modern” and the past is not unique to the so-called epoch of modernity or postmodernity, but has occurred repeatedly throughout different historical periods.This paper discusses different junctures in Buddhist history when scriptural authority was problematized as part of self-reflection and criticism of the “tradition.” Rethinking the authority of scriptures often involves juxtaposing it against the authority of religious experience, and such reconsideration typically took place as part of religious change that unfolded in different sociocultural and geographical environments. It is tempting to immediately equate “religious experience” in the early Buddhist texts to the prevalent understanding of this term in the modern world, but one must caution that modern definitions and discourse on the topic are largely shaped [End Page 85] by post-Enlightenment ideals and rhetoric in Western religious history, which may not be applicable to traditional Buddhist cultures.4 Hence, it is necessary to unpack the range of premodern Buddhist understanding of “religious experience” according to its contextual references, and not hasten to assume a necessary polarity between the unmediated experience and scriptural exegesis that is generally assumed in modern discourse. Rather than a singular voice for the Buddhist position on scriptural authority, it is important to acknowledge the polyphony of voices and perspectives, sometimes even contradicting one another, in different forms of Buddhism. It is thus critical to contextualize the multiple voices within the different historical and religious circumstances that engendered a particular perspective.It should be noted that my discussion is hardly intended to be a comprehensive survey, but focuses on three examples: early Buddhism, early Mahāyāna, and Chan Buddhism. They are chosen because they aptly illustrate how Buddhists reconceived scriptural or textual authority as part of a critical rethinking of Buddhist thought and practice. Moreover, while religious experience was regularly invoked to undermine the normative scriptural authority of the time, nevertheless, in all the examples considered in this paper, the undermining of “old” scriptural authority gave way to new scriptural or literary authorities. This prioritization of religious experience in reality rarely excludes scriptural or textual authorities, but was often adopted for polemical and rhetorical purposes. The paper concludes with an attempt to broaden the understanding of Buddhist scriptural authority by highlighting the authority of scriptures as material objects, a perspective that has been largely neglected in comparative cross-cultural studies of scriptures.5 On a cautionary note, I am using the word “scripture” in a broad sense to mean the body of sacred texts accepted as the authority by a given religious tradition. As historians of religion have noted, it is necessary to dissociate sacred texts (particularly those of Asian religions) from the concept of “scripture,” which in its literal sense, as used to discuss Abrahamic religions, means the “written word... (shrink)

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was the mastermind behind the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 that ended the War of the Spanish Succession, and a lifelong rival of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. He is also known for his political use of history based on the saying of Dionysius of Halicarnassus: ‘history is a philosophy teaching by examples’. While much scholarly attention has been paid to Bolingbroke’s historical criticism of Walpole’s Whig oligarchy, his discussion of European (...) international history has been treated as a mere vindication of the Treaty of Utrecht, thus not meriting further investigation. This article reconstructs Bolingbroke’s writings on European politics as a history of British foreign policy. Arguing that his focus was on Britain’s role in maintaining the balance of power, this article demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, Bolingbroke attacked the Hanoverian government not for its involvement in European politics per se but for its abandonment of the Old System of William III against France. Bolingbroke believed history was repeating itself. As the Stuarts had helped France achieve hegemony half a century ago, the Hanoverians enabled France to regain supremacy in their pursuit of private interests, re-disrupting the European balance of power. (shrink)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was described by Paul Ricoeur as 'the greatest of the French phenomenologists'. The essays in this volume examine the full scope of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, from his central and abiding concern with the nature of perception and the bodily constitution of intentionality to his reflections on science, nature, art, history, and politics. The authors explore the historical origins and context of his thought as well as its continuing relevance to contemporary work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive (...) science, biology, art criticism and political and social theory. What emerges is a fresh image of Merleau-Ponty as a deep and original thinker whose philosophical importance has been underestimated, in part owing to the influence of intellectual movements such as existentialism and structuralism, into which his work could not be easily assimilated. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Merleau-Ponty currently available. (shrink)

Originally published in 1971. The purpose of this book is to draw attention to important aspects of thought in the nineteenth century. While its central concerns lie within the philosophic tradition, materials drawn from the social sciences and elsewhere provide important illustrations of the intellectual movements that the author attempts to trace. This book aims at examining philosophic modes of thought as well as sifting presuppositions held in common by a diverse group of thinkers whose antecedents and whose intentions often (...) had little in common. After a preliminary tracing of the main strands of continuity within philosophy itself, the author concentrates on how, out of diverse and disparate sources, certain common beliefs and attitudes regarding history, man, and reason came to pervade a great deal of nineteenth-century thought. Geographically, this book focuses on English, French, and German thought. Mandelbaum believes that views regarding history and man and reason pose problems for philosophy, and he offers critical discussions of some of those problems at the conclusions of parts 2, 3, and 4. (shrink)

About the Author James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His many books include Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, and What Painting Is, all published by Routledge. Michael Newman teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College in the (...) University of London. His publications include the books Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) and Jeff Wall, and he is co-editor with Jon Bird of Rewriting Conceptual Art. (shrink)

This study discusses the treatise of Jalāl al-Dīn Davvānī (d. 908/1502) named Risāla fī taʻrīf ʻilm. This treatise criticizes a definition of knowledge adopted by some theologians in the late period (mutaʾakhkhirīn). The definition of knowledge at issue consists of three components: Attribution, discernment, no possibility of contradiction. Knowledge is an attribute as a category and with this attribution, a discernment is obtained. As a result of this process knowledge is acquired and there should be no possibility of this knowledge (...) to be inconsistent. Davvānī examines eight possibilities of the definition on knowledge. In each of these eight possibilities a different problems arises. According to Davvānī, the definition mentioned is problematic in all probability. Nonetheless, Davvānī does not propose another definition of knowledge that can replace the definition of knowledge that he criticizes. This article represents the process of reaching the definition of knowledge stated in the history of theological thought. The definitions on knowledge made from the first period (al-mutaqaddimīn) are summarized and the strengths and weaknesses of these definitions are explained. There are two main approaches regarding the nature of knowledge in Islamic thought: According to the first approach pioneered by Fakhr al-Dīn Rāzī (d. 606/1202), absolute knowledge is a priory (badīhī) and undefinable. According to the second one, the nature of absolute knowledge is a posteriori (naẓarī) and definable. The first part of this article includes the definitions and criticisms of knowledge in Islamic thought. The second part discusses the claim of originality. In the second part, Davvānī’s treatise will be evaluated for the first time. According to the conclusion of the treatise, the definition made to find the essence of knowledge is unfounded in all respect. It is important to evaluate the treatise as a reflection of anti-essentialism in the history of Islamic thought. Most contemporary studies do not count this treatise among Davvānī’s works. In the biography book al-Aʿlām written by Khayr al-Dīn al-Ziriklī (d. 1976), Risāla fī taʻrīf ʻilm is counted among the works of Davvānī. In the introduction of more than one manuscript, the work is clearly attributed to Davvānī. As a result of the double-sided research, it has been ensured that the work belongs to Davvānī. However, in other two manuscripts containing the same treatise, the work is shown as belonging to an unknown person named Şāirzāda. But there is no information found about this person. This name seems more like a copyist (mustansıh) than an author. Possibly, such a mistake occurred as a result of confusing the two names. Davvānī’s small volume treatise sheds light on the intellectual atmosphere and level of its period. The definition of knowledge mentioned in the classical theology book of ‘Aḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1355) called al-Mawāqif is superior to other definitions of knowledge. Instead of this definition of knowledge, which is presented as perfect, Jurjānī (d. 816/1413) preferred the definition of knowledge attributed to al-Māturīdī (d. 333/944) in the Sharḥ al-Mawāqif. This preference has been accepted as an implicit criticism for future generations, including Davvānī. Those who claimed that Jurjānī did not taken a random choice, carried on their criticism by going over the definition. The fine craftsmanship revealed in the treatise reveals that critical thinking is used intensively. The properly understanding of the treatise depends on knowing the science of logic and following it with intense attention. The definition of knowledge is examined from various angles with the help of concepts such as conception, ratification, judgment and contradiction (nakz) of the science of logic. In the science of logic, every layer of knowledge such as certainty, conjecture, imitation, doubt is investigated one by one. In the science of kalām, attention is paid that the ideal level of knowledge is precise. An uncertain knowledge is not considered knowledge according to kalām. Because the main goal of theologians is to build religious beliefs on the obtained certain knowledge. It is not accepted to base knowledge to a probable information on imprecise knowledge. For a knowledge among the knowns to reach the level of certainty, it must be correct and exclude other possibilities. Another condition is required for certainty in the definition of knowledge that Davvānī examines in his treatise is that the opposite is wrong. The fact that a piece of information is considered true depends on the fact that its reverse is false. In this treatise, it is discussed how to look for the contradictions or discrepancy that are wanted to be excluded. Knowledge is inseparable from the human mind, from outside of the world, or from the relationship between the two. (shrink)

The problem I have in mind is the problem of the possible justification of subjecting one's will to that of another, and of the normative standing of demands to do so. The account of authority that I offered, many years ago, under the title of the service conception of authority, addressed this issue, and assumed that all other problems regarding authority are subsumed under it. Many found the account implausible. It is thin, relying on very few ideas. It may well (...) appear to be too thin, and to depart too far from many of the ideas that have gained currency in the history of reflection on authority. The present article modifies some aspects the account, and defends it against some criticism made against it. (shrink)

Ever since it was first published 1930, William Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity" has been perceived as a milestone in literary criticism - far from being an impediment to communication, ambiguity now seemed an index of poetic richness and expressive power. Little, however, has been written on the broader trajectory of Western thought about ambiguity before Empson; as a result, the nature of his innovation has been poorly understood. This book remedies this omission. Starting with classical grammar and rhetoric, and (...) moving on to moral theology, law, biblical exegesis, German philosophy, and literary criticism, the author explores the many ways in which readers and theorists posited, denied, conceptualized, and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts between antiquity and the twentieth century. This process took on a variety of interconnected forms, from the Renaissance delight in the "elegance" of ambiguities in Horace, through the extraordinary Catholic claim that Scripture could contain multiple literal - and not just allegorical - senses, to the theory of dramatic irony developed int he nineteenth century, a theory intertwined with discoveries of the double meanings in Greek tragedy. Such narratives are not merely of antiquarian interest: rather, they provide an insight into the foundations of modern criticism, revealing deep resonances between acts of interpretation in disparate eras and contexts. This book lays bare the long tradition of efforts to liberate language, and even a poet's intention, from the strictures of a single meaning. (shrink)

: The 1997 Japanese organ transplantation law is the fruit of a long debate on "brain death" and organ transplantation, which involved the general public and experts in the relevant fields. The aim of this paper is to trace the history of the implementation of the law and to critique the law in terms of its consistency and fairness. The paper argues that the legislation adopts a double standard regarding the role of the family. On the one hand, the (...) legislation overemphasizes the family's authority by granting the family a veto on the matter of organ transplantation, while, on the other hand, not allowing the family to make surrogate decisions. In addition, the role of the law in cases involving minor or incompetent patients is shown to be similarly misguided. The paper argues that accepting a decisive role for the family in current law is compatible with Japanese culture. (shrink)

Hans Kelsen has been praised for his defense of democracy but that defense has also been criticized, most notably by Carl Schmitt. Leo Strauss was just as critical but his critique has gone unnoticed. Much of this neglect is because the relevant works remained unpublished. In one work Strauss contends that his conception of authority guarantees order and security whereas Kelsen’s notion of democracy leads to anarchy and chaos. This essay is intended to fill this gap by providing an examination (...) of Strauss’ criticism of Kelsen’s democratic liberalism. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name (...) for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In my essay on Austin I did not specify what I took the politics of my own discourse to be, but the institutional pressures on it, in particular the pressures of the professionalization of American philosophy, were in outline clear enough. I was more and more galled by the mutual shunning of the continental and the Anglo-American traditions of philosophizing, and I was finding more and more oppressive the mutual indifference of philosophy and literature to one another, especially, I suppose, (...) of American philosophy and American literature, and especially philosophy's indifference to the literary conditions of its own existence. I was still near the beginning of what is turning out to be a lifelong quarrel with the profession of philosophy. One of its recent manifestations has been the question put to me by certain professional colleagues whether I do not take satisfaction from the newer literary theory and criticism, especially as that has been inspired by developments over the past fifteen or so years in French intellectual life. This would seem to answer my plea at one stroke for both continental philosophy and for an understanding with literary matters. The fact is that my ambivalence toward these developments has been so strong, or anyway periodic, that I have found it difficult to study in any very orderly way.The reason for my difficulty is contained in what I mean by my quarrel with the profession of philosophy. That this is a quarrel means that I recognize the profession to be the genuine present of the impulse and the history of philosophy, so far as that present takes its place in our public intellectual life. This is what makes my quarrel with it a part of what I take my intellectual adventure to be. My point in the quarrel is that I can recognize no expression of mine to be philosophical which simply thinks to escape my profession's paradigms of comprehensibility; so that the invocations of the name of philosophy in current literary debate are frequently not comprehensible to me as calls upon philosophy. It may be that I should care less about this than I do, even less than my ambivalence asks. I mean to bear this in mind as I go on to spend the bulk of my time here considering in a practical way some passages from the writing of two literary theorists who have recourse to the work of Austin. In the case of the passages from Stanley Fish, it may be that my efforts will just amount to clearing up some unnecessarily confusing terminology; some passages from Paul de Man I find more troubling.Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of Walden, The Claim of Reason, and most recently Pursuits of Happiness. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "On Makavejev On Bergman" , "A Reply to John Hollander" , and "North by Northwest". (shrink)

The paper determines the status of the “Oral History of Philosophy” within the history of philosophy as a discipline. The author formulates his theses as answers to the fundamental questions Serhii Yosypenko asked in 2019. The latter subjected the first attempts to comprehend the then-new concept of “Oral History of Philosophy” to fruitful criticism. It is in response to his criticisms that the former gives now his answers which can be summarized in six points: (1) Oral (...) class='Hi'>History of Philosophy is fundamentally different from Oral History and is not limited to the application of the interview method; (2) it is a set of dialogical methods of producing new information in the field of the history of philosophy, that is, a new methodology that can be used in any historical-philosophical research; (3) the main difference is the orientation of the Oral History of Philosophy not to personal testimony, but to joint reflection; (4) this focus on reflection determines all the methods of Oral History of Philosophy; (5) the name “Oral History of Philosophy” is due to the specifics of the situation that gave rise to this methodology rather than a conscious conceptual reflection; (6) this methodology can be given a more exact name: “Dialogical forms of historical-philosophical reflection”, while the name “Oral history of philosophy” can be used for those dialogical forms that rely on oral speech. (shrink)

In this book, one of the world's leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism." Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek (...) historiography--Herodotus's broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides' contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question. The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley's highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past. (shrink)

This article is a "review of reviews," a study of the critical response to Simone de Beauvoir's book, The Second Sex , published in 1949; it also reports the publishing history and provides some statistical information on the criticism and citations of the book. The claim here is that Beauvoir's work is a "classic" appreciated for its theoretical notion of "woman as absolute Other" and its accompanying description of patriarchal culture as a reflection of that notion. But it is (...) a classic with a mercurial past. Though the book and its author were severely attacked following its French publication, the work received positive reviews four years later upon its translation into English. Yet until the onset of the feminist movement, Beauvoir's ideas were largely ignored. However, upon the development of feminist activism followed by feminist scholarship and feminist theory, the book's analysis quickly took on a foundational status. A survey of the criticism of the book provides insight into the history of contemporary feminist theory, for nearly all of the serious debates of contemporary feminism are reflected in the critical discussion of The Second Sex. (shrink)

"Ruskin was the most important aesthetic authority of the 19th century. In his dozens of books and lectures he wrote about the qualities of art. the key figure, the history that connected one to another. In The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, Seven Lamps of Architecture he developed rules and standards that are amazingly contemporary in their range of sympathies. However, Ruskin wrote thousands of pages of criticism; for the modern reader his thought needs always to be rediscovered. This (...) anthology by Robert Herbert contains the essential thought of Ruskin on theory and practice (creativity, color, compositio, exhibiting workd of art), ("the nature of gothic," Venetian Renaissance, iron and glass as new materials for building), and sculpture and ornament (Greek, Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance). Herbert devotes his section on painting to Ruskin's remarks on Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Michelangelo, the Venetians, Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, and many others. Ruskin was full of contradictions and quirks, but he is the one 19th-century critic who gave the 20th century many of its most progressive thoughts on architecture, painting, and relationship of art to a social and moral context."--BOOK COVER. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sacrificial Nationalism In Henrik Ibsen's The Pretenders William Mishler University ofMinnesota Even during his lifetime, the ambiguity essential to Henrik Ibsen's dramatic method gave rise to considerable interpretive debate. In the near century since his death new approaches to his work have steadily continued to arise in accord with the changes in critical and literary theory. We have had, writes Charles Lyons in a recent survey, Ibsen "the realist, (...) the iconoclast, the successful or failed idealist, the poet, the psychologist, the romantic, the antiromantic" (4). The extraordinary "hermeneutic generativity" evinced by Ibsen's plays cannot be attributed, in my view, solely to their aesthetic excellence or to changes in critical fashion, but as much or even more to the fact that they touch in a prescient way on conundrums inherent in modern life that are both fundamental and particularly intractable. In The Pretenders, for example, Ibsen composed an artistic meditation on the nature of nationalism which, seen from today's vantage point, can be called prophetic. The question the work implicitly poses might be formulated as follows: Is it possible for modern people to create a nation-state on a basis other than the threat of reciprocal violence? In other words, can a modern state attain to a condition ofpeace that would amount to something other that the mere stasis of fear? And if the answers to this question is negative—the work clearly asks—what will prevent the modern nation-state, which lacks the safeguards and restraints formerly supplied by various institutions of transcendent authority, from falling into desperate conditions? These are questions that are easy, even unavoidable, to pose today when we witness with horror the fires ignited by nationalism around the world. In mid-nineteenth century, however, when Ibsen wrote The Pretenders, the situation was vastly different. Then was the high noon of nationalistic optimism in Europe and America and elsewhere, the euphoric cultural moment when in the wake of the French and American Revolutions small 128William Mishler elites in numerous countries were shifting their spiritual and philosophical allegiance from outmoded agencies of order (religious, humanistic, transnational ) to the ethnically ordered collective. The story of this shift is a familiar one, no doubt, but one whose lessons only now are becoming fully apparent. In mid-nineteenth century Norway, nationalist enthusiasm was the order of the day. Accorded its independence from Denmark in 1814, and with it the end to 400 years of subjugation, Norway had good grounds to be enthusiastically self-preoccupied. Its historians engrossed themselves in the fervent recital of the national past, its artists worked to create works that celebrated the Norwegian spirit and projected images of future national greatness. In short, as the literary histories designate it, this was Norway's period of National Romanticism, and it was in this atmosphere that Ibsen in 1850, age 21, began composing plays. For the first dozen years of his career all of his plays were written in the National Romantic mode. It is true that his first play, Catalina, takes its subject matter from Roman history, but it is a Roman history largely stripped of its specificity and adapted for purposes ofpsychological allegory. Ibsen's next four plays all use material drawn from Norway's history and folklore. The Pretenders, begun in 1858 and completed in 1864, was the last and by common consensus the greatest of these. The most Shakespearean of Ibsen's plays, its plot material was taken from Norwegian historian P. A. Munch's account of Norway's civil wars in the thirteenth century. Ibsen chose the climactic moment when several of the deceased King Sverre's heirs were laying claim to the throne, directing his attention to the two major contenders, Sverre's grandson Hâkon and his rival Duke Skule, his maternal uncle and former guardian. The play traces the course of their rivalry from its inception to the final confrontation in which Skule is killed and Norway is united under King Hâkon. From the early days of Ibsen criticism the biographical approach, later amplified by various thematic readings, has been the dominant one to The Pretenders. In this view Skule and Hâkon are seen as vehicles... (shrink)

Reissuing five works originally published between 1937 and 1991, this collection contains books addressing the subject of time, from a mostly philosophic point of view but also of interest to those in the science and mathematics worlds. These texts are brought back into print in this small set of works addressing how we think about time, the history of the philosophy of time, the measurement of time, theories of relativity and discussions of the wider thinking about time and space, (...) among other aspects. One volume is a thorough bibliography collating references on the subject of time across many disciplines. (shrink)