_Varieties of the Self_ discusses human perspectives of the Paraclete (founded in 1129) on sacrifice, intentionality, and views on body and soul. The anthropological approach connects different works written by Peter Abelard to views on the individual within this community.

Drawing on recent scholarship, with essays by a selection of international scholars, this volume throws new light on the literary persona of Peter Abelard, one of the most diversely gifted people of the Middle Ages.

The act of drawing a line or uttering a word is often seen as integral to the process of making art. This is especially obvious in music and the visual arts, but applies to literature, performance, and other arts as well. These collected essays, written by scholars from diverse fields, take a historical view of the richness of creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) in order to draw out debates, sometimes implicit and sometimes formally stated, about the production and (...) reproduction of cultural meaning in a period of great change and novelty, between the beginnings of the medieval intellectual tradition and the imprint of the Enlightenment. The authors pose the following questions: Do tradition and creativity conflict with one another, or are they complementary? What are the tensions between composition and live performance? What is the role of the audience in perceiving the object of art? Are such objects fixed or flexible? What about the status of the event? Is the event part of creation, in the sense that it disturbs the still waters of historical continuity? These and other questions build on the foundation of Roland Barthes' concept of Degree Zero, offering new insights into what it means to create"--Back cover. (shrink)

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

In this astonishingly rich volume, experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. A lengthy introduction, annotated (...) bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. (shrink)

Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science, is the second volume of a collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, featuring essays addressing truth, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, with a substantial representation of analytically schooled Nietzsche scholars. This collection offers a dynamic articulation of the differing strengths of Anglo-American analytic and contemporary European approaches to philosophy, with translations from European specialists, notably Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Paul Valadier, and Walther Ch. Zimmerli. This broad collection also features a preface by Alasdair (...) MacIntyre. Contributions explore Nietzsche's contributions to the philosophy of language and epistemology, and include essays on the social history of truth and the historical and cultural analyses of Serres and Baudrillard, as well as new contributions to the philosophy of science, including theological and hermeneutical approaches, history of science, the philosophy of medicine, cognitive science, and technology. (shrink)

This article argues that the limited influence of Ludwik Fleck's ideas on philosophy of science is due not only to their indirect dissemination by way of Thomas Kuhn, but also to an incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework of history and philosophy of science and Fleck's own more integratedly historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to understanding the evolution of scientific discovery. What Kuhn named "paradigm" offers a periphrastic rendering or oblique translation of Fleck's Denkstil/Denkkollektiv , a derivation that may also account (...) for the lability of the term "paradigm". This was due not to Kuhn's unwillingness to credit Fleck but rather to the cold war political circumstances surrounding the writing of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Following a discussion of Fleck's anatomical allusions, I include a brief discussion of Aristotle (on menstruation and darkened mirrors) and conclude with a reference to the productivity of error in Mach and Nietzsche. (shrink)

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and conclude by (...) taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation. (shrink)

radicalization of Kant 's critical project inverts or opposes traditional readings of Kant 's critical program. Nietzsche aligns both Kant and Schopenhauer with what he named the effectively, efficiently pathological optimism of the rationalist drive to knowledge, patterned on the Cyclopean eye of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy. For the rest of Nietzsche's writerly life, the name of Socrates would serve both as a signifier for the historical personage marking the end of the "tragic age" of the Greeks as (...) well as a signifier for the philosophical tradition of the idealization of reason, knowledge, and truth: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer. (shrink)

in Charles Scott and Arleen Dallery, eds., Ethics and Danger: Currents in Continental Thought. Albany. State University of New York Press. 1992. Pp. 83-106.

What I here call Merleau-Ponty’s crystal lamellae corresponds to a phenomenology of the crystal of the interstices of being: the between. Phenomenology’s crystal as I refer to this here is a layered in and through spatial tensions, shimmering, overlapping, intervals magnifying planes and surfaces in all dimensions. This is a crystallography in words to retrace the relations of lived space, tactically navigated, anticipated, recalled, as this experienced awareness of the world around, the places in which we live, especially public spaces, (...) layered in layers, including lattice arrays of space, seen and unseen, including a reflection on art, aesthetic production, especially but not only in Lascaux, and perception, on anger, and the political including the terrorism of capital. (shrink)

This collection dedicated to and including David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," offers a much needed resource for students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, political reflection, value and judgments, economics, and art. The authors include experts in the philosophy of art, aesthetics, history of philosophy as well as the history of science. Contributors include Babette Babich, Howard Caygill, Timothy M.Costelloe, Andrej Démuth / Slávka Démuthová, Bernard Freydberg, Peter Kivy, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Christopher MacLachlan, Emilio Mazza, Roger Schiner, Roger Scruton, (...) and Dabney Townsend, . (shrink)

In what follows I raise the question of Ariadne and Dionysus for Nietzsche, including the relative size of Ariadne’s ears, as Dionysus observes at the close of “Ariadne’s Lament” [Klage der Ariadne]. Nietzsche’s references to ears invoke not only Nietzsche’s “selective” concern with having the right ears but also the question of myth and genealogical context. Reading through myth is key not only in terms of the textual, lyric tradition but also painting and sculpture, including sarcophagi in antiquity. It makes (...) all the difference to ask, as Karl Kerényi cites Nietzsche as asking: Wer weiß …was Ariadne ist? And not less: who was she to Dionysus? To this extent, Nietzsche’s concern with ears, small and long, is less incidental or furry fetish than hermeneutic attunement. (shrink)

Nietzsche's creative and fundamental account of chaos in both its cosmic, universal as well as its humane context, recalls the ancient Greek meaning of chaos rather than its modern, disordered, decadent significance. In this generatively primordial sense, chaos corresponds not to the watery nothingness of Semitic myth or modern, scientific entropy but creative, uncountenancedly abundant potency. And in such an archaic sense, Nietzsche's chaos is a word for both nature and art. Nietzsche's creative conception of chaos equates it with the (...) will to power: as the foundational essence of the world "to all eternity." This same correspondence is also the stylistic prerequisite for creating oneself as a work of art. /// O artigo começa por demonstrar até que ponto a mais fundamental explicação criadora dada por Nietzsche a respeito do caos, em seu contexto tanto cósmico e universal como meramente humano, constitui uma evocação do antigo sentido que Ihe foi dado pelos Gregos, mais do que uma adesão à significação moderna do mesmo, desordenada e decadente. Para Nietzsche, com efeito, o caos em seu sentido generativo mais primordial, não corresponde nem à ambiguidade do nada inerente ao mito semítico nem ao sentido moderno, científico, da entropia, mas sim a uma potência criadora assinalada por uma abundãncia inesgotável Mostra-se, assim, até que ponto, em conformidade com o sentido arcaico do termo, o caos em Nietzsche constitui um nome que se dá tanto à natureza como à arte. Mais, o presente artigo mostra ainda até que ponto a concepqao nietzschiana do caos o transforma em algo equivalente à vontade depoder, ou seja, na essãncia fundadora do mundo " para toda a eternidade". Desta correspondência, aliás, resulta a condição estilistica para que cada um se crie a si mesmo como verdadeira obra de arte. (shrink)

It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’sÜbermenschderives from Lucian of Samosata’shyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’sKataplous– literally, “sailing into port” – referring to the soul’s journey (ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes) into the afterlife. TheKataplous he tyrannos, usually translatedDownward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire of the “overman” who is imagined to be superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly (...) life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) transport into the underworld. As a reflection on the life and the death of Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same topic. InThus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, including the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, no matter whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage, or indeed in the pursuit of more trivial satisfactions. (shrink)

Günther Anders offers one of the first phenomenological analyses of broadcast radio (in 1930) and its transformation of the contemporary experience of music. Anders also develops a reflection on its political consequences as he continues his reflection in a discussion of radio and newsreel, film and television in his 1956 ‘The World as Phantom and Matrix’. A reflection on the consequences of this transformation brings in Friedrich Kittler’s reflection on radio and precision bombing. A further reflection on Jean Baudrillard’s notion (...) of ‘speech without response’ permits a review of digital culture and the self-creation of the digital consumer absorbed in what Anders named a schizo-topia, that is, today, an autistic culture of distraction, displacement, and self-driven surveillance. (shrink)

Beginning with Jürgen Habermas's 1968 reflection on Nietzsche's criticisms of knowledge and science, the essays in this volume engage Nietzsche's challenge to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory as well as other social and political theories of modernity and postmodernity. Juxtaposing Habermas and Nietzsche for the sake of the "future" of critical theory, the essays in this collection draw variously on Marx and Weber as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and others. The distinguished authors in this book (...) argue that critical theory is best served by responding to challenges such as those associated with identity politics and globalization and including an authentic engagement with Nietzsche. This important volume features contributions by Babette E. Babich, Karin Bauer, Howard Caygill, Rebecca Comay, Fred Dallmayr, Josef Früchtl, Jürgen Habermas, Dominique Janicaud, Alexander Nehamas, David Owen, Max Pensky, Holger Schmid, Tracy B. Strong, James Swindal, and Bernhard Taureck. (shrink)

Adorno’s phenomenological study of radio offers a sociology of music in a political and cultural context. Situating that phenomenology in the context of Adorno’s philosophical background and the world political circumstances of Adorno’s collaboration with Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio Project, illuminates both Adorno’s Current of Music and the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer and the ‘Culture Industry’. Together with an analysis of popular music in social practice/culture, this article also explores Adorno’s spatial reflections on Paul Bekker’s notion (...) of the community-building power of the symphony, including his reflection on the radio face which he elaborated in terms of both time and the physiognomics of the time-space of sound, private and communal, and adds connections with today’s Internet and related media. (shrink)

This essay claims that, despite the explicit opposition to Darwin in his writings, Nietzsche is regarded as a Darwinist both by the educated public and, increasingly, by Anglo analytic philosophers. In part, the problem is that, while scholars correctly observe the influence on Nietzsche's thinking of Spencer and Malthus, Roux and Haeckel — names commonly associated with Darwin — they pay no attention to the greater impact on Nietzsche's thought of Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche mounted a cogent condemnation (...) of Darwin's views, moreover, on the empirical insight that there is more calm and abundance in the natural world than civilized humanity supposes, with its fantasies of nature red in tooth and claw. Nietzsche continues to be associated with Darwin owing to Darwin's class-based racism, but Nietzsche's argument was that slave morality inexorably works against the triumph of the master in favor of the average man. This insight drives Nietzsche's view of the “last man,” or slavishly moral human being, and of what he called the Übermensch, which, it is inadequately recognized, was is a concept drawn from Lucian and used satirically to contrast Dionysian abundance with vapid social values that promote ruthless competition for supposedly limited resources. (shrink)

Contemporary scholarship accents incipient theurgical practice for Plotinus; this lends a certain urgency to the question of his acceptance of magic. While use of magic recorded in Porphyry's Vita Plotini has received considerable attention, far less has been done to analyze actual discussion in the Enneads. Examination of key passages brings to light the context for discussion of magic, particularly issues of sympathy, prayer, astrology and divination. Equally important is Plotinus' understanding of the cosmos and role of the heavenly bodies. (...) Plotinus' affirmation of the highest part of the soul as undescended, together with the claim that our soul has a common origin with the World Soul in Soul-Hypostasis, is significant for the relative unimportance he attributes to the role and effect of magic. (shrink)

Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact foregrounds claims traditionally excluded from reception, often regarded as opposed to fact, scientific claims that are increasingly seldom discussed in connection with philosophy of science save as examples of pseudoscience. I am especially concerned with scientists who question the epidemiological link between HIV and AIDS and who are thereby discounted—no matter their credentials, no matter the cogency of their arguments, no matter the sobriety of their statistics—but also with other classic examples of (...) so-called pseudoscience including homeopathy and other sciences, such as cold fusion. The pseudoscience version of the demarcation problem turns out to include some of the details that Latour articulates multifariously under a variety of species or kinds in his essay/interactive research project/monograph, ‘Biography of an Investigation’. Given the economic constraints of the current day, especially in the academy, the growing trend in almost all disc.. (shrink)

A discussion of Nietzsche's philology as the prelude to his philosophy of science.

This essay seeks to make the case for reading hermeneutic philosophy of science with Feyerabend. In addition, there is the question of science, as Nietzsche raises this question along with Feyerabend’s programmatic recommendations for traditional philosophy of science. Including a discussion of method in history as in theology and philology, including Nietzsche’s hermeneutics, this essay reviews Feyerabend’s exchanges with Lakatos along with the resistance of mainstream philosophy of science to hermeneutics as such. A discussion of Feyerabend’s ‘gods’ engages what he (...) invokes as ontological abundance as well as his criticism of the limitations of Popper’s critique of Parmenides requiring both historical/historiographical context, an understanding of science in practice, via a contextualization of Schrodinger, and via Plato’s epistemology along with Duhem on experiment and Riegl on style, crucial for Feyerabend on the notion of ‘progress,’ key for Lakatos and others, in art and science. (shrink)

For both continental and analytic styles of philosophy, the thought of Martin Heidegger must be counted as one of the most important influences in contemporary philosophy. In this book, essays by internationally noted scholars, ranging from David B. Allison to Slavoj Zizek, honour the interpretive contributions of William J. Richardson's pathbreaking Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The essays move from traditional phenomenology to the idea of essential (another) thinking, the questions of translation and existential expressions of the turn of Heidegger's (...) thought, the intersection of politics and language, the philosophic significance of Jacques Lacan, and several essays on science and technology. All show the influence of Richardson's first study. A valuable emphasis appears in Richardson's interpretation of Heidegger's conception of die Irre, interpreted as Errancy, set in its current locus in a discussion of Heidegger's debacle with the political in his involvement with National Socialism. (shrink)

On the political nature of the analytic - continental distinction in professional philosophy and the general tendency to discredit continental philosophy while redesignating the rubric as analytically conceived.

This essay raises the question of material hermeneutics in Heelan’s philosophy of techno-science. For Heelan, a continental philosophy of technoscience, referring to Husserl and Heidegger and especially to Merleau-Ponty, features hermeneutic contexts of mathematics and measurement as well as laboratory observation, including what the later Heelan spoke of as “portable laboratories,” for the sake of objectivity and “meaning making.” For Paul Feyerabend, this material practice corresponded to the use of both techniques of observation and instrumentation, and not less “propaganda” in (...) the case of Galileo which practice for Heelan included the ontological status of measures and numbers as well as apprenticeship in what Heelan called “contingent local practical cultural milieus.” The essay includes a discussion of Heidegger on mathematics and Bruno Latour on pasteurization. (shrink)