Plotinus, the founder of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy, conceptualises two different notions of self : the corporeal and the rational. Personality and imperfection mark the former, while goodness and a striving for understanding mark the latter. In this text, Dr Remes grounds the two selfhoods in deep-seated Platonic ontological commitments, following their manifestations, interrelations and sometimes uneasy coexistence in philosophical psychology, emotional therapy and ethics. Plotinus' interest lies in what it means for a human being to be a temporal (...) and a corporeal thing, yet capable of abstract and impartial reasoning, of self-government and perhaps even invulnerability. The book argues that this involves a philosophically problematic rupture within humanity which is, however, alleviated by the psychological similarities and points of contact between the two aspects of the self. The purpose of life is the cultivation of the latter aspect, the true self. (shrink)

Although Neoplatonism has long been studied, until recently many had dismissed this complex system of ideas as more mystical than philosophical. Recent research, however, has provided a new perspective on this highly influential school of thought, which flourished in the pagan world of Greece and Rome up through late antiquity. Pauliina Remes's lucid, comprehensive, and up-to-date introduction reassesses Neoplatonism's philosophical credentials, from its founding by Plotinus through the closure of Plato's Academy in 529. Using an accessible, thematic approach, she explores (...) the ideas of leading Neoplatonists such as Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Simplicius, and Damascius, as well as less well-known thinkers. She situates their ideas alongside classical Platonism, Stoicism, and the neo-Pythagoreans as well as other intellectual movements of the time, including Gnosticism, Judaism, and Christianity. She also considers Neoplatonism's enduring legacy in the history of philosophical thought, providing a gateway to Neoplatonism for contemporary readers. _Copub: Acumen Publishing Limited_. (shrink)

Plotinus' recognises the possibility of conflict between self-referential aims and the good of the kosmos. His solution resembles closely one attributed sometimes to the Stoics. The inner reformation Plotinus proposes will yield a detached understanding of the whole universe. This view is accompanied by a realisation that one's happiness lies in functioning as a part of the whole and in contributing to the perfection of the universe. Other-regard cannot, therefore, be seen as altogether missing from neoplatonic ethics. What gives Plotinus' (...) ethics an agent-centred spin is its emphasis on how this state can be attained. Promoting the self's true well-being by an inward turn is the only means to an understanding of what is good simpliciter. (shrink)

According to John Rawls, the methods and conclusions of science—when these are non-controversial—constitute public reasons. However, several objections have been raised against this view. This paper focuses on two objections. On the one hand, the associational objection states that scientific reasons are the reasons of the scientific community, and thus paradigmatically non-public in the Rawlsian sense. On the other hand, the controversiality objection states that the non-controversiality requirement rules out their public character when scientific postulates are resisted by a significant (...) portion of the citizenry. The paper replies that both objections miss their mark. To the associational objection, it replies that the relevant test for a reason to be public is whether the reasons have been construed under the rules and constrains of a public frame of thought. Insofar as scientific methods and conclusions correspond to the principles of reasoning and rules of evidence that liberals understand as public, their associational origin is secondary. To the controversiality objection, it replies that the standard for a scientific argument to be regarded as non-controversial should refer to its degree of intra-scientific consensus, since ordinary citizens accept or reject scientific pronouncements conditioned to their particular comprehensive views. Nonetheless, a wide extra-scientific agreement on the epistemic virtues of the scientific method will be needed. The paper concludes that there is a good case to think about scientific reasons as public to the extent that scientific reasoning is a mode of inquiry that mirrors a central aspiration of Rawlsian political liberalism: having a public way of thought and an impersonal standpoint to adjudicate between competing claims. (shrink)

While some film theorists and philosophers have seen motion as a necessary element of cinema, this view is challenged by a body of avant-garde films which offer little or no movement. These experiments—by film-makers such as Andy Warhol, Larry Gottheim, and Michael Snow—challenge essentialist definitions of film, while simultaneously foregrounding the crucial role played by duration in cinema’s ontology.

Levinas est traditionnellement perçu comme une voix critique à propos de la pensée de la totalité de Hegel et, ainsi, comme un philosophe qui cherche à dénoncer la négation de toute différence dans la pensée de l’identité, que ce soit dans l’unité de la vie, de l’esprit, du savoir ou du concept. Or, le paradoxe de Levinas est de critiquer Hegel tout en réinterprétant et en s’appropriant certains de ses concepts fondamentaux. Plus particulièrement, c'est le cas avec la radicalisation de (...) la puissance du négatif. Il s’agit donc de s’interroger sur l’effort de Levinas pour développer une forme intrinsèque à la dialectique hégélienne que Hegel aurait entrevue sans développer dans sa philosophie, encore trop enracinée dans une métaphysique que Levinas tente de quitter. Ce faisant, il s’agit d’éclaircir si l’on peut même parler d’une dialectique négative lévinassienne. (shrink)

When and how were the arrows of love created? Individual invention has been argued for by classicists; a connection to everyday metaphors has been suggested in cognitive linguistics. I propose new cognitive-theoretical tools: the Abstract Cause Personification blend and an EMISSION image-schema. I explain the emergence of Love the Archer in Antiquity through conceptual integration from earlier materials: Apollo the Archer personifying death, erotic emissions in lyric imagery, the link between passion and extreme illness, and possibly the arrows of glance. (...) The embodied, human-scale story of causation that structures the arrows of love has been crucial for their success. (shrink)

This collection studies the various ways and conceptual frameworks with which the ancients approached selfhood.

Plotinus treats certain pre‑philosophical concepts as reliable or promising starting‑points for philosophical study. This article studies the way in which he, in the act of philosophizing, conceives of the passage from an unclear understanding, a kind of pre‑concept, to a better, philosophical conception. What are the sources of this passage? What is the role of data given by sense‑perception? In what way are innate conceptual and cognitive capacities involved? It will be argued that the methodology suggested is a Platonic version (...) of the Stoic appeal to common notions (koinai ennoia). Moreover, Plotinus seems to maintain several features of the empirical original. The concepts discussed are not primarily introspected or intuited, but seem to result from both experience and from innate tendencies. The bottom‑up approach of scrutinizing the combination of inquiries in the Enneads (and in a commentary of Proclus) and the methodological remarks made within these same inquiries, exposes, further, an interesting list of concepts significant for the Neoplatonic theory‑building : freedom, oneness, time and eternity, as well as good and evil. (shrink)

Journal Name: Apeiron Issue: Ahead of print.

Desde el pensamiento ontológico de cautiverio que realizó Emmanuel Lévinas, es decir, desde su concepto de Il y a y su descripción de la experiencia más próxima al ser anónimo e impersonal, el insomnio, el presente artículo tiene el propósito de efectuar una conversación o un acercamiento con el pensamiento pesimista de Emil Cioran. Todo para graficar el horror de esta patología y de la importancia del sueño o el inconsciente frente a ella, presentado este, el inconsciente, como una salida (...) necesaria. (shrink)

El presente ensayo se fija como propósito precisar la crítica hegeliana del Derecho natural y del Derecho abstracto y determinar una doctrina propiamente hegeliana del Derecho. En este sentido, nuestra hipótesis es que es en el contexto de la doctrina de la Sittlichkeit,que el Derecho debe ser comprendido según Hegel. En efecto, en sus Lecciones sobre la filosofía de la historia, Hegel define la Sittlichkeit como un “orden de lo sustancial de suerte que todo sujeto singular tiene la universalidad por (...) propósito, por espíritu y por costumbre ética, y que es en y por este espíritu que él quiere, actúa, vive y goza, si bien que es su naturaleza, a saber su naturaleza segunda y espiritual”2. Luego para Hegel la normatividad jurídica debe ser comprendida al interior de este campo, en un sentido social más amplio de normatividad constituido por la praxis de una comunidad que configura un campo inmanente de objetividad que estructura cotidianamente la vida de los individuos. Lejos entonces de una separación de deber y ser, Hegel nos llama a comprender la forma cómo la norma está presente en el corazón del mundo de la vida como reconciliación de lo racional con lo real en la efectividad. (shrink)

El modelo de desarrollo sustentable ha motivado la generación de una importante producción científica en distintos ámbitos. Tal ha sido el caso de la psicología que se ha propuesto comprender el papel de los factores conductuales y mentales implicados en la relación del hombre con la naturaleza. Si bien el emergente campo de la psicología ambiental se ha planteado objetivos pertinentes para el fomento de conductas sustentables, ésta ha operado desde modelos epistemológicos que tienden a mantener elementos de la cosmovisión (...) moderna relacionada con el deterioro ambiental. Se proponen las aproximaciones narrativas de la psicología como una alternativa capaz de subvertir el orden epistemológico. (shrink)

En este artículo intentamos exponer algunas de las cuestiones principales elaboradas en _El anti-Edipo_, con el objeto de enfatizar su relevancia para la comprensión de una filosofía política novedosa. Para ello nos centramos en tres aspectos articulados que están presentes en el libro, pero que se vuelven más claros para nuestra actualidad al momento de ponerlos en contacto con algunas de las discusiones que han suscitado y con el corpus deleuziano-guattariano. Esos aspectos son: 1) la tematización del deseo, sometido a (...) una transformación a partir del concepto de “máquina”, 2) el análisis del capitalismo, a partir de la teorización de un _socius_ específico, donde el deseo adquiere un tratamiento singular, y 3) el descubrimiento de un fascismo molecular, que será desarrollado abiertamente en textos posteriores de ambos autores. (shrink)

This paper tries to propose a reading focused mainly on some of Foucault’s late works, developed since the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité, from 1976. The aim of our reading tends to note that the distance between Foucault and Deleuze, even marked in an explicit rupture after the publication of that book, is not so much due to Foucault's “fascination” with power, or to his peremptory challenge of desire and its leakage power, or its supposed abandonment of (...) the detailed analysis of dispositifs. According to our reading, the distance taken by Deleuze will account, in this impasse, for the possibility of a resistance that is not exerted on dispositifs and power formations, and that projects the problem of power towards differents ways of life, according to a logic of modulation of life, very similar to that outlined by Foucault in his later years, and creating a singular consonance between both projects of thought. (shrink)

Este artículo propone una lectura interpretativa de la mutilación ocular como estrategia político-policial sistemática aplicada durante el llamado “estallido social” comenzado en Chile en octubre de 2019. A partir de una elaboración del concepto de “rostridad”, desarrollado por Deleuze y Guattari, sugerimos que dicha estrategia sugiere, por una parte, el reconocimiento anticipado de la potencia subversiva de la revuelta, difícil de desactivar por los poderes gobernantes. Por otra parte, que la mutilación no solo apunta a los ojos sino también a (...) las subjetividades que estos parecen organizar, las cuales aparecen ante el poder como clandestinas o nómades. Por ello, la mutilación ocular puede ser leída como una estrategia político-policial de re-subjetivación utilizada por el gobierno para desactivar una revuelta política que también se define por líneas de resistencia que se fugan de dicha estrategia. (shrink)

As a comparative politics scholar, it is more than a challenge to read and comment on the work of political theorists. The reason for this lies in the fact that comparative politics and political t...

Cristóbal Balbontin Dans Totalité et infini, Emmanuel Levinas s’attaque surtout à critiquer la dimension anonyme que comporte l’État. Proche du geste de Franz Rosenzweig dans L’étoile de la rédemption qui relie la fin de la Phénoménologie de l’esprit avec les Principes de la philosophie du droit, la critique lévinassienne vise surtout la philosophie politique hégélienne. Pourtant, chez Levinas — par opposition à Rosenzweig —, il ne s’agit pas seulement de dénoncer le devenir de la Raison dans la pensée occidentale, (...) mais sinon plus fondamentalement l’ontologie à partir de laquelle cette raison est devenue possible. Ce faisant, il s’agit de déceler les points de rapprochement aussi bien que les différences entre les deux philosophes à l’égard du politique. À ce propos, il s’agit de relever le tournant dans la démarche lévinassienne qu’implique une revalorisation du politique. (shrink)

En el presente artículo nos proponemos desarrollar y discutir una posible hipótesis de lectura respecto a la obra de la filósofa Catherine Malabou. La crítica de la forma que lleva a cabo desde sus primeros escritos, permite valorarla más allá de la presencia, pero sin apelar a una trascendencia que se plantee por fuera del movimiento de la formación. En esa discusión sobre la forma, Malabou descubre una novedosa idea de materialismo, que hace posible considerar de otro modo la estructura (...) auto-afectiva que subyace al movimiento especulativo y a la naturaleza de la subjetividad. A partir de esta consideración, buscaremos mostrar que una impersonalidad y una indiferencia, que es en cierto sentido un momento de desafección, permite entender de una manera distinta la amplia reflexión sobre la plasticidad, concepto operativo clave que atraviesa gran parte de la obra de Malabou. (shrink)

In this paper we will reconstruct a hypothesis on love in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. We notice that, at different moments of his philosophical itinerary, the topic of love is the object of a complex treatment, which moves from the discovery of the expression of worlds that the other involves, and which gradually detach themselves from that other, towards a progressive liberation of dehumanized elements that open up in a transformed sexuality. We will try to show that this experimental exercise reveals (...) a surface, defined by the decomposition of the self and where the passage through a world without others will allow us to discover a plane of liberated elements, open to connections that will allow us other ways of understanding the phenomenon of love. (shrink)

This article analyses an important category from Deleuze's philosophy – the notion of intensity – and explores its significance for Deleuze and the ways it can be used to think about poetic cinema. I use the concept of the intensive-image to define a cinematic style that dissipates narrative action in favour of more contemplative and sensory experiences, hence films that are able to turn onscreen reality into purely affective phenomena. The notion of intensity, I argue, does not allow us to (...) reply easily to the question about representation (i.e., “what is the film about?”), mainly because its images are indeterminate and flowing, combined in a multiple manner that excludes any simple reduction to signification. The general argument that follows, illustrated by a careful reading of key poetic texts, is that the focus on the intensive-image inspires readers to reconsider Deleuze's classification of the cinema into two separate periods as well as to understand the ways in which intensity finds expression in films that produce problems, displacements and provocations. In the words of Pasolini, this is the poetic film tradition which must be placed diachronically in relation to the language of the film narrative, a diachronism that, he says, would appear destined to be always more pronounced. In the last section of this article, I look at Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) as an early case of the poetic image and draw on key theorists and filmmakers who have discussed the cinema's power of affection and intensity. (shrink)

Cet article passe en revue les principaux points à retenir des travaux de Gilles Fauconnier, en particulier de son travail collaboratif avec Mark Turner sur la théorie du _blending_, pour les lecteurs qui ne sont pas familiers avec ce cadre théorique ou qui pourraient bénéficier d'un regard extérieur. Je souligne les leçons globales à tirer des notions d'espaces mentaux et de leurs connexions ou _mappings_, les avantages d'utiliser de petits packages au lieu de grands domaines pour analyser l’activité conceptuelle, comment (...) les réseaux d'intégration (_blending networks_) nous permettent d'aller au-delà de simples projections ou correspondances entre domaines de l'expérience, ainsi que la nécessité d'étudier des modèles qui fournissent un pont entre les principes généraux et les exemples riches et contextualisés qui les exposent. Je cherche avant tout à transmettre le message de Gilles Fauconnier sur la fascination, la curiosité, l'ambition et l'humilité requises par l'entreprise scientifiq... (shrink)

The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami’s notion of identity is original and challenging to liberal political theory, but still largely unaddressed by it. In a nutshell, Bilgrami characterizes identity as holding certain values and commitments with a crucial addendum: as we want to continue living by those values and commitments in the future, we erect some social and legal barriers to prevent them from change. Liberals of a Millian and/or Rawlsian cast of mind, in turn, arrange political institutions to enable such change, (...) as they assume that we are the kind of creatures that change their minds. In this sense, the identitarian and the liberal mindset are, as the philosopher claims, “mirror opposites”. This article engages with Bilgrami’s view in two senses: on the one hand, it highlights some potentially problematic areas that may call for further clarification and reinterpretation of the liberal canon, as well as offering other set of tensions that arise with non-liberal philosophical traditions. On the other hand, it contends that Bilgrami’s ultimate claim is not merely that the identitarian mindset is more rational than the liberal mentality, as he does, but that it makes political demands that should be assessed against the liberal ideal of justification. While it may be the case that identitarianism is rationally superior to certain versions of comprehensive liberalism, the paper concludes that it loses out to political liberalism, to the extent that Bilgrami’s identitarianism is willing to display the state’s coercive muscle in oppressive ways, in a way that political liberalism does not. (shrink)

La noción de lo público se ha desdibujado. Ese es el marco de la pretensión de que las universidades privadas, por sus frutos, sean públicas a mismo título que las estatales, y que el fisco deba darles financiamiento. La exégesis del concepto de lo público a partir de las disputas políticas por la libertad religiosa a inicios del cristianismo y el contraste con algunos textos filosóficos modernos y contemporáneos arruinan esa pretensión. Gracias a ese análisis se pueden esclarecer algunos aspectos (...) de la diferencia entre lo privado y lo público, y mostrar que deducir de la pérdida de contornos de lo público la primacía del mercado universitario contiene pretensiones normativas no explícitas en favor de este. (shrink)