Philosophy -- Ethics beyond existentialism and structuralism: Sartre's critique of dialectical reason and the debate with Levi-Strauss -- Foucault's ethics of the self -- Derrida in Heidelberg: the specter of Heidegger's Nazism and the question of ethics -- Richard Rorty's cultural politics: ironist philosophy and the ethics of reading -- History -- From metahistory to the practical past: Hayden White's existentialist philosophy of history -- Hayden White and the ethics of historiography literature -- The ethics of conversion: (...) metaphysical desire in Ren, Girard, and Jean-Paul Sartre -- The ethics of realism: literary history and the sublime in Erich Auerbach's mimesis -- The ethics of philology: Erich Auerbach and the fate of humanism -- Edward Said, orientalism, and the political turn in literary and cultural studies. (shrink)

Philosophy, when understood to embody the values that are fundamental to modernity, is biblical in origin, both historically and ontologically. Central to this idea is the question famously posed by Tertullian: What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? The answer – as based on a comprehensive and systematic discussion of the key texts and ideas of Spinoza, Vico, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche – is that we can overcome the conventional opposition between reason and faith, between (...) class='Hi'>philosophy and theology, and between the secular and the religious only if we learn to see that, as Spinoza shows us, both philosophy (reason) and theology (faith) are based on caritas: love – on the divine command to do unto others what you want others to do unto you. Provided throughout is a commentary on how fundamentally different philosophy is in the Greek and in the biblical traditions (in Athens and in Jerusalem). Whereas Socrates argues that (human) desire and the (divine) good are contradictory opposites, Spinoza shows that it is human desire that truly constitutes the divine good of all. This book would be indispensable to courses (both undergraduate and graduate) in philosophy, religious studies, and the history of ideas – in interdisciplinary courses in the humanities, generally – that focus on the values that are central, both historically and ontologically, to modernity. (shrink)

A popular view among autonomy theorists is that facts about the history of a person's desires, and specifically facts about how they were formed or acquired, matter crucially to her autonomy. I argue that while there is an important relationship between a person's autonomy and the history of her desires, a person's autonomy does not depend on how her desires were formed or acquired. I argue that a desire's autonomy lies not in its origins but in whether its bearer (...) has a history of having engaged with it in the right sort of way. I argue that this view has important advantages, and no obvious disadvantages, over its historical and its non-historical rivals. (shrink)

In this study, Bethany Somma argues for a dichotomous interpretation of human desire developed by late ancient Greek and medieval Islamic philosophers in response to an ambiguity in Aristotle’s account of desire.

Among Marxists and Communists, Louis Althusser has long had a reputation for theoreticism and scientism, the factors most often cited to explain the eclipse of his work since the 1960’s. According to the standard account, the distinguishing characteristic and major flaw of his work is that it brings everything back to knowledge. In this essay, I interrogate this understanding of Althusser by reconsidering two cornerstones of Althusserian theory that seem most to exemplify his extreme privileging of epistemology: the symptom and (...) the interpellation theory of ideology. I argue not that taking them to work on the epistemological level is wrong but rather incomplete; there exists a not quite acknowledged beyond of knowledge and interpellation in Althusser, which takes the form of a traumaticnarrative of history, enjoyment, and desire. The production of knowledge in Althusser unfolds as a pathos-laden story, which on one level gestures toward the turbulent world history in which he developed his theory: primarily WW II and the post-war Stalinist revelations, along with the conflicts it provoked in the Communist Party, and the French Communist Party in particular. Although not the subject of extended analysis, these events haunt Althusser’s texts in the form of allusions and the surprisingly violent figurative language with which Althusser discusses theoretical labor. I contend that they call to be analyzed as a kind of return of the repressed, best approached through Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytically inflected theory of ideology. (shrink)

The question why Bevir's account of intentionality is conceptualized purely in terms of individual beliefs is important as such a conceptualization appears to depart from standard accounts of intentionality within the philosophy of mind, that include reference to individual desires. It is beliefs and desires which are usually considered the rock?bottom components of individual intentional states, yet Bevir defines weak intentions solely in terms of the former while explicitly rejecting attention to the latter. There are a number of difficulties (...) which an account of meaning that excludes reference to desires faces. Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons for historians of ideas to embrace a theory of meaning that includes reference to beliefs but not desires. Through an extension of a different argument put forward by Bevir, it is suggested that such a belief?based definition of the nature of meaning is made defensible through reference to an account of the identity of the history of ideas as a discipline, a distinct area of academic enquiry that can be ? and for good reasons is ? individuated from the history of human action. (shrink)

What do Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray have in common? These giants of critical theory are all linked by their analyses of desire. Theories of Desire looks at the role of desire in the works of these writers, as well as examining other major issues and themes of post-structuralism. Fuery considers the place of desire in psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary studies and feminism. In a lucid and accessible manner, he highlights the connections between (...) desire and the critical analysis of subjectivity, language and culture. He examines the institutionalisation of desire, the relationship between language, discourse and desire, and notes the problems of dealing with women's desire in phallocentric contexts. For anyone seeking a comprehensible introduction to the arcane tangles of post-structuralism, this book will be an invaluable guide. (shrink)

The early modern period is arguably the most pivotal of all in the study of the mind, teeming with a variety of conceptions of mind. Some of these posed serious questions for assumptions about the nature of the mind, many of which still depended on notions of the soul and God. It is an era that witnessed the emergence of theories and arguments that continue to animate the study of philosophy of mind, such as dualism, vitalism, materialism, and idealism. (...) -/- Covering pivotal figures in philosophy such as Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, Leibniz, Cavendish, and Spinoza, Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages provides an outstanding survey of philosophy of mind of the period. Following an introduction by Rebecca Copenhaver, sixteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including: -/- Hobbes, Descartes’ philosophy of mind and its early critics, consciousness, the later Cartesians, Malebranche, Cavendish, Locke, Spinoza, Descartes and Leibniz, perception and sensation, desires, mental substance and mental activity, Hume, and Kant. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, enlightenment philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Early Modern and Modern Ages is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as religion, history of psychology, and history of science. (shrink)

The guiding fictions -- Desire and its objects -- Desire without a proper object -- Nothingness and being -- The nothingness of desire and the desire for nothingness -- Defining self through no-self -- Getting over one's self -- The mind of nothingness -- The self with its desires -- No-self with its desire -- No-self and self-transcendence -- God and death -- From God to nothingness -- God and life -- Displacing the personal God (...) -- Towards an impersonal God -- The absolute of relatedness -- The god of nothingness -- The place of morality -- Convivial harmony -- Customs, habits, decisions -- Morality and religion -- The moral subject in love -- The experience of happiness -- Giving and receiving -- The body as property -- Detachment -- Orthoaesthesis -- Consumption -- Sufficiency -- An elusive horizon -- Rewriting the history of philosophy -- Philosophical antiphony -- Cultural disarmament -- Philosophy beyond the divide. (shrink)

Social science, history, and philosophy have often been neglect in thinking through their fundamentally intertwined relationship. The result is often an inattention to philosophy where social science and history is concerned, or a neglect of historicity and social analysis where philosophy is concerned. Meanwhile, the place of values in research is often uneasily passed over in silence. The inattention to, and loss of, the intersection between these different disciplines and their subject matters, leaves our investigations all the (...) more impoverished as a result. In resolving these problems, it is not enough to strive for cooperation or integration, but to rethink of the nature of the disciplines themselves; their interests, purposes, and presuppositions. In this volume, contributors explore different facets of these relationships, and move beyond the problematics erected by positivism often cast in terms of value-free or value-neutral science, that is, a science obsessed with empirical data, schematic classifications, and the pursuit of law-like forms. While positivism has been subject to critique, the influence and legacy of positivism remains. It remains in the way in which we often think about science; the line drawn between the sciences and the humanities; the norms researchers should follow; what a successful explanation looks like; and the ethical, normative, and political implications of scientific research. Aimed at students and researchers of philosophy, history and the social sciences, this book is driven by a desire to revindicate questions concerning ontology and social ontology, to rethink the nature of explanation, and to resituate normativity and values within scientific, social scientific, and historical pursuits. (shrink)

This book focuses on the notion of desire in the Italian fin de siècle. It narrates how this notion informs the works of two of Italy's most prominent authors in the fin de siècle, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D'Annunzio.

Sterelny (2003) develops an idealised natural history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that belief-like states are natural elaborations of simpler control systems, called detection systems, which map directly from environmental cue to response. Belief-like states exhibit robust tracking (sensitivity to multiple environmental states), and response breadth (occasioning a wider range of behaviours). The development of robust tracking and response-breadth depend partly on properties of the informational environment. In a transparent environment the functional relevance of states of the world is directly (...) detectable. Outside transparent environments, selection can favour decoupled representations. Sterelny maintains that these arguments do not generalise to desire. Unlike the external environment, the internal processes of an organism, he argues, are selected for transparency. Parts of a single organism gain nothing from deceiving one another, but gain significantly from accurate signalling of their states and needs. Key conditions favouring the development of belief-like states are therefore absent in the case of desires. Here I argue that Sterelny’s reasons for saying that his treatment of belief does not generalise to motivation (desires, or preferences) are insufficient. There are limits to the transparency that internal environments can achieve. Even if there were not, tracking the motivational salience of external states suggests possible gains for systematic tracking of outcome values in any system in which selection has driven the production of belief-like states. (shrink)

In this paper I defend Kant’s Incorporation Thesis, which holds that we must “incorporate” our incentives into our maxims if we are to act on them. I see this as a thesis about what is necessary for a human being to make the transition from ‘having a desire’ to ‘acting on it’. As such, I consider the widely held view that ‘having a desire’ involves being focused on the world, and not on ourselves or on the desire. (...) I try to show how this view is connected with a denial of any deep distinction between reason and inclination. I then argue for an alternative view of what ‘having a desire’ involves, one according to which it involves being focused both on the world and on ourselves. I show how this view fits naturally with the Kantian distinction between reason and inclination, accounts for independent intuitions about ‘having a desire’, and supports the Incorporation Thesis. I then make some further suggestions about how we might conceive of the object of incorporation. (shrink)

A common view among autonomy theorists is that a desire is autonomous only if it has the right sort of history. Usually, an autonomy-compatible history is taken to consist in the desire’s having had proper origins. In a recent article in this journal, Mikhail Valdman has proposed an alternative historical theory on which a desire’s origins are irrelevant. On Valdman’s “agent-engagement” theory, a desire is autonomous if and only if the agent has made it her own (...) by deliberatively deciding it is worth maintaining and acting on. I argue that both of these approaches are overly demanding: the history of many autonomous desires lack proper origins, agent-engagement, or both. Taking as my starting point Alfred Mele’s account, which I go on to revise and supplement in several important ways, I outline a more flexible historical theory of autonomy which recognizes multiple ways in which a desire can become one’s own. (shrink)

What is philosophy? Why does it matter? How have philosophy and its relation to religion and science changed from the ancient to the medieval and modern periods and beyond? What are the central philosophical ideas, from Socrates to Nietzsche? Reexamining Love of Wisdom addresses these questions. It offers a new perspective by organizing the material under the theme of philosophical desire and shows the timeless importance of philosophy understood as the love of wisdom. Flores provides an (...) historical introduction to philosophy suitable for college students that is a resource for more advanced students or scholars interested in the history and nature of philosophy. -- back cover. (shrink)

Gorman proposes to investigate historical practice under the rubric of a philosophy of disciplines. Such philosophy must first “recover historically” the self-constitution of the discipline in order then to appraise its procedures for warranting claims. Gorman's concept of discipline would have profited from consulting the substantial body of empirical research and theory regarding disciplinarity, and his “historical recovery” of the discipline of history leaves a lot to be desired. These insufficiencies vitiate the interesting arguments he has to offer (...) concerning the question of the truth-claims of whole historical accounts. A better reconstruction of disciplinarity might also have provided him with stronger rejoinders to the postmodern challenge to historical practice that he sees himself called to rebut. (shrink)

PREFACE. THE Author of this very practical treatise on Scotch Loch - Fishing desires clearly that it may be of use to all who had it. He does not pretend to have written anything new, but to have attempted to put what he has to say in as readable a form as possible. Everything in the way of the history and habits of fish has been studiously avoided, and technicalities have been used as sparingly as possible. The writing of this (...) book has afforded him pleasure in his leisure moments, and that pleasure would be much increased if he knew that the perusal of it would create any bond of sympathy between himself and the angling community in general. This section is interleaved with blank shects for the readers notes. The Author need hardly say that any suggestions addressed to the case of the publishers, will meet with consideration in a future edition. We do not pretend to write or enlarge upon a new subject. Much has been said and written-and well said and written too on the art of fishing but loch-fishing has been rather looked upon as a second-rate performance, and to dispel this idea is one of the objects for which this present treatise has been written. Far be it from us to say anything against fishing, lawfully practised in any form but many pent up in our large towns will bear us out when me say that, on the whole, a days loch-fishing is the most convenient. One great matter is, that the loch-fisher is depend- ent on nothing but enough wind to curl the water, -and on a large loch it is very seldom that a dead calm prevails all day, -and can make his arrangements for a day, weeks beforehand whereas the stream- fisher is dependent for a good take on the state of the water and however pleasant and easy it may be for one living near the banks of a good trout stream or river, it is quite another matter to arrange for a days river-fishing, if one is looking forward to a holiday at a date some weeks ahead. Providence may favour the expectant angler with a good day, and the water in order but experience has taught most of us that the good days are in the minority, and that, as is the case with our rapid running streams, -such as many of our northern streams are, -the water is either too large or too small, unless, as previously remarked, you live near at hand, and can catch it at its best. A common belief in regard to loch-fishing is, that the tyro and the experienced angler have nearly the same chance in fishing, -the one from the stern and the other from the bow of the same boat. Of all the absurd beliefs as to loch-fishing, this is one of the most absurd. Try it. Give the tyro either end of the boat he likes give him a cast of ally flies he may fancy, or even a cast similar to those which a crack may be using and if he catches one for every three the other has, he may consider himself very lucky. Of course there are lochs where the fish are not abundant, and a beginner may come across as many as an older fisher but we speak of lochs where there are fish to be caught, and where each has a fair chance. Again, it is said that the boatman has as much to do with catching trout in a loch as the angler. Well, we dont deny that. In an untried loch it is necessary to have the guidance of a good boatman but the same argument holds good as to stream-fishing... (shrink)

In this paper, I will investigate the early work of William Temple (1881–1944). My contention is that Temple’s systematic philosophy contains resources for an interesting variant of a desire argument for God’s existence and for the truth of Christianity. This desire argument moves from claims about the nature of human reason to the conditions for its satisfaction and how that satisfaction might be achieved. In constructing this argument, Temple confronts the problem of evil, and so I will (...) also outline his response to the problem here. Temple is often overlooked in histories of philosophy, though he was conversant with philosophical classics, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Lotze, and, to list a few of the contemporaries or near-contemporaries: Balfour, Haldane, F. H. Bradley, A. C. Bradley, Moore, Bosanquet, Joachim, and Croce. He also acknowledges, in the preface to his main philosophical work Mens Creatrix, a special debt to Bergson, but also signals distance from him in the same place. Temple presents an interesting case of a philosopher and theologian (most of his books are a mixture of the two, some being more predominantly one or the other) because of his commitment to philosophical system in the midst of early analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This paper investigates the fragmentation required of the philosophy of history in light of three key moments in its formation: German Idealism’s desire to see freedom realized in the world, the death of God, and the disasters of the twentieth century. I argue that Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot respond to these threads of the philosophy of history with revolutionary imperatives that belong to no program or project, imperatives that both reorganize and destructure the work of education, (...) affirmations of transience and unmediated violence. I argue, following their lead, that any philosophy of history today must begin in a refusal of state power and the mediated violence of contemporary forms of community. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this paper, I address the question of what we are really after when we seek Smithian mutual sympathy; I also show how the answer I propose can be used to illuminate a crucial feature of Smith's moral philosophy. The first section develops a Smithian response to egoistic interpretations of the desire for mutual sympathy. The second section identifies a number of different self- and other-relevant ways in which one could desire mutual sympathy. Some of these different (...) ways of desiring mutual sympathy comprise a spectrum of degrees of self-centredness; others comprise a spectrum of degrees of other-centredness. The third section shows that the spectra of ways of desiring mutual sympathy can be used to explain the kind of sincere, motivating attachment to morality characteristic of fully developed Smithian moral agents. (shrink)

The philosophy of history has achieved, in the last decade or two, a place of importance in English-speaking philosophy which it has long had on the continent. Professor Dray has been one of the most active contributors to recent discussions on this group of related topics, first with his Laws and Explanation in History, later in articles published in journals or collections of essays, and most recently in Philosophy of History, an introduction to the subject published in (...) the Prentice-Hall Foundations of Philosophy Series.Once thought to be on the periphery of philosophical interest, the philosophy of history can no longer be so considered both because of the increasing importance and accuracy of historical knowledge—and the desirability of a correct analysis of it—and because the attempt to achieve this analysis raises problems in the philosophy of mind and epistemology which are generally admitted to be central philosophical interests. (shrink)

Desire is a central concept in Aristotle's ethical and psychological works, but he does not provide us with a systematic treatment of the notion itself. This book reconstructs the account of desire latent in his various scattered remarks on the subject and analyses its role in his moral psychology. Topics include: the range of states that Aristotle counts as desires ; objects of desire and the relation between desires and envisaging prospects; desire and the good; Aristotle's (...) three species of desire: epithumia, thumos and boulêsis ; Aristotle's division of desires into rational and non-rational; Aristotle and some current views on desire; and the role of desire in Aristotle's moral psychology. The book will be of relevance to anyone interested in Aristotle's ethics or psychology. (shrink)

Plotinus calls the first principle the One and the Good. According to Plotinus, ‘Good’ is an appropriate name for the One because the One is that which all things desire. Since he says that the One is beyond knowledge, beyond language, beyond intellect, and beyond being, however, what philosophical evidence can he provide for his claim that the One is that which all desire? In this article I offer some philosophical evidence, aside from mystical union with the One, (...) for why ‘the Good’ is an appropriate name for the One, and for why calling the One ‘Good’ is not at odds with the fact that it is beyond knowledge, but rather entails it. To this end, after an initial consideration of the relationship between the good and desire in Plato and Aristotle, I focus on the role that desire plays in relation to the Good in Plotinus’ thought. (shrink)

Leading economist Daniel Cohen provides a whirlwind tour of the history of economic growth, from the early days of civilization to modern times, underscoring what is so unsettling today. The new digital economy is establishing a "zero-cost" production model, inexpensive software is taking over basic tasks, and years of exploiting the natural world have begun to backfire with deadly consequences. Working hard no longer guarantees social inclusion or income. Drawing on economics, anthropology, and psychology, and thinkers ranging from Rousseau to (...) Keynes and Easterlin, Cohen examines how a future less dependent on material gain might be considered and, how, in a culture of competition, individual desires might be better attuned to the greater needs of society."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its (...) complex functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be "literate in desire," that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements. Choosing a variety of battlegrounds, from historical phenomena - the 40,000 unsettling photographs of Moroccan drapery taken by Lacan's mentor, G. G. de ClA©rambault; the coincidence between vampire literature and the eighteenth-century imperative to breast-feed; the recurrent emptiness of urban spaces in film noir; the rise of democracy and questions of human rights - to theoretical concepts such as the gaze, cause, and sexual difference, Copjec imagines the blows that each contender might strike. Although Lacan emerges the victor, one has a sense that for Copjec the contest is close, that she is interested not in simply dismissing Foucault but in seizing his theory at those moments when its concerns and strategies are similar to Lacan's. She is intent on understanding how two compelling theories come to diverge, how small differences distort common assumptions. Establishing the links between psychoanalysis and critical philosophy, Copjec treats psychoanalysis not as a private language but as the mother tongue of modernity. She thus makes Lacan's famous "return to Freud" a return, as well, to the best principles of the Enlightenment. By this maneuver she forces us to question the historicist dialect that we have been taught to speak and that we all but take for granted and to regret the loss in it of psychoanalysis's more rousing accents. (shrink)

Explains the desire-fulfillment theory of well-being, its history, its development, its varieties, its advantages, and its challenges.

This innovative volume, by Michael Shapiro, is not about Adam Smith in the sense in which 'about' is usually understood, for it is neither a comprehensive explication of his views nor a careful tracing of the sources of them. Instead it is a confrontation. This is a book about modernity whose vehicle is a reading of Adam Smith—it is an enactment of the convention that despite the contribution Smith made to creating and legitimating the conceptual space for modern, commercial, liberal, (...) and democratic society, his views are inadequate for those who want an effective, politicized understanding of the present. Shapiro's ultimate goal in this examination is to 'exemplify a way of doing political theory—one that challenges some traditional ways of constructing and celebrating the 'political theory cannon.'. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relationship between the history and philosophy of science by way of the issue of epistemic normativity. After brief discussion of the relationship between history and philosophy of science in Kuhn’s own thinking, the paper focuses on the implications of the history of science for epistemic normativity. There may be historical evidence for change of scientific methodology, which may seem to support a position of epistemic relativism. However, the fact that the methods of science undergo (...) variation does not entail that epistemic justification varies with the methods employed by scientists. In order to arrive at the relativist conclusion, an epistemological argument is required that justification depends upon operative methods. This raises the question of epistemic normativity. Kuhn himself attempted to deal with this question on a number of occasions, but without success. Following brief discussion of Kuhn on this topic, the paper then turns to the treatment of epistemic normativity in the work of Lakatos, Laudan and Worrall. Lakatos and Laudan proposed that particular episodes from the history of science might be employed to adjudicate between alternative theories of method. Such episodes are selected on the basis of value judgements or pre-analytic intuitions, but such value judgements and intuitions are themselves problematic. Laudan later proposed the normative naturalist view that a rule of method is to be evaluated empirically on the basis of its reliability in conducing to a desired cognitive aim. Against this attempt to naturalize meta-methodology, Worrall argued that the normative force of the appeal to past reliability requires an a priori inductive principle. In my view, the problem of epistemic normativity is solved by combining the particularist focus on specific episodes in the history of science with the naturalistic account of the reliability of method. (shrink)

What are the methodological consequences of the fact that Philosophy has a history and that Philosophy incorporates the products of the history of Philosophy into its current practice? Is an internal ‘philosophical’ history of Philosophy possible and desirable or is the history of Philosophy best approached as a branch of Intellectual History and/or Cultural History. This chapter first sketches some of the history of the study of philosophy’s past and contrasts some widely employed ‘doxological’, (...) ‘anthropological’, and sociological approaches to that study with the approaches employed in a particular, historically recent discipline, History of Philosophy. It argues that History of Philosophy has a distinctive methodological structure which poises it interestingly between the disciplines of History and Philosophy and which can be usefully compared with, but is quite distinct from, that of the History of Science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 593-610 [Access article in PDF] The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World Edward Peters I. The letter to Ferdinand and Isabella that Christopher Columbus intended to serve as the preface to the Libro de las profecías began with a remarkable observation about his own career and the particular temperament it had shaped in him: From a very young (...) age I began to navigate the seas, and I have continued to do so until today. This art inclines those who follow it to desire to know the secrets of this world. 1Although Columbus was certainly not unlearned, there is an artlessness and directness about his remark that suggest that whatever Columbus may have meant by "the secrets of the world" and the desire of navigators to know them, he was probably not speaking reconditely or mystically. 2 [End Page 593]Nor was Columbus the only early sixteenth-century practical man who spoke this way. The letters of Hernán Cortés, hardly a philosopher or a navigator, pointed out to correspondents that it was "a universal condition of man to want to know," and that he was first of all desirous of knowledge "of the secrets of these parts"; that "many new secrets" had been learned from the discoveries; of a volcano, "I wished to know the secret of this, which seemed something of a miracle." 3If practical folk could speak thus at the turn of the sixteenth century, it is not surprising that in the course of that century their rulers should appropriate the language of secrets, including the secrets of distant places, and the desire to know them and in doing so to transform their realms into information-gathering states, using detailed questionaires to assemble and organize new data just as they assembled cabinets of curiosities, libraries, zoos, observatories, and botanical gardens. As J. H. Elliott put it: But curiosity also had its due place within a wider Christian framework. At the end of the century, José de Acosta, in his great Natural and Moral History of the Indies, likened men to ants in their refusal to let themselves be deterred, once they had set out on their quest for facts. "And the high and eternal wisdom of the Creator uses this natural curiosity of men to communicate the light of His holy gospel to peoples who still live in the darkness of their errors." This assumption, that all knowledge was subordinated to a higher purpose and fitted into a providential design, was crucial for the assimilation of the New World of America by sixteenth-century Christendom. 4Elliott's characterization of an honorific Christian intellectual curiosity represented a very small part of a very complex semantic universe that centered on the Latin term curiositas and its vernacular cognates, not all of whose meanings were neutral or honorific. Just three years before Acosta wrote there had, after all, appeared the first printed history of Doctor Faustus, another sixteenth-century practical man who was also interested in the secrets of the world. 5 And not [End Page 594] too many years after Acosta wrote, another practical being, Milton's Lucifer, also went forth boldly to seek new worlds. 6 Only in a restricted sense could the desire to know the secrets of the world be understood in the way that Columbus, Cortés, Philip II, and Acosta celebrated it. In many cases it had to be extricated from a semantic universe in which it had long been identified with less honorable motives and more dangerous or ephemeral objects.The most influential exploration of part of that semantic universe appeared in Hans Blumenberg's long essay entitled, "The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity," first published as part of a larger work in 1966, later slightly revised and separately reprinted, and translated into English in 1983. 7 Blumenberg's particular understanding of the history of philosophy, however, and his narrow focus on the natural sciences as the arena of "theoretical" curiosity limited both his conceptualization and his argument. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LITERARY THEORY, PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND EXEGESIS XYONE FAMILIAR with the present state of biblical studies is aware that there is a significant shift on the part of many,scholars away from the historical critical method as it was practiced earlier toward methods that are based upon various theories of literature.1 Criteria for judging the aptitude of either the historical or literary method are often established on the ·basis (...) of their practical effectiveness in " yielding a meaning," particularly one that seems to serve the believing community. The difficulty with such an approach is that the philosophical principles latent in and undedying the various methods are not examined directly and are thus left to function unquestioned while the debate centers on results. The purpose of this study is modest. It is to reflect critically on a concrete work of exegesis in order to see how exegesis actually proceeds or might proceed. I a1so wish to question some of the unexpressed epistemological principles that often operate in whrut biblical scholars do. Taking rus a model those historians who have reflected philosophically on what it means to do history, I wish in a similar manner to reflect on what it means to do exegesis·. Such an undertaking, it is hoped, will advance the dialogue between systematic theology and exegesis and indicate further avenues to be explored. We have arrived at a moment when it is in the interest of both disciplines to have a clearer notion of how to assess the results of biblical study. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the central issue in biblical studies is not method as such, though discussion of 1 For a description of more profound aspects of this shift, see: J. P. Martin, "Toward a Post-Critical Paradigm," New Testament Studies 33 (1987) 370-385. 575 576 FRANCIS MARTIN what is called the historical critical method, the literary method, etc. will always have its place. The core problem is that of developing a theology of human communication. This will be a theology that learns from the philosophy of language and literature and yet derives its primary lessons from the unique communication that each theologian experiences in his or her personal contact with the biblical text. The work done by Paul Ricoeur in the field of the philosophy of l1 anguage and literature can provide a, point of departure in the elaboration of such a theology of communication. In addition to reflecting philosophically on many aspects of human communication, Ricoeur has expressed himself from time to time on the relation of his philosophy to biblica,l issues. Thus, in his essay, " Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation," 2 Ricoeur speaks of biblical hermeneutic as being " one regional hermeneutic within a general hermeneutic and a unique hermeneutic that is joined to philosophy as its organon." 3 In discussing the expression of dependence without heteronomy, at the conclusion his essay, Ricoeur goes on to say:... the experience of testimony can only provide the horizon for a specifically religious and biblical experience of revelation, without our ever being able to derive that experience from the philosophical categories of truth as manifestation and reflection as testimony.4 These statements, as we can easily recognize, touch upon a key dimension of the problem facing us as we attempt to locate the human communication of the scriptures in the context of revelation. The question is that of the presence of the unique existing within the common. It is the fact that the particular and irreducible nature of the biblical witness is necessarily made in language common to 1 alL Scripture directs itself, not 2Now found in L. Mudge (ed.), Essays iAi Bibliaal Interpretation (Philadelphia : Fortress, 1980), pp. 73-118. See in addition, "Naming God," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34 (1979) 215-227. 3" Toward a Hermeneutic," p. 104. 4Jbid., p. 117. LITERARY THEORY, HISTORY AND EXEGESIS 577 to a remote and privileged sphere of " religion," but rather to the marketplace where human thoughts about existence jostle one another in a desire to be heard: Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the open squares she raises her voice. Down the crowded ways she calls out, at the city gates she... (shrink)

Kant's 'practical philosophy' comprehends a diverse group of his writings on ethics, politics, law, religion, and the philosophy of history and culture. Kristi E. Sweet demonstrates the unity and interdependence of these writings by showing how they take as their animating principle the human desire for what Kant calls the unconditioned - understood in the context of his practical thought as human freedom. She traces the relationship between this desire for freedom and the multiple forms of (...) finitude that confront human beings in different aspects of practical life, and stresses the interdependence of the pursuit of individual moral goodness and the formation of community through the state, religion, culture and history. This study of Kant's approach to practical life discovers that doing our duty, itself the realization of our individual freedom, requires that we set for ourselves and pursue a whole constellation of social, political and other communal ends. (shrink)

This article addresses the ways in which art and philosophy have been discursively used to conceptualize critical political changes and frame narratives of liberation by including and excluding primitive consciousness simultaneously. More concretely, it analyzes the contribution of art and philosophy to the understanding of history and post-history through different representations of black bodies, black desires, and black agencies in the novels She (1886) by Rider Haggard and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) by W. E. B. (...) Du Bois. At stake is the question of the archeology of the past as a living memory in the post-historical time. This past is politically relevant especially if its cognitive fossils negate the idea of exhausted primitive consciousness in the modern world and give meanings to incongruous bedfellows such as civilization and slavery, neoliberalism and poverty, democracy and Nazism, globalization, terrorism and racism, liberalism and homophobia. Arguably, the triumph of scientific ideas has left us with a perpetual quest for liberation rather than the actualization of liberation as a world phenomenon. I hypothesize the relation between exhaustible elements of technical consciousness simulating progress and their inexhaustible materiality at critical historical junctures as a struggle for taste and self-determination. Critical in this relation is the sense that not only primitive stages of consciousness are never fully exhausted at historical junctures, but that one never comes close to thinking about genuine liberation without engaging with real world matters both domestic/intimate and foreign. (shrink)

For Jean-Paul Sartre, both love and sexual desire are necessarily doomed to failure. In this paper, I wish to briefly explain why Sartre takes this position. Both love and sexual desire fail, as do all patterns to conduct towards the other, because they involve an attempt to simultaneouslycapture the other-as-subject and as-object. This, for Sartre, involves an ontological contradiction which I demonstrate.Furthermore, I wish to offer the outline of a criticism of this position, a criticism made from the (...) perspective of an acceptance of the basic Sartrian approach taken in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s description of love implies an attempt to overcome ontological aspects of the human condition which are fundamentally insurmountable. I will show that this description is flawed even within the confines of a Sartrian ontology by pointing out unwarranted assumptions on Sartre’s part as to the goals of these activities and their worth, as well as the worth of the emotional consciousness itself. (shrink)

Where is my mind?: locating the mind metaphysically in Hobbes / Amy M. Schmitter -- The Cambridge Platonists: material and immaterial substance / Jasper Reid -- Descartes' philosophy of mind and its early critics / Antonia LoLordo -- Consciousness and reflection: the later Cartesians / Steven Nadler -- Malebranche on mind / Julie Walsh -- Cavendish and Conway on the individual human mind / Karen Detlefsen -- Locke and metaphysics of "state of sensibility" / Vili Lähteenmäki -- Spinoza on (...) thinking substance and the non-substantial mind / Beth Lord -- Two theories of mind as an immaterial substance: Descartes and Leibniz / Martha Brandt Bolton -- Leibniz on perception, sensation, apperception, and conscientia / Christian Barth -- Leibniz on appetitions and desires / Julia Jorati -- The Clarke Collins correspondence / William Uzgalis -- Mental substance and mental activity / Margaret Atherton -- Thomas Reid's common sense philosophy of mind / Todd Buras -- Persons and passions in Hume's philosophy of mind / Angela Coventry -- Kant on the mind / Andrew Brook. (shrink)

Why History? is a compelling introduction to the issue of history and ethics. Designed to provoke discussion, the book asks whether and why a good knowledge and understanding of the past is desirable. In the context of current postmodern thinking, Keith Jenkins suggests that the goal of "learning lessons from the past" actually means learning lessons from stories written by historians and others. If the past as history has no foundation, can anything ethical be gained from history? Daring and controversial, (...) Why History? presents liberating challenges to history and ethics, proposing that we have reached an emancipatory moment which is well beyond the "end of history.". (shrink)

Philosophy of biology is often said to have emerged in the last third of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, it has been alleged that the only authors who engaged philosophically with the life sciences were either logical empiricists who sought to impose the explanatory ideals of the physical sciences onto biology, or vitalists who invoked mystical agencies in an attempt to ward off the threat of physicochemical reduction. These schools paid little attention to actual biological science, and (...) as a result philosophy of biology languished in a state of futility for much of the twentieth century. The situation, we are told, only began to change in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a new generation of researchers began to focus on problems internal to biology, leading to the consolidation of the discipline. In this paper we challenge this widely accepted narrative of the history of philosophy of biology. We do so by arguing that the most important tradition within early twentieth-century philosophy of biology was neither logical empiricism nor vitalism, but the organicist movement that flourished between the First and Second World Wars. We show that the organicist corpus is thematically and methodologically continuous with the contemporary literature in order to discredit the view that early work in the philosophy of biology was unproductive, and we emphasize the desirability of integrating the historical and contemporary conversations into a single, unified discourse. (shrink)

During the eighteenth century, the discovery of sexual reproduction in insect species prompted the demise of spontaneous generation and new developments in natural history, theology, and political economy. The sexual lives of insects prompted debates on whether insects were governed by desire, free will, and even marital tendency. Fuelled by the democratisation of microscopy, early modern entomology took a new turn and breadth: the study of insects and of their sexual lives provided unexpected new insights into human sexuality, reproduction, (...) and Malthusian fears of overpopulation. This article surveys the intellectual culture of entomology and natural history during the crucial decades when entomologists worked to quantify the reproductive capacities of insect species. Assessing the influences these entomological works had within political economy and theology, we argue that the sexual lives of insects − once analysed and delineated − influenced familiar ideological features of the intellectual landscape of the late Enlightenment, particularly in the theological philosophies of northern Europe and in the political economy of population in Britain. (shrink)

What role should a motivation to do the right thing, read de dicto, play in the life of a virtuous agent? According to a prominent argument from Michael Smith, those who are only motivated by such a desire are moral fetishists. Since Smith’s argument, a number of philosophers have examined what role this desire would play in the life of the morally virtuous agent. My primary aim in this paper is an historical one. I will show that much (...) of this discussion can be found in Adam Smith’s The Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1764), published over two hundred years before Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem. I will then argue that there is an important insight to be found in Adam Smith’s book that is missing from the contemporary discussion. According to Adam Smith, while a de dicto desire to do the right thing can play an important role in the life of a virtuous agent, the person who is only ever motivated by this desire will often be epistemically disadvantaged compared to the person who possesses the appropriate sentiments. I will argue that Adam Smith’s claim is plausible given his own view of the moral sentiments as providing the foundation of morality. In addition, there is good reason to accept Smith’s claim even for those who do not accept his view of the foundational role of the moral sentiments. (shrink)

In this paper two main claims are presented. (1) Hume's theory of action, which was tailored to complement his Moral Philosophy perfectly, has independent strengths, and it is possible to defend Hume's arguments for the autonomy of desire and to show that Hume was being fully consistent in allowing reason to be a cause of action and also in arguing for his two theses. (2) A recurrent theme can be isolated in Hume's writings in which Hume, on the (...) one hand, attempts to solve traditional philosophical problems by adverting purely to the role of sentiment, and on the other hand, wants to retain all the common sense criteria of truth and reasonableness. And the tension that appears to exist between Hume's views on the respective roles of reason and passion in influencing the will is merely a reemergence of this theme. (shrink)

Descartes a bien reconnu que les passions de l’ame manifestent l’union de l’âme et du corps. Mais on peut regretter qu’il ait réduit les passions à des perceptions confuses, et qu’il n’ait pas indiqué qu’elles supposent toutes la force primordiale du désir. C’est le désir qui façonne la matière et l’organise en un corps vivant. Les êtres particuliers sont constitués par le désir en tant qu’il poursuit un but extérieur, et c’est pourquoi leur existence s’écoule dans le temps. Mais chez (...) l’homme, le désir peut s’affranchir de l’immédiate sollicitation des objets, et trouver un accomplissement plus intérieur et plus profond. (shrink)