Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century. The principal founder of existentialism, a political thinker and famous novelist and dramatist, his work has exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and cultural studies. Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings is the first collection of Sartre's key philosophical writings and provides an indispensable resource for readers of his work. Stephen Priest's clear and helpful introductions make the volume an ideal companion to those coming to Sartre's (...) writing for the first time. (shrink)

On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the (...) renewed opening of existence onto nothing, or onto an “outside” that the opening itself constitutes. (shrink)

The article reflects on the silence and apparent passivity of many women priests in the current debate on their representation in the episcopate of the Church of England. The author locates such inactivity in clergy women's fear of militancy, and the absence, in their expression of vocation hopes, of an agenda for the transformation of ecclesial structures. The legal provi sions defining their priesthood, and the lack of organizational strategy to equip them for leadership, foster professional tension and uncertainty as (...) to status and development. Women clergy seem surprisingly ignorant of the debt owed to Christian feminists and their role in the promotion of women's ordination; this needs to be remedied. Unless they support one another, and so inform themselves as to speak out responsibly and courteously for fresh understandings and exercises of authority that are viable for the pre sent, their ordination as priests brings no radical change to the institutional Church, in which their opponents remain articulate and active in dissent. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Marion has long endeavored to broaden our view of truth. In this illuminating new book--his deepest engagement with theology to date--Marion proposes a rigorous new understanding of human and divine revelation in a deeply phenomenological key. Although today considered the central theme of theology, the concept of Revelation was almost entirely unknown to the first millennium of Christian thought. In a penetrating historical deconstruction Marion traces the development of this term to the rise of metaphysics from Aquinas through (...) Descartes, Suárez, and Kant; formalized into an epistemological framework, this understanding of Revelation has restricted philosophical and theological thinking ever since. To break free from these limits, Marion takes hints from theologians including Balthasar and Barth while mobilizing the phenomenology of givenness to provide a rigorous new understanding of revelation as a mode of uncovering. His extensive study of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures unfolds a logic of Trinitarian phenomenality, worked out in conversation with Augustine, Basil, Hegel, Schelling, and others, that ultimately transforms our very notions of being and time. The result is precisely what we have come to expect from this acclaimed philosopher: masterful historical scholarship working in tandem with daring originality. (shrink)

In this interview, Jean Greisch discusses the 1979 Colloquium Heidegger et la Question de Dieu, his original contribution to the published volume, and its impact on his later work. Greisch first situates the conference within the reception history of Heidegger as well as the critical advancements of Levinas and Derrida that made such a questioning of God palatable within the French philosophical context. He argues that theological thinking delivers an important challenge to philosophical thinking, and reflects on what such (...) a meeting point could mean. Finally he voices a double challenge to Heidegger, not only in his forgetting of the Hebraic tradition, but his complicity with Nazi antisemitism, while yet advising against a wholesale rejection of Heidegger’s insights. (shrink)

This book explores the ways deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity (what Jacques Derrida calls the "to-come," [l'à-venir]). In order to achieve this, it focuses on three French expressions, venue, survenue, and voir-venir, each taken from the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Catherine Malabou. The idea behind this focus is to elude the issue of the one and only "to-come," as if this was a uniform and coherent entity or structure of experience, and to put forward instead (...) the possibility of a multiplicity of structures, each with a different intonation or pitch. Overall, this book makes an original contribution to the way deconstruction addresses the issue of futurity in the act of writing and translation. (shrink)

This book is a rich collection of philosophical essays radically interrogating key notions and preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger’s Being and Time as its permanent point of reference and dispute, this collection also confronts other important philosophers, such as Kant, Nietzsche, and Derrida. The projects of these pivotal thinkers of finitude are relentlessly pushed to their extreme, with respect both to their unexpected horizons and to their as yet unexplored analytical potential. A Finite Thinking shows that, paradoxically, (...) where the thought of finitude comes into its own it frees itself, not only to reaffirm a certain transformed and transformative presence, but also for a non-religious reconsideration and reaffirmation of certain theologemes, as well as of the body, heart, and love. This book shows the literary dimension of philosophical discourse, providing important enabling ideas for scholars of literature, cultural theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has stolen up on us. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we no longer build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages— and we do this at the same time as we form (...) multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the state. In such a time, one of the world’s most eminent philosophers and an emerging astrophysicist return to the ancient art of cosmology. Nancy and Barrau’s work is a study of life, plural worlds, and what the authors call the struction or rebuilding of these worlds. Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, “What’s this world coming to?,” is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but in one of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Of Struction” is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what they carefully call the struction of dis-order. (shrink)

This book provides an introduction to the historical sources of philosophical hermeneutics as it has come to fruition in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer.

A theory of how concept formation begins is presented that accounts for conceptual activity in the first year of life, shows how increasing conceptual complexity comes about, and predicts the order in which new types of information accrue to the conceptual system. In a compromise between nativist and empiricist views, it offers a single domain-general mechanism that redescribes attended spatiotemporal information into an iconic form. The outputs of this mechanism consist of types of spatial information that we know infants attend (...) to in the first months of life. These primitives form the initial basis of concept formation, allow explicit preverbal thought, such as recall, inferences, and simple mental problem solving, and support early language learning. The theory details how spatial concepts become associated with bodily feelings of force and trying. It also explains why concepts of emotions, sensory concepts such as color, and theory of mind concepts are necessarily later acquisitions because they lack contact with spatial descriptions to interpret unstructured internal experiences. Finally, commonalities between the concepts of preverbal infants and nonhuman primates are discussed. (shrink)

On the one hand, freedom is said to be the property of a subject. On the other, freedom only happens in the space of being-in-common. Freedom, then, is the place of a conflict between the “self” and the “with,” between independence or autonomy and dependence or sharing. Resolving this apparent antinomy requires showing how the with ontologically constitutes the self. This, in turn, allows for a rethinking of freedom beyond what liberal democracy and political economy have to offer, as the (...) renewed opening of existence onto nothing, or onto an “outside” that the opening itself constitutes. (shrink)

"Christian philosophy" is commonly regarded as an oxymoron, philosophy being thought incompatible with the assumptions and conclusions required by religious faith. According to this way of thinking, philosophy and theology must forever remain distinct. In From Theology to Theological Thinking, Jean-Yves Lacoste takes a different approach. Stepping back from contemporary philosophical concerns, Lacoste--a leading figure in the philosophy of religion--looks at the relationship between philosophy and theology from the standpoint of the history of ideas. He notes in particular that (...) theology and philosophy were not considered separate realms until the high Middle Ages, this distinction being a hallmark of the modern era that is coming to an end. Lacoste argues that the intellectual task before us now is to work in the frontier region between or beyond these domains, work he identifies as "the task of thinking." With this argument, Lacoste resets our understanding of Western Christian thought, contending that a new way of thinking that is at once philosophical and theological will be the lasting discourse of Christianity. (shrink)

The implementation of a diplomacy that could put more emphasis on democracy and human rights was not an easy process in Belgium. Treatment of these matters have taken a different perspective in Zaïre, Rwanda and Burundi, Belgium 's three most important African partners. Reasons for that are twofold. Fore one thing, the Belgian foreign affairs service has always been overloaded by mercantile preoccupations. Secondly, knowledge on Africa has been limited to short circle diplomatic contacts while no instruments were ever implemented (...) that could have ensured some following up of the African civil society at large.In the future, the continuation for a slow process of disengagement might be foreseable. New "partners" might come to the forefront such as South Africa while the U.S. and international financial organisations will definitely try to impose "good governance" together with a reasonable dose of human rights. (shrink)

One of the most important questions in the young field of numerical cognition studies is how humans bridge the gap between the quantity-related content produced by our evolutionarily ancient brains and the precise numerical content associated with numeration systems like Indo-Arabic numerals. This gap problem is the main focus of this paper. The aim here is to evaluate the extent to which cultural factors can help explain how we come to think about numbers beyond the subitizing range. To do this, (...) I summarize Clark’s notion of a difference maker in explaining complex causation that criss-crosses between mind and world and apply it to Menary’s Open MIND. MIND Group, Frankfurt, 2015a) discussion of mathematical cognition as a case of enculturation. I argue that while Menary’s views on enculturation can help explain what makes the difference between numerate and anumerate cultures, it cannot help specify what makes the difference between numerate and anumerate individuals. I argue that features of enculturation do not provide an account of innovation capable of explaining how individuals manage to improve and modify the practices of their cultural niche. This is because Menary’s construal of the role of enculturation in the development of mathematical cognition focuses mostly on the inheritance and transmission of practices, not on their origins, which involve individual-level understanding, rather than population-level practices and pressures. The upshot is that culture provides the necessary background conditions against which individuals can innovate. This role is crucial in the development of numerical abilities—crucial, but explanatorily limited. (shrink)

Along with Husserl's Ideas and Heidegger's Being and Time, Being Given is one of the classic works of phenomenology in the twentieth century. Through readings of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, and twentieth-century French phenomenology (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Henry), it ventures a bold and decisive reappraisal of phenomenology and its possibilities. Its author's most original work to date, the book pushes phenomenology to its limits in an attempt to redefine and recover the phenomenological ideal, which the author argues has never (...) been realized in any of the historical phenomenologies. Against Husserl's reduction to consciousness and Heidegger's reduction to Dasein, the author proposes a third reduction to givenness, wherein phenomena appear unconditionally and show themselves from themselves at their own initiative. Being Given is the clearest, most systematic response to questions that have occupied its author for the better part of two decades. The book articulates a powerful set of concepts that should provoke new research in philosophy, religion, and art, as well as at the intersection of these disciplines. Some of the significant issues it treats include the phenomenological definition of the phenomenon, the redefinition of the gift in terms not of economy but of givenness, the nature of saturated phenomena, and the question “Who comes after the subject?” Throughout his consideration of these issues, the author carefully notes their significance for the increasingly popular fields of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Being Given is therefore indispensable reading for anyone interested in the question of the relation between the phenomenological and the theological in Marion and emergent French phenomenology. (shrink)

I inquire into argument at the system level, exploring the controversy over whether climate scientists should fly. I document participants’ knowledge of a skeptical argument that because scientists fly, they cannot testify credibly about the climate emergency. I show how this argument has been managed by pro-climate action arguers, and how some climate scientists have developed parallel reasoning, articulating a sophisticated case why they will be more effective in the controversy if they fly less. Finally, I review some strategies arguers (...) deploy to use the arguments of others against them. I argue that only by attending to argument-making at the system level can we understand how arguers come to know the resources for argument available in a controversy and to think strategically about how to use them. I call for more work on argument at the system level. (shrink)

El problema del presente es abordado en su dimensión de realidad dada al hombre. En primer lugar, este articulo ahonda en el carácter impersonal del tiempo y en su condición contradictoria de lugar de entrega de lo dado: al presentarse el presente no hay ni donador ni beneficiario. En segundo lugar, declinando el sentido de la palabra francesa "maintenant", se evidencia el "ahora" como nulidad entre pasado y futuro; como intersticio dual en el que se alcanza y se pierde toda (...) cosa. Apoyándose en la concepción kantiana del tiempo y en la noción de donación de Derrida, el autor indica que el "ahora" es receptividad inmediata, intuitiva y no conceptual: en el presente el hombre se da y se recibe a si mismo. El presente, a la vez que constituye el espacio de la identidad, es también vector de diferencia: al hacerse signo a si mismo de sí mismo, el presente aparece como su propia alteridad. La duración del presente, por expresar la relación del hombre consigo mismo, es signo de alternancia entre llegada y partida; entre muerte y reparación. En fin, se analizan las mutaciones del sentido que se le ha dado a la noción de promesa en la historia de Occidente, entendida como la experiencia de la proyección del ahora hacia el porvenir. The problem of present is analyzed as a reality given to man. First, the impersonal character of time is studied in its contradictory condition of opening place of giving: when present appears, there is not a giver, nor a receiver. In the second place, by considering the etymological sense of the French word "maintenant", it is showed that the "now" is a nullity between past and future, a dual interstice in which everything is reached or lost. Following the Kantian conception of time and the Derridian notion of "donation", the author highlights that the "now" is immediate receptivity, intuitive and not conceptual: in the present, man gives himself to himself and receives himself from himself. The present, at the same time that it constitutes the space of identity, it is also the vector of difference: when it becomes a sign to himself of himself, the present appears as his own alterity. The present duration, as it traduces the relation of man with himself, is a sign of alternation between coming and leaving; between dead and reparation. Finally, the mutations in the meaning of the notion of "promise" in Western history are investigated and understood as the experience of the now projected towards the future. (shrink)

Approximations form an essential part of scientific activity and they come in different forms: conceptual approximations (simplifications in models), mathematical approximations of various types (e.g. linear equations instead of non-linear ones, computational approximations), experimental approximations due to limitations of the instruments and so on and so forth. In this paper, we will consider one type of approximation, namely numerical approximations involved in the comparison of two results, be they experimental or theoretical. Our goal is to lay down the conceptual and (...) formal foundations of a local theory of partial truth. This is done by introducing and exploring the concept of truth space. (shrink)

One of Michel Henry’s major contributions to the phenomenology of the body consists in his proposal, based on his reading of Maine de Biran, to understand the subjective corporeity from the angle of the ability of action. Subjective corporeity acquires its ontological autonomy and its reality only through its own temporality. In reference to several unpublished texts, this article tries to clarify the nexus between ability and time, and thus to emphasize the crucial importance of the past for a “phenomenology (...) of life”, in his paradoxical connection with the necessity to think a “coming in presence” of the world. (shrink)

This paper aims to determine the major axes of the economic policy implemented by the Walloon Region since it acquired significant powers in january 1989. A brief summary of the mechanisms introduced by the Special Financing Law demonstrates how much federal entities suffer from financial constraints imposed by the budgetary sourcing from the National Government. As a result the resources made available are lower than 1988 expenditure on items which have since been 'federalized". The balance will have to be financed (...) by Regional borrowing.We discuss several budgetary policies scenarios and their effects. The Walloon Region has chosen a middle way between two extremes. It has avoided an unchanged expenditure policy, which would have led to an undesirable increase in the debt of the Region, followed by a chronic budgetary shortage. neither has it introduced an excessively strict policy - obtaining a balanced budget by 1996 would have meant a 20% cut in current expenditures. The Walloon Region has opted for a policy of distributing growth between the present and the future by accepting a reasonable level of debt with borrowing limited to the financing of investments which increase the Region's earning assets.When it comes to the budgetary policy of the French Community, we confine ourselves to a brief presentation of the budget because of uncertainty about how it will be made up. (shrink)

The paper discusses analogies between the way in which infinity is understood and dealt with in mathematics and in Jewish tradition. It begins with recalling the classical debate about infinity in the field of the foundations of mathematics. Reading an important paper by A. Robinson, we come to the conclusion that mathematicians work “as if” infinite totalities existed. They do so by following the rules of their formalized discourse which, at least if it refers to anything at all, also refers (...) to such totalities. The paper describes how, according to Jewish tradition, infinity is also not theological: instead of thinking that they own some infinite being or relate to it, observant Jews follow Jewish law. The analogy is then extended to what is called ‘epistemological infinity’. The paper shows that both in mathematics and in Judaism, we get some epistemological experience of infinity, as far as both Talmudic knowledge and contemporary mathematical encyclopedia are experienced as inexhaustible sources of new thoughts, structures, ideas, developments. (shrink)

Who Comes After the Subject offers the most comprehensive overview to date of contemporary French thinking on the question of the "subject." Nineteen philosophers and critics offer diverse perspectives on the subject as it has manifested itself in our modern discourses: the subject of philosophy, of the State, of history, of psychoanalysis. Each contribution asks What has become of the subject? or What has the subject become? in the wake of its critiques and deconstructions .

Nowadays nothing is more discredited than freedom. In the past, people sometimes sold their freedom for money. Today people sell it even if in its place they can only look forward to war or death. How did things come to this pass? Because the freedoms provided by bourgeois democracies are mystifications. The rights or the socalled rights we all have in principle have real meaning only for a miniscule part of the population.

Elephant fish and GPS is an attempt to reflect on data flux, and artistic practice considered as a way to implement an experience specific to a flux. Sonification is particularly well suited to this type of implementation. As such, it leads us to question the nature of this type of experience, the position of the person who is faced with the artistic object, and the position and function of the artist. It allows us to query the status of devices produced (...) by such an artistic practice and the status of what is, traditionally, called a “work of art”. The approach is derived from neither the study of specific artistic projects that could be considered as examples from which a general model could be extrapolated, nor, conversely, that of the enunciation of models illustrated by concrete references. The intention is not to categorize practice or behavior. It is rather an approach that seeks to shift concepts and ways of thinking through progressive analogies aimed at critically questioning the notion of experience in a transition from “object” based logic to “flux” or “field”, based logic, coming from an aesthetic perspective. (shrink)

The sciences of man, conciously or not, work on significations. It is therefore desirable that they learn from hermeneutics, which is the science of interpretation; and interpretation of behaviour uses the same methods and comes upon the same difficulties as interpretation of texts. The history of hermeneutics has shown the various dimensions of symbols: neutral aspect of textual configurations, poietical aspect of production strategies and aesthetic aspect of reception strategies. Hermeneutics is a semiology, but semiology is also a hermeneutics. Both (...) must merge into a theory of symbolic forms of peircean inspiration, which will transcend the traditional apories of hermeneutics and the uncertainties of semiology. (shrink)

According to a popular thought, sympathy is an epistemic phenomenon: in sympathizing with others we come to be aware of them as fellow sentient beings. This view–which I call the Epistemic View–effectively characterizes sympathy as a form of social cognition. In this paper, I will argue against the Epistemic View. As far as I can see, this view radically misconstrues the way sympathy is directed at others. I will at the same time provide some material for, and motivate, an alternative (...) proposal according to which the primary significance of sympathy is practical rather than epistemic. On this account, sympathy is a form of interpersonal acknowledgment rather than interpersonal awareness. (shrink)

Beginning with The Automatic Society, where Stiegler, on the occasion of an analysis of the unification of the technical system by the digital, synthesizes his thought of the three stages of the process of "proletarianization," this paper comes first to a critical examination of the originary "prosthetic conditions" which, according to Technics and Time, made possible the ambivalence of the technical pharmakon and the "systemic stupidity" of today. This leads then to a development on the problem of the status of (...) desire in the stieglerian pharmacology of mind, which makes it infinite and specific to humans. Finally, this development leads us to a confrontation between Stiegler’s mobilization of doing-right (faire-droit) to unify the domains of philosophy, and a redefinition of doing-right within a differently unified human ecology, whose archireflexive methodological questioning is translated secondarily in this redefinition in terms of suffering needs versus consumerist Desire. (shrink)

In Beyond Tragedy and Eternal Peace, Jean-François Drolet provides a synoptic interpretation of Nietzsche's reflections on politics and international relations in the context of the late nineteenth century. Revolving around questions concerning conflict and political violence, the study examines the symbiotic relationship between Nietzsche's critique of Western metaphysics and his analyses of the political processes, institutions and dominant ideologies shaping public life in Germany and Europe during the 1870s and 1880s. This includes the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of (...) Germany under Bismarck, the advent of mass democracy and the rise and transformation of European nationalism. In the German-speaking world, these developments were also central to the emergence of what would come to be known as "Geopolitik" (geopolitics)--a distinct set of intellectual and political initiatives driven by growing anxieties over the more permanent aspects of German political geography and the destabilizing consequences of techno-scientific innovations for world order. Drolet exposes and analyses Nietzsche's account of these developments against the backdrop of Nietzsche's engagement with Kantian thought and "European nihilism"--an all-consuming crisis of meaning triggered by the dissolution of the structuring ideals which had connected the exercise of power with purpose and determined questions of human co-existence under Christianity. Through this reconstructive exegesis, he shows that Nietzsche's philosophy channels a powerful and still greatly under-appreciated account of the changing political processes and agencies that culminated in the momentous collapse of the European society of states during the first half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This article aims to present some of the main results of contemporary French psychodynamics of work. The writings of Christophe Dejours constitute the central references in this area. His psychoanalytical approach, which is initially concerned with the impact of contemporary work practices on individual health, has implications that go well beyond the narrow psycho-pathological interest. The most significant theoretical development to have come out of Dejours's research is that of Yves Clot, whose writings will constitute the second reference point in (...) this article. The article attempts to demonstrate that the thick definition of work that Dejours and Clot operate with, as a result of their focus on its psychological function, speaks directly, in substantial and critical ways, to all disciplines with an interest in work, to philosophers, social theorists and social scientists, including economic theorists. (shrink)

The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterises being. The first part of this book, 'Existence' asks how, today, one can give sense or meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our 'sense'. In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence 'is'; (...) rather, we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. The second section, 'Poetry', asks: What if art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe the coming of existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence, and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political and philosophical, as well as all the realms of poetry. (shrink)

No one would think of denying that literary texts lend themselves to “plural” readings, as we say today: the studies collected in this issue are one more proof, as is the title of the collection. Tens of thousands of pages have already been written on Shakespeare and on Montaigne, which does not preclude the enjoyment of those that are offered us here; and the idea would not occur to anyone that this process of re-writing could ever come to an end, (...) aside from the apocalyptic end of all human things, written and unwritten. (shrink)

We are in 1563, somewhere on a Brazilian beach about 100 kilometres north of what is now São Paulo. A young man in a cowled robe alone on the beach is writing a poem on the sand with the point of his stick. The hostage of a savage tribe for weeks, he struggles daily against manifold carnal temptations, personified in the voluptuous native women who come to visit him every evening in his hammock, and addresses his Latin verses to the (...) Virgin Mary in order to fortify his virtue. The threat of being killed and eaten by cannibals is nothing to him by comparison with the loss of his virginity. Recourse to his own original culture is the ultimate bulwark against contamination, the sign of resistance and strengthening of his identity. The definitive rejection of the Other is, in these circumstances, a survival reflex. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:382 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the spiritual effort of all mankind. Many so-called historic events, he was convinced, will in the end be "as written in water," but the work of the human "spirit," however limited at any given time, is accumulative and helps prepare a better future. It seems fitting to close this review with the concluding words of high commendation addressed to him by the Argentinian Society of (...) Writers on the occasion of the appearance of the Theory of Man: "Se premia a un hombre, a una obra, a una conducta." (We are paying homage to a man, a work, a noble conduct.) COR~ELI~:S KRUS~ Wesleyan University The Knowledge o] Man. Selected Essays. By Martin Buber. Edited with an Introduction by Maurice Friedman. Translated by Maurice Friedman and Ronald Gregor Smith. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister Library, TB 135H. Pp. 186. $1.45.) The present volume contains the English translations, previously published, of six anthropological essays of Martin Buber, which had appeared originally in German. They are: Distance and Relation (1950), Elements of the Interhuman (1954), What is Common to All (1956), The Word that is Spoken (1960), Guilt and Guilt Feelings (1957), Man and his Image-Work (1955). As an Appendix has been added the unpublished text of a discussion between the late Martin Buber and the psychologist Carl R. Rogers, in April 1957. An introductory Essay by Maurice S. Friedman intends to set these essays in the context of Buber's philosophy of dialogue and "to show their interrelations and their significance for other fields of thought" (p. 7). Both the Introductory Essay and the translated texts had been seen by Buber before going to the press. Broadly speaking, these essays concern the distinctive features of man, and the reality of the dazwischen (p. 12), translated as "there in-between," "the between" or "betweenness" (p. 107): between man and reality (art), and between man and man (the interhuman in dialogue, word and language, guilt and psychotherapy). No specific texts on religion and knowledge have been included in this collection, its purpose being to present Buber's "philosophical anthropology" (p. 7). One may speak of a synthesis of Buber's view of man, as it comes out in this volume. Man is constituting "a special category of being" (60), by being capable of entering into living relations; this happens in the sphere of "the between," in particular the interhuman, the unfolding of which is "the dialogicaI" (p. 75). Here the "spokenness" of the word has its place (p. 112), here are found the different forms of encounter from which the human "selves" emerge after "a bold swinging...into the life of the other" (p. 81) and making each other "present" through "imagining" the real in each other (p. 70). There is the permanent "temptation to... take refuge in the pseudo security of the world of It, the world of ordered objectivity and private subjectivity" (Friedman, p. 23). But there is also the "common world" (cosmos) as built by "common speech-with-meaning" (logos) (Friedman, p. 40); this is the world of the We (pp. 107-108). Buber dismisses the annihilation of the human person in the dream and sleep of the East (pp. 91-96), the "situationless" and "uncommunal" chemical holidays of Aldous Huxley (p. 100), the solipsism and panpsychism of C. G. Jung (p. 124-125) : by all of these "the pure duty and responsibility of waking togetherness" (p. 91) has been forsaken. Of particular interest are Friedman's pages concerning Buber's view of the unconscious (pp. 32-38): they replace an essay which Buber had intended to write on the subject. In this connection the essay on existential guilt to oneself and to others is illuminating ; this guilt is "as something of an ontic character" (p. 123), and only a--"for the man of our age" (p. 138)--difficult self-illumination can hereby give insight and open the door into "the identity of the human person as such with himself" (p. 147). Also, the discussion on psychotherapy should be mentioned, where Buber puts his finger on "this dialogue bounded by tragedy" (p. 174) in which "You are not equals and cannot... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, Freedom by Eric S. NelsonJean-Yves Heurtebise (bio)Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, Freedom. Eric S. Nelson. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. Pp. viii + 256. Paper $103.50, ISBN 978-1-350411-90-6.On the Way: from Heidegger to Nagarjuna via Lao-ZhuangAfter having reviewed Eric S. Nelson’s 2017 Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought (for the Journal of Chinese Philosophy) and his 2020 Daoism and Environmental Philosophy (for (...) Monde Chinois Nouvelle Asie), reviewing now, for Philosophy East & West, Nelson’s 2024 Heidegger and Dao: Things, Nothingness, Freedom, which develops on the insights of his two previous opuses, is both a real pleasure and a true challenge. It’s a pleasure to read again Eric S. Nelson’s scholarly prose with its own specific conceptual style and distinctive philosophical rhythm. It’s a challenge to give a meaningful and fair overview of a conceptually complex, scholarly rich, and thought-provoking book.No one can speak better about the aim and goals of Nelson’s book than the author himself--following the wayist way of spontaneous ziranity, we will thus let the book speak for itself:Its primary thesis is that, entangled with Daoist and other intercultural sources, Heidegger’s path proceeds from the paradigmatic Occidental philosophy of available givenness and mere presence--which conceals the open spacing of things and seeks to logically exclude and dialectically subordinate negativity and the nothing--to nothingness, emptiness, and the clearing in their coming to presence and withdrawal in absence or, to accentuate its mutable verbal sense, presencing-absencing. […] Zhuangzi’s vision of free and easy wandering indicates ways of practicing philosophy as contesting and unraveling fixations. These practices allow rethinking Heidegger’s pathways and reimagining for ourselves things, nothingness, and world in the specificity of our existential condition.(p. 10)These lines can give already a good indication about what the reader will be provided with: a Heideggerian reading of Daoism nurturing and enriching a Daoist reading of Heidegger; a Daoist reinterpretation of the late Heidegger feeding and complexifying a Heideggerian Pre-Socratic reinterpretation of early Daoism; a continuous feedback loop leading to a process of mutual symbiosis and multiple conceptually creative hybridizations. Ziran and Dao are used to unlock the concealed potentialities of overdetermined Western concepts such as Nature and Ethos while the Heideggerian deconstruction of “Western metaphysics” is [End Page 1] used to de-Eurocentricize our understanding of Daoist and Buddhist thoughts about Thing and Nothingness.The book is divided in two parts: the first part deals with the concept of Thing, the second with the concept of Nothingness. Thing and Nothingness seem to be the perfect antithesis but the magic of Nelson’s reading of their tri-cultural Daoist, Buddhist and Heideggerian conceptualization is to dissipate the classical, ontological antinomy between Being and Non-Being to explore what’s both beyond and below: the natural source of life emergence, coming and returning to a Nothing that is Everything via a Thing that is never Anything (a ready-made and exchangeable object in the universal trading scheme of capitalist general equivalence) but always Something (this and that in particular, in their own specific rhythm of coming back and forth, from and to their source of un-nothingity).The first five chapters evoke the issue of the encounter of Heidegger and Daoist thinking in relation to the deconstruction of Thingness. In the first chapter, Nelson proposes a cross-cultural perspective about the Nature of the Thing linking Heidegger’s critique of the reduction of Things’ Presence to Functional Tools to the Daoist extended conception of Things in terms of Multitude (wanwu 萬物), in which objects, living beings, and spirits participate in the fabric of reality. Chapter 2 examines the connection between Heidegger’s and Daoism’s understanding of “nature” as manifesting a distinct yet similar attention to things’ autopoiesis: following the natural disclosing and unfolding of “things” entails a specific way to think and be in the world. In chapter 3, a comparison is established between Heidegger and Laozi with respect to the notion of void and emptiness: the fact that what powers the utility of a thing is what... (shrink)

"Image of God, man finds himself only in God." Such was Pascal's quest and, thanks to Jean Mesnard, anyone can now not only read and love Pascal, as Nietzsche did, but can even come to understand him.

As a follow-up to Stephen Deakin's analysis on the ethics of mercy killing on the battlefield in this journal, this article proposes a moral justification for this type of action, as well as a judicial framework that could clarify what qualifies as such morally permissible action. Based upon contemporary cases, it argues that the current military codes of conduct are incoherent when it comes to the punishment of soldiers who commit mercy killings, and that the military codes of justice should (...) be amended accordingly. (shrink)

Les définitions de la rationalité fondées sur les seules ressources des activités communicationnelles et des formes de vie qui leur sont liées se heurtent à des difficultés dont la tentative de Habermas constitue un eminent exemple. La question de la légitimation en constitue la pierre de touche; elle est au coeur de la controverse qui oppose Apel à Habermas et de ce qui les conduit à chercher différemment une issue dans les prétentions à la validité que renferment à leurs yeux (...) les activités communicationnelles. Leur mobilisation d’un modèle pragmatique de la rationalité s’articule ainsi à la recherche d’un élément inconditionné dans lequel on peut voir une source majeure d’apories et de désaccords quant aux solutions respectivement envisagées. Cette situation conduit à se demander 1) si le concept de « rationalité communicationnelle » n’est pas intrinsèquement affecté par l’ambiguïté qui associe à l’argumentation et à l’immanence des pratiques communicationnelles l’idée d’une légitimation, elle-même liée à une transcendance que celles-ci paraissent exclure, 2) si un éclairage, à défaut d’une issue, ne résiderait pas dans une meilleure compréhension des liens qui associent le nécessaire à l’arbitraire.The possibility of defining the rationality upon the only basis of communicative actions and forms of life lies at the root of several difficulties, of which Habermas’ attempts give a very significant example. Legitimation is its touchstone. It is the central point of the Apel-Habermas controversy and it is the basis of its latest developments. Apel and Habermas are both seeking an out- come by looking at " claims to validity " which they consider to be embodied in communicative actions. So they appeal at the same time to a pragmatist account of rationality and to some Unconditional, which is the main source of the dilemmas and disagreements they have to cope with. One may wonder whether the kind of tension which strikes the tie relating argumentation to some " transcendant moment " is not built into the very notion of communicative rationality. But one may also wonder whether some illumination, if not outcome, might not consist in some attempt to investigate the very connections between Necessary and Arbitrary. (shrink)

This book, the last one written by Piaget, presents a new line of empirical studies based on a revised formulation of his theory of the development of logical reasoning. The amended theory overcomes many problems and criticisms of his earlier formulations by providing a fresh explanation for the origin of mental operations and mental organization based on the concept of meaning. It also offers a more elegant vision of the continuity in mental development from birth to adulthood. As the final (...) revision of Piaget's theory -- and one that opens up new areas of inquiry -- this book calls for a reinterpretation of his earlier work -- a task which will occupy scholars for decades to come. (shrink)