Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the (...) purpose of certain thinking activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

Essays by an international team of scholars in Latin literature and ancient philosophy explore the understanding of emotions (or 'passions') in Roman thought and literature. Building on work on Hellenistic theories of emotion and on philosophy as therapy, they look closely at the interface between ancient philosophy (especially Stoic and Epicurean), rhetorical theory, conventional Roman thinking and literary portrayal. There are searching studies of the emotional thought-world of a range of writers including Catullus, Cicero, Virgil, (...) Seneca, Statius, Tacitus and Juvenal. Issues of debate such as the ethical colour of Aeneas's angry killing of Turnus at the end of the Aeneid are placed in a broad and illuminating perspective. Written in clear and non-technical language, with Greek and Latin translated, the volume opens up a fascinating area on the borders of philosophy and literature. (shrink)

A preeminent scholar of American studies explores the American literary and philosophical traditions, and the connections between them, by investigating, first, Emerson's thought and its influence on American writing and, second, the pluralistic and radical ways in which American modernists engaged the world.

"In recent years, we have grown accustomed to philosophical language that is intensely self-conscious and rhetorically thick, often tragic in tone. It is enlivening to read Bergson, who exerts so little rhetorical pressure while exacting such a substantial effort of thought.... Bergson's texts teach the reader to let go of entrenched intellectual habits and to begin to think differently—to think in time.... Too much and too little have been said about Bergson. Too much, because of the various appropriations of (...) his thought. Too little, because the work itself has not been carefully studied in recent decades."—from Thinking in Time Henri Bergson, whose philosophical works emphasized motion, time, and change, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. His work remains influential, particularly in the realms of philosophy, cultural studies, and new media studies. In Thinking in Time, Suzanne Guerlac provides readers with the conceptual and contextual tools necessary for informed appreciation of Bergson's work. Guerlac's straightforward philosophical expositions of two Bergson texts, Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, focus on the notions of duration and memory—concepts that are central to the philosopher's work. Thinking in Time makes plain that it is well worth learning how to read Bergson effectively: his era and our own share important concerns. Bergson's insistence on the opposition between the automatic and the voluntary and his engagement with the notions of "the living," affect, and embodiment are especially germane to discussions of electronic culture. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century the tropes of messianism, apocalypse and redemption, which had been so central to the West's religious formation, seemed spent forces in Germany. Nietzsche had pronounced God as dead and theology seemed to be travelling the same secular route as philosophy. But World War I changed that. This book introduces some of Germany's key thinkers in theology, philosophy, literature and social and political thought through their engagement with these previously discarded concepts. They (...) initiated a new and urgent dialogue between philosophy and theology. This imaginative and innovative collection brings together essays by established scholars on Messiamism, Redemption and Apocalypse in twentieth century German thought. Major theologians such as Barth, Buber, Bonhoeffer, Rahner, Pannenberg and Moltmann are discussed alongside leading intellectuals such as Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Heiddeger and Rosenzweig. Literary figures, such as Kafka and George, are also included. The interfaces imply a different way of reading theology and challenge the reader to think what the implications of immanence in a specific philosophical culture are for the theological project. Some of the essays introduce thinkers who are little known to English speaking readers. Others cast new light on more familiar figures. The collection as a whole contextualises German religious and philosophical thought on these crucial topics in very useful ways. The dialogue at work in these pages is a very important one and should be carried further. (shrink)

This volume explores the conceptual terrain defined by the Greek word eikos: the probable, likely, or reasonable. A term of art in Greek rhetoric, a defining feature of literary fiction, a seminal mode of historical, scientific, and philosophical inquiry, eikos was a way of thinking about the probable and improbable, the factual and counterfactual, the hypothetical and the real. These thirteen original and provocative essays examine the plausible arguments of courtroom speakers and the 'likely stories' of philosophers, verisimilitude in (...) art and literature, the likelihood of resemblance in human reproduction, the limits of human knowledge and the possibilities of ethical and political agency. The first synthetic study of probabilistic thinking in ancient Greece, the volume illuminates a fascinating chapter in the history of Western thought. (shrink)

An inadequate grasp of the role of imagination has vitiated understanding of human cognition in western thinking. Extending a project initiated with George Lakoff in _Metaphors we Live By_ (1980), Mark Johnson's book _The Body in the Mind_ (1987) offers the claim that all thinking originates in bodily experience. A range of schemata formed during our early experience manipulating a physical world of surfaces, distances, and forces, lays the foundation of later, more abstract modes of thought. In (...) presenting his argument, Johnson lays special stress on the qualities and dynamics of the image schemata, the (generally unnoticed) metaphoricity of the transformations underlying abstract thought, and the new significance that should be attributed to the imagination, which is the general term Johnson wishes to claim for the mental processes he expounds. In this paper I draw attention to the importance of Johnson's insights for understanding literary response. In particular, I will show how a typical procedure of literary texts involves bringing to awareness image schemata of the kind that Johnson describes. At the same time, several problems in Johnson's account which limit its usefulness will also be examined: an undue reliance upon the spatial properties of schemata; a conflation of dead with live or poetic metaphors; and a neglect of other bodily influences on thought, especially kinaesthetic and affective aspects. These problems, for example, limit the usefulness of Johnson's attempt to build on Kant's theory of imagination. In comparison with Coleridge, who also attempted to build on Kant, Johnson is unable to overcome the formalism of Kant's theory. Coleridge's account of imagination, I will suggest, provides a better foundation for examining the bodily basis of meaning, while remaining compatible with Johnson's intentions and his more valuable insights. (shrink)

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail (...) Montero develops a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

Leo Bersani’s career spans more than fifty years and extends across a wide spectrum of fields—including French studies, modernism, realist fiction, psychoanalytic criticism, film studies, and queer theory. Throughout this new collection of essays that ranges, interestingly and brilliantly, from movies by Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Godard to fiction by Proust and Pierre Bergounioux, Bersani considers various kinds of connectedness. _Thoughts and Things_ posits what would appear to be an irreducible gap between our thoughts and things. Bersani departs from his (...) psychoanalytic convictions to speculate on the oneness of being—of our intrinsic connectedness to the other that is at once external and internal to us. He addresses the problem of formulating ways to consider the undivided mind, drawing on various sources, from Descartes to cosmology, Freud, and Genet and succeeds brilliantly in diagramming new forms as well as radical failures of connectedness. Ambitious, original, and eloquent, _Thoughts and Things_ will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, film, literature, and beyond. (shrink)

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne’s criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon’s Doctrine of the Idols, (...) as well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle’s moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume’s sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin’s and Schmitt’s works on modern scepticism. This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

Stephen Schiffer has argued that natural languages do not have compositional semantics. But it has been widely held that compositional semantics is required in order to explain how it is possible that we have the linguistic capacities that we do. In particular, our use of natural languages is productive in the sense that there are indefinitely many sentences that we have never heard or considered before, but which we are nonetheless capable of understanding. How is this possible? Compositionality evidently supplies (...) a clear answer to that question, because it guarantees that there is some way of determining the meaning of each sentence of the language from a fixed and finite base of semantic value assignments. This poses a serious challenge to Schiffer's negative thesis. -/- Schiffer proposes to answer this challenge in a way that will also provide a solution to the language-relation problem. This is the problem of specifying what relation must obtain between a population P and a language L in order for L to be a language of P. Schiffer's strategy is to reduce the problem for public languages to that of specifying the language-relation for languages of thought-specifying what it is to think in a language. -/- I will show in a precise way that Schiffer has neither met the productivity challenge nor solved the language-relation problem. Using Schiffer's characterization of what it is to think in a language, I show that if an agent thinks in some language L, then there is an infinity of languages that the agent also thinks in with the very same sentence tokens, but with arbitrarily different meanings. Thus, Schiffer has clearly not given a sufficient condition for an agent to think in a language, and Schiffer cannot do with less than a sufficient condition. Moreover, I will argue that Schiffer cannot avail himself of various attempts in the literature to address similar problems. (shrink)

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. -/- The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne’s criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon’s Doctrine of the (...) Idols, as well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle’s moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume’s sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin’s and Schmitt’s works on modern scepticism. -/- This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually (...) graspable - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

Our ability to attribute mental states to others ("to mentalize") has been the subject of philosophical and psychological studies for a very long time, yet the role of language acquisition in the development of our mentalizing abilities has been largely understudied. This book addresses this gap in the philosophical literature. -/- The book presents an account of how false belief reasoning is impacted by language acquisition, and it does so by placing it in the larger context of the issue, (...) how language impacts cognition in general. The work provides the reader with detailed and critical literature reviews, and draws on them to argue that language acquisition helps false belief reasoning by boosting the ability to create schemata that facilitate processing of information in some social contexts. According to this framework, it is a combination of syntactic clues and cultural narratives that helps the child to solve the classic false belief task. -/- The book provides a novel, original account of how language helps false belief reasoning, while also giving the reader a broad, precise and well-documented picture of the debate around some of the most fundamental issues in social cognition. (shrink)

In this scholarly study, the author, a professor of theology at the University of Iowa, argues that Tillich's thought sought an answer to the problem posed by the questions: "What certainty is left for thought after men have become conscious that thinking itself is historical? If thinking is historically conditioned, can ontological thought ever achieve objective certainty and can theological thought ever achieve religious certainty?" Scharlemann endeavors to show that Tillich constructed his answer to (...) these questions "with two basic ideas, that of 'correlation' and that of a 'paradoxical reality and presence'." In the introduction the author establishes the critical terms which he will use to carry out his "constructive analysis." The first chapter sketches the historical development leading up to the question Tillich faced. The subsequent chapters present various contexts and aspects of Tillich's answer. In the final chapter the author indicates certain aspects of Tillich's thought which seem to be unclear or incomplete, certain contradictory motifs, an entirely new systematic structure which would retrace the same ground as did Tillich, but on a different and, the author believes, a more adequate analytic basis. This study will be of interest primarily to those who are already familiar with Tillich's thought. It is particularly thorough in its analysis of Tillich's early works. The author is quite conversant with the literature by and about Tillich and provides a useful bibliography.--H. F. (shrink)

This volume examines modern scepticism in all main philosophical areas: epistemology, science, metaphysics, morals, and religion. It features sixteen essays that explore its importance for modern thought. The contributions present diverse, mutually enriching interpretations of key thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche. The book includes a look both at the relationship between Montaigne and Pascal and at Montaigne's criticism of religious rationalism. It turns its attention to an investigation into the links between ancient scepticism and Bacon's Doctrine of the Idols, (...) as well as into the ancient problem of the criterion in Cartesian philosophy. Next, three essays focus on more general topics, like modern sceptical disturbances, clandestine literature and irreligion. Two essays investigate the role of scepticism in Bayle's moral thinking and his theory of religious toleration. Hume's sceptical philosophy is the subject of two papers by distinguished scholars. In addition, many contributors address the presence of scepticism in Kant and in the German Idealism, such as the role of Schulze's scepticism in the works of the young Hegel. The book closes with a paper on Nietzsche and scepticism, and an essay on the role of Popkin's and Schmitt's works on modern scepticism. This collection continues along a rich, fruitful path opened by Richard H. Popkin and pursued by many important scholars, like Gianni Paganini, John-Christian Laursen, and José Raimundo Maia Neto. It re-establishes that necessary dialogue between researchers of scepticism from all over the Americas, which began with Popkin, Oswaldo Porchat and Ezequiel de Olaso long ago. This insightful reflection on modern European scepticism will also serve as an important resource in the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

German classicist's monumental study of the origins of European thought in Greek literature and philosophy. Brilliant, widely influential. Includes "Homer's View of Man," "The Olympian Gods," "The Rise of the Individual in the Early Greek Lyric," "Pindar's Hymn to Zeus," "Myth and Reality in Greek Tragedy," and "Aristophanes and Aesthetic Criticism.".

"The odium of doubtfulness" : or, the vicissitudes of Arendt's metaphorical thinking -- Why does Hannah Arendt lie? : or, the vicissitudes of imagination -- "A peculiar apparatus" : Kafka's thanatopoetics -- A strike of rhetoric : Benjamin's paradox of justice -- Pernicious bastardizations : Benjamin's ethics of pure violence -- The return of the human : Germany in autumn -- A politics of enmity : Müller's Germania death in Berlin.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trains Of Thought And AfterthoughtsJohn EllisWhen I think about how this conference has gone, it’s hard not to begin with the fact that so many came. “We happy few” turned out not to be so few after all.* While I cannot be the most objective judge of a conference that I spent so much time helping to plan, it still seems to me that being able to listen, (...) on two successive evenings, to talks of the quality of Bernard Knox’s and Stanley Crouch’s was a rare treat. Stanley’s talk had the effect that all first-rate criticism must have; it made those who heard it want to rush out and get the book to read or reread it. And I shall long remember Bernard’s anecdote about Aristophanes being subpoenaed, which was just about the funniest and most instructive story I’ve ever heard. Singling out any of the shorter papers is unfair, for I enjoyed all of them, but I have to say that poetry as a genre would not be lagging behind the other genres (fiction and drama) in our age if there were more people who could read poetry like Rosanna Warren.Rather than commenting on how things turned out, I should tell you a little of how we wanted things to turn out, so that you can get your own sense of the relation between our intent and what actually happened. The one stark fact that faced everyone involved in planning this conference was that it was easy to say what we didn’t want to do—we could see examples of that everywhere—but deciding how to chart a new course was an altogether different question. There was one shape [End Page 197] we knew we didn’t want, but there were all kinds of possible shapes we could have chosen to replace it. The program as you heard it was in fact the result of many different trains of thought.Take the panel on poets and critics; it might seem just a nice invention, but was actually the result of a studied train of thought. The most visible sign of what has gone wrong with academic criticism is that it is now largely written for and read by other academic critics. Academic criticism in the process has lost touch with the wider world of readers and writers. Academic critical essays have become a game played on campuses in an increasingly isolated and parochial world where they are heavily involved in matters of professional hierarchy and the place of individuals within it, but in very little else in the real world. The “poets and critics” panel was, in part, an attempt to begin to bring academic criticism back to the reality of readers and writers, to subordinate the unquestionable cleverness and intellectual ingenuity of academics to a common sense and realism that recently seem to have been in somewhat short supply.The panel on how to read a book results from a quite different train of thought. Academic criticism has now assumed a forbidding verbal complexity. A highly elaborate verbal superstructure covers over the essentials of the situation—literature and its readers—to the extent that it becomes a barrier that obscures what is real in it. This panel was in part an attempt to cut through pseudo-complexity and to return to the basic elements of the situation. I might well have said “the basic theory of the situation,” since I’m always reluctant to concede theory to people who have no exclusive claim to it (as they imagine) but merely misuse it.1The notion of “back to basics” really requires no justification. There is a charming story of a man who has played golf all his life, but each year goes back to his first teacher and says to him quite simply: teach me how to play golf. The teacher instructs him as he does anyone else who has never played the game, beginning with how to hold a club, how to stand, and so on. This might seem a rather obsessive habit—unless you know who this man is. One has to assume that this... (shrink)

Despite a growing body of literature that engages both Catholic social thought and the Capability Approach, little has been done to explore what these two traditions of thought might offer to a reassessment of the project of global democracy promotion. This essay brings Catholic social thought and the Capability Approach into conversation for this purpose. What emerges is a framework for thinking about and engaging in what the author calls democratic democracy promotion (DDP). DDP is (...) based on a broadened conception of democracy and avoids a dogmatic commitment to the promotion of Western liberal democracy; it takes a needs-based approach to the allocation of externally driven democracy assistance; and it prioritizes education initiatives as central components of democracy promotion. Refashioned as such, democracy promotion has the potential to bring about more participatory democratic processes, a more inclusive global democracy, and a critical and caring mass of global democrats. (shrink)

The topic of the paper is at the intersection of recent debates on de se thought and phenomenal intentionality. An interesting problem for phenomenal intentionality is the question of how to account for the intentional properties of de se thought-contents---i.e., thoughts about oneself as oneself. Here, I aim to describe and consider the significance of a phenomenological perspective on self-consciousness in its application to de se thought. I argue that having de se thoughts can be explained in (...) terms of the ways that subjects consciously attend to themselves in experiences of thinking. Therefore, a strong form of first-person persectivalness, in which the subject is capable of self-directed control of the focus of conscious attention, is required for de se thought. But no constraints on the semantic content of such thoughts are required. The outcome of the question therefore bears importantly on both on the problem of self-reflexive self-reference and the wider problem of self-consciousness. My model suggests phenomenologically-derived conceptual constraints for the extension of minimal, background forms of self-awareness to robust, cognitive forms of self-awareness that have been of interest in recent empirical studies on self-consciousness. The framework therefore provides a way of operationalizing the concept of self-reflexive consciousness by deploying widely deployed notions from the empirical literature such as attention and minimal phenomenal selfhood, enabling a framework for empirically falsifiable hypotheses about the neural mechanisms underlying the structure of self-consciousness. What Is it Like to Think about Oneself? De Se Thought and Phenomenal Intentionality. (shrink)

Art makes its mark upon our flesh. It ravishes our eyes, invades our ears, and stirs our viscera; it commandeers our powers of attention and unsettles our body with its strangenesses. The event of art is thus an encounter both with a sensuous object and with ourselves, exposing us as subjects strangely susceptible to being moved. The 21st-century European thinkers elucidated here describe a theory of the aesthetic subject: Irigaray articulates the basic outlines of a subject ill at ease with (...) itself. Badiou, Nancy, and Perniola theorize art as an event of deformation that befalls an aesthetic subject fundamentally invested in form. Rancière and Sloterdijk explore the figuration of the body (and its limits) in contexts closer to everyday experience and our life within modern history and politics. This study brings together feminist, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological inheritances to describe the operations of the real in art and aesthetic life. (shrink)

Buddhism traces its origin to the teachings of the historical figure of Gautama, the Buddha. Buddhist system addresses perennial human concerns and articulates profound insights into human nature and thus provides a practical context against the back ground of which it is possible to unravel the meaning of lives. Different branches of this school developed various scriptural traditions. Among them early Buddhist thought branched out into diversity of orders, schools of thought and teaching lineages. Wisdom and compassion are (...) the distinctive marks of Buddhism and this strife-tormented world is in dire need of these qualities. Buddhism not only talks about these qualities, it also illustrates the way how to acquire the same. Post-modernism which is a movement in different fields, culture, philosophy, literature, and arts etc. claims to decentralize the importance of reason. There are many post modern thinkers like, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, Levinas who worked in their own way and they discerned a shift in the art and culture of their societies from a distinctively modern phase to a postmodernist phase. Considering these observations this paper is motivated by two questions. On the one hand, one is constantly intrigued by the vast treasures of early Buddhist heritage; on the other hand, one is perplexed by the post modern deconstructive method which has some point of similarities with early Buddhistthought. In between these two lines of thinking this paper tries to argue that the better our understanding and appreciation of this ancient legacy of Buddhist treasures becomes, the more able we will be to grasp the lines of post-modern thinking. There are certain concepts of Buddhism namely, language, writing, desire, suffering, death which are all important issues to the post-modern thinkers. The present paper is an effort to high light some of these concepts against the back ground of early Buddhist traditions. (shrink)

David Farrell Krell reflects on nine writers and philosophers, including Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and Holderlin, in a personal exploration of the meaning of sensual love, language, tragedy, and death. The moon provides a unifying image that guides Krell's development of a new poetics in which literature and philosophy become one. Krell pursues important philosophical motifs such as time, rhythm, and desire, through texts by Nietzsche, Trakl, Empedocles, Kafka, and Garcia Marquez. He surveys instances in which poets or novelists explicitly (...) address philosophical questions, and philosophers confront literary texts--Heidegger's and Derrida's appropriations of Georg Trakl's poetry, Blanchot's obsession with Kafka's tortuous love affairs, and Garcia Marquez's use of Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return--all linked by the tragic hero Empedocles. In his search to understand the insatiable desire for completeness that patterns so much art and philosophy, Krell investigates the identification of the lunar voice with woman in various roles--lover, friend, sister, shadow, and narrative voice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and AestheticsJoseph GrangeIn Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. By François Jullien. Translated by Paul M. Varsano. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Pp. 1,969.A book praising "blandness"—which is the translator's English word for the French fadeur, which is the author's translation of the Chinese dan!—and a book that is at once fascinating and "repellent" (to (...) use the translator's description of his tortuous search for an equivalent of fadeur and dan), In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics by François Jullien is a "globalizing" philosophical essay bent on stopping readers in their tracks at every twist and turn of the text. Is it worth the trouble? I shall venture a response in this review.More than once while reading this book, I was reminded of Plato's Sophist, where the difficulty in locating the sophist is described in such intricate detail. First he is here, but then he is over there; on the other hand, he could be hiding near by— but wait, maybe he has disappeared. So it is also with blandness. And perhaps it should be so, because once you have located the bland, it ceases to be bland and turns into something else. To take a fix on blandness Jullien throws it against a number of traits, qualities, experiences, and events: strength, music, sounds, signs, landscapes, painting, tastes, literature, ideology, margins and centers, and, finally, the fact that "transcendence is natural." At the same time, the author weaves these contrasts and comparisons through the history of Chinese culture, especially in the evolution of its painting and poetry. [End Page 484]Foremost among the qualities associated with blandness is inner detachment. What come immediately to mind are Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and aspects of Confucian teaching. Jullien has already given us a splendid treatise in his The Propensities of Things, and in some ways this volume rings many changes on that study of Chinese culture. But there is more to blandness than causal efficacy. It also suggests openness and a mood of friendliness toward the other, the different, and all things strange. Further, blandness is similar to harmony in the sense that it does not insist on its own presence. Rather, it constantly blends together opposites through its own power.It is power and its expression that is at the heart of the author's project. He attempts over and over again to show how the seemingly weak is actually the strong, that the far away is really close to hand, that emptiness is charged with spontaneous creative energy. Thus, what lingers is not yet finished expressing itself. And the translator tells us that a gustatory sense is the primary base of fadeur, dan, and blandness. The body is the region within which the bland can have its most powerful effect. Think of Chinese medicine, where "the web that has no weaver" (the title of Ted Kaptchuk's brilliant book) is the object of the physician's art. Or consider the power of water to yield and then conquer all. Or remember the Mahāyāna Buddhist's invocation of śūnyatā as the source of healing and renewal. Or recall the many times that Confucius advises silence rather than words. All these moments are akin to what Jullien calls "blandness."One way to grasp the insight into Chinese culture that Jullien is struggling with is to express it by way of Neoplatonism and Spinoza. What is often forgotten in expositions of these formidable philosophies is the way in which they use a novel doctrine of causality to bind together different realms of beings. For Plotinus and Spinoza the cause never really leaves the effect but remains there, hidden but effective. It is through this lingering presence that transcendence and immanence, body and soul, and God and the World remain conjoined. The image of the ladder so frequently found in these texts must be understood to run in both directions—up and down. So also, blandness is a dao that opens up experience to further depths and heights.Jullien's major concern is aesthetics... (shrink)

This book investigates the role and significance that examples play in shaping arguments and thought, both in philosophy and in everyday life. It addresses questions about how our moral thinking is informed by our conceptual practices, especially in ways related to the relationship between ethics and literature, post-Wittgensteinian ethics, or meta-philosophical concerns about the style of philosophical writing. Written in an accessible and non-technical style, the book uses examples from real-life events or pieces of well-known fictional stories (...) to introduce its discussions. In doing so, it demonstrates the complex way examples, rather than exemplifying philosophical points, inform and condition how we approach the points for which we want to argue. The author shows how examples guide or block our understanding in certain directions, how they do this by stressing morally relevant aspects or dimensions of the terms, and how the sense of moral seriousness allows us to learn from examples. The final chapter explores whether these kinds of engagement with examples can be understood as "thinking primarily through examples." Examples and Their Role in Our Thinking will be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in ethics and moral philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of literature. (shrink)

With his powerful thought image of the constellation, Walter Benjamin provides a method for the core practices of the Humanities: reading, writing, and thinking. This collection of provocative essays demonstrates how thinking in constellations with Walter Benjamin leads us towards a new understanding of the critical task of the Humanities today: it goes beyond disciplinary boundaries and challenges assumptions of linearity, coherence, and progression inherent in our scholarly praxis. The volume brings some of the most articulate young (...) voices in international Benjamin scholarship together, and takes an interdisciplinary approach, covering wide-ranging fields of knowledge quantum physics, postcolonial studies, natural philosophy, psychoanalysis, film theory, literature, and the arts. Benjamin's texts are re-considered in light of thinkers and poets, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Sigmund Freud, Gottfried E. Leibniz, W. G. Sebald, Franz Kafka, or Carlos Martìnez Rivas. The critical potential of constellations in Benjamin's work and beyond will be of the highest interest for researchers and students in all areas of the Humanities. (shrink)

In an introduction to Louis J. Halle's Civilization and Foreign Policy, Dean Acheson notes with approval that Halle believed a group of men, formerly members of the Policy Planning Staff of the United States State Department, to be seeking a new theory of foreign policy which would lie outside the traditional theory. Halle's work, like that of the others whose names were mentioned (George F. Kennan, Paul Nitze, and C. B. Marshall), represented a serious and searching analysis of the conceptual (...) frame of American foreign policy, a search largely accompanied by a demand for a more realistic consideration of problems of power. The members of the Policy Planning Staff were by no means the only, or even the first, Americans to question American thinking on foreign policy from the standpoint of power politics. Without going back to Alexander Hamilton, we must consider, in particular, Hans J. Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr. This kind of thinking is still being advanced; and, more recently, the warning that Americans misunderstood the problem of power was put with some forcefulness by Robert Endicott Osgood : “More than any other great nation, America's basic predispositions and her experience in world politics encourage the dissociation of power and policy.” There is no doubt that work of recent years has shown the increased seriousness of American interest in the problems of foreign policy and civilization. The contribution which these and other writers have made is a very great one. Despite many differences among themselves, their trend seems to embody a certain oneness, which lies in a perception of the problems of power. Acheson points to the practical experience of the State Department group and their intention to “see life steadily and see it whole,” in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase. Yet, a few years after these writers, whom Acheson so highly regarded, had tried to acquaint the American people with the realities of power in foreign policy, one of them, George F. Kennan, was publicly criticized by Acheson himself for “never having understood the realities of power politics.” Shortly thereafter, Acheson, in his latest book, reiterated the charge that “power politics” was, for Americans, still a derogatory term. Kennan, one of our most thoughtful and sensitive writers on foreign policy, and Acheson, one of our most articulate and eloquent secretaries of state, had failed to satisfy the American people, and Kennan had failed, apparently, to satisfy Acheson regarding the significance and the reality of power politics. Yet in the light of some of the literature which has appeared since the rise of these writers, whom we may call “realists” though they do not necessarily so characterize themselves, one may question whether the danger is still that which Acheson described. One who reads Henry A. Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy may wonder not whether Americans understand the realities of power but whether, indeed, some of them understand anything else. We face the danger that the wheel may come full circle, that a naïve idealism may be replaced by a purely methodical realism, and that the very words “politics” and “strategy” may become interchangeable terms. We face that danger, but let no one suspect that Americans, in general, have succumbed to it. (shrink)

This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the 'legal imagination'. Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate (...) throughout the legal system. The collection probes 'the transatlantic constitution' and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability. The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future. (shrink)

Gestures’ Contribution to Collective Metaphorical Thinking in a Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI). This paper explores an idea expressed by a student discussing where our thoughts come from: to think we have to move our hands. Such sentence echoes the literature on the role of gesture for thinking. This study also focuses on the collective advancement of reasoning in a CPI. The instructor chooses to conclude by asking each student to suggest an analogy of thinking. This (...) closing sequence reveals how the instructor, through metaphorical gestures, fosters collective awareness of new propositions, and their further elaboration. After characterizing the cognitive models so produced, video analysis is used to follow their collective, verbal and gestural construction along the discussion. (shrink)

Analogy, as the connection of similar things, is present in all fields of human thought. Art uses verbal (in poetry, literature, art criticism) and optical analogies(in the visual arts), aiming at an emotional perception and interpretation of the world. Philosophy and the sciences also use largely analogical applications, as ameans to construct intuitionally understandable theories. In Law the analogical application of laws is an efficient way to regulate social conflicts. The risk,however, of cognitive distortions, by transferring inadequately explanatory (...) models to other fields, created doubts about the rational appropriateness of suchmethodological tools. Applications of analogical thinking in different domains are readily comprehensible, if the role of analogies in each of them is analysed. Thedifferent aims of science, philosophy and art imply different similarity-criteria to support the transfer of linguistic and visual expressions in regions to which theydo not have a direct connection and application. (shrink)

Gregg Lambert demonstrates that since the publication of _Proust and Signs_ in 1964 Gilles Deleuze’s search for a new means of philosophical expression became a central theme of all of his oeuvre, including those written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. Lambert, like Deleuze, calls this “the image of thought.” Lambert’s exploration begins with Deleuze’s earliest exposition of the Proustian image of thought and then follows the “tangled history” of the image that runs through subsequent works, such as _Kafka: Toward (...) a Minor Literature_, _The Rhizome_, and several later writings from the 1980s collected in _Essays Critical and Clinical._ Lambert shows how this topic underlies Deleuze’s studies of modern cinema, where the image of thought is predominant in the analysis of the cinematic image—particularly in _The Time-Image_. Lambert finds it to be the fundamental concern of the brain proposed by Deleuze in the conclusion of _What Is Philosophy? _By connecting the various appearances of the image of thought that permeate Deleuze’s entire corpus, Lambert reveals how thinking first assumes an image, how the images of thought become identified with the problem of expression early in the works, and how this issue turns into a primary motive for the more experimental works of philosophy written with Guattari. The study traces a distinctly modern relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy that has developed into a hallmark of the term “Deleuzian.” However, Lambert argues, this aspect of the philosopher’s vision has not been fully appreciated in terms of its significance for philosophy: “not only ‘for today’ but, to quote Nietzsche, meaning also ‘for tomorrow, and for the day after tomorrow.’”. (shrink)

Dionysus after Nietzsche examines the way that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche irrevocably influenced twentieth-century literature and thought. Adam Lecznar argues that Nietzsche's Dionysus became a symbol of the irrational forces of culture that cannot be contained, and explores the presence of Nietzsche's Greeks in the diverse writings of Jane Harrison, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka (amongst others). From Jane Harrison's controversial ideas about Greek religion in an anthropological modernity, to (...) Wole Soyinka's reimagining of a postcolonial genre of tragedy, each of the writers under discussion used the Nietzschean vision of Greece to develop subversive discourses of temporality, identity, history and classicism. In this way, they all took up Nietzsche's call to disrupt pre-existing discourses of classical meaning and create new modes of thinking about the Classics that speak to the immediate concerns of the present. (shrink)

Crafted within a knowledge-first epistemological framework, Mona Simion’s engaging and wide-ranging work ensures that both the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) and Classical Invariantism (CI) can be part of a viable and productive research program.Dissatisfied with current strategies on offer in the literature, she successfully counters objections to the pair sourced in “shiftiness intuitions”—intuitions that seem to indicate that mere changes in practical context can impact the propriety of assertions and knowledge attributions. For example, in Keith DeRose’s famous pair (...) of low stakes versus high stakes bank cases, the consequences of Keith’s acting on The bank is open on Saturday if it were false change from trivial in low stakes to catastrophic in high stakes. We are to suppose that the proposition is true, and that Keith has access to the same quantity and quality of evidence for it in both cases. In low stakes, but not in high stakes, we are inclined to think that Keith can appropriately assert to his inquiring wife “The bank is open on Saturday.” In low stakes, Keith’s knowledge ascription “I know that the bank is open on Saturday” strikes us as aptly asserted and true. In high stakes only a knowledge denial on Keith’s part strikes us as aptly asserted and true.If we want to hang on to KNA, it looks like we will have to abandon CI and concede that ‘knows’ or knowledge is sensitive to changes in practical considerations. If we want to retain CI, we can try to say that, while Keith does still know that the bank is open on Saturday in high stakes, he does not have sufficient warrant to properly assert that it is. But such a move seems to run counter to KNA. We appear to be stuck in the Shiftiness Dilemma.Keen to get us out of the dilemma and to preserve the idea that epistemically good thinking and asserting are independent of practical concerns, Simion suggests a strategy that can also be used to protect other epistemic speech-act norms and notions from similar threats of practical shiftiness. She notes that having an impact on the degree of epistemic warrant required is not enough to make a norm an epistemic one. Fair enough. If I am given strong practical reason (a million dollars, or a gun to the head) not to adopt full belief until I have gathered more evidence, there is potentially some nonepistemic norm at work in the demand for further evidence. So it is a live possibility (indeed, a plausible one, as Simion would say) that our intuitions in the Shiftiness Dilemma are being misdescribed: they are tracking all-things-considered propriety of assertion, not epistemic propriety. In high stakes, practical norms override the epistemic norm KNA. Keith’s asserting “The bank is open on Saturday” would be epistemically proper but all-things-considered improper.Simion backs up her account with an etiological-function origin story and typology for the norms of assertion. Here is her characterization of etiological function for traits, artifacts, and actions. E-function.A token of type T has the e-function of type B of producing effect E in a system S iff (1) tokens of T produced E in the past, (2) producing E resulted in benefit of type B in S/S’s ancestors, and (3) producing E’s having B-benefited S’s ancestors contributes to the explanation of why T exists in S.In this schema, norms governing an action are typed by the functions or purposes of the action, which in turn are typed by the benefits the action delivers. The epistemic norm of assertion will be the one that characteristically and reliably enables participants in the practice of assertion to secure its primary epistemic good, which Simion identifies as knowledge (testimonial knowledge in hearers generated under normal conditions by the assertions of knowledgeable speakers). Moves in a practice either directly or indirectly aim at fulfilling the goal of the practice. Assertion is a move in the practice of inquiry, which has the generation of knowledge as its aim. Hence, Simion concludes, assertion aims at generating knowledge.This account helps to explain why, in cases like high stakes, Keith all-things-considered ought not to assert “The bank is open on Saturday,” even though he knows it is true. Prudential norms of assertion override the epistemic KNA, for when multiple functions come into conflict, the ones that are more important to the survival of the organism will generate weightier normative constraints.Simion then applies her account to the general category of constatives—for example, speech acts that express a speaker’s belief and the intention that the hearer form or continue to hold the like belief. Employing the taxonomy of Bach and Harnish, she argues that, as expressions of belief and hence varieties of assertion, constatives are subject to knowledge norms as well. Bach and Harnish identify fifteen different subcategories of constatives, each characterized in terms of the kind of belief and intention they express. The norms governing a species have to be at least as strong as the norms governing the corresponding type. As species of the type assertion, each subcategory, then, is subject to at least the necessary direction of KNA. Ultimately, we arrive at a knowledge norm for every speech act on the list, such as The Knowledge Norm of Conjecture (KNC):One’s conjecture that p is epistemically permissible only if one knows that there is reason, but not sufficient reason, to believe that p. Most of the proposed interpretations of various constatives are on the whole reasonable enough, though J. L. Austin would surely be unhappy to see so many different speech acts fashioned into varieties of assertion. Simion concludes with reflections on conjecturing, telling, and moral assertion.Construing the challenge of shiftiness intuitions in terms of the Shiftiness Dilemma allows Simion to declare success when the compatibility of KNA and CI with the relevant data of intuition is secured. Ensuring empirical adequacy for an explanatory framework is an important step, but pronouncements of victory by way of inference to the best explanation would be premature.Other candidates have been shown to match KNA’s familiar explanatory successes (involving lottery propositions, Moorean statements, etc.). Unlike KNA, alternatives that require only epistemically justified or rational belief or credence can allow that a subject is epistemically proper to assert what they believe when their belief is epistemically rational, even under conditions where there are defeating reasons that they are not in a position to be aware of. Furthermore, such norms seem better suited for philosophical or heated moral discussions where there is little consensus and individuals routinely fail to know that what they assert is true. Simion sounds the alarm that the Shiftiness Dilemma threatens to generalize “to epistemic normativity as a whole” (xi–xii), but norms concerning rational credence seem particularly immune.As Simion notes, the etiological-function model of norms that she proposes could be rebuilt with a different central epistemic aim at its core. Indeed, Millikan-inspired models along these lines are appealed to in other areas in philosophy where the concept of information takes center stage—a concept that may be more amenable to rigorous definition and use in dialogue with the sciences than knowledge. We can wonder, also, what special weight the etiological-function model accords to a knowledge-first perspective on epistemic normativity when the model is malleable in this way.The effectiveness of Simion’s strategy for shielding epistemically good thinking and assertion from practical shiftiness becomes less apparent when we try to apply it to Keith’s belief or judgment that the knowledge ascription/denial he asserts is true. It is unclear whether we are to suppose that, in high stakes, Keith epistemically ought to believe/judge that his asserted knowledge denial is false, but all-things-considered he ought to believe/judge that it is true. We do not have to accept that the knowledge-first, etiological function account of normativity for assertion carries over to belief, of course, but then what progress have we made in accounting for the shiftiness in Keith’s judgment that he knows the bank is open on Saturday in low stakes but not in high stakes?Furthermore, there are other ways to generate problems for fallibilist Classical Invariantists in low versus high stakes pairs of cases. Here is a simplified version of a puzzle from the debate over pragmatic encroachment. Consider low cases where you meet the invariant standards for knowing that p, but your justified confidence falls short of certainty. Among these cases, there must be some where you also meet the invariant standards for knowing that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome. Say, for instance, that you have a machine with a ϕ button, and your machine, which you know to be extremely reliable, tells you what the cost or benefit will be if you push the button and p is true versus if p is false. If you ϕ (push the ϕ button) and p is true, you win one hundred dollars; if you ϕ and p is false, you lose one hundred dollars. You face the choice: to ϕ or not to ϕ. Since you know that p, and you know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, you rationally conclude that ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, and hence that you ought to ϕ. If you know which choice of action has the best overall outcome, that is what you all-things-considered should do. Now consider high, where the quantity and quality of your evidence for p is the same, and you still know that your machine is extremely reliable. This time, however, the machine tells you that if you push ϕ and p is true, you win one hundred dollars, but if you push ϕ and p is false, you lose $1 million. Your rational confidence in p is not high enough to justify pushing the button, so you rationally conclude that you ought not to ϕ. Since in high nothing evidentially relevant has changed (all that has changed is the machine informing you of a new, more serious cost of acting on p if p is false), the classical invariantist will have to say that you still know that ϕ, and you still know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome. So, according to CI, you should still be able to reason properly as follows: you know that p, and you know that if p is true, then among your choices of action ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, so you know that ϕ-ing results in the best overall outcome, hence you ought to ϕ. Classical invariantists owe us an explanation concerning how we can avoid the paradox here without conceding that knowledge is practically shifty. (shrink)

In Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, Professor Bobzien accomplishes what she describes as her “primary goal”; namely, “to establish-as far as that is possible—what the Stoic positions were, and to make them comprehensible to modern readers”. To this end, she demonstrates a scholarly command of the ancient texts and the contemporary secondary literature that places her as one of the most knowledgeable philosophers working in the history of ancient philosophy today. Moreover, as Myles Burnyeat says in his remarks (...) on the jacket, not only is the book “a model of scholarly method,” it is “an outstanding example of lucid philosophical thinking in an area where clear thought is extremely difficult.” Bobzien herself says that the “book is written with those in mind who have an interest in philosophy” and that “[t]his means that historical and philological questions are treated strictly as subordinate to the question of what the respective philosophical position was, whether it was consistent, etc.” This strict subordination is not always so clear, and the philosophical problems are certainly interesting enough that a deeper and more extensive discussion would have been welcome, but Bobzien does provide a philosophically lucid treatment of the Stoic position on determinism, freedom, and related subjects. Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy is likely to be a dominate work in the field for quite some time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 19-37 [Access article in PDF] Eudaimonism and Theology in Stoic Accounts of Virtue Michael Gass The Stoics were unique among the major schools in the ancient world for maintaining that both virtue and happiness consist solely of "living in agreement with nature" (homologoumenos tei phusei zen). We know from a variety of texts that both Cleanthes and Chrysippus, if not also (...) Zeno, characterized such conduct both in essentialist terms, as a matter of living purposively in a manner natural for the human species, and in cosmological terms, as a matter of living in agreement with the purposes of nature as a whole, this being regarded as identical to Zeus. This is not to suggest, however, that cosmo-theological speculation figured prominently in the ethical systems of the early Stoics. Judging from extant summaries and discussions of Stoic ethical doctrines, those doctrines were justified in a dialectical fashion, not by appeal to facts about the purposive order of nature but simply from an analysis of ethical concepts patterned after similar analyses by earlier philosophers (most notably, Aristotle). It is this kind of learning that Chrysippus apparently had in mind when he maintained that ethics should be studied prior to undertaking a systematic investigation of nature: [T]here are three kinds of philosopher's theorems, logical, ethical and physical.... [W]hat should be ranked first of these are the logical, next the ethical, third the physical; and what should come last in the physical theorems is theology. 1On the other hand, as we learn from the testimony of Plutarch (and also from other indirect textual evidence examined recently by Jacques Brunschwig), 2 [End Page 19] Chrysippus also believed that physics in general and theology in particular yield a quite distinct, demonstrative knowledge of the matters first studied in ethics. A. A. Long and others have suggested that such knowledge was regarded by the Stoics as encompassing not just information about the ways in which virtuous living is encouraged by, and fits into, the wider aims of nature at large but also a deeper understanding of the very essence of virtue. 3 Specifically, virtue is revealed to consist in a conscious and deliberate harmonization of one's actions with the purposes of the divine architect. Thus, under this interpretation of their ethical intentions, the Stoics thought of the initial, analytical approach to ethics as necessarily incomplete even in its treatment of strictly ethical topics; the systematic study of nature was thought to impart additional wisdom regarding ethical matters.In her recent study of ancient ethical theories, Julia Annas seeks to counter this view of the place of cosmo-theological speculation in early Stoicism by arguing that such a religious characterization of virtue is incompatible with the eudaimonism to which all schools of ancient philosophy, including Stoicism, were committed. 4 She concedes that first Cleanthes and then much later the Roman Stoics did regard virtue in religious terms, but in her assessment this represents a radical departure from mainstream Stoic thinking on this subject (which is identified mostly with the views of Chrysippus and his disciples, all of whom were clearly and consistently committed to the eudaimonistic model of ethical inquiry). Annas argues that whereas the Stoic sage was traditionally depicted as a person whose commitment to morally appropriate conduct stems from his own rational reflection on his own needs and interests, a person who identified completely with the aims of the divine architect in his purposive activity would be someone who surrendered his right to decide for himself what his needs and interests are, and who therefore could even be required to act in violation of what he might judge by himself to be crucial to his happiness.In what follows I demonstrate that this argument, often advanced in the literature as a reductio ad absurdum of divine command theories of morality, falls wide of the mark in the present case due to the fact that those Stoics who characterized virtue in religious terms did so apparently because they regarded a complete identification with... (shrink)

Salafism is one of the most important issues of the last few centuries. There are intense discussions on the issues related to Salafism, its emergence, how it was first used by whom and in what sense. Discussions about Salafism are sometimes experienced in relation to whether this concept corresponds to a mentality or to a sect, and sometimes this phenomenon is brought up in relation to a number of important names that have taken place in the history of Islamic (...) class='Hi'>thought. Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) emerges as the most frequently mentioned name in this context. Therefore, in this article, we have examined how Salafism/Salafiyya concept is used in the works of Ibn Taymiyya who is accepted as the theorist and the most powerful representative of Salafism. We have discussed the issue in a comprehensive manner by including the concept of Salaf, which is one of the most used concepts of Ibn Taymiyya. When we consider Ibn Taymiyya's use of the concepts of Salaf and Salafiyya, the concept of Salaf is seen to be used much more than the concept of Salafiyya. Thus, the concept of Salaf in the thought of Ibn Taymiyya refers to the Islamic society that lived in the early centuries and the conception of religion revealed by this society. The concept of Salafiyya, however, appears to have been used in a way that reflects a mentality and a way of thinking rather than a particular school or sect.Summary: Sects are human made structures that emerged with the institutionalization of differentiations in the conception of religion. The production of systematic theology and fiqh, the formation of its own literature, its dissemination and dissociation from other systems of thought are the most important turning points for the emergence of sects. One of the most important variables that determine the formation process of sects is the mentality of sect. It is known that the sects come into the realm of existence when the mindsets with the implicit reference system become visible. Therefore, there is a mentality on which every sect is based, but not every mentality has come to the point of being a sect. While some mentalities have influenced different sects in different shades, some of them have been confronted with only one sect.In fact, Salafism is one of the ways of thinking which is a mindset and it is a subject of important debates about whether it is a sect. Although the use of salafiyya is seen in the literature in the past, the fact that Salafism felt its existence as a kind of religion or mentality was realized in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is also known that the discussions about the definition of Salafism have started since these periods. From the second half of the 20th century, Salafism began to take a place in the agenda of both the Islamic world and the West. This has naturally led to efforts to define Salafism. Thus, Salafism is subjected to attempts to identify and associate with structures, such as denomination, ideology, religious understanding and mentality. In this direction, it is seen that Salafism is tried to be defined by establishing close link with the structures, such as Ahl al-Sunnah, Ahl-i Hadith, Hanbalism and Wahhabism or by reducing them directly to one of these structures. Thus, Salafism is sometimes backed up to the early stages of Islamic thought and sometimes associated with multilayered structures, such as the Ahl al-Sunnah, which embodies many political-mythic and fiqh structures.In line with the efforts of defining Salafism, it is also seen that many names that have had a say in classical Islamic thought or have been mentioned in modern times have been brought to the agenda. In addition to the names, such as Ahmad ibn Hanbal, Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, the names of Emir al-Saneyani, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Muhammad al-Shawkani, Shaykh Abdulaziz ibn Baz and Muhammad Nasir al-din al-Albani are frequently mentioned in this process. It should be noted that there is a special place of Ibn Taymiyya among these names. Ibn Taymiyya took the place of both in history of Islamic thought and Ahl al-Hadith-Hanbalite tradition and made a name for himself in the context of many subjects. It is claimed that Ibn Taymiyya, who was the theorist of the Hanbalite conception of religion, and the missionary of the New Hanbalism, was also the founding figure and the most important representative of Salafism. In modern times, most of those who declare ideas about Salafism place Ibn Taymiyya at the center of Salafism and present him as the founding name of this mentality. However, the question of what kind of relationship between the mentality called Salafism and Ibn Taymiyya's world of thought and religion is not the subject of academic studies. However, the works of Ibn Taymiyya, who is an author of a very velocity, should be analyzed from this point of view and all kinds of words about Ibn Taymiyya-Salafism relationship should be left behind this effort. Our study, which aims to fulfill this gap, was designed to explain topics, such as whether the concept of salafiyya was used in the works of Ibn Taymiyya, whether and how the past was used, and the extent to which the meaning attributed to the salafiyya coincided with the current Salafism. Understanding of the concept of the salafiyya in the works of Ibn Taymiyya depends on the explanation of how the term salaf was derived and used by Ibn Taymiyya. When the works of Ibn Taymiyya are scanned, it is seen that he used the word salaf much more than the word salafiyya. In fact, the word of salafiyya, which Ibn Taymiyya has rarely included, has been placed in some places in a way that refers to the meaning field of the word salaf. When we consider the use of the word salaf in the works of Ibn Taymiyya, we first see the generations who lived in the early historical periods of Islamic thought and the conception of religion which these generations have revealed. Other names that have taken place in the history of Islamic thought have similar opinions about the generation of the predecessors and the religious understanding of this generation. In other words, according to the general opinion of the predecessor, especially the first three centuries came to mind. However, it is seen that Ibn Taymiyya made some attempts to periodize both the generation of the predecessors and to define the understanding of religion of this generation. Nevertheless, Ibn Taymiyya could not provide a clear picture on this issue, and he occasionally contradicted his findings regarding his involvement in the predecessor generation. Nevertheless, he generally adopted generalizations and an attitude to limit the meaning of the predecessor to the first generations. The word salafiyya, which Ibn Taymiyya placed on the meaning of the word salaf, is used less compared to the word salaf and is given in more complete terms. This indicates that the main factor that influenced Ibn Taymiyya's salafi thought was salaf, not salafiyya as a systematic structure. These findings make it necessary to reconsider the claims of Salafism being a sect and it is being represented at the time of Ibn Taymiyya. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate central temporal and spatial notions in the second part of Plato’s Parmenides and argue that also these notions, and not only the metaphysical ones usually discussed in the literature, can be understood as a response to positions and problems put on the table by Parmenides and Zeno. Of the spatial notions examined in the dialogue, I look at the problems raised for possessing location and shape, while with respect to temporal notions, I focus on (...) the discussion of ‘being in time’ and exaiphnês (the latter notion will be shown to be also an important influence for Aristotle’s Physics). In displaying a paradoxical character and taking up crucial notions from Parmenides, the second part of the Parmenides seems to display some resemblance to Zeno’s paradoxes. I will show, however, that in contrast to Zeno, the second part of Plato’s Parmenides also demonstrates Parmenides’ One to be problematic on its own terms. Furthermore, the dialogue presents not only important problems that these spatial and temporal notions seem to lead us into, but also establishes some positive features necessary to think of time and space. In this way, Plato’s Parmenides can be seen as contributing to the development of temporal and spatial conceptualisations in ancient Greek thought. (shrink)

From the Series Editor's Introduction: For much of the twentieth century, French intellectual life was dominated by theoreticians and historians of mentalite. Traditionally, the study of the mind and of its limits and capabilities was the domain of philosophy, however in the first decades of the twentieth century practitioners of the emergent human and social sciences were increasingly competing with philosophers in this field: ethnologists, sociologists, psychologists and historians of science were all claiming to study 'how people think'. Scholars, including (...) Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, Leon Brunschvicg, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Lucien Febvre, Abel Rey, Alexandre Koyre and Helene Metzger were all investigating the mind historically and participating in shared research projects. Yet, as they have since been appropriated by the different disciplines, literature on their findings has so far failed to recognise the connections between their research and their importance in intellectual history.In this exemplary book, Cristina Chimisso reconstructs the world of these intellectuals and the key debates in the philosophy of mind, particularly between those who studied specific mentalities by employing prevalently historical and philological methods, and those who thought it possible to write a history of the mind, outlining the evolution of ways of thinking that had produced the modern mentality. Dr Chimisso situates the key French scholars in their historical context and shows how their ideas and agendas were indissolubly linked with their social and institutional positions, such as their political and religious allegiances, their status in academia, and their familial situation.The author employs a vast range of original research, using philosophical and scientific texts as well as archive documents, correspondence and seminar minutes from the period covered, to recreate the milieu in which these relatively neglected scholars made advances in the history of philosophy and science, and produced ideas that would greatly influence later intellectuals such as Foucault, Derrida and Bourdieu. This book will appeal to historians of science and philosophy, particularly Continental philosophy, and those with interest in the history of ideas and the historiography of the disciplines of the social sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Francis Sparshott TEXT AND PROCESS IN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY Ir. H. Bradley in an optimistic moment described philosophy as an • unusually intense and sustained attempt to think clearly.1 If that is what it is, it is clearly a process; and, if it is a process, one does not see what a philosophical text could be. A text is surely not a process, though it may be the product (...) of one. A text that purported to be philosophy would deceive, as many of us complain that textbooks deceive, by substituting for the living endeavors of thought a series of slogans and purported conclusions the parroting of which demonstrates that thought has been evaded, not clarified. But there are such things as philosophical texts, and we could not easily do without them. They are, indeed, central to our experience ofwhat philosophy is. They must be doing some work, and it is up to us to establish what that work could be. 2. If philosophy is indeed a process of clarifying thought, it must in each of us be a self-critical monologue, and it must in the world be a manyvoiced conversation among Thaïes and his contemporaries and successors through history. (Similar traditions in other parts of the world constitute different conversations, in other corners of the room, and sometimes we eavesdrop on each other's conversations; but we will not be concerning ourselves witii them here.) A philosophical text should be a record of parts ofthat conversation, a minute ofthe long meeting ofminds. Without such a record the conversation could be no better than a bull session; we would be forever returning to the beginning, not to recover our origins but because memory had stretched to snapping. After all, what use would the clarification of thought be unless die progress won could be preserved? Philosophy begets philosophy as humanity begets humanity; there must be an Aristotelian efficient cause, a form-bearer. 2 Philosophy and Literature 3.As minute of the clarifying conversation, the text might serve the purpose of an interim conclusion, a tentative result. But not necessarily, and not if the clarity sought is indeed clarity in thinking. Minutes of decision-making bodies may record only the motions passed; but deliberating bodies often prefer to include in the minutes the arguments on either side, so that when they come to reconsider a matter on which a motion has been passed they may do so with renewed insight. A progress report may report only where one has progressed to, but it may also retrace the progression whereby die progress was made. So perhaps die best sort of text in philosophy is die sort I shall call a philosophoumenon, a text that recreates in and for the reader the experience ofclarification itself. But if this is to be done the reader must be sucked in: before clarification can be done, unclarity must be re-enacted. Confusion must be induced and its recognition must be enforced: the reader must be enticed not only to recognize but to undergo in person the Socratic elenchus, which for two millennia has ensured that the best philosophers shall be the best hated philosophers. To do its elenctic work, a philosophoumenal text must be deeply ambiguous, internally divided, blatantly self-contradictory. The Platonic dialogues are exemplary in this as in most ways: dramatic denunciations of drama, written disparagements of writing, conclusive proofs of the impotence of reason. But the other masters did the same: Descartes guides the reader of his Meditations step by step through the argument that is to lead the reader to doubt Descartes's existence; Aristotle invents and deploys a highly technical vocabulary which he never uses in the same way twice, and establishes a classification of intellectual methods into which none ofhis own work can be fitted; Wittgenstein obsessively philosophizes to show the folly of philosophizing, and carefully ensures diat his students circulate die content of the texts that he ostentatiously refuses to publish; Kierkegaard stridently claims authorship of his pseudonymous works so that he can repudiate them audioritatively; G. E. Moore accurately defines goodness so as to make it clear exactly what he is saying when he says that goodness is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 410-411 [Access article in PDF] S. P. Ward. Penology and Eschatology in Plato's Myths. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Pp. v + 295. Cloth, $99.95.In this work the author begins by asking himself the following question: What is an eschatological myth? The adjective "eschatological" indicates that the discourse it qualifies is concerned with the last things; that is, death and (...) the judgment of souls that follows it. Hence, the relation that may be established between eschatology understood in this sense and penology, which refers to the punishments the soul undergoes at the end of its earthly existence. As far as the meaning of 'myth' is concerned, the author, influenced by G. S. Kirk (The Nature of Greek Myths [Penguin, 1974]), adopts a relativist position. He does not think it possible to give a general definition; therefore, he limits himself to pointing out some of the characteristics of this type of discourse, on the basis of passages from the Platonic corpus which are usually considered as myths.Having set his analytical tools in place, the author proposes a commentary on the eschatological myths at the end of the Gorgias (523a-527e), at the end of the Phaedo (107c-115a), at the end of Republic X (614b-621d), in the Phaedrus (246a-249d), in some parts of the Timaeus (42b-d, 91a-92c), and in the Laws (903a-905d). He then examines the relations between penology and eschatology in the dialogues of the first period, the intermediary period, and old age.Although Plato takes his inspiration from traditional myths, those that appear in the dialogues are distinguished from traditional myths by two features: a scientific background, which indicates an influence from the Presocratics; and the role played by elements proper [End Page 410] to the Platonic doctrine. The insertion of considerations of a scientific nature into myths makes them more credible, but is not enough to make them into true discourses. Thus, the question of the relation in Plato between these myths and his philosophical doctrine remains open. Nevertheless, and although it is sometimes difficult to justify particular points in the myths, it is still true that we can note a great deal of coherence between what they recount and the ethical questions developed in the dialogues in which they appear.In spite of this consistency, one observes an evolution in the way these myths are presented. In the Gorgias, the punishments inflicted on the soul by the gods are presented as intended to make the soul better. The idea of reincarnation plays no role here, but it is present in the Phaedo. In this dialogue, however, the question arises of how to harmonize reincarnation with post-mortem punishments which, because of it, no longer seem to be necessary. In the Republic, emphasis is placed instead on the role of individual responsibility in the process of reincarnation. The Phaedrus continues in this direction, but is characterized by its allusions to the theory of intelligible forms. In the Timaeus, by contrast, Plato abandons the theme of a way of life and that of the judgment of souls, for a vision of the process of reincarnation that is integrated, not without difficulty, within a cosmological vision. The Laws continue along this path.This analysis shows that Plato evolved on questions of eschatology and penology, even if he did not radically change his mind. Yet there is one point on which he never varied: even if he did not establish precise frontiers between science and religion, Plato never thought his myths to be true discourses, but he always considered their capacity for ethical edification and their pedagogical value.This work is clear and well structured. It is completed by a bibliography and a general index, is easy to read, and presents a genuine usefulness. One also notes, on the part of the author, a good overall knowledge of the whole of Greek literature, from the origins to the end of Antiquity. Nevertheless, three criticisms may be made: (1) This publication merely reproduces the format... (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish four kinds of (...) textual-context error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically. (shrink)

Space and time are geometrical notions that Sophie Germain, a French mathematician, discusses on several occasions in her Pensées diverses, however not only in a geometrical way but also in terms of a philosophical and moral understanding: she speaks of a human’s lifespan, the space they occupy, their place in creation and the knowledge toward which they always aim. This mixture of mathematical and philosophical thinking brings out Germain’s dream: she wants to apply the language of numbers to moral (...) and political issues. As such this chapter aims to examine Germain’s mathematical understanding of space and time in order to discover her moral theory. Furthermore, in a purely hypothetical context (because one does not know which authors she has read), I compare Germain’s moral thinking to Pascal’s moral and mathematical thoughts in Pensées. We underline the possible inspiration by Pascal by highlighting the similarities between these authors concerning space and time, which both treat mathematically and philosophically. These authors agree that time and space can be measured, and thus provide constant and mathematically uniform elements. At the same time, time and space provide the framework for moral thinking. The latter is not “capable” of enjoying the present moment; he is on a quest for the future. For Germain, this results into knowledge, but for Pascal, this is a sign of an unhappy life in which people do not find rest and are constantly looking for a diversion. (shrink)

Essays on Greek philosophy and literature from Homer and Hesiod to Aristotle. In Logoi and Muthoi, William Wians builds on his earlier volume Logos and Muthos, highlighting the richness and complexity of these terms that were once set firmly in opposition to one another as reason versus myth or rationality versus irrationality. It was once common to think of intellectual history representing a straightforward progression from mythology to rationality. These volumes, however, demonstrate the value of taking the two together, (...) opening up and analyzing a range of interactions, reactions, tensions, and ambiguities arising between literary and philosophical forms of discourse, including philosophical themes in works not ordinarily considered in the canon of Greek philosophical texts. This new volume considers such topics as the pre-philosophical origins of Anaximander’s calendar, the philosophical significance of public performance and claims of poetic inspiration, and the complex role of mythic figures (including perhaps Socrates) in Plato. Taken together, the essays offer new approaches to familiar texts and open up new possibilities for understanding the roles and relationships between muthos and logos in ancient Greek thought. “This is a stellar effort. The essays are all of extremely high quality and interest. The scholarship is rigorous and the content is innovative. The conception of the book is highly original, well-grounded, and well-thought-out. William Wians’s work as a scholar and as an editor has been consistently first-rate, and with this volume he has surpassed himself.” — Rose M. Cherubin, George Mason University. (shrink)

This article sets out to think through the double absence of literary language posited by Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire in the shadow cast by a consideration of Alvin Lucier’s piece I am sitting in a room and the sound installation practice of Bernhard Leitner. What I wish to suggest is that a consideration of these sound works enables us to identify a parallelism in the mechanics of the literary sign that creates the space of literature in Blanchot and the (...) phenomenological experience of the visitor entering into and thereby enacting the space of installation. If the term “phenomenological” here requires a parenthetical qualifier, this is because the double absence enacted on the sign in Blanchot is deployed here from within the visitor in the creation of the space of installation in a move that requires us to reformulate our thinking about the creation of space of all kinds. In revisiting Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire in this way, it is suggested that the ethical and... (shrink)

Lament, mourning, and the transmissibility of a tradition in the aftermath of destruction are prominent themes in Jewish thought. The corpus of lament literature, building upon and transforming the biblical Book of Lamentations, provides a unique lens for thinking about the relationships between destruction and renewal, mourning and remembrance, loss and redemption, expression and the inexpressible. This anthology features four texts by Gershom Scholem on lament, translated here for the first time into English. The volume also includes (...) original essays by leading scholars, which interpret Scholem's texts and situate them in relation to other Weimar-era Jewish thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, who drew on the textual traditions of lament to respond to the destruction and upheavals of the early twentieth century. Also included are studies on the textual tradition of lament in Judaism, from biblical, rabbinic, and medieval lamentations to contemporary Yemenite women's laments. This collection, unified by its strong thematic focus on lament, shows the fruitfulness of studying contemporary and modern texts alongside the traditional textual sources that informed them. (shrink)

These challenging essays defend Romanticism against its critics. They argue that Romantic thought, interpreted as the pursuit of freedom in concrete contexts, remains a central and exemplary form of both artistic work and philosophical understanding. Marshalling a wide range of texts from literature, philosophy and criticism, Richard Eldridge traces the central themes and stylistic features of Romantic thinking in the work of Kant, Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Hardy, Wittgenstein, Cavell and Updike. Through his analysis he shows that Romanticism is (...) neither emptily literary and escapist nor dogmatically optimistic and sentimental. This is the first serious philosophical defense of the ethical ideals of Romanticism and will appeal particularly to all professionals and students in philosophy, literature and aesthetics who are interested in what, philosophically, literature can show that philosophy cannot say. (shrink)