The Ethics of Geometry is a study of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Essential differences in the ethos of mathematics, for example, the customary ways of undertaking and understanding mathematical procedures and their objects, provide insight into the fundamental issues in the quarrel of moderns with ancients. Two signal features of the modern ethos are the priority of problem-solving over theorem-proving, and the claim that constructability by human minds or instruments establishes the existence of relevant entities. These figures are (...) combined in the emblematic statement of Salomon Maimon, "In mathematical construction we are, as it were, gods." Construction is the mark of modernity. The disciplines of classical philology, literary interpretation and the history of philosophy and of mathematics are woven together in this volume. (shrink)

The generative and governing "idea" of radical modernity is spawned by the technique of mathematical construction deployed and interpreted by the major early-modern thinkers and their legatees. ;Chapter I is a survey of this legacy as it appears in Vico, Kant, Fichte, Marx and Nietzsche and in the post-Nietzschean inheritance of contemporary philosophy, hyperbolic in the case of Derrida et al., elliptical, in the case of Carnap and Goodman. ;In Chapter II I try to show how the pre-modern mathematical tradition, (...) represented by Euclid, aimed at keeping the enticements of technical facility in check by means of didactic phronesis and how the post-Kantian interpretation of "existence" in Euclid as constructibility betrays his usage and self-understanding. I suggest that his focus in the postulates and elsewhere is on the undistorted iterability of graphic evocations of the items already intelligible thanks to the definitions or to the pre-understanding shared by the teacher and student. ;In Chapter III, devoted to Descartes the principal claims of modern constructivism are brought to sight. After examining Descartes' fabulous autobiography and its emphasis on self-origination, I turn to the style, contents and under-pinnings of the Geometry in an effort to extract from that text what he once referred to as "the metaphysics of geometry." The latter yields the conditions of successful problem-solving, i.e., dimensional homogeneity and kinematic continuity. These conditions, in turn, find their justification in Descartes' theses in the Rules concerning order, measure and the uniformity of "mental" activity. In the final section I apply the lessons learned from the Geometry and the Rules to one critical issue in the later Meditations, the transition from essence to existence. Descartes' "solution" generates a sequence of perplexities with Hobbes, Leibniz, Kant and other radical moderns continue to wrestle. (shrink)

Included are essays in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical psychology by one of the most important twentieth-century continental philosophers.

Every speech has a long ancestry, even if it was composed for a novel occasion. It may help to clarify my purposes in today’s speech if I say a few words about its genealogy and its genesis. Its lone ancestor was my undergraduate teacher, Simon Kaplan, a learned and a pious man. I recall vividly the day he admonished me in a thick Russian accent which I can’t mimic, “Mr. Lachterman, you spend all your time with the Greeks and none (...) of your time with the Jews.” Although he prepared a reading list of traditional Jewish texts for me, it was many years before I undertook to read the books on that list. I was, however, able to repay a small portion of the extravagant debt that I owed him both as a teacher and as a friend, by helping him with the English translation of Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason, a book about which I shall have more to say later. (shrink)

Praxis is the identifying signature of the most prevalent contemporary versions of the reception and interpretation of Marx and of the movements of thought inspired or provoked by him. This view seems to accord well with the early “Theses on Feuerbach” and is frequently mobilized in support of the further claim that the “mature” or “scientific” Marx, the Marx of Das Kapital, above all had left behind his former preoccupations with philosophy in anything like a traditional sense, in order to (...) pursue single-mindedly and whole-heartedly his critical diagnosis of bourgeois political economy, the opening wedge in his “practical” campaign to establish first socialism and then communism. In this essay, I want to call into question some of the central commitments of this consensus. In particular, I shall suggest that Marx’s understanding of praxis, of human activity and interaction, is pervasively shaped by his conception of poiesis, the production of hitherto non-existing objects and, therewith, the ongoing transformation of external Nature. Accordingly, appreciations of Marx’s supposedly revolutionary transfiguration of the relation between theoria and praxis need to be recast and reconstrued in light of his reduction of praxis to technical production. Poiesis is the cardinal, indeed the unique, category in the ontological vocabulary Marx adopted in his earliest works and never abandoned afterwards, even when he went on to treat ontological issues much more economically. This monochromatic vocabulary so colored Marx’s analysis of the nature and civic places of labor and human interrelations, that both tended to lose the variegated contours by which pre-modern, if not all pre-Marxist, thinkers recognized them. Marx’s elliptical, not to say sibylline, allusions to the condition and the telos of “socialized humanity” in the Grundrisse and in the final volume of Das Kapital prove so perplexing exactly because ‘labor’ itself has become paradoxical—does it figure with equal prominence in both the ‘realm of necessity’ and the ‘realm of freedom’?—while praxis, once it seems finally set free from the spell cast on it by the presumptive ultimacy of poiesis, appears to lose its bearings, its pre-modern orientation to a goal such as achieved and mutually-acknowledged human excellence. The claims and promises of praxis turn out to be deeply enigmatic. (shrink)

This is the most noteworthy and, potentially, most fructifying Aristotelian study in recent decades. Unlike many other vues d'ensemble, it is neither a reconstruction of Aristotle's putative "development," nor an analytical rehabilitation of sedimented "doctrines"; rather, Brague's work is an engagement with the original evidence generating and sustaining Aristotle's discourses on the human, the worldly, and the divine. This engagement is carried through in a special register: Aristote et la question du monde is a surrogate for the book on Aristotle (...) Heidegger intended to write and for which Being and Time is the published substitute. The result is not a simplistic transcription of Aristotle into what often passes for Heideggerian jargon, but a thoroughly scholarly and philosophical reading of Aristotle from the "optic" of Being and Time. By examining many of the incises, the parenthetical cuts, into the corpus Aristotelicum, Brague summons our attention to what is important, not only "for Aristotle," but "in Aristotle". (shrink)

A recent bibliography of Maimonidean studies in the major scholarly languages lists over 300 items from 1950 to 1986. Almost all of the entries antedate the numerous collective publications honoring the 850th anniversary of Maimonides' birth held in 1985. The present volume is an impressive specimen of this latter genre, being a collection of papers presented at the Catholic University of America, plus four papers commissioned by the editor.

The final publication of the late Paul Wienpahl is an exceedingly curious and, perhaps, deliberately controversial book, giving fullest expression to the promise made in some of his earlier studies, viz., to bring about a rapprochement between Spinoza and Eastern, especially Zen Buddhistic, thought. He pursued this aspiration along two fronts, the first involving historical analysis and cross-cultural comparison, the second consisting of a new translation of all the definitions, axioms and propositions of the Ethics, together with a facing Latin (...) text. (shrink)

The two most conspicuous features of the rather hectic activity in contemporary moral philosophy seem to be these: First, while eleventh-hour attempts are still being made to salvage foundationalism in some Kantian sense, center stage is held by the debate between partisans of a pallid, if ironic, liberal solidarity and defenders of the supposedly vivid authority, or authoritarianism, of shared traditions and life-practices. And yet, second, jettisoning rational foundations has not meant abandoning all sense of the reasonableness of the "moral" (...) requirements inherent in the descriptive or prescriptive frameworks being championed. The search is still on for apposite tracings of those textures of moral/ethical life such that it appears reasonable, if not ultimately justified, for an agent to adhere to some array of norms, prescriptions, laws, recommendations, or, at the least, beliefs about what is good. (shrink)