It is a pleasure to respond to these thought-provoking commentaries by Laurence J. Kirmayer and Nancy Nyquist Potter. Rather than addressing their comments one-by-one—and rather than entering into the same meditative attitude that produced my original essay, an unusual and exploratory text—I will take the liberty of responding to a theme that appears in both commentaries: the potential epistemic violence done by interpretation. It is perhaps no mistake that interpretative violence is thematized in commentaries on the topic of haunting—the haunting (...) of texts and of experience. In responding to this theme, I will offer some reflections on the role of psychotherapy in producing interpretations.Kirmayer’s commentary... (shrink)

The late 1980s and early 1990s opened up Russian philosophy to the reader at large. The works of N.A. Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov, LA. Il'in, L.P. Karsavin, N.O. Losskii, V.V. Rozanov, G.P. Fedotov, P.A. Florenskii, S.L. Frank, and Lev Shestov are now published and republished in runs of many thousands. This is a wonderful circumstance, and one can only welcome it. Despite forced emigration and severance from its national roots, Russian philosophy at the beginning of the century held its ground in (...) the intellectual quests and disputes of the twentieth century. A vivid and instructive "Russian imprint" is obvious in existentialism, in structuralism, and in philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

In the preface to the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson’s poems, the editors remark that “for a modern reader who can recreate the situation in which [“London”] was written, it may still be exciting enough. But to one with less imaginative capacity or historical knowledge, its appeal lies in Johnson’s skillful handling of the couplet.”2 To assist us in re-creating the milieu of 1738, the editors supply the usual notes identifying various historical personages and events which are no longer in (...) the domain of common knowledge. In this respect they follow Johnson’s lead. “London” is manifestly an occasional poem; and its occasion—in part, Walpole’s timidity abroad and corruption at home—like all occasions, passed.3 Indeed it passed so quickly that Johnson himself felt called upon in the fifth edition to annotate, for instance, his mention of “the Gazetteer”: “the paper which at that time contained apologies for the Court.” By 1750 Walpole was long out of court, the Gazetteer extinct, and “London” as outdated as yesterday’s newspaper.For poems like “London” whose contents are neither au courant nor immortal but rather historical or simply dead, the Yale editors suggest two avenues of resuscitation: the reader may either restore the background by means of historical imagination or, failing that, admire Johnson’s couplet art, which perhaps has a better chance at perennial appeal. Either content or form, either history or art—both options require a sacrifice on our part, and that sacrifice is our occasion, our need. Even assuming that the poem’s context could be exhumed and that we could participate once again in all the rage of the “patriot” opposition to Walpole, Why would we want to? The problem is that not only “London” but the Walpole regime itself is now defunct. Yet the same question must be asked of the poem’s art, even and especially if it is eternal. Why are we interested in the aesthetic knowledge of couplets that have been drained of all substance? Is understanding “London” in either case an end in itself? The pure content of the poem is too concrete, its pure form too abstract, to answer our occasions. Thus to understand the poem as either history or art demands a leisure that has no exigencies and is therefore free for the bygone and ethereal.42. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne, eds., Poems, vol. 6, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson , p. xvii.3. For a detailed exposition of the social and political background of “London,” see Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson , pp. 88-92, and James Clifford, “London,” Young Sam Johnson , pp. 175-94.4. John Locke explains the infinite leisure we can take in understanding the obscurities of ancient authors in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. , 2:110:There being no writings we have any great concernment to be very solicitous about the meaning of, but those that contain either truths we are required to believe, or laws we are to obey, and draw inconveniences on us when we mistake or transgress, we may be less anxious about the sense of other authors; who, writing but their own opinions, we are under no greater necessity to know them, than they to know ours. Our good or evil depending not on their decrees, we may safely be ignorant of their notions: and therefore in the reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside. (shrink)

Proceedings of the First Conference of the International Society for Hermeneutics and Science.

I explore three challenges for the current dialogue between science and religion: the challenges from hermeneutics, feminisms, and postmodernisms. Hermeneutics, defined as the practice and theory of interpretation and understanding, not only deals with questions of interpreting texts and data but also examines the role and use of language in religion and in science, but it should not stop there. Results of the post‐Kuhnian discussion are used to exemplify a wider range of hermeneutical issues, such as the ideological (...) potential of scientific concepts, the dynamics of interdisciplinarity, and the significance of the socioeconomic situatedness of science and religion. Feminist research analyzes the consequences of the interplay of masculine, feminine, and gender typologies in religion and science. Examples from the history of science as well as current scientific conceptualizations indicate that beliefs in the inferiority of woman form part of our inherited scientific, religious, and metaphysical framework. It is argued that postmodernism in its most constructive form shares the best fruits of modernity, especially of the Enlightenment, while avoiding some of its most serious mistakes. In conclusion, reflecting on the three publics engaged in the dialogue between science and religion—academe, religious communities, and societies—I offer constructive suggestions and critical observations concerning the future of this dialogue. (shrink)

On the hermeneutic. Palmer declares it unnecessary to recover Parmenides’ original authorial intentions in performing his poem ). It is “simply a mistake—one might term it the ‘essentialist fallacy’—to privilege Parmenides’ intended meaning as the determining factor in his subsequent influence”. Here the claim is not the one that authorial intention is irrecoverable, but the quite different claim that it is an “error vitiating most appraisals of this influence [of Parmenides on Plato to make] the assumption that one can base (...) an appraisal upon an interpretation of Parmenides developed independently of the actual Platonic reception”. And it is thus Palmer’s claim that most previous studies of what I above termed ‘the Plato-Parmenides connection’ have tacitly assumed that we can guess at how Plato received Parmenides by starting with our own interpretations of Parmenides. Stated in this way, the hermeneutic is original and quite acceptable, indeed necessary. But if exaggerated into the intention, say, to comment only on those parts of Parmenides used by Plato utterly without any attempt to read them as they might have carried meaning for Parmenides himself, such a hermeneutic would rule out even Palmer’s own procedure. For example, Palmer reads the second ‘deduction’ of the second half of the Parmenides as corresponding to what the historical Parmenides himself meant in sentences like “Both Parmenides himself and Plato’s Parmenides then draw the conclusion that Being/the One is equal to itself”. One must therefore proceed with care, as Palmer does in the sentence I have just quoted. Palmer cannot mean that the meaning of Parmenidean words or the use or construction of Parmenidean sentences is “largely irrelevant” to a study of how Plato ‘receives’ Parmenides. (shrink)

The configurational dimension, in turn, displays temporal features that may be opposed to these "features" of episodic time. The configurational arrangement makes the succession of events into significant wholes that are the correlate of the act of grouping together. Thanks to this reflective act—in the sense of Kant's Critique of Judgment—the whole plot may be translated into one "thought." "Thought," in this narrative context, may assume various meanings. It may characterize, for instance, following Aristotle's Poetics, the "theme" that accompanies the (...) "fable" or "plot" of a tragedy.1 "Thought" may also designate the "point" of the Hebraic maschal or of the biblical parable, concerning which Jeremias observes that the point of the parable is what allows us to translate it into a proverb or an aphorism. The term "thought" may also apply to the "colligatory terms" used in history writing, such terms as "the Renaissance," "the Industrial Revolution," and so on, which, according to Walsh and Dray, allow us to apprehend a set of historical events under a common denominator. In a word, the correlation between thought and plot supersedes the "then" and "and then" of mere succession. But it would be a complete mistake to consider "thought" as a-chronological. "Fable" and "theme" are as closely tied together as episode and configuration. The time of fable-and theme, if we may make of this a hyphenated expression, is more deeply temporal than the time of merely episodic narratives. · 1. It may be noted in passing that this correlation between "theme" and "plot" is also the basis of Northup Frye's "archetypal" criticism. Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris and John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago. Some of his works to appear in English are Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, Main Trends in Philosophy, and The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays on Hermeneutics. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling," appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue. (shrink)

Schleiemacher has been taken, historically, as a reception and divulgation via Dilthey, of a unilateral stress in its psychological character. The present article has as its scope to display that Gadamer came to join in this trend of thought. The aid of Manfred Frank will allow us to show the mistake in such reception and the possibility of another reading where the meaning of psychological interpretation is a complement of grammatical interpretation and vice-versa. The discussion is placed, basically, on the (...) interpretation with special focus in the “concept of divination”. (shrink)

In the context of Christian evangelization, the dialogue between culture and the Gospel has always been a major challenge for the Church. In Africa, particularly in Mozambique, this challenge still persists, since the western colonization of Africa failed in the evaluation of existing cultures and in the respect for the African Traditional Religion. Hence the need of an encultured Christianity, rooted in these peoples cultural reality, despite the wearing and difficulties to understand this concept. Culture is a fundamental dimension, inherent (...) to the human being and characterizes all of its existence. Therefore, an evangelization that ignores it, together with the local religiosity and takes them for primitive, is a huge mistake. Thus, the present dissertation approaches the need for the Church in Africa - Mozambique of an effective inculturation of the faith. It founds its approach on a bibliographical review of authors who ponder the theme. The research, developed in three chapters, it will present, first, an outline of Africa's history, its cultural diversity and the Christian presence on the Continent and then will elaborate an understanding of the following concepts: culture, interculturality, inculturation, acculturation, enculturation. We conclude with analyses of the promises, limits and criticisms of the inculturation of faith. The scope is to propose a new hermeneutics for the inculturation of the faith, which recognizes interculturality as the a priori of the way to an inculturated evangelization in Africa-Mozambique. (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

Hilbert arithmetic in a wide sense, including Hilbert arithmetic in a narrow sense consisting by two dual and anti-isometric Peano arithmetics, on the one hand, and the qubit Hilbert space (originating for the standard separable complex Hilbert space of quantum mechanics), on the other hand, allows for an arithmetic version of Gentzen’s cut elimination and quantum measurement to be described uniformy as two processes occurring accordingly in those two branches. A philosophical reflection also justifying that unity by quantum neo-Pythagoreanism links (...) it to the opposition of propositional logic, to which Gentzen’s cut rule refers immediately, on the one hand, and the linguistic and mathematical theory of metaphor therefore sharing the same structure borrowed from Hilbert arithmetic in a wide sense. An example by hermeneutical circle modeled as a dual pair of a syllogism (accomplishable also by a Turing machine) and a relevant metaphor (being a formal and logical mistake and thus fundamentally inaccessible to any Turing machine) visualizes human understanding corresponding also to Gentzen’s cut elimination and the Gödel dichotomy about the relation of arithmetic to set theory: either incompleteness or contradiction. The metaphor as the complementing “half” of any understanding of hermeneutical circle is what allows for that Gödel-like incompleteness to be overcome in human thought. (shrink)

Understanding the motivations behind those who partake in extreme sports can be difficult for some. If the popular conception holds that the incentive behind extreme sports participation is entirely to do with risking one's life, then this confusion will continue to exist. However, an in-depth examination of the phenomenology of the extreme sport experience yields a much more complex picture. This book revisits the definition of extreme sports as those activities where a mismanaged mistake or accident would most likely result (...) in death. Extreme sports are not necessarily synonymous with risk and participation may not be about risk-taking. Participants report deep inner transformations that influence world views and meaningfulness, feelings of coming home and authentic integration as well as a freedom beyond the everyday. Phenomenologically, these experiences have been interpreted as transcendent of time, other, space and body. Extreme sport participation therefore points to a more potent, life-enhancing endeavour worthy of further investigation. This book adopts a broad hermeneutic phenomenological approach to critique the assumed relationship to risk-taking, the death wish and the concept of "No Fear" in extreme sports, and repositions the experience in a previously unexplored manner. This is valuable reading for students and academics interested in Sports Psychology, Social Psychology, Health Psychology, Tourism, Leisure Studies and the practical applications of phenomenology. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The main purpose of the study is to examine Kant’s first experience in creating a methodology for determining the holistic, spiritual nature of man, firstly, in terms of identifying the range of phenomena that should be included in the analysis of the spiritual essence of man, and secondly, this experience may be indicative for identifying dead ends in the research of spirituality of modern philosophers. _Theoretical__ basis._ The study is based on the methodology of philosophical anthropology formulated by M. (...) Scheler, which, on the one hand, integrates the achievements of philosophy of life, phenomenology, existentialism and philosophical hermeneutics, and on the other hand, is based on the premise of the initial direct unity of the opposition of mental and physiological processes of human life. The basis for further expansion of the theoretical framework is the experience of spiritual practices of the Ancient East and religious practices of the Christian Middle Ages. Particularly noteworthy is the experience of modern psychotherapeutic practices, which, for all their diversity, have their roots in the depths of primitive beliefs and mysteries of ancient civilisations, and the tips of their branches reaching to the ideas of modern transpersonal psychology. _Originality__._ Firstly, the author uses M. Scheler’s ideas about the spiritual nature of man and the unity of his essential forces: corporeality, senses, feelings, thinking, values of worldview principles and the Absolute to analyse Kant’s anthropological concept. Secondly, Kant’s position on the way of describing human nature reveals contradictions. These contradictions are caused, on the one hand, by the prevailing mechanistic picture of the world, and, on the other hand, by the philosopher’s intuitive assumptions that did not follow from the provisions of his dualistic position (the concepts of mind and soul as used in Kant’s work "Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View"). Thirdly, the author identifies those fragments of the said work where Kant assumes the presence of corporeality, but does not clearly formulate its role in building the integral nature of the spiritual man. _Conclusions__._ Immanuel Kant was one of the first to raise the issue of the primary study of human nature in comparison with issues of ontology, epistemology, morality, etc. However, the philosopher failed to create a concept of holistic human nature, the essence of which would be its spiritual core. Kant based his methodology of studying human nature on the dualistic opposition of the essential forces of man. This methodology was conditioned by the dominant mechanistic picture of the world. Kant’s researches in the field of morality, aesthetics, and science were carried out in the cognitive-theoretical plane, so they were unable to reach a true synthesis of the essential forces of man by their methodology. Such a synthesis is possible on the basis of spiritual practice. The results of the study of the experience of the achievements and mistakes of the outstanding philosopher in the study of human nature open up the possibility of further refinement and development of philosophical and anthropological methodology in understanding the spiritual nature of man as a whole through comprehension of the mechanism of spiritual practice and, on this basis, understanding of the phenomenon of spirituality in all historical forms of its manifestation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas on Art and AestheticismGetting “Reality and Its Shadow” RightRichard A. Cohen (bio)1. The Standard Misreading of Levinas on Arta. IntroductionMuch has been written in the secondary literature about Levinas and art and about Levinas and literature more specifically. In addition to Maurice Blanchot’s observations in The Writing of the Disaster, which is more a primary text than a secondary source, two exceptional studies — well-written, insightful, nuanced, erudite (...) — in English on Levinas and literature are Robert Eaglestone’s book of 1997 entitled Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas and Jill Robbins’s 1999 book entitled Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature.1 No doubt there are other fine studies, but these two will be sufficient for our purposes. They are scholarly in the best sense, effecting to understand Levinas first of all, hence hermeneutically sympathetic, and at the same time taking critical distances, articulating reservations, basically unconvinced by Levinas’s claims. Unfortunately, given all their considerable virtues, these books are also hampered by a serious flaw, one that unhappily appears in all too much of the secondary literature on Levinas and art. [End Page 149] Despite their good will and intelligence, both books fundamentally misunderstand the relation of Levinas’s thought on and to art, and thus also his relation to literature more specifically, because they misconstrue the nature and the status of Levinas’s account of art within his philosophy. Surely this is serious and unfortunate. One aim of the present essay is to expose this flaw, despite its pervasiveness and entrenchment. Another aim, more positive and ultimately the means by which to accomplish the first, is to present a faithful account of what Levinas really has to say about art.Counter to the misgivings leveled against Levinas in the above two books, not to mention the many commentaries that repeat more or less the same things, the present article proposes two theses in his defense. To the charge that Levinas has misrepresented art, my first claim is that Levinas does not misrepresent art and, indeed, that he has a fine sense of it. To the charge that Levinas is hostile to art, my second claim is that Levinas is not at all hostile to art, one sign of which — noticed by both critics — is the literary and aesthetic references that abound in his own writings. That is to say, contrary to his critics, Levinas grasps quite well the nature and the value of art. His own literary practices, found throughout his own writings, some of them quite obvious, such as exegeses of Shakespeare and repeated citations taken from Dostoevsky and Grossman, not to mention a wealth of other references and allusions to artists and writers, and, of course, including explicit comments and discussions about art, all these are consistent with and help underwrite my larger claim that Levinas understands and values art and, indeed, that he understands it very well and values it highly.To be sure, and no one can mistake this, Levinas’s philosophy is ultimately an ethics and not an aesthetics. The ultimum verbum belongs not to aesthetics but to moral responsibility and the quest for justice. It is here, for those who would make aesthetics ultimate, that the rub lies, here that we find the spur and speculum for their distortion and darkening of Levinas on art. All the more necessary, then, are the two sides of the present essay: to understand properly what Levinas is saying by means of a careful reading of his one article devoted entirely to [End Page 150] art, “Reality and Its Shadow,” to discern in as unprejudiced a fashion as possible what Levinas actually has to say about art and its value, and by so proceeding to unmask the inadequacies of Levinas’s aesthetic critics. Getting Levinas right certainly does not foreclose criticism, by any means. It is, nevertheless, the first step to serious criticism or to acceptance. Getting him wrong, however, goes nowhere at all, because it has not even begun.Inasmuch as their mishandling of Levinas is in an important sense basically the same, in the following I treat Robbins’s Altered Reading and Eaglestone’s... (shrink)

My reflections on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial were provoked some time ago in a quite natural way, by a visit to the memorial itself. I happened upon it almost by accident, a fact that is due at least in part to the design of the Memorial itself . I found myself reduced to awed silence, and I resolved to attend the dedication ceremony on November 13, 1982. It was an extraordinary event, without question the most moving public ceremony I have (...) ever attended. But my own experience of the Memorial on that and other occasions is far from unique. It is almost commonplace among the many visitors to the VVM—now the most visited of all the memorials in Washington—a fact so striking as to have compelled journalists, art historians, and architects to write countless articles about the monument. And although philosophers traditionally have had little to say about architecture in general or about that of memorials in particular, there is much in the VVM and its iconography worthy of philosophical reflection. Self-knowledge includes, I hazard to say, knowledge of ourselves as members of the larger social and political context, and so includes knowledge of that context.Architecture need not memorialize or symbolize anything; or it may symbolize, but not in a memorializing way, let alone in a way that is tied to a nation’s history. The structures on the Washington Mall belong to a particular species of recollective architecture, a species whose symbolic and normative content is prominent. After all, war memorials by their very nature recall struggles to the death over values. Still further, the architecture by which a people memorializes itself is a species of pedagogy. It therefore seeks to instruct posterity about the past and, in so doing, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth recovering. It would thus be a mistake to try to view such memorials merely “aesthetically,” in abstraction from all judgments about the noble and the base. To reflect philosophically on specific monuments, as I propose to do here, necessarily requires something more than a simply technical discussion of the theory of architecture or of the history of a given species of architecture. We must also understand the monument’s symbolism, social context, and the effects its architecture works on those who participate in it. That is, we must understand the political iconography which shapes and is shaped y the public structure in question. To do less than this—if I may state a complex argument in hopelessly few words—is to fall short of the demands of true objectivity, of an understanding of the whole which the object is. To understand the meaning of the VVM requires that we understand, among other things, what the memorial means to those who visit it. This is why my observations about the dedication of the VVM and about the Memorial’s continuing power over people play an important role in this essay. Charles L. Griswold, associate professor of philosophy at Howard University, is the author of Self-Knowledge in Plat’s “Phaedrus” and has published widely in the areas of Greek philosophy, German Idealism, hermeneutics, and political philosophy. He is an editor of the Independent Journal of Philosophy and a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. Currently he is working on a project which centers on Adam Smith’s notion of the “self” and Smith’s relationship to Stoicism and to the American Founding. (shrink)

In “Moral Perfectionism,” an essay in To Shape a New World, Paul C. Taylor explicitly mentions and openly avoids King’s personalism while advancing a type of Emersonian moral perfectionism motivated by a less than adequate reconstruction of King’s project. In this essay, I argue this is a mistake on two fronts. First, Taylor’s moral perfectionism gives pride of place to shame and self-loathing where the work of King makes central use of love. Second, by evading the personalist King, Taylor misses (...) the importance of love as foundational to King’s theory of community, the Beloved Community. In effect, Taylor engages in hermeneutic violence regarding King’s work and self-description as a personalist. I offer an account of King’s love informed by personalism that better situates love and shows why it is central to King’s philosophy. In conclusion I argue the following: Love is a type of orientation, attitude, and standpoint one can take in relation to another person. Philia and eros forms of love are contingent and conditional. Agapic love opens up persons to see the eternal dignity we all possess and is restorative and generative of community. The Holy Spirit that animates King’s conception of history is made manifest or hindered by the choice to act on the agapic principle of love that animates the cosmos. In the end, I suggest that Taylor’s perfectionist insights might be applied to a supplemental development of Kingian moral philosophy in the direction of a fuller virtue ethics. (shrink)

In “Moral Perfectionism,” an essay in To Shape a New World, Paul C. Taylor explicitly mentions and openly avoids King’s personalism while advancing a type of Emersonian moral perfectionism motivated by a less than adequate reconstruction of King’s project. In this essay, I argue this is a mistake on two fronts. First, Taylor’s moral perfectionism gives pride of place to shame and self-loathing where the work of King makes central use of love. Second, by evading the personalist King, Taylor misses (...) the importance of love as foundational to King’s theory of community, the Beloved Community. In effect, Taylor engages in hermeneutic violence regarding King’s work and self-description as a personalist. I offer an account of King’s love informed by personalism that better situates love and shows why it is central to King’s philosophy. In conclusion I argue the following: Love is a type of orientation, attitude, and standpoint one can take in relation to another person. Philia and eros forms of love are contingent and conditional. Agapic love opens up persons to see the eternal dignity we all possess and is restorative and generative of community. The Holy Spirit that animates King’s conception of history is made manifest or hindered by the choice to act on the agapic principle of love that animates the cosmos. In the end, I suggest that Taylor’s perfectionist insights might be applied to a supplemental development of Kingian moral philosophy in the direction of a fuller virtue ethics. (shrink)

The era in which Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī emerged as a canonical scientist significantly contributed to his education and shaped his scientific worldview. The formation of al-Farabi’s spiritual worldview and his ideas is directly associated with embracing the ancient philosophical tradition, more precisely, Aristotle’s philosophy and logic. The focus of the article is alFarabi’s analysis of Aristotle’s principles in the study of logic and their further development. Al-Farabi’s worldwide reputation as the Second Teacher after Aristotle, the First Teacher, in the East (...) is directly rooted in his mastery and advancement of the science of logic. In simple terms, the philosopher states that logic leads a person to a straight path to being capable of radically discerning between good and bad, truth and lies, and honesty and deceit. This, in turn, steers humanity away from succumbing to mistakes or getting into trouble. Al-Farabi constructs a comprehensive scientific analysis of the socio-cultural foundations of Aristotle’s doctrine of logic and the ability to adapt it in his unique way to society. The study of the theoretical basis of al-Farabi’s teachings on logic and its significance involves employing hermeneutic, comparative, and stylistic methods in the research of the texts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Levinas on Art and AestheticismGetting “Reality and Its Shadow” RightRichard A. Cohen (bio)1. The Standard Misreading of Levinas on Arta. IntroductionMuch has been written in the secondary literature about Levinas and art and about Levinas and literature more specifically. In addition to Maurice Blanchot’s observations in The Writing of the Disaster, which is more a primary text than a secondary source, two exceptional studies — well-written, insightful, nuanced, erudite (...) — in English on Levinas and literature are Robert Eaglestone’s book of 1997 entitled Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas and Jill Robbins’s 1999 book entitled Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature.1 No doubt there are other fine studies, but these two will be sufficient for our purposes. They are scholarly in the best sense, effecting to understand Levinas first of all, hence hermeneutically sympathetic, and at the same time taking critical distances, articulating reservations, basically unconvinced by Levinas’s claims. Unfortunately, given all their considerable virtues, these books are also hampered by a serious flaw, one that unhappily appears in all too much of the secondary literature on Levinas and art. [End Page 149] Despite their good will and intelligence, both books fundamentally misunderstand the relation of Levinas’s thought on and to art, and thus also his relation to literature more specifically, because they misconstrue the nature and the status of Levinas’s account of art within his philosophy. Surely this is serious and unfortunate. One aim of the present essay is to expose this flaw, despite its pervasiveness and entrenchment. Another aim, more positive and ultimately the means by which to accomplish the first, is to present a faithful account of what Levinas really has to say about art.Counter to the misgivings leveled against Levinas in the above two books, not to mention the many commentaries that repeat more or less the same things, the present article proposes two theses in his defense. To the charge that Levinas has misrepresented art, my first claim is that Levinas does not misrepresent art and, indeed, that he has a fine sense of it. To the charge that Levinas is hostile to art, my second claim is that Levinas is not at all hostile to art, one sign of which — noticed by both critics — is the literary and aesthetic references that abound in his own writings. That is to say, contrary to his critics, Levinas grasps quite well the nature and the value of art. His own literary practices, found throughout his own writings, some of them quite obvious, such as exegeses of Shakespeare and repeated citations taken from Dostoevsky and Grossman, not to mention a wealth of other references and allusions to artists and writers, and, of course, including explicit comments and discussions about art, all these are consistent with and help underwrite my larger claim that Levinas understands and values art and, indeed, that he understands it very well and values it highly.To be sure, and no one can mistake this, Levinas’s philosophy is ultimately an ethics and not an aesthetics. The ultimum verbum belongs not to aesthetics but to moral responsibility and the quest for justice. It is here, for those who would make aesthetics ultimate, that the rub lies, here that we find the spur and speculum for their distortion and darkening of Levinas on art. All the more necessary, then, are the two sides of the present essay: to understand properly what Levinas is saying by means of a careful reading of his one article devoted entirely to [End Page 150] art, “Reality and Its Shadow,” to discern in as unprejudiced a fashion as possible what Levinas actually has to say about art and its value, and by so proceeding to unmask the inadequacies of Levinas’s aesthetic critics. Getting Levinas right certainly does not foreclose criticism, by any means. It is, nevertheless, the first step to serious criticism or to acceptance. Getting him wrong, however, goes nowhere at all, because it has not even begun.Inasmuch as their mishandling of Levinas is in an important sense basically the same, in the following I treat Robbins’s Altered Reading and Eaglestone’s... (shrink)

Existe un consenso general en torno a la condena de los textos de Foucault sobre la revolución iraní, a los que se considera un error manifiesto, ya sea debido a que el entusiasmo por la revolución islámica lo habría alejado imprudentemente de sus verdaderos intereses teóricos, ya sea debido a que ellos revelan un trasfondo totalitario, ingenuo y hasta misógino de su filosofía, lo cual, por supuesto, ahorra a los comentadores un trabajo hermenéutico sobre la inserción de tales escritos en (...) una obra cuya apuesta general aún es objeto de disputa académica. En este trabajo proponemos una vía alternativa de comprensión que no toma estos textos como un error, sino como parte de un diagnóstico al que se busca echar luz a través de la dimensión del viaje, el periodismo radical y la heterotopología como elementos fundamentales de una apuesta filosófica por la alteridad. There is consensus in disapproving the journalistic articles written by Foucault about the Iranian revolution. They are considered clear mistakes. Some say that this is so because the enthusiasm of Foucault towards the Islamic revolution moved him away from his true theoretical interests; others say that what those texts reveal is a totalitarian, naive, and even misogynistic background of his philosophy. By doing this, commentators spear themselves a hermeneutical work on the incorporation of those texts into a work whose general bet remains the subject of academic discussion. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to the issue; one in which the texts are not considered a mistake but rather they are seen as part of a diagnosis that can get some light from the ideas of travel, radical journalism and heterotopology. These considered as fundamental elements of a philosophical bet on alterity. (shrink)

Whilst considering the problems of the relationship between philosophy and pedagogy, Kant’s philosophy offers one especially rich and layered example for consideration. Kant’s philosophy stands in a triple relationship towards school-philosophy, understood in its real and original context. First, the complete corpus of Kant’s philosophy is valid as a conscious and critical prevalence of Leibniz-Wolff metaphysics . Secondly, Kant’s philosophy – even if one cannot in its real meaning consider it as school-philosophy – in its specific made source, as well (...) as the prevalence of the Leibniz-Wolff system, counts as school-philosophy as well. And thirdly, Kant’s philosophy, in its own way, can understand itself as a new positive school-philosophy alternative, for which it is predestined with its systematically complete execution of problem circles, consequently significant hermeneutic and didactic aspects or its complete linguistic coherence. Thus Kant’s relationship towards the Leibniz-Wolff system differs from Schelling’s or even Hegel’s relationship. Hegel also enters correctly into the manifold historical significance of this strong school-philosophy, while Schelling underlines that the mistakes of this school were of incomparable value to philosophy, because without it there wouldn’t have been an efflorescence of philosophy. For Kant, this scholastic philosophy does not mean history or a contrary pole, nor does it mean a lower degree of higher philosophy – for him, it means a contemplative framework which on the one hand must be transformed in each of its particularities, while on the other hand the new higher philosophy must in its constitution take into consideration its school-philosophical framework. This is possible only because the need for philosophy, if it is not already identical to the need for school-philosophy, unveils school-philosophy in its width. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental PilgrimageRoger CorlessThe Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. By Norman J.Girardot. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2002. xxx + 780 pp.Don't make the mistake I made and allow the size of this book intimidate you. I let it sit around for many months, fearing, as did the author, to "[row] out over the great ocean (...) of material" (pp. xix-xx), but once I had set sail I found myself in enjoyable, if sometimes irascible, company and I was unwilling to jump ship. Girardot is in full command of his ark of fascinating and diverse creatures, and his main argument is never lost in the details. His writing is lucid and the text is broken up into manageable blocks by subheadings with intriguing titles, rendering each segment ehipassiko, encouraging us to keep reading.A book of this importance and weight (about 1.5 kg) deserves a review article more than just a review, or, better, a discussion panel at a major academic conference. This journal is notorious for reviews of astonishing length, but I would like my review to be short enough that it will actually be read, so that it will entice you to read the book. I will not attempt a summary nor will I critically address all the issues that are brought up. Instead, I will try to show why I regard this book as an instant classic and even, I would say, a watershed in the meta-science of sinological and Religionswissenschaftlich self-reflection.We all know James Legge as the perpetrator of The Chinese Classics, the multivolume opus that, in the 1960 Hong Kong University Press revision, dominates the Chinese religion(s) section of our personal libraries. Since there is nothing like it, we consult it, but we pretend we do not, for, after all, it's out of date, surely, and Legge was an old fuddy-duddy—Scottish, a Protestant missionary, and, worst of all, a Victorian. Girardot seems to have had somewhat this opinion of Legge when he assayed a brief biography of him, but he discovered that his "Legge work" (as he calls it) opened the door to a pivotal era in academe and world culture. Once the door to the long-neglected cupboard had been opened, all kinds of fascinating objects came tumbling out. "Oh, so that's how it used to be, and that's why it's like this today!" No scholar of Chinese religion(s) can afford to ignore Girardot's extensive and insightful ruminations on the state of the field then and now.The point of the book is summed up on page 531: "[Legge] is an outstanding [End Page 276] example of the difficult nineteenth-century passage from religious discourse to what Edward Said calls the 'secular criticism' of the modern world." To study Legge is to study the origins of our discipline. He may have been a fuddy-duddy; he was certainly a workaholic, putting his Sassenach colleagues at Oxford to shame by sleeping little and rising in the middle of the night to persist in his hermeneutic labors. But he was also a student of the heathen land he went to convert, and he tried his best not only to see (the presumed universal) God in the ancient texts but also to find something noble in apparent atheists and agnostics such as Confucius. In his interaction with Max Mueller (and this book is as much about Mueller as it is about Legge) he both agreed and disagreed, in a complex choreography, with the comparative method underpinning The Sacred Books of the East. He was a Scotsman's Scotsman, a stag at bay, dourly standing his ground (as a Congregationalist, and therefore a nonconformist both north and south of the border) against, first, the London Missionary Society and, later, the prevailing academic and ecclesiastical climate at Oxford.No armchair orientalist, as were some of his colleagues across the Channel, he befriended native informants and studied the indigenous commentaries (mostly Qing) to which they referred him, so that his translations, although not as fluid as Waley... (shrink)

One limitation of medical ethics modeled on ideal moral theory is its relative silence on the aftermath of medical error: not just on the recognition and avoidance of malpractice, wrongdoing, or other such failures of medical ethics, but on how to respond given medical wrongdoing. Ideally, we would never do each other wrong; but given that inevitably we do, as fallible, imperfect agents we require non-ideal ethical guidance. For such non-ideal contexts, Nancy Berlinger’s analysis of medical error and Margaret Walker’s (...) account of moral repair present powerful hermeneutical and practical tools toward understanding and enacting what is needed to restore relationships, trust, and moral standing in the aftermath of medical error and wrongdoing. Where restitutive justice aims to make injured parties whole and retributive justice to mete out punishment, reparative justice, as Walker describes it, “involves the restoration or reconstruction of confidence, trust, and hope in the reality of shared moral standards and of our reliability in meeting and enforcing them.” Medical moral repair is not without its challenges, however, in both theory and practice; the standard ways of holding medical professionals and institutions responsible for medical mistakes or malpractice function retributively and restitutively, either impeding or giving benign inattention to patient-practitioner relationship repair. This paper argues for the value of medical moral repair, while considering some complications of extending and synthesizing Berlinger’s and Walker’s respective accounts on medical error and moral repair. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes on Love and/as ErrorByron WillistonBut if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs, paining soul, or sense, And of the sun his working vigour borrow, Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their Muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.1One (...) of philosophy’s most enduring questions is inspired by Plato’s Euthyphro: do we love something because it is lovable, or is it lovable because we love it?2 Perhaps nowhere is this problem more intractable than in Descartes’s theory of love. In his view love is the concrete attempt on the part of humans to develop an ethical reciprocity which ideally fulfils the need both to discover and to create value. The strict disjunction of the Platonic question is to this extent somewhat misleading because Descartes is genuinely challenged by the respective demands of both sides of the question. It would therefore be a mistake to fasten on one side of this distinction to the utter exclusion of the other.But the temptation to do precisely this with Descartes is strong indeed. This is a temptation which extends even to ethical matters, in which Descartes seems loathe to subordinate the search for certainty to merely contingent practical demands. In addressing the problem of moral weakness he writes, for [End Page 429] example, that “the strength of the soul is inadequate without knowledge of the truth.”3 The call to live in the light of certain truths—moral or otherwise—is so persistent a theme for him that the burden of proof would seem to be on those who want to claim that this is nevertheless not so in certain areas. The bulk of this paper is thus devoted to showing that, despite some appearances, Descartes is not concerned overmuch with the problem of attaining certainty and avoiding error in love judgments. He wants us to see love as a complex psycho-physical phenomenon which cannot be reduced to the desire to obtain true judgments about the world.To focus the discussion I examine Irving Singer’s philosophy of love as presented in The Nature of Love and especially his hermeneutic distinction between “appraisal” and “bestowal,” a distinction which maps felicitously onto the Platonic disjunction as sketched above. Singer criticizes the Cartesian theory of love as excessively “appraisive,” that is, as relying too heavily on an objective standard as guarantor of the worth of beloved objects. I maintain on the contrary that this interpretation distorts what Descartes’s texts tell us. By arguing that the will, with no necessary input from the appraising intellect, is paramount in love judgments, I show that love for Descartes is largely an imaginative means of “bestowing” value which as such does not require either the guidance or the corroboration of objective criteria. The bestowal theory warrants, rather, the free subjective creation of value. The distinction which Singer uses to criticize Descartes is thus turned to Descartes’s favor.I. Before getting to that argument, however, we need to examine the place which love as a specific passion has within the overall economy of the third notion primitive,4 that is, the union of body and soul as distinct from the treatment of these elements as mutually separate. Passions are for Descartes a species of thought. In a general sense all “perceptions” are passions of the soul. They represent the world to the will which then acts in some way on them (“action” is taken as the other species of thought). Now of these perceptions generally considered, some are caused by the external objects of the senses5 and some by the natural appetites and affections of the body.6 There are, however, those perceptions “whose effects we feel as being in the soul itself....”7 These are strictly speaking the “passions” of the soul; and despite our not always being able to locate their proximate cause,8 they may be stimulated by the [End Page 430] “fortuitous movement of the spirits,”9 by intellectual judgments, or by external... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic VeilAnne-Emmanuelle Berger (bio)In 1995, in a piece published in a special issue of Les temps modernes devoted to the Algerian “Guerre des frères,” the late Monique Gadant, a sociologist of postcolonial Algeria, called for a dispassionate reflection on the reasons why a sizable number of Algerian women, in Algeria but also in France, decided to wear the hijab, or “Islamic (...) veil,” without, she said, being coerced into doing it. Warning against a naive French ethnocentrism which may have led people to mistake the hijab too quickly for a sign of women’s oppression, she wrote:C’est s’aveugler que de ne pas voir qu’il y a de très nombreuses femmes qui portent le hidjab sans y être forcées par personne.... Avant de se dresser contre le hidjab, réduit à un symbole d’oppression (les femmes qui le portent étant jugées en contradiction avec ce qui est censé être leurs intérêts et la vérité sur elles-mêmes dites par d’autres), on devrait prendre un peu de temps pour réfléchir aux motivations de ces femmes.[”Femmes alibi” 228][One would be blind not to see that numerous women are wearing the hijab without being forced to do it by anybody.... Before denouncing the hijab, reductively conceived as a symbol of oppression—the women wearing it being found to contradict what are supposed to be their interests and the truth about themselves as told by others—one should take some time to reflect on these women’s motivation.]Indeed, a growing number of women have adopted the hijab in the past decade, in Muslim or predominantly Muslim countries where the “Islamic veil” has not yet been made state law, as is the case in Iran. One thinks of Egypt or Indonesia, for instance, as two other examples where—against weak attempts by the governments in place to curb the powerful development of Islamism, after they helped foster it—the hijab has enjoyed considerable though unequal success. One should not underestimate coercion as a factor, especially within the last few years, when terrorism directed against civilians in Algeria and ever-growing intimidation stemming from Islamism’s social success in Egypt have undeniably led tens of thousands of scared, weary, or energetically “persuaded” women to wear the veil. Nonetheless, I want to take up Monique Gadant’s suggestion that we seriously try to think through at least some of the stakes of the phenomenon she identifies: an impressive number of women today affirm that they want to wear the hijab, and they do it. This raises at least two series of questions: (1) if the hijab fulfills a wish, rather than indicating a state of oppression or alienation, one has to reflect on the nature and structure of this wish or desire, and perhaps ask what the relation might be between desire and the veil, or rather this veil. For the hijab, as it is called in Arabic, is indeed a new kind of veil, or rather a new way of using an old Koranic precept, one intended to replace traditional modes of dressing and veiling. (2) If the hijab, and sometimes even the nikab and the jelbab, which cover women’s faces and bodies entirely, are willingly worn, should one [End Page 93] take this as a particularly blatant testimony to the radical relativity of cultures, which would in turn preclude any “Westerner” or non-Muslim individuals or groups, beginning with women, from making any assumptions concerning the condition of women or the hermeneutics of gender relations across cultures? This is indeed what Gadant hints at when she denounces the “naive [French] ethnocentrism” [228] at work in the negative response to the hijab. 1 One encounters here, as we know, a most divisive, philosophically crucial, and politically decisive issue, one that not only pitches non-Westerners against Westerners, but sometimes equally forcefully, as in this case, “Westerners” against “Westerners.” Ethnocentrism, as a tendency to (mis)understand a different culture in terms of one’s own, hence as a veiled form of cultural imperialism, should be uncovered and indeed denounced... (shrink)

To engage with Hegel's philosophy from a feminist perspective is necessarily to be confronted with questions about the politics of reading. Politics, that is, both in the obvious, traditional ideological sense and in the less obvious sense of the politics of the relation between reader and text. For some scholars this automatically places feminist readers in the category of a dubious scholarship which rests on a mistaken understanding of the meanings of both politics and truth.It seems to me a mistake (...) — and an inexcusable conceit — to say as some now do, that all scholarship is somehow ‘political’ or is itself politics practised by other means. That view demeans both politics and scholarship. Now this isnotto say that a scholar's motives must not be political, only that the methods and results of her researches must be judged according to scholarly standards and not political ones. The aim of scholarship is to seek and to tell the truth, as best one can discern it, and not to promote any particular partisan cause. Ball here confines the role of politics in the traditional sense to the Weberian category of ‘value’, which may motivate and orient scholarship but which cannot provide the criteria according to which scholarly work is carried out or its findings are judged. He dismisses the relevance of the category ‘politics’ to the understanding of the relation between reader and text as such and instead, argues that ‘truth’ is what that relation should be about. Yet, the work of interpretation and reflection in the reading of texts insofar as it involves a process of interaction between reader and text always problematises, I would argue, the distinction between politics and truth upon which Ball's analysis relies. There are various models on offer, both descriptive and prescriptive for what the process of textual interpretation does or should involve. One can contrast the notion of ‘scholarly standards’ as the route to the true meaning of a text with Skinner's new historicism, the virtuous circle of hermeneutics or the destabilising ambitions of deconstruction. These approaches elicit very different interpretive results but they also differ in their assumptions about what is or ought to be taken as authoritative for understanding and interpretation and in this sense they are characterised by a politics of the interplay between reader and text. This is a modest claim but one which disrupts the politics/truth distinction even if it doesn't necessarily imply the end of distinguishing between good and bad, valid and invalid understanding/interpretation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis by Karen Silvia de León-JonesMatt GoldishKaren Silvia de León-Jones. Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis (Yale Studies in Hermeneutics). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 272. Cloth, $40.00.Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition has become a standard work for the study of Renaissance thought, and it is through her interpretation (...) of Bruno in the tradition of Hermeticism and Lullism that he is generally understood by non-specialists. Karen Silvia de León-Jones proclaims her goal in the present volume to be a new reading of Bruno as a thinker far more affected by Kabbalah than Yates believed, and she expresses herself very sharply against many of Yates’ positions (e.g., 18–23).The book has appropriately been placed in a series on hermeneutics. It is essentially a detailed interpretation of Bruno’s dialogue La cabala del cavallopegaseo, along with two other related dialogues, Lo spaccio della bestia trionjante and De gli eroici furori. The non-specialist reader is not offered a clear introduction to the structure and content of these dialogues or an explanation of how they fit into Bruno’s thought and the larger Renaissance context. This is not to say that de León-Jones does not introduce her material at all, but the choppy prose and lack of overview, particularly in the early chapters of the book, lend it a certain amount of Bruno’s own famous obscurity for those not already conversant with Bruno’s oeuvre.I am not in a position to say whether de León-Jones interprets Bruno’s thought correctly, but I will comment on her approach to Kabbalah and its significance in Bruno’s thought. She makes clear that the Kabbalah “practiced” by Bruno is not identical with Jewish Kabbalah; it is rather what I would call “Cabala,” a group of hermeneutical and mystical techniques based loosely on Jewish Kabbalah, which was used by Renaissance and Baroque Christians. The author nicely defines the theurgic Kabbalah as absorbed by Christian savants: the study of the secret names of God, manipulation of [End Page 675] the Hebrew alphabet and numbers by gematria, temurah and notankon, and meditation on the sephiroth (10).In Bruno’s idiosyncratic theology, or “Cabala-teologia-filosofia” as it is described, Kabbalah has more specific significances. Kabbalah teaches the goal of prophecy and unio mystica; transmigration of souls; the image of God’s relationship to the world through the tree of the sephiroth (he especially emphasizes Hokhmah); the Mors osculi; and manipulation of the divine efflux. Bruno thinks of all Jewish sages who are not pedantic Talmudists as kabbalists, beginning with Moses and Solomon. Biblical wisdom too is Kabbalah. De León-Jones is therefore correct in saying that “Bruno is not a Kabbalist in the strictest sense of [the] word, but instead the example of Renaissance syncretism at its most extreme: in reality Bruno is Bruno; he proselytizes his own philosophy” (181). Going though the book one finds that Kabbalah, or Cabala, which the Nolan clearly learned mainly from Agrippa (as Yates stated), was simply another literature of the prisca sapientia to be manipulated, along with Hermetic writings, Plato, the Bible and many others, as “support” for his own system of thought. Syncretism is indeed the key here, and while de León-Jones is undoubtedly correct that Bruno used kabbalistic hermeneutics and symbols along with everything else in his satchel, I question whether it is meaningful to speak of Bruno and the Kabbalah in the normal sense of the term.After the author so roundly reproves Dame Yates for various errors, including her alleged narrowness in understanding Kabbalah, it is surprising to find that de León-Jones herself makes numerous mistakes when she talks about the Jewish Kabbalah. Over the course of four pages (12–15) for example, she errs with all the following. She says Yohanan Alemanno “was not a practitioner of Kabbalah but knew it well” (he was one of the great Renaissance Jewish kabbalists); that Pico learned Hebrew from Flavius Mithridates then translated and widely circulated Abulafian... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Renegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics ed. by Joshua Daniel and Rick ElgendyAndy DunningRenegotiating Power, Theology, and Politics Edited by Joshua Daniel and Rick Elgendy HAMPSHIRE, UK: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2015. 195 PP. $99.00After Michel Foucault and the advent of liberationist thought, power has become an increasingly important topic in theology. This volume of essays is a valuable addition to a series that recognizes power's importance, New Approaches to Religion (...) and Power, edited by Joerg Rieger. As the editors note in their introduction, the material contained here began as a collection of papers presented at a 2012 conference on authority, power, and theology.Offerings from William Schweiker and Robin Lovin bookend the collection. Schweiker extends themes he has explored elsewhere, articulating a moral realism grounded on the "integrity of life" and its claim on human beings as responsible actors (16). Lovin's essay concludes the book with an examination of authority in modernity. He argues that the various goods that claim our allegiance are fragmented and competitive rather than unified, that secular and sacred are no longer viewed as complementary. The challenge as Lovin sees it is "to figure out how we can submit ourselves to the multiple authorities that are necessary for the goods that we have chosen without losing those goods to the demands of creating and maintaining them" (187).Other essays take up questions of power in religion and politics from diverse points of view. Kathryn Tanner offers a theology of power drawing on Foucault's insight that human power relations can be understood as good to the extent that the subjects of power can resist and dismantle them, while God's is the only power good in its very irresistibility. Rick Elgendy offers a nuanced picture of revelation "without authority" but not thereby robbed of power, which comports with Tanner's vision. Jonathan Tran addresses revelation's authority in dialogue with both Karl Barth and Stanley Cavell, producing a winsome account of revelation in a pluralistic, relational, necessarily linguistic world.Power is extraordinarily difficult to navigate in intercultural conversation and in the world of real politics, and chapters by Marion Grau and Vincent Lloyd address these concerns. Grau takes up the former, working toward what she calls a "polydox hermeneutic of the sacred, a theopoetical epistemology" by which the embodied nature of knowledge can be recognized and made part of hermeneutical dialogue (134). In a sobering argument, Lloyd engages the work of Raymond Geuss to note that while political philosophers and political actors use similar language, for political actors this language is primarily rhetoric used [End Page 223] to gain power. Philosophers mistake this common language for common purpose and thus "operate with the false consciousness that their systematic work could have an effect." Lloyd argues that political theology can avoid this trap by taking the critique of ideology as its primary task, finding in Huey Newton an exemplar of "political theology at its best" (159).This volume rewards rereading. These essays and others included in the book are admirably clear and well written. They engage and argue with one another and will evoke similar reactions in their readers. While some of the arguments may be too immersed in the discussions of their specific fields for even advanced undergraduate courses, graduate students will find in this book a stimulating sampler of the theological concerns raised by power and authority in religion, theology, and politics, and thoughtful approaches with which to navigate them.Andy DunningSt. Andrew United Methodist Church and Iliff School of TheologyCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The term "naturalism" has been used in many senses. Here, that term refers to the theory that the methods used in the natural sciences can appropriately be used also in the social sciences. The expression "the possibility of naturalism" raises the question whether the methods of the natural sciences can indeed be fruitfully applied in the social sciences. The author outlines the competing answers to the question of the possibility of naturalism as including positivism, which is a blatantly affirmative answer; (...) hermeneuticalism, which is a hesitantly negative answer; and the author's mediating position, which, he asserts, avoids the mistake made by both of the other answers. Their mistake, he says, is their assumption that natural science is essentially positivistic, while social science is essentially subjective. (shrink)

The Wrong Question? is the response by an anthropologist to a question posed by a philosopher concerning the intelligibility of alien forms of thought. I argue that it is wrong to describe the problem of intelligibility as one of logic or rationality. Indeed, foreign practices (no less than our own) may become intelligible only once they are not evaluated according to abstract criteria of rationality. To ask of a given practice or form of life whether it is rational is an (...) error of grammar (nonsense) in Wittgenstein’s sense. I describe how intelligibility emerges over the course of ethnographic fieldwork but also argue that we must work on our own concepts in order to make foreign ones intelligible. The response draws from both Gadamer and Wittgenstein as well as anthropologists Geertz, Evans-Pritchard, and Lévi-Strauss. Following Cora Diamond, I suggest further that the ethical and rational dimensions of understanding another are indissociable. (shrink)

There are three parts and altogether fourteen chapters in the book. The parts are: I Why Action Theory Rests on a Mistake, II Dynamical Systems Theory and Human Action, and III Explaining Human Action: Why Dynamics Tells Us That Stories Are Necessary. The first part gives a survey of some historical views of causation and explanation. It also surveys current philosophical action theory especially from the point of view of its treatment of mental causation and related themes. This part is (...) meant to be mainly introductory. Part II gives an account of dynamical systems theory, including a discussion of information theory. In this part the author also develops here own views of actions in terms of dynamical systems with a special emphasis on “second-order constraints”. In part III she gives a hermeneutical account of the explanation of action. (shrink)

The author reviews the various Anglo-American philosophies which align themselves directly in one way or another with mathematics, physics, and logic; this has been done in many ways, but this book does it in such a way that it seems to give more a feel for what is going on in a rather complicated corner of the world than the various histories and anthologies. Radnitzky is engaged in an ambitious critical project, which, put quite simply, says that English-speaking philosophies of (...) science are exercises in irrelevance. His point of view is the hermeneutic-dialectic tradition, and continental philosophy of science; moreover his point of view is that he has a point of view, and he insists that the Anglo-Americans do not; to be ignorant and uncritical insofar as one's own assumptions are concerned is to be open to many serious mistakes, many of which have been made by Americans: they have shifted their attention to less rewarding areas of interest, they have accepted models which are not fruitful, they have not been able to relate to actual scientific activity or methodology, etc. This sweeping criticism is of little value; it is partisan in precisely the manner that English speaking "program" philosophy strenuously attempts to avoid; it suggests that its own philosophy corrects major systematic mistakes in the areas surveyed. But in spite of what might be viewed as divisive and arrogant interference, this book could be of value to two groups of readers: those who are simply interested in what goes on in metascience; those who have some dissatisfaction with the self-knowledge that is displayed in these areas. A fair criticism of the book would be to say that the author exaggerates the lack of self-knowledge, and tends to devaluate the efforts of people like Quine and Goodman to bring logical empiricism to a less strictly positivistic position.--J. J. E. (shrink)

If, as Schmitt suggests, Heidegger bases the claim that moods are cognitive on the philosophical distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical knowing, then much of what Heidegger says in this connection turns out to be either unclear, trivially true, or else false. Yet Schmitt himself only occasionally seems to recognize how dubious this account really is. Moreover, in attempting to help Heidegger say what he means, Schmitt's interpretation in Chapter 5 falters. It falters because(1) the emphatic likening of moods to skills,(2) (...) the introduction of the bizzare notion “knowing how occurrently,” and (3) the misconceiving of self-deception, are not to be found in Sein und Zeit. They represent, rather, an imposition upon Sein und Zeit from without. This fact means either that Schmitt's interpretation is faulty or else that it is as much reconstructive as explicative. And if reconstructive, then several conceptual mistakes are attributable to him more than to Heidegger. In spite of these difficulties Martin Heidegger on Being Human is a prize book. It attempts to understand a thinker better than he understood himself. And according to Schleiermacher this is the goal of every hermeneutic.In contrast to the successful parts of the book, the chapter on moods fails to make sense out of Heidegger's view - one reason being, I would guess, that Heidegger is, after all, equivocating on the German word “Stimmung.” Sometimes he uses it to refer specifically to states such as being depressed, being serene, being anxious. At other times he uses it to refer vaguely to Dasein's “attunement” to the world. If the human being is always already (immer schon) attuned to the world, and if such a posture toward the world is also considered a mood, then in some imprecise way one's being in a mood might be a necessary condition for any belief to affect him emotionally. But, of course, “mood” in this broad sense would indicate an ontologically, and not a causally, necessary condition. And so, it would not follow that every belief which affected one emotionally need have some specific mood (e.g., depression, serenity, anxiety) as its necessary causal antecedent. Nor would it follow that, as a matter of fact, a change of belief could not effect a specific change of mood.I fear that with regard to some topics the sense in which one understands Heidegger better than he understood himself may well be the original Socratic sense: one knows what Heidegger himself does not know, viz., that the conceptions of Sein und Zeit are not always intelligible. And one wonders whether any philosophical midwifery can really be of aid - at least with respect to the claim that moods are cognitive. (shrink)

Category mistakes are sentences such as 'Green ideas sleep furiously' or 'Saturday is in bed'. They strike us as highly infelicitous but it is hard to explain precisely why this is so. Ofra Magidor explores four approaches to category mistakes in philosophy of language and linguistics, and develops and defends an original, presuppositional account.