Depuis la renaissance des études aristotéliciennes avec Werner Jaeger, on a souvent observé la fréquence lexicographique des termes dénotant la médiété et la médiation dans le corpus aristotélicien. Cette récurrence a cependant généralement été traitée comme un effet homonymique, rien ne permettant de relier a priori la médiété éthique, le terme intermédiaire en logique ou encore le milieu perceptif. Et pourtant, le fait qu'Aristote s'interroge lui-même sur cette « plurivocité » du médium peut être lu comme une indication que, sous (...) le couvert d'une apparente homonymie, il y a bien un problème de la médialité qui traverse la pensée du Stagirite. L'article se propose de recenser les figures majeures de cette médialité dans ses déclinaisons éthiques, logiques et aïsthétiques, afin de déterminer dans quelle mesure une relecture du corpus à l'aune de la médialité permet de dépasser l'alternative entre une lecture fonctionnaliste et une lecture naturaliste d'Aristote. (shrink)

W artykule stawia się pytanie o rolę poznania symbolicznego w poznaniu filozoficznym. Punktem wyjścia jest analiza słynnej mowy Diotymy przytoczonej przez Sokratesa w Uczcie Platona. Zagadnienie przedstawia się w panoramicznym ujęciu od czasów antycznych do współczesnych.

The body is the canvas on which the female experience is painted and through which female identity is often understood. The female body is a slate on which a patriarchal story has been written, scarred onto the flesh. For Simone Weil metaxu was simultaneously that which separated and connected, so for instance the wall between two prison cells cuts off the prisoners but was also the means by which they communicated by knocking on that wall. Could the body be (...) that metaxu all at once separating us and connecting us to the Divine? The nature of metaxu is that it offers a route not just for the individual soul but for the souls of others to travel. If all peoples renounce their outer shell – and by this I do not mean their bodies but rather the bodies or clothes or ideals written upon those people by patriarchy or capitalism or colonialism – if those real bodies come to the broken body of Christ [which is stripped and scarred] standing in solidarity with and mimicking this broken body, without the things which have been put upon their bodies but with scarred flesh showing, then this is where metaxu is possible for here we see a renouncing of ‘self’ as created by patriarchy and all that is left is a space that is the place where we are authentically self and God dwells. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer a way of characterizing Plato’s dualism through his use of the intermediate {metaxu). There are three distinct uses of the metaxu : a) as an interval between two limits, b) as a median position between two extremes, and c) as a step towards a distinct and positive pole. The intermediate is that according to which the value of an interval or of an opposition can be justified as such, in order to have a (...) better intelligibility of the realm of becoming. (shrink)

Human life is defined between diverse extremes: birth and death, nothing and infinity. Theater tries to stage something of this between-being and bring it out of its recess in everyday life. What can be called a metaxological philosophy can illuminate this between-condition. “ Metaxu ” is the Greek word for “between,” while “ logos ” can mean an accounting, or reasoning, or wording. A metaxological philosophy of the theatre would look on it as staging the between . Can we (...) say that the theatrical stage, as an intermedium of human communication, is a distinctive wording of the between? Can a metaxological philosophy throw light on what is staged on it, in and through it? In light of this philosophy of the metaxu, reflections are offered on essential themes such as: the space of the stage, the intermediation of inter-action, the shaping of plot, the openness of endings, the tragic and the comic, the sacred and the profane. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCommentators have commonly noted the metaphysical role of participation in Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity: participation both describes how creation is suspended from God and also how believers share in Christ through grace. Yet, the role in Hooker’s thought of the attendant Platonic language of ‘between’ and ‘desire’ has not received sustained attention. Metaxu describes the ‘in-between’ quality of participation: the participant and the participated remain distinct but are dynamically related as the former originates from and (...) returns to the perfection of the latter. Within this metaxological dynamic, desire acts as the physical and psychic motor driving the move between potentiality and perfect actuality, that is to say from multiplicity to divine unity: desire aims at goodness and so ultimately tends towards that which is goodness itself, namely God’s nature. For Hooker, desire becomes couched in amorous affectivity and has an erotic register. This essay explores, then, how Hooker appeals to a language of ‘between’ and ‘desire’ within his accounts of participation. First, it examines how human beings exist between the footstool and throne of God in Hooker’s legal ontology. Here, angelic desire acts as a hierarchical pattern of and spur to erotic participation in the divine nature. Second, this essay examines how theurgy transforms desire in Hooker’s account of liturgical participation as a redemptive commerce between heaven and earth. Here, angels still act as invisible, hierarchical intermediaries within earthly worship, but soon give way to immediate grace through participation in Christ within the sacraments. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This paper re-constructs Plato's ‘philosophy of geometry’ by arguing that he uses a geometrical method of hypothesis in his account of the cosmos’ generation in the Timaeus. Commentators on Plato's philosophy of mathematics often start from Aristotle's report in the Metaphysics that Plato admitted the existence of mathematical objects in-between ( metaxu) Forms and sensible particulars ( Meta. 1.6, 987b14–18). I argue, however, that Plato's interest in mathematics was centred on its methodological usefulness for philosophical inquiry, rather than on (...) questions of mathematical ontology. My key passage of interest is Timaeus’ account of the generation of the primary bodies in the cosmos, i.e. fire, air, water and earth ( Tim. 48b–c, 53b–56c). Timaeus explains the primary bodies’ origin by hypothesising two right-angled triangles as their starting-point ( arkhê) and describing their individual geometrical constitution. This hypothetical operation recalls the hypothetical method which Socrates introduces in the Meno (86e–87b), as well as the use of hypotheses by mathematicians which is described in the Republic (510b–c). Throughout the passage, Timaeus is focussed on explicating the bodies in terms of their formal structure, without however considering the ontological status of the triangles in relation to the physical world. (shrink)

Erotic Wisdom provides a careful reading of one of Plato's most beloved dialogues, the Symposium, which explores the nature and scope of human desire (erôs). Gary Alan Scott and William A. Welton engage all of the dialogue's major themes, devoting special attention to illuminating Plato's conception of philosophy. In the Symposium, Plato situates philosophy in an intermediate (metaxu) position--between need and resource, ignorance and knowledge--showing how the very lack of what one desires can become a guiding form of contact (...) with the objects of human desire. The authors examine the concept of intermediacy in relation both to Platonic metaphysics and to Plato's moral psychology, arguing that philosophy, for Plato, is properly understood as a kind of "being in-between," as the love of wisdom (philosophia) rather than the possession of it. (shrink)

Kant's revolution in methodology limited metaphysics to the conditions of possible experience. Since, following Hume, analysis—the “method of discovery” in early modern physics—could no longer ground itself in sense or in God's constituting reason a new arché, “origin” and “principle,” was required, which Kant found in the synthesis of the productive imagination, the common root of sensibility and understanding. Charles Bigger argues that this imaginative “between” recapitulates the ancient Gaia myth which, as used by Plato in the Timaeus, offers a (...) way into this originary arché. Since it depends on myth and the “likely story” rather than on a self-certain apprehension of Being, this facilitates an imaginative approach to the natural sciences which, through its synthetic a priori formations, can claim to be Kantian. Bigger explores Kant's ethics as an alternative to metaphysics that holds open the prospect of a Good beyond Being—and phenomenology—whose traces nevertheless appear in original synthesis. Though wary of its reductive implications, Bigger uses Derrida's difference, a medial, feminine arché, as a way into this creative and procreative metaxu. As Emmanuel Levinas suggests, this is Plato's gap [chaos] between being and becoming, whose possibility, beyond both, lies in chora and the Good. This Open also presents the possibility for a new, yet still Kantian, understanding of the formal and material conditions for the natural sciences. (shrink)

La philosophie s'est historiquement concentrée sur les questions de l'être et de l'esprit. Elle a souvent laissé de côté, ou n'a traité que de manière secondaire, la question de l'amour. Le présent essai constitue une tentative de mettre au contraire le thème de l'amour au principe même de la pensée. D'où la double invitation de ce livre. D'une part, négativement, à abandonner l'habitude philosophique moderne d'isoler un seul fondement ou une seule logique de la pensée : il y est proposé (...) de retrouver le sens des paradoxes, des polarités, des metaxu et de l'in-between. D'autre part, positivement, à ne pas restreindre l'amour au seul terme de donation, mais à l'inscrire aussi dans le carré polaire de la donation, du consentement, de la réciprocité et de la fécondité. Par-delà les percées de Jean-Luc Marion, Ferdinand Ulrich, Claude Bruaire ou Maurice Nédoncelle, mais en s'appuyant sur elles, cet essai tente de déployer le sens d'une véritable métaphysique de la communion des êtres."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The articles in the present issue are the result of a study day on William Desmond’s recent book, Ethics and the Between, held at the K.U.Leuven's Institute of Philosophy. This important book certainly deserves a thorough discussion and for many reasons. It is the manifestation of an ambition that reminds us of past periods in the history of philosophy. These days not so many philosophers venture to set up a body of work — three volumes — in the tradition of (...) the great philosophical systems that once tried to cover and understand the whole of reality. When reading Ethics and the Between, Hegel’s system comes to mind not only because we know that William Desmond is a Hegel scholar but also because of its ambition to give everything a place within an encompassing system.Of course Desmond takes care to explain where the difference lies between his metaxological approach and an insufficiently open and pluralist dialectics. His is an attempt to rethink the notion of system so that it is more hospitable to otherness as other, to the rich inexhaustibility of being. He wants to be true to the equivocities of our being and not to give in to the seduction of mediated univocity, as some forms of dialectics do. What is at stake in his work is not forgetting the surplus, the excess, the otherness of the good which suggests a transcendence of each dialectical completion in terms of self-determination.Desmond’s oeuvre is not only unusual today because of its systematic ambition. A second characteristic marks off more specifically his book on ethics: the attempt to write an ethics dominated by the idea of the good, raising the question of the relation between metaphysics and ethics, between being and being good. Desmond seems to tell us that something has been forgotten: the good which continues to be there incognito, present even in philosophies that forget it. This seems to be Desmond’s way of situating himself in an age characterized by the subtle ethos of valuelessness, the perplexity about the inherent value of being, of being as good; an age oscillating between foundationalist unity and postmodern plurality.If it were my task to give an introduction to Desmond’s thought I would have to pay attention to the richness of the concept of metaxu, the between, the way it seems to encompass the whole and keep it together, while at the same time being excessive. I would have to speak about the fourfold meaning of being and the way it shapes different ways of being ethical that dwell more and more intensively with what is at play in the ethos, that is to say in the metaxu.But it is not my task to do this; others have made the attempt more extensively in the papers reproduced here. I doubt whether they will be sufficient to bring to light all the rich dimensions of this book that is written at the same tempo as William speaks when discussing and, I suppose, when he goes running in the morning. (shrink)

Godsends is William Desmond's newest addition to his masterwork on the borderlines between philosophy and theology. For many years, William Desmond has been patiently constructing a philosophical project-replete with its own terminology, idiom, grammar, dialectic, and its metaxological transformation-in an attempt to reopen certain boundaries: between metaphysics and phenomenology, between philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, between the apocalyptic and the speculative, and between religious passion and systematic reasoning. In Godsends, Desmond's newest addition to his ambitious masterwork, he presents an (...) original reflection on what he calls the "companioning" of philosophy and religion. Throughout the book, he follows an itinerary that has something of an Augustinian likeness: from the exterior to the interior, from the inferior to the superior. The stations along the way include: a grappling with the default atheism prevalent in contemporary intellectual culture; an exploration of the middle space, the metaxu between the finite and the infinite; a dwelling with solitudes as thresholds between selving and the sacred; a meditation on idiot wisdom and transcendence in an East-West perspective; an exploration of the different stresses in the mysticisms of Aurobindo and the Arnhem Sermons; dream monologue of autonomy, a suite of Kantian and post-Kantian variations on the story of the prodigal son; a meditation on the beatitudes as exceeding virtue, in light of Aquinas's understanding; culminating in an exploration of Godsends as telling us something significant about the surprise of revelation, in word, idea, and story. Godsends is written for thoughtful persons and scholars perplexed about the place of religion in our time and hopeful for some illuminating companionship from relevant philosophers. It will also interest students of philosophy and religion, especially philosophical theology and philosophical metaphysics. (shrink)

Philosophers of science don't very often discuss the place of mathematics between other sciences or the meaning of mathematics for other sciences. They consider mathematics as a formal language with mainly analytical statements about the use of symbols (Carnap, Russell, Ayer ). Originally Wittgenstein defended this formalistic interpretation of mathematics in his TLP. Gradually, however, he develops himself towards an intuitionistic and ontological position, in which mathematics is conceived as the central and therefore normative part of our thought (of course (...) : on what there is and how it is). Mathematical science plays the role of logic in relation to other sciences. Its universal applicability and efficiency are consequences of its creating beings on a necessary level, in virtue of the number of its relations (always still by substitution). This highly important philosophy of mathematics (misinterpreted by Crispin Wright) starts with his lectures in Cambridge (in the thirties ) and reaches its culmination in the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics and in On Certainty. In a second part this philosophical determination of mathematical reasoning is traced backwards through history. David Hume's contribution is reinterpreted from a new point of view. Inside the total field of our beliefs he distinguishes between different sciences with the critérium of the intricacy of relations between items of our knowledge field. The more and stronger these relations, the more forceful and necessary their influence on the remaining parts of the system of our belief. So mathematics is in the centre, the loose reveries of our fancy on the periphery. Quine's representation of ‘the tribunal of sense experience’, by which the total field should be judged and corrected, must be disqualified. Hume's dictum ‘Whatever we conceive, we conceive it to be existent’ reveals sharply that this evaluative and corrective role is performed by the necessary thoughts (or, if one likes it so, ‘realities’) of mathematical science. That reason and especially mathematical reason is the highest judge on the population and structure of our world and a very precious heritage of Pythagorism and Platonism. From the sources of Sextus Empiricus and Aristotle the author tries to reconstruct exactly the original assertion of Pythagoristic mathematical philosophy, which has nothing to do with a naive hypostazation of numbers or a kabbalistic number mysticism. Philolaos' saying, that some propositions are stronger than we, is demonstrated to refer to mathematical laws. The pythagorical position is fully integrated in Plato's dialectical philosophy. Mathematics is the great mediator towards the intuition of true being, the ‘metaxu’ between sensible phenomena and ideas. This tradition of philosophical taxation of mathematics as the ‘logic of science’ is broken by Aristotle, who didn't use mathematics in his qualitative natural science and considered mathematics as an abstract science (about the quantitative aspect of being). Moreover, he disowned its logical role and created a special science for this task. Human reason is mathematical in so far it is sure of its language and thought, which is excellently expressed by the Greek μαθηματιxα (= what can be understood, learned and taught) and by the Dutch word ‘wiskunde’ (= science of what is certain). The remarks and reflections of Wittgenstein have produced a new perspective on the placevalue (‘Stellenwert’) of mathematics among all possible sciences and beliefs and have proven that its onto-logical purport is an unavoidable implication. (shrink)

In this paper I try to shed light on platonic criticism of mathematicians for taking hypotheses as principles. The mathematician is forced to resort to hypotheses and go beyond the sensible, but he does, according to Plato, ignoring his own abilities. In this sense, his attitude is similar to that of the majority, lover of opinions, unaware that only thanks to the help of thought is it possible to identify what is offered to the senses. This interpretation fits the dream (...) metaphor, which Plato uses to describe both the attitude of the mathematician and that of the majority. (shrink)

This article examines Dostoevsky's "fantastic realism," which challenges the explanation of rationalism or empiricism in the need for determinate categories fixed in nature. His use of paintings by Hans Holbein, Claude Lorrain, and Raphael in terms of the sublime and beautiful exemplify an understanding of Holy Saturday and its status between death and resurrection. Julia Kristeva's reading of Dostoevsky's melancholy as exemplifying a religious ideal and William Desmond's metaxological philosophy allows us to propose a terminology that rhymes with Dostoevskian between-ness, (...) a conclusion that does not resolve the space between the beautiful and the sublime but remains open to the confessional enigmatic liminality that is Holy Saturday. (shrink)