After the demise of German Idealism, Neo-Kantianism flourished as the defining philosophical movement of Continental Europe from the 1860s until the Weimar Republic. This collection of new essays by distinguished scholars offers a fresh examination of the many and enduring contributions that Neo-Kantianism has made to a diverse range of philosophical subjects. The essays discuss classical figures and themes, including the Marburg and Southwestern Schools, Cohen, Cassirer, Rickert, and Natorp's psychology. In addition they examine lesser-known topics, including the Neo-Kantian influence (...) on theory of law, Husserlian phenomenology, Simmel's study of Rembrandt, Cassirer's philosophy of science, Cohen's philosophy of religion in relation to Rawls and Habermas, and Rickert's theory of number. This rich exploration of a major philosophical movement will interest scholars and upper-level students of Kant, twentieth-century philosophy, continental philosophy, sociology, and psychology. (shrink)

“The apocalypse of hope” and other comparable flourishes in the writings of Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre on political violence strike an alarming tone. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocates the way of revolutionary violence as the inevitable consequence of colonialism and its systematic exploitation of colonized natives. In his role of agent provocateur, Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s influential and controversial work characteristically dramatizes this redemptive promise of violence: “to gun down a European is to kill two birds (...) with one stone…there remains a dead man and a free man.” This notorious pronouncement constitutes itself as an act of violence—we must feel threatened—meant to incite the latent counter-violence behind, in Sartre’s diagnosis, the false consciousness of bourgeois toleration and understanding. Could Sartre’s bold statement be spoken today without violent condemnation? This statement claims that, against the dehumanization of colonial oppression, only revolutionary violence allows for the colonized natives to constitute a “people” and recreate themselves in the image of a new humanity forged from the experience of liberation. For Fanon in particular, the recreation of humanity is impossible without the birth of a national consciousness and a revolutionary culture. As Fanon writes, “[w]e believe that the conscious, organized struggle undertaken by a colonized people in order to restore national sovereignty constitutes the greatest cultural manifestation that exists.” This reach toward a new humanism through the praxis of revolutionary violence points directly to the problem of beginnings. As Arendt observes in On Revolution, “[r]evolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.” Anti-colonial violence, for Fanon, inaugurates the beginning of political life; the colonized native reconstitutes himself as a βίοσ πολιτικόσ capable of both speech and praxis. For Sartre, anti-colonial violence reveals the dialectical necessity of world history in its struggle towards genuine universality and the utopia of a “classless” society. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between Augustine’s and Husserl’s conceptions of time, consciousness, and memory. Although Husserl claims to provide a phenomenological understanding of the paradox of time so famously formulated by Augustine in his Confessions, this paper explores the apparent similarities between Augustine’s concept of distentio animi and the Husserlian concept of inner time-consciousness against their more profound differences. At stake in this confrontation between Augustine and Husserl is a fundamental divergence in the sense of time as the movement (...) of transcendence in immanence. Within this discussion, the contrast between speaking time (rhetoric) and seeing time (perception), time and eternity, and contrasting notions of the past and future are explored. (shrink)

Is a phenomenology of sleep possible? If sleep is the complete absence of experience, including the self-experience of consciousness itself, how can phenomenology, as a description of lived experience, have access to a condition that is neither lived nor experienced? In this paper, I respond directly and indirectly to Jean-Luc Nancy’s challenge that a phenomenology of sleep is impossible. As an indirect response, my sketch of the contours of phenomenology of sleep investigates Husserl’s employment of the distinction between sleep and (...) wakefulness as a metaphor. Specifically, the metaphorical characterization of retentional consciousness is assessed. On the basis of this metaphorical characterization of time-consciousness in terms of sleep and wakefulness, I turn to Husserl’s account of the constitution of sleep. I argue that Husserl’s phenomenology of time-consciousness remains incomplete without an account of “sleep-consciousness”(by which we mean, in a restricted manner, dreamless sleep）. In pursuing Husserl’s phenomenological account of sleep, falling asleep and waking up within the context of his genetic phenomenology, I offer a suggestion for how to understand the sense in which consciousness (temporarily) constitutes itself as sleep--as the absence of itself. I conclude with an analogy with Husserl’s investigations into the imaginary: in both instances, consciousness induces within itself its own suspension or self-abstention. In the particular instance of sleep, consciousness disengages itself entirely from the complex of interests while also immunizing itself to the force of affectivity. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is understand Husserl’s “Platonism” through an understanding of how the method of eidetic variation and a phenomenological conception of essences reformulates by means of a conceptual and historical translation Plato’s doctrine of essences. In arguing that a theory of essences and method for the discovery of essences proves indispensable to a proper conception of phenomenology, Husserl positions himself as a philosophical “friend of essences” without thereby adopting a Platonic conception of essences. In addition to a (...) reconstruction of Husserl’s image of Plato and the historical tradition, this paper examines the pivotal role played by “variation” and “manifold” in Husserl’s distinctive understanding of essences. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes four senses of naturalism: reductive physicalism; a naturalism that departs from what Thompson calls “natural-historical judgments”; a naturalism that recognizes that physical nature is located within the space of reasons; and a phenomenological naturalism that shifts the focus to the “natural” experiences of subjects who encounter the world. The paper argues for a “phenomenological neo-Aristotelianism” that accounts both for the internal justification of our first-order moral experience and the need for a broader grounding in a universalistic account (...) of the goods of agency. (shrink)

Although it is commonly held that good sense is the most equally distributed of all things, it is just as commonly acknowledged that we humans excel at stupidity in its boundless varieties. The aim of these reflections is to make a start with a philosophical examination of stupidity, combining both literature, myth, and philosophy. Rather than propose a “theory” or “concept” of stupidity, this exploration charts the archipelago of stupidity in both its wisdom and folly.

La prise en compte de l’incertitude ne constitue pas un obstacle à la prise de décision par les institutions de l’Union et, le cas échéant, par les autorités étatiques lorsque la matière a été harmonisée. Ainsi les applications du principe sont nombreuses. Il se trouve tour à tour invoqué dans des matières aussi diverses que les additifs alimentaires, les produits chimiques, les déchets dangereux, voire la pêche, lesquelles sont souvent en proie à l’incertitude. On examine ici, à la lumière d’affaires (...) tranchées récemment tant par le tribunal de l’Union européenne que par la Cour de Justice, l’étendue du contrôle juridictionnel de la légalité de mesures de précaution. (shrink)

That the presence of others, after their death, continues to resonate within our own lives, that, in other words, death does not rob the other of their meaning for us, as if the meaning of their lives for us would suddenly become extinguished upon their death, is revealing of who we are, of how I am constituted in relation to others. The question of life after death is thus inseparable from the question of life before death, of what it is (...) to have a life in concert, communication, and consort with others. How does the other, whose actual presence in the world is no longer, remain present to those who continue to exist in the world? In this paper, it is argued that the intimacy of disappearance attests to the singular quality of another’s existence in terms of the value, or meaningfulness, their existence had, and continues to have, for the value of my own life. In this manner, the intimacy of another’s disappearance for us is inseparable from an intimacy of our own disappearance from ourselves. We are touched, as never before, besides ourselves in grief for a disappearance from our lives that never lets us go. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Relationship Between Philosophy and Literature Intersecting Themes.

In this chapter, I propose to examine a specific form of self-awareness in which we become aware of our existence in a problematic sense: wistfulness. In thinking about what it means to have a life, one is often haunted by different senses of possibility: of what could or should be, of what might have been, but just as well, of what could never have been. In such latter instances, we become aware of ourselves not in terms of actuality (who I (...) am) or possibility (who I can or could become), but in terms of impossibility, namely, as the impossible selves that nonetheless, in some sense, define and hence belong to us, as attested to in the experience of regret and remorse, not for what we did (or who we have been) but for what was impossible for us to be (or do). Drawing on Georg Simmel’s philosophy of life, I shall explore various senses in which we are responsible for ourselves, of who we have been and could yet be, as well as who it was impossible for us to once have been. In this regard, what Simmel calls the meta-ethical significance of death refers to the responsibility we have for ourselves in terms of what was both possible and impossible for us. (shrink)

En las últimas décadas se ha prestado una gran atención a la obra de Hannah Arendt: de su teoría acerca del totalitarismo a su polémico análisis del juicio de Eichmann, las páginas de la literatura secundaria acerca de la filósofa hebrea han crecido enormemente. Sin embargo, aquellos textos marginales, secundarios, en los que la autora ensayaba retratos de grandes hombres y mujeres de su tiempo permanecen, en gran medida, ocultos. En este artículo nos ocupamos de desentrañar la lectura que Arendt (...) realizó del gran poeta de posguerra de lengua alemana: Franz Kafka. Esta relación, transida por el judaísmo, adoptó tres rostros diferentes a lo largo de los muchos años en que la pensadora estuvo escribiendo. La conceptualización que se realiza aquí gira en torno al eje de la gran obra The Origins of Totalitarianism para comprender al paria de buena voluntad, el contemporáneo apolíneo y el pensador del tiempo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938Nicolas de WarrenRonald Bruzina. Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xxvii + 627. Cloth, $45.00.Edmund Husserl defined a new field and method of philosophical research that required the employment of students in the pursuit of a rigorous and elusive science called transcendental phenomenology. Husserl's most famous (...) student, Heidegger, quickly proved a disappointment to the phenomenological cause, and it is in the shadow of Heidegger's waywardness that Eugen Fink, known primarily as the author of spirited defenses of Husserl's thinking, developed a close intellectual relationship with Husserl as his assistant from 1928 until 1938. Fink's collaboration with Husserl and his metaphysical recasting of phenomenology are the principal themes of Bruzina's scrupulously researched study, largely based on Fink's unpublished writings.A first chapter presents a narrative of Fink's significant influence on Husserl's thinking and writing. In chapter two, "Orientation I: Phenomenology Beyond the Preliminary," Bruzina details how Fink further developed Husserl's phenomenology in a systematic and self-critical direction. Whereas Husserl cautiously argued that the noetic-noematic schema "runs through all levels of constitution," including the seemingly intractable level of absolute time-consciousness, Fink—under the influence of Heidegger—rejects the universality of the "apriori-correlation" and its attending "philosophy of reflection." Working out the "being of transcendental subjectivity" and its distinctive temporality is, for Fink, the "remaining task of phenomenology." Bruzina pursues the confrontation between Husserl and Heidegger in Fink's thinking in chapter three, "Orientation II: Whose Phenomenology?" According to Fink, Husserl remains "blind to transcendence," yet Heidegger remains blind to "constitution" (132). What emerges from this chapter, however, is the significance of Hegel as Fink recasts the difference between Husserl and Heidegger into a difference between a philosophy of reflection and a philosophy of Being. Against this backdrop, Bruzina signals Fink's proposal to re-think the concept of origin in a speculative register of the "meontic," that is, as "non-being."Before launching directly into Fink's "meontic" recasting of metaphysics, Bruzina presents three thematically defined chapters. In chapter four, "Fundamental Thematics I: The World," Bruzina discusses Fink's sublimation of Husserl's "natural attitude" into the concept of "world-captivation" and his charge that Husserl presupposes the horizon of the world as a whole. Chapter five, "Fundamental Thematics II: Time," examines Fink's writings on time-consciousness. A first set of writings speaks to the task of rendering Husserl's "Bernau Manuscripts" into a publishable form; a second set reflects Fink's intention to complete his own larger work on "Time and Temporalization." Both projects were abandoned, the later manuscript destroyed by Fink himself. Fink emphasizes the "special character of retention-protention intentionality as depresencing (Entgegenwärtigung), providing therein the basic consideration for addressing the question of finiteness in the stream of consciousness" (261). This insight allows Fink to propose a critique of Husserl's "presentialism" and his own thesis that "the Absolute is origin" in both a temporal and non-temporal sense, as the "excess/superabundance (Überschwang) of depresencing," further characterized the Plotinian idea of "emanation" (273). "Life" and "Spirit" are the final set of fundamental themes discussed by Bruzina in chapter six. For Fink, the essence of life is conceived as the "play of being," which he understands with a Nietzschean emphasis on "creation" (333). The "self-realization" of life in its creative self-performance delivers a "meontic" definition of the absolute; subjectivity is displaced (entstellt) in its self-performance such that it remains incomplete, a "metaphysical gap in the cosmos" (341).In chapter seven, we arrive at the "critical-systematic core" of Fink's "meontic" speculations. Here, much of Fink's pronouncements are a heady mixture of Heidegger and Plotinus. Bruzina admits that Fink "freely draws" from the traditions of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism; yet a quick attempt to distance Fink from his sources remains unconvincing. The "radical difference between the One of ultimate origin and all else" (448) that Bruzina takes as the exceptional focus of Fink's thinking is also of metaphysical concern in... (shrink)

El artículo explora “la importancia de lo que nos preocupa” desde un ángulo fenomenológico, siguiendo el espíritu del ensayo seminal de Harry Frankfurt. El trabajo discute de manera algunos de sus conceptos y asuntos centrales dentro de un marco husserliano de análisis. Mi tesis general es que la distinción tripartita de Frankfurt –conocer, conducta ética, cuidado– es igual de central para la fenomenología de la razón de Husserl y, más directamente, subyace a la ética husserliana de los valores y la (...) vocación que se desarrolla en sus manuscritos de Friburgo de las décadas de 1920 y 1930. (shrink)

Il n’est pas inhabituel de considérer l’imagination comme une conscience d’objets non réels, ayant la forme d’images internes ou de représentations privées de toute incarnation spatiale. Dans cet article j’interroge la phénoménologie de l’imagination de Husserl à partir de deux questions : l’imagination est-elle un type de conscience d’image? L’imagination, est-elle privée de toute incarnation spatiale? Après avoir reconstruit la distinction nette opérée par Husserl entre imagination et conscience d’image (l’imaginaire n’est pas une image mentale interne), j’explore la thèse de (...) Husserl, fort suggestive, selon laquelle toute imagination implique la projection du corps vécu. Loin d’être entièrement dépourvu de spatialité, l’imaginaire exhibe des caractéristiques quasi-spatiales, et il est fondé sur ce qui est « le plus propre » de mon corps vécu – cela même que, pour ainsi dire, j’amène toujours avec moi, même dans les envols les plus éloignés de mon imagination. (shrink)

This paper re-examines the vexing issue of Husserl’s Cartesianism. Against the commonplace image of Descartes as the father of the modern turn to subjectivity or the introduction of “description from the first point of view”, this paper argues that Husserl’s orientation towards Descartes resides with his emphasis on the centrality of the problem of reason for transcendental phenomenological. Through a detailed discussion of the complex senses in which Husserl evokes Descartes in his Paris Lectures and in the Cartesian Meditations, this (...) paper also reveals the political and cultural significance of phenomenology’s claim of Cartesianism in the aftermath of the First World War. Lastly, through a close treatment of Husserl’s critique of Descartes’ failure to fully exploit the transcendental potential of his Meditationes, this paper demonstrates how the problem of subjectivity for Husserl is firmly situated within the problem of reason; a phenomenological description of experience is not, contrary to a commonplace understanding, from the first person point of view, but more specifically, from the perspective of reason as an attitude towards human experience and knowing. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to develop a novel interpretation of the significance of trauma and substitution in Levinas’s ethical thinking in light of the problem of temporality, language, and the question of what it means to be a created being. With an emphasis on Levinas’s style of writing, the intersections of Derrida, Husserl, and Freud in his thinking, and the “two-times” of traumatic temporality, the argument of this article seeks to understand how responsibility for the other is crystallized (...) through the trauma of the Goodness and expiation for the impossibility of enduring its unforgiving demand. (shrink)

This essay explores Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” and Andrew Goldsworthy’s artworks. Both Heidegger and Goldsworthy can be seen as refashioning our ontological bearings towards nature through the work of art. After introducing a set of distinctions (e.g., world/earth) in the context of Heidegger’s conception of the artwork as the event of truth, I argue that Heidegger’s releasing of the work of art from metaphysical notions of “the thing” illuminates the ambiguous status of Goldsworthy’s artworks as things. (...) Goldsworthy’s crafting of artworks from natural materials exemplifies Heidegger’s concept of technē as the bringing forth of a work in the midst of phūsis, or beings that arise of their own accord. (shrink)

To be a father is to be an indispensable principle and symbol. In the case of Descartes, the widely perceived and ever accountable “father of modern philosophy,” his principal contribution to the foundation of modern philosophy is inseparable from its symbolic significance. For with Descartes, according to Hegel.

This chapter investigates forgiveness through a phenomenological inflected analysis of its temporal constitution as an inter-subjective self-constitution. A central claim to phenomenological thinking is the recognition of temporality as fundamental to the constitution of human subjectivity. The intentionality of forgiveness directs the offender as its primary object in view of her past wrongdoing. The conjunction of repudiation and responsibility plays itself out along two intersecting distinctions: between act and self, and between the past and present/future. An interpretation of shame within (...) the etiology of self-repudiation is then reported. The assumption of responsibility by the offender does not separate the past misconduct. Bitterness mobilises the offender to responsibility, and demands of the offender that he or she recognize and respect the victim. The offender accepts the burden of his or her past wrong into the compass of the person he or she is today and thus becomes the living questionability of his or her own wrongdoing. (shrink)

It is a truism, that we are not self-created beings, that each of us has been singularly brought into the world by others, that we did not beget ourselves. From the Biblical image of the fall of humankind to Heidegger’s existential schema of the “fallenness” of human existence, what it is to be has been reflected upon in terms of what it is to have been not self-created. To have been marks our being, and yet, we only come to know, (...) or realize, our own created existence belatedly, after the fact, in a sudden awareness that we have already been before we have been for ourselves. This realization of having been born is often experienced in a register of emotional shock, as the trauma of creation. As a trauma, it is structured by the disjointed time of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit. The “shock” of having been born is only experienced as an affect after the fact, even as this fact must have occurred before; the affect is disjointed from the shock even as the shock can only affect us afterwards. Through an exploration of the literary writings of Clarice Lispector, this paper examines the philosophical significance of the “emotional shock” of having been born. In contrast to Heidegger’s emphasis on the anxiety of “being towards death” or Sartre’s nausea, I argue for the originality of Lispector’s conception of createdness in the radiance of its realization, as expressed in the pithy formulation: “the pain of creation, yet without the creation.”. (shrink)

Although Levinas’s thinking has generated substantial attention for its emphasis on the irreducibility of alterity, an unconditional responsibility for others, and “ethics as first philosophy,” his accentuation of war and suffering, and hence “evil” in a capacious sense, as endemic to existence, has attracted less notice. In this paper, I explore the originality of Levinas’s reflections on evil in his essay “Transcendence and Evil” against the backdrop of his earlier identification of the “evil of being” and historical conceptions of evil (...) as “privation of the Good” and theodicy. In shadowing the biblical Book of Job, Levinas’s insight into the “transcendence of evil,” with its tear in the fabric of being and disruption of subjectivity, represents, as explored in this paper, a striking departure from his previous considerations on evil and categorical rejection of theodicy, in its secular and theological forms, while nonetheless insisting on the redemptive breakthrough of the Good at the heart of darkness. (shrink)

Although Levinas’s thinking has generated substantial attention for its emphasis on the irreducibility of alterity, an unconditional responsibility for others, and “ethics as first philosophy,” his accentuation of war and suffering, and hence “evil” in a capacious sense, as endemic to existence, has attracted less notice. In this paper, I explore the originality of Levinas’s reflections on evil in his essay “Transcendence and Evil” against the backdrop of his earlier identification of the “evil of being” and historical conceptions of evil (...) as “privation of the Good” and theodicy. In shadowing the biblical Book of Job, Levinas’s insight into the “transcendence of evil,” with its tear in the fabric of being and disruption of subjectivity, represents, as explored in this paper, a striking departure from his previous considerations on evil and categorical rejection of theodicy, in its secular and theological forms, while nonetheless insisting on the redemptive breakthrough of the Good at the heart of darkness. (shrink)