This essay presents an argument for reconceptualizing subjectivity as orientational rather than foundational in nature. My focus is on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant. I begin by summarizing Levinas''s theory of ethical subjectivity as a theory of the self where the internal and the external are in constant play. Then I turn to two works of Kant for resources to understand better the meaning of Levinas''s theory of the self. In "What is Orientation in Thinking?" Kant presents (...) a model for orientation in thought that I make use of as a basic framework for a model of orientational subjectivity. Then I analyze two feelings described by Kant in the third Critique which I argue can be understood as orientational feelings within such a model of orientational subjectivity: the feeling of sensus communis and the feeling of vocation. (shrink)

Descartes’s work as a philosopher was inspired by three dreams he had on November 10, 1619, and yet the philosophy that Descartes produced in response to this inspiration included an argument that all dreams are deceptive. This particular incongruity is indicative of a more general ambivalence and anxiety in Descartes’s thought concerning images, which creates a tension that is never fully resolved. In this essay I focus primarily on one side of that tension: the part of Descartes’s philosophy that is (...) distrustful of images. To do this I first reconstruct Descartes’s theory of images, drawing from several of his lesser-known writings on optics, and then I consider how that theory of images leads Descartes to conceptualize true vision as a matter of “insight” rather than “eyesight” and to argue that the blind actually see better than those with working eyes. In the final part of the essay I briefly consider some of the consequences of Descartes’s theory of vision and the suspicion of images that animates it. (shrink)

Descartes’s work as a philosopher was inspired by three dreams he had on November 10, 1619, and yet the philosophy that Descartes produced in response to this inspiration included an argument that all dreams are deceptive. This particular incongruity is indicative of a more general ambivalence and anxiety in Descartes’s thought concerning images, which creates a tension that is never fully resolved. In this essay I focus primarily on one side of that tension: the part of Descartes’s philosophy that is (...) distrustful of images. To do this I first reconstruct Descartes’s theory of images, drawing from several of his lesser-known writings on optics, and then I consider how that theory of images leads Descartes to conceptualize true vision as a matter of “insight” rather than “eyesight” and to argue that the blind actually see better than those with working eyes. In the final part of the essay I briefly consider some of the consequences of Descartes’s theory of vision and the suspicion of images that animates it. (shrink)

This essay argues that Kant's explanation of the purposiveness-without-a-purpose of beauty (in the third Critique) can help to make sense of Nancy's theory of the inoperative community.

In an interview with Philippe Nemo, Emmanuel Levinas makes a very revealing comment about what he was trying to accomplish in his ethical philosophy. In response to a question about the ‘starting-point’ of his ethics, Levinas protests: ‘My task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning … One can without doubt construct an ethics in function of what I have just said [in describing his philosophy up to this point in the interview], but this (...) is not my own theme’. (shrink)

I argue that Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks deserve to be read as works of philosophy and not just used as supplements to bring order and respectability to Kierkegaard’s other writings. There are at least three specific philosophical values in Kierkegaard’s journals – three ways in which the journals create philosophy within their own pages and therefore deserve to be read as independent works of philosophy and not just as supplements to Kierkegaard’s other writing: (1) The journals demonstrate what a true (...) work of existential philosophy looks like. (2) The journals contribute to Kierkegaard’s theory of indirect communication. (3) The journals create new philosophical concepts. All three of these are best understood as philosophical performances or a kind of philosophical theatre. The idea that philosophy can be a kind of theatre is inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly their book What is Philosophy? I draw from Deleuze and Guattari especially in section (3) to argue that Kierkegaard’s Journals create new philosophical concepts. (shrink)

This essay argues that, in the first Critique, the need for unity leads Kant to re-inscribe the subject in a situation of multiplicity and undecidability. The result, however, is not a relativization that negates the meaning of the subject’s existence, but rather a contextualization that makes meaning possible. This reading clarifies some of the connections between Kant and contemporary postmodernism, especially the work of Jacques Derrida.

This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard's philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard's many excellent jokes about assistant professors (...) as a guide to how not to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy; specifically: - Don't cease to be human. - Don't be a parasite, merely feeding off other people's creations and never creating anything new. - Don't reduce or simplify or systematize Kierkegaard's ideas in order to make life easier for everyone (because that was never the point). - Don't kill Kierkegaard's philosophy by lecturing on it, thereby turning it into a collection of dead ideas for nonhumans rather than subjective truths that need to be lived. Following these guidelines, the book attempts to extend and amplify some of Kierkegaard's most important ideas in a way that combats the persistent problem of nihilism--a disease that even Kierkegaard succumbed to at the end of his life. (shrink)

In this dissertation I outline a theory of non-cognitive ethics--a theory of how ethics is possible in response to feeling rather than to concepts--that is drawn from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant. In general I argue that in the work of Levinas we can find a description of non-cognitive ethics in which community and subjectivity are still meaningful, and that Kant's third Critique can contribute to this project by providing some of the (...) transcendental conditions for such an ethics. ;I begin with a discussion of the general nature of Levinas's ethical project, and the three principal axes of that thought: the singular Other before whom we are obligated, the community of others to which we also belong, and the nature of the subject that must respond to both. Next, I focus on the contribution that Kant's third Critique can make to a Levinasian theory of non-cognitive ethics. After arguing that this contribution is rooted in a general affiliation between Kant's approach to aesthetics and Levinas's approach to ethics, I address three particular connections between Levinasian ethics and the third Critique. These connections involve the sublime and the fact of obligation, the beautiful and non-purposive communities, and finally orientation and ethical subjectivity. (shrink)

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche explores the nature of teaching and learning and concludes that a teacher can do more harm than good in a student's life if she allows her students to become her ‘disciples’. A disciple assigns too much authority to a teacher and thus loses the ability to think independently; this is what Zarathustra means when he warns his students, ‘Beware that you are not killed by a statue!’ In this article I argue that Zarathustra's solution to (...) this problem is to undermine his own authority by performing several different variations of the Liar's Paradox in parts 2 and 3 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (shrink)

I argue for an approach to Philosophical Fragments that allows it to be philosophical and fragmentary, and that pays particular attention to the fragments, or crumbs, that seem least important. One such overlooked crumb is the theory of merely human education in the book—education that does not enlist God as the teacher, where humans simply try to teach and learn from each other. I argue that Philosophical Fragments defends this theory of education with several reductio ad absurdum proofs that are (...) especially useful because they clarify why merely human education so often fails. Finally I apply the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments to Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and argue that it gives us a paradigm for understanding all of Kierkegaard’s texts that is more fundamental than the distinction between direct and indirect communication. (shrink)

A review of volume 11, part 1 of _Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks._.

In this book of essays, he argues that morality cannot be defined solely by rational and universal principles; instead, a major place must be found for changing and conflicting ideals, values peculiar to specific times and cultures.

In this book, Stuart Hampshire argues that no individual and no modern society can avoid conflicts between incompatible moral interests.

We might think that thought experiments are at their most powerful or most interesting when they produce new knowledge. This would be a mistake; thought experiments that seek understanding are just as powerful and interesting, and perhaps even more so. A growing number of epistemologists are emphasizing the importance of understanding for epistemology, arguing that it should supplant knowledge as the central notion. In this chapter, I bring the literature on understanding in epistemology to bear on explicating the different ways (...) that thought experiments increase three important kinds of understanding: explanatory, objectual and practical. (shrink)

Much has been made of the so-called “speculative turn” in contemporary philosophy. For some, this turn marks the “end of phenomenology” and the dawn of a new empiricism in European philosophy. For others, it amounts to nothing more than a renewal of the straw-person accusation of psychologism against phenomenology. In truth, it is neither. Instead, this article argues that while at times mutually critical of one another, speculative materialism and phenomenology are best understood as parallel projects with shared trajectories and (...) aims, common concerns, and even comparable methods. The bene????it of reading these two apparently divergent camps as parallel projects is that it allows phenomenology to understand the diversity of its own history anew and, in light of this, to draw from speculative realism as a resource for rethinking its objectives and methods in its pursuit of a robust post-Kantian realism. (shrink)

On 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead. This decade is one of the most fascinating of his career. It begins with the initiation of the sexuality project, and ends with its enforced and premature closure. Yet in 1974 (...) he had something very different in mind for The History of Sexuality than the way things were left in 1984. Foucault originally planned a thematically organised series of six volumes, but wrote little of what he promised and published none of them. Instead over the course of the next decade he took his work in very different directions, studying, lecturing and writing about historical periods stretching back to antiquity. This book offers a detailed intellectual history of both the abandoned thematic project and the more properly historical version left incomplete at his death. It draws on all Foucault’s writings in this period, his courses at the Collège de France and lectures elsewhere, as well as material archived in France and California to provide a comprehensive overview and synthetic account of Foucault’s last decade. (shrink)

What role does the imagination play in scientific progress? After examining several studies in cognitive science, I argue that one thing the imagination does is help to increase scientific understanding, which is itself indispensable for scientific progress. Then, I sketch a transcendental justification of the role of imagination in this process.

There is a previously unrecognized coupling which underlies the Western evaluation of aesthetic experiences. By and large, we are taught that for our aesthetic pleasures to have any “value” (i.e. to be good) they must do more than merely entertain, distract, or delight. Instead, they should confront us with some “truth” about the nature of our existence and/or guide us to some “reality” concerning the state of our world. This paper asks: 1) whence this prejudice concerning the value of our (...) aesthetic experiences? 2) What metaphysical and ethical assumptions underlie this epistemological standard? And, finally, 3) how might our expectations concerning the nature and value of aesthetic experiences alter if these assumptions are called into question, as they are, for example, by contemporary metaphysical pessimism? This paper uses the concept of “guilty pleasures” as a site to expose the history of our Western assumptions concerning the evaluation of aesthetic experiences and to explore how a pessimistic revaluation of reality might change our analysis of what comprises “good” art. To this end, this paper traces the origins of our aesthetic assumptions in the West, shows how these assumptions continue to influence our aesthetic expectations today, exposes the hidden metaphysical premises, which underly those expectations, and explores why and how we might call these premises into question through a pessimistic revaluation of existence. All of these supports, in the end, a critical reassessment of the status and value our so-called “guilty pleasures.”. (shrink)

1. Animal Cruelty Industrial farming is appallingly abusive to animals. Pigs. In America, nine-tenths of pregnant sows live in “gestation crates. ” These pens are so small that the animals can barely move. When the sows are first crated, they may flail around, in an attempt to get out. But soon they give up. Crated pigs often show signs of depression: they engage meaningless, repetitive behavior, like chewing the air or biting the bars of the stall. The sows live like (...) this for four months. Gestation crates will be phased out in Europe by the end of 2012, but they will still be used in America.1 In nature, pigs nurse their young for about thirteen weeks. But in industrial farms, piglets are taken from their mothers after about ten days. Because the piglets are weaned prematurely, they develop a lifelong craving to suck and chew. But the farmers don’t want them sucking and chewing on other pigs’ tails. So the growers routinely snip off the tails of all their pigs. They do this with a pair of pliers and no anesthetic. However, the whole tail is not removed; a tender stump remains. The point is to render the area sensitive, so the pigs being chewed on will fight back. Which they do.2 Over 113 million pigs are slaughtered each year in America.3 Typically, these pigs are castrated, their needle teeth are clipped, and one of their ears is notched for identification —all without pain relief.4 In nature, pigs spend up to three quarters of their waking hours foraging and exploring their environment.5 But in the factory farms, “tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. ”6 Bored, and in constant pain, the pigs must perpetually inhale the fumes of their own waste. These pigs often get sick, and their ill health is exacerbated by the overcrowding. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture compared hog farms containing over 10,000 pigs—which is the norm—with farms containing under 2,000 pigs. (shrink)

John D. Norton is responsible for a number of influential views in contemporary philosophy of science. This paper will discuss two of them. The material theory of induction claims that inductive arguments are ultimately justified by their material features, not their formal features. Thus, while a deductive argument can be valid irrespective of the content of the propositions that make up the argument, an inductive argument about, say, apples, will be justified (or not) depending on facts about apples. The argument (...) view of thought experiments claims that thought experiments are arguments, and that they function epistemically however arguments do. These two views have generated a great deal of discussion, although there hasn’t been much written about their combination. I argue that despite some interesting harmonies, there is a serious tension between them. I consider several options for easing this tension, before suggesting a set of changes to the argument view that I take to be consistent with Norton’s fundamental philosophical commitments, and which retain what seems intuitively correct about the argument view. These changes require that we move away from a unitary epistemology of thought experiments and towards a more pluralist position. (shrink)