Continental Philosophy, Miscellaneous

This paper follows Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophy and his non-religion and non-theology to suggest anon-philosophical approach to the sociology of religious pluralism. The entanglements of experiences of the religious end-user are analysed vis-a-vis Laruelle’s thought and a dogma free inclusive approach to religion is envisaged.

The article focuses on the scholarly career of German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno. Examined are his leading publications, his notable teachers and collaborators, and his time in exile in the United States, among other places. Special emphasis is placed on his negative dialectics, including how this perspective formed a method of communication in itself. Adorno's contributions to the Frankfurt School, and to 20th-century Continental philosophy, sociology, and musicology, are also covered.

This essay proposes to rethink the conceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose it to (divine) transcendence. It asks: What if immanence is divorced from the conceptual opposition between the world and its openings to (divine) other(s), between enclosure and the trace of a transcendent outside? What might arise if immanence is severed from its link with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another conceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature? To pursue these questions, the essay engages (...) a variety of materials, including medieval mysticism, anthropological critiques of the secular, work in Black studies, critiques of the subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. The result links immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the subject’s self-possession—and entwines it with the undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation. (shrink)

In the midst of a pandemic, what does it mean to see the Other as Other and not as a carrier of the virus? I argue that in seeking a Levinasian response to the pandemic, we must be mindful of the implications of the mechanisms of surveillance and control that, presented as ways to protect the Other, operate by controlling the Other and rendering our relation to the Other increasingly impersonal. Subjected to these mechanisms, the Other becomes a dangerous entity (...) that must be controlled, and the state that deploys them comes increasingly to mediate the relation between self and Other. The more we rely on such mechanisms for protection, the easier it becomes to regard the Other not as one who summons me to an infinite responsibility but as a vector of disease. Despite all the differences between Levinas’s and Foucault’s approaches, reading them in conversation shows that the control and surveillance of the population functions within a discourse that medicalizes and objectifies the Other in favor of the centralizing power that uses those technologies. In defiance of Levinas’s warning against imposing a narrative on the Other’s suffering, this discourse coopts that suffering as a justification for biopower. (shrink)

The essay examines solitude not as fate, sacrifice or passion, but as an experience that is actively initiated, that is perceived ambivalently, sometimes painfully, but also sensually, and that functions as context as well as occasion for the practice of cultural techniques – talking, reading, writing, drawing or painting. Solitude techniques are analysed as “technologies of the self” and “techniques of the body”, as strategies for self-perception and “internal policy”. The history of these self-techniques as solitude techniques is unfolded using (...) examples from Stoic philosophy and early Christian theology. An emphasis is placed on self-doubling or splitting techniques: those who are alone with themselves also see themselves as more or less resilient objects that can be strengthened against the influences of other voices and people. Among the techniques of solitude is, above all, the quest for suitable places that are often – desert, sea, mountain peak, etc. – characterised not only by being devoid of humans, but also by a kind of uniformity. In this way, they resemble writing or drawing surfaces on which meanings can be brought to light through sketches or graphic characters. (shrink)

The diaries that detail Ernst Jünger’s time in occupied Paris can be as frustrating as they are captivating. Their tone is often both elegiac and detached, at once keenly aware of and distant from the suffering occurring all around their author. This ambiguity becomes particularly apparent in the contrast between the remarkable everyday encounters the diaries describe and their broader cosmic and world-historical ruminations. In this paper, I want to suggest that this tension can be read as a response to (...) the imperatives through which totalising thought shapes how subjects operating under its confines relate to time itself. This dynamic, which can already be found in Jünger’s own earlier work, is dramatized in the way that the diaries construct the alternative temporal perspective of the witness. The witness here is one who survives outside of, and yet also remains caught between, two temporal imaginaries characteristic of modernity: Totalising historicization – the sweeping narrative of progress that demands the sacrifice of the present individual and individual present – and mechanised temporality, that is, instrumentalised clock time. (shrink)

Jane Bennett’s vital materialism develops positive ontological commitments to lively matter and resistant vitality, articulated using notions of actant and assemblage, thing-power and the out-side. I show that these ontological commitments reveal a limit for traditional modes of human knowing, favoring an emergent epistemology that attends to the ways actants and assemblages express themselves. I then argue for an account of acting that positions humans as guests of vibrant matter. Compacts of guest-friendship in Plato’s Crito and Kant’s To Perpetual Peace (...) indicate that to be a guest is to be embedded in an asymmetrical system. The compact that binds the guest in a world of vibrant matter is the prospect of friendship with nonhuman others, a prospect I discuss following the work of Nick Bingham. I conclude by addressing Axelle Karera’s recent critique of Anthropocenean discourses, explaining the role guest-friendship can play in addressing certain of the weaknesses Karera identifies. (shrink)

Resumo: A Logoterapia proposta por Viktor Frankl está fundamentada na teoria dos valores e antropologia de Max Scheler. Frankl constrói seu pensamento psicológico baseado em conceitos-chave do pensamento scheleriano como (i) o valor e os bens, (ii) o querer e os sentimentos, (iii) a hierarquia de valores e (iv) a ideia de pessoa. É com eles que desenvolve suas teses originais da (i) motivação espiritual da ação humana, (ii) busca de sentido e (iii) inconsciente espiritual. Ao fazê-lo, ofereceu não só (...) uma psicoterapia dos valores, mas também uma nova teoria da motivação humana positiva, não concebida como fruto de deficiência ou necessidade, mas do espírito livre direcionado a valores objetivos. A busca humana por sentido na vida só é possível ser bem-sucedida com a vivência e realização de valores superiores, no sentido hierárquico proposto por Scheler. (shrink)

Philosophy, starting from Kant, tries to delimit the limits and thus to finitize human consciousness, but then it fails in the task of assuming finiteness itself as finite, with a certain beginning and an end. In my essay I present different conceptualizations of the end which resist the logic of means, opened up by ecological thought, starting from the problem – central to the continental philosophy of the 20th century – of human finitude. In the first part of the essay, (...) the relationship between finitude and truth is problematized through a critical reading of Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Alain Badiou. In the second part I present some hypotheses on how this relationship is transformed by the category of extinction, understood as a non-human transformational capacity of human thought, a radical capacity of alienation which can, however, become an access to a dimension of thought in which «ecology» designates a new thinking of togetherness and of cooperation which drives contemporary thought into reformulation of political possibilities for the future. If, however, current ecological thought sometimes promotes the post-political scenario of an organic return to the earth, an extinction understood in the sense of the end of human life and an abrupt termination of the world, in my essay I rather try to maintain human’s ability of detachment as a political dimension, the capacity of thought to make a difference. (shrink)

Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” and the “empirical side” of Whitehead’s metaphysics are paradoxical unless placed in the context of their unorthodox readings of empiricism. I explore this context focusing on their engagements with Hume. Both subvert presumptions of a categorical gap between external nature and internal human experience and open possibilities for a speculative empiricism that is non-reductive while still affirming experience as source for philosophical thinking. Deleuze and Whitehead follow Hume in beginning with events of sensation as primary but do (...) not presume the logic of (human) subjects and objects (of nature) as necessary structuring polarities for their interpretation. This challenges a basic distinction (between inner and outer or between self and world) that seems inherent in the ordinary concept of experience, thus earning the moniker speculative. The speculative empiricist studies how these abstractions arise from events of experience prior to their consolidation in representation. This includes a critical component: to what extent do unexamined assumptions about conceptual abstraction hinder, block, or prefigure experiential attention? This critical component has existential implications for how we attend to the affective, intuitive, and preconceptual. (shrink)

The essays in this volume all ask what it means for human beings to be embodied as desiring creatures—and perhaps still more piercingly, what it means for a philosopher to be embodied. In taking up this challenge via phenomenology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of literature, the volume questions the orthodoxies not only of Western metaphysics but even of the phenomenological tradition itself. We miss much that has philosophical import when we exclude the somatic aspects of human life, and it (...) is therefore the philosopher’s duty now to rediscover the meaning inherent in desire, emotion, and passion—without letting the biases of any tradition determine in advance the meaning that reveals itself in embodied desire. Continental philosophers have already done much to challenge binary oppositions, and this volume sets out a new challenge: we must now also question the dichotomy between being at home and being alienated. Alterity is not simply something out there, separate from myself; rather, it penetrates me through and through, even in my corporeal experience. My body is both my own and other; I am other than myself and therefore other than my body. Additionally, this book is a conversation, not a presentation of a new orthodoxy. Thus, the hope is that these essays will open the way for further dialogue that will continue to radically rethink our understanding of embodied desire. Gathered together here are twelve essays that address these issues from deeply interrelated albeit unique perspectives from within the field. (shrink)

In Capitalism, Alienation and Critique Asger Sørensen offers a wide-ranging argument for the classical Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, thus endorsing the dialectical approach of the original founders (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) and criticizing suggested revisions of later generations (Habermas, Honneth). Being situated within the horizon of the late 20th century Cultural Marxism, the main issue is the critique of capitalism, emphasizing experiences of injustice, ideology and alienation, and in particular exploring two fundamental subject matters within this horizon, namely economy (...) and dialectics. Apart from in-depth discussions of classical political economy and Hegelian dialectics, the explorative and inclusive argument also takes issues with Émile Durkheim’s theory of value, the general economy of Georges Bataille and the dialectics of Mao Zedong. -/- - See below link to the book's homepage at the publisher Brill. - See also link to a Youtubevideo from a seminar on the book in Belgrade, November 2019. (shrink)

The notion of ‘the end’ has long occupied philosophical thought. In light of the horrors of the twentieth century, some writers have gone so far as to declare the end of philosophy itself, emphasizing the impossibility of thinking after Auschwitz. In this book the distinguished philosopher Alain Badiou, in dialogue with Giovanbattista Tusa, argues that we must renounce ‘the pathos of completion’ and continue to think philosophically. To accept the atrocities of the twentieth century as marking the end of philosophy (...) is intolerable precisely because it buys into the totalizing doctrines of the perpetrators. Badiou contends that philosophical thinking is needed now more than ever to counter the totalizing effects of globalized capitalism, which prescribes no objective for human life other than integration into its system, giving rise to a widespread sense of hopelessness and nihilism. (shrink)

Статья посвящена выявлению оснований доксологии Матса Розенгрена – шведского философа, который пытается реабилитировать доксу в теории познания и рассматривает возможность построения «протагорейской гносеологии». Доксология – это вариант натурализованной конструктивистской теории познания, развивающийся на базе риторической версии философской антропологии, где формулируется реалистичная версия субъекта познавательной деятельности. Познание, с точки зрения доксологии, – это преобразование человеческими коллективами мира и себя, предпосылкой которого является освоение объективированных результатов своей предшествующей деятельности. В ходе исследования использованы методы интерпретации и критический метод философии с опорой на принципы (...) историзма, непротиворечивости и системности рассмотрения. Показано, что выражением доксологической позиции и доксологического стиля мышления является неософистическая трактовка тезиса Протагора о человекомерности. Согласно этой трактовке, человек – это человечество, а не индивид; мерой, общей для всех людей, является логос, который формирует природу человека и мира в целом. В основе доксологической трактовки познавательной деятельности лежит схема функционального круга логоса и доксы. Содержательные предпосылки доксологического стиля мышления Розенгрен находит в работах П. Бурдьё, Л. Флека, Э. Кассирера, К. Касториадиса, в которых продемонстрировано, как фактически способы восприятия, мышления и действия, и способы производства, объективации и освоения опыта человеческих коллективов могут взаимозависимо конструировать друг друга. (shrink)

For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with Deleuzian categories. (...) While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference. (shrink)

An enquiry into the relevance of Hans Jonas' thinking to present-day debates, including transhumanism, posthumanism, and human enhancement.

Apresentamos a leitura deleuziana do papel e do poder da imaginação e do esquematismo no juízo estético segundo Immanuel Kant destacando, em particular, a importância de se pensar um desacordo entre faculdades e de, no limite, afirmarmos a impossibilidade de uma filosofia da arte. Como se dá o processo que liga sensações e conceitos, arte e filosofia? Ao respondermos a esta questão, também esclarecemos a situação peculiar de Kant na filosofia de Gilles Deleuze e a leitura que este faz em (...) A Filosofia Crítica de Kant, publicado em 1963. Teremos como objeto de análise um filme sensorial, To the Wonder/A Essência do Amor, realizado por Terrence Malick. (shrink)

This special issue brings together some of the highlights from the fifty-fourth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Emory University hosted the conference on October 8–10, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. The articles included in this volume draw out, in plural ways, the trajectories, methodologies, and orientations that run through what we call today Continental philosophy. By mining the affective, imaginary, conceptual, and political dimensions of experience, they critically deepen and elaborate, indeed perform, not only what Continental (...) philosophies are about but how they orient perception, feeling, and thinking. Hence our issue, “Critical, Affective, and Plural... (shrink)

In 1928, a German zoologist and philosopher named Helmuth Plessner published a book titled Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Almost a 100 years later, Jos de Mul has edited a collection of 26 new essays on Plessner’s text, titled Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: Perspectives and Prospects. The volume offers a variety of advanced discussions of its theme. In this review essay of de Mul’s collection, I provide a critical overview of the contents of the (...) new volume and some speculations on the possible motives and future directions of the current “Plessner renaissance.”. (shrink)

While our world is characterized by mobility, global interactions, and increasing knowledge, we are facing serious challenges regarding the knowledge of the places around us. We understand and navigate our surroundings by relying on advanced technologies. Yet, a truly knowledgeable relationship to the places where we live and visit is lacking. This book proposes that we are utterly lost and that the loss of a sense of place has contributed to different crises, such as the environmental crisis, the immigration crisis, (...) and poverty. With a rising number of environmental, political, and economic displacements the topic of place becomes more and more relevant and philosophy has to take up this topic in more serious ways than it has done so far. To counteract this problem, the book provides suggestions for how to think differently, both about ourselves, our relationship to other people, and to the places around us. It ends with a suggestion of how to understand ourselves in an eco-political community, one of humans and other living beings as well as inanimate objects. This book will be of great interest to researchers and students of environmental ethics and philosophy as well as those interested in the environmental humanities more generally. (shrink)

This book aims to see how the victim and the ‘identity of the Real’ are wedded to philosophers and intellectuals. Towards this aim Laruelle does not ‘leave philosophy to its own authority’ just as he does not ‘leave theology or religious beliefs to their own authorities’ (119).

The topic of my remarks is progress, but I should note at the outset that I have structured this article as something like a theme with variations, rather than a tightly interconnected, progressive argument. I am interested in problematizing how the concept of progress is deployed across a range of discussions. I start with the role of progress in my own field of critical social theory, and then move on to consider the idea of philosophical progress, and finally connect this (...) idea to different visions of philosophical pluralism. So, in other words, I will be starting with the otherwise and then moving on to the philosophical.First-generation critical theorists of the Frankfurt school, especially Walter Benjamin and.. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a volume of articles containing highlights from the fifty-third Annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Loyola University–New Orleans with Tulane University from October 23–25, 2014. Many of the articles included here mine the rich and productive vein of post-Kantian critical philosophy that inspires so much work in Continental philosophy; hence the title of our volume is “Legacies of Critique.” The volume opens with the “Co-director’s Address” by outgoing SPEP (...) co-director Amy Allen. (shrink)

Erwin Panofsky’s essay “Perspective as Symbolic Form” from 1924 is among the most widely commented essays in twentieth-century aesthetics and was discussed with regard to art theory, Renaissance painting, Western codes of depiction, history of optical devices, psychology of perception, or even ophthalmology. Strangely enough, however, almost nothing has been written about the philosophical claim implicit in the title, i.e. that perspective is a symbolic form among others. The article situates the essay within the intellectual constellation at Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche (...) Bibliothek in Hamburg, and analyzes the role of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms for the members of the Warburg circle. Does perspective meet the requirements for becoming a further “symbolic form,” beyond those outlined by Cassirer? The article argues that, ultimately, perspective cannot possibly be a symbolic form; not because it does not meet Cassirer’s philosophical requirements, but rather, because that would uproot Cassirer’s overall project. While revisiting Panofsky with Cassirer unearths the wide-raging philosophical implication of the essay, revisiting Cassirer with Panofsky means to highlight the fundamentally perspectival nature of all symbolic forms. (shrink)

Improvisation is the origin of art and science, tragedy and comedy, acting and doing, of the self as improvising and improvised. But clearly we cannot use improvisation to explain improvisation. We cannot be satisfied with an argument that improvisation is, well, improvisational--nor simply free-play. Rather, improvisation as αὐτο-σχεδιάζεῖν, means self-schematization.

What is a problem? What is problematic about any problem whatsoever, philosophical or otherwise? As the origin of assertion and apodeiction, the problematic suspends the categories of necessity and contingency, possibility and impossibility. And it is this suspension that is the essence of the problem, which is why it is so suspenseful. But then, how is the problem problematic? Only if what is suspended neither comes to presence, nor simply goes out into absence, that is, if the suspension continues, which (...) continues the problem. But what is problematic about suspension? As a consideration of language shows, the problem of suspension is the problem of implication. If being, for example, is merely implied, neither present nor absent, then it is the suspension of both, at least insofar as it is problematic. And this not only says something about language; rather, it has ontological implications as well — it speaks of being, and the being of anything whatsoever. For if being is implied, if that is the problem of being, it is because being is an implication. Then the being of things like problems is implied as well; or being is in things by implication. But what does it mean for being to be neither presence nor absence, but an implication? It means that being is implied in a way that is problematic — before it is necessary, or even possible. For being’s way of being is characterized by suspension — which has implications for thinking and speaking about being, and about things like problems, even about anything whatsoever. And this has implications for what being implies, namely, unity and time and aspect. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a volume of articles containing highlights from the fifty-second annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at the University of Oregon from October 24–26, 2013. All three of the plenary sessions for this conference constituted reflections on limits of various kinds: the limits of conceptual thinking, the limits of continental philosophy understood as a kind of post-Kantian quasi-transcendental enterprise, and the idea that SPEP’s guiding orientation is an openness to experience that (...) requires the Society to push against its own limits continually, to edge beyond itself. This common thread of reflection on limits has inspired the title of this volume: "Philosophy at/of the Limit.". (shrink)

En 1845 Marx escribió las Tesis sobre Feuerbach, donde subrayaba de manera explícita el lugar fundamental que ocupa la Praxis en su nueva concepción del mundo; y durante el mismo año comenzó la redacción de la parte de La ideología alemana donde también se critica a Feuerbach. Se trata de dos textos de contenido similar, pero que –por la azarosa historia de su respectiva publicación– no pudieron ser cotejados hasta los años veinte del siglo pasado, cuando finalmente vio la luz (...) el segundo de ellos. A partir de esta constatación histórica, el presente artículo se propone mostrar la existencia de una lectura intelectualista de los ambiguos términos que Marx utilizó en las Tesis para definir la Praxis. Las consideraciones históricas serán complementadas, pues, con un exhaustivo análisis filológico de tales equívocos, y con una reflexión sobre sus consecuencias ético-políticas. (shrink)

Philosophizing and the True Knowledge of Human Being -/- Abstract -/- The article presents the principles and method of classical philosophy. This kind of philosophy, developed mainly in ancient and medieval times, is still viable and interesting today. What is more important, it can be used as grounds for academic philosophy. Doing so provides a philosopher with resources for autonomy in her philosophical inquiry as well as the usefulness and application of its results for various cultural, social, and political tasks. (...) The last part of the article explains the manner in which the principles of philosophy may be connected with different ways of classical philosopher’s concern the with knowledge of the human being understood as a special, unique being, with her transcendence behind her biological nature and human society. In the conclusion, several tasks for philosophical reflection are given. In all its parts, the article emphasizes the importance of the concept of philosophizing subject for the understanding of philosophy. -/- Keywords: ; ; ; ; , ; . (shrink)

Itinerant Philosophy: On Alphonso Lingis gathers a diverse collection of texts on Lingis’s life and philosophy, including poetry, original interviews, essays, book reviews, and a photo essay. It also includes an unpublished piece by Lingis, “Doubles,” along with copies of several of his letters to a friend.

From its humble beginnings in 1961, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy has emerged as the second largest society of philosophers in the West. From a near-impromptu gathering of a couple dozen participants, those who now claim SPEP membership number into the thousands, with one recent meeting having around 750 registered participants. The fact of its size and its diversity provokes several important questions concerning the identity and orientation of SPEP—questions that are as much philosophical as they are practical: (...) Is SPEP a blanket umbrella organization, or does it have a direction and/or sense? What implications do the latter have for its place as a philosophical organization .. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a volume of essays bringing together some of the highlights from the fifty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Nazareth College from November 1-3, 2012. Our keynote speakers for the 2012 meeting were Adriana Cavarero and László Tengelyi, and we lead off this issue with their essays.

Kazimir Malevich’s style of Suprematist painting represents the inauguration of nothing less than a new form of culture premised upon a demolition of the Western tradition’s reifying habits of objective thought. In ridding his canvases of all objects and mimetic conventions, Malevich sought to reconfigure human perception in such a way as to open consciousness to alternative modes of organization and signification. In this paper, I argue that Malevich’s revolutionary aesthetic strategy can be illuminated by a return to the very (...) basis of this tradition, namely by a reconsideration of Aristotle’s account in De Anima III.2 of the initial possibility of objective perception as such. (shrink)

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening (...) by distinguishing between l’écoute and l’entente. L’écoute is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and l’entente is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of l’écoute, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (il s’écoute) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (se fait entendre) as he makes himself listened to (se fait écouter). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both l’entente and l’écoute when it listens as Chaplin listens. (shrink)

Andrew Feenberg’s distinction between formal and substantive bias in the design of technology is interrogated. The two dimensions of his definition—inten­tion and the enhancement of specific social interests—are examined and eight logical possibilities arising from his argument are identified. These possibilities are explored through discussion of examples and it is argued that Feenberg has both: a) not broken sufficiently with substantivist philosophies of technology so that he retains ambivalence on technology’s ‘biased essence,’ and b) illegitimately rejected the idea of a (...) technology that is biased in itself. The latter category is important to critical theory of technology and the paper offers a conceptualization of it that draws on Habermas’s discourse ethics. (shrink)

"Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy" presents a comprehensive and accessible analysis of the most recent developments in European thought. From feminist thought to environmental philosophy to analytic themes in Continental philosophy to recent discussions of citizenship, "Emerging Trends" offers an overview of the currents animating contemporary Continental philosophy. The volume focuses on thematic developments rather than individual figures, allowing the reader to follow the threads that weave different thinkers together. Each essay is written by an expert in the area covered, (...) displaying the passion of these experts for the fields they discuss without lapsing into jargon. The volume provides a broad map of the landscape of recent European thought as well as the latest thinking from leading scholars on key themes. (shrink)

"Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy" presents a comprehensive and accessible analysis of the most recent developments in European thought. From feminist thought to environmental philosophy to analytic themes in Continental philosophy to recent discussions of citizenship, "Emerging Trends" offers an overview of the currents animating contemporary Continental philosophy. The volume focuses on thematic developments rather than individual figures, allowing the reader to follow the threads that weave different thinkers together. Each essay is written by an expert in the area covered, (...) displaying the passion of these experts for the fields they discuss without lapsing into jargon. The volume provides a broad map of the landscape of recent European thought as well as the latest thinking from leading scholars on key themes. (shrink)