Alasdair MacIntyre: narrative introduction to his work In the wake of the publication of the last book of the British philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, this work proposes a way to understand his bibliographical production in the context of the narrative of his life and his intellectual career. It is elaborated a periodization of the itinerary of MacIntyre, based on the references that the author himself has made of (...) his academic life and in the proposals of several scholars of his thought. It is concluded that the narrative examination of MacIntyre’s work reveals that his philosophical project is basically marked by Aristotle and Aquinas, whose thought helped our author a solid proposal on the main issues of moral philosophy and philosophy of religion. This work is conceived as introductory because it focuses only on MacIntyre’s books, but it’s expected to serve as a solid basis for a thorough critical study —especially from a chronological perspective— of his entire work, which includes chapters of books, papers, interviews, among others. (shrink)

This paper gives a brief sketch of György Márkus’s philosophical style as manifest in the context of his role within the revival of Hegelian philosophy in Sydney in the last decades of the 20th century. Written from the perspective of one of his students, this style is sharpened by the contrast with that of another philosopher who was influential in the Hegel revival around that time, Richard Rorty. It is suggested that the stark antithesis between Márkusian and Rortarian philosophical and (...) interpretative styles reflects tensions within Hegel’s own attitude to what it might mean to reanimate a philosophy from the past within a radically changed cultural context. (shrink)

Consider the following proposition: It is possible that all of our perceptual experiences are ‘delusive.’ According to Gilbert Ryle, is demonstrably absurd. In this paper I address four questions: What is Ryle’s argument against?; How persuasive is it?; What positions are ruled out if is absurd?; and How does Ryle’s position compare with contemporary work on skepticism?

Hegel’s theory of freedom is complex and sweeping, and while most interpreters of Hegel will readily agree that it is the centerpiece of his political philosophy, perhaps also of his social philosophy and philosophy of history, they will just as readily disagree about what exactly the theory claims. Such interpretive disagreements have fueled, in large part, the resurgence of interest in Hegelian philosophy over the last few decades.

What is arguably the central criticism of Hegel’s philosophical system by the Continental tradition, a criticism which represents a unifying thread in the diverse work of Schelling, Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Adorno, is that Hegel fails to adequately do justice to the notion of individuality. My aim in this paper is to counter the claim that Hegel’s idea of the concrete universal fails to properly explain the real uniqueness of individuals. In what follows, I argue that whilst the Continental critique (...) (as it is particularly expressed by Adorno) is prima facie attractive, it is ultimately misguided. This is because the critics of Hegel fail to correctly understand (i) his principal argument in Sense-Certainty; (ii) crucial features of his logico-metaphysics; and (iii) his notion of wholeness. I contend that carefully explicating these important parts of the Hegelian system not only shows that Hegel’s metaphysical commitments are not those which do not leave meaningful room for or make adequate sense of individuality, but that they also reveal a sophisticated treatment of the interdependency between the categories of individuality, particularity and universality in a way which conceives of individuality robustly. (shrink)

While commentators recognize the centrality of the notion of Geist in Hegel’s philosophical project, there is no consensus about what the term exactly designates and what its role is within his system. One interpretation, which has appeared on the scene in recent years, overemphasizes the onto-theological connotations of the Hegelian term and understands it as a kind of supernatural or divine force determining the development of the system and guiding human history. Critically opposing this reading and showing its conceptual shortcomings, (...) the paper clarifies Hegel’s concept of Geist and discusses its real place in the philosopher’s system. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas’s opus magnum, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, synthesises his impressive work of the last half century. His thesis is that the modern project of the normativity of “rational freedom” can be reconstructed as a learning process of the conflictual dialogue between reason and faith, philosophy and religion in the West. Furthermore, under conditions of a world society, cross-cultural communication across lifeworlds, based on such normative principles, is possible. I argue that Habermas’s argument recapitulates a claim first made in (...) The Phenomenology of Spirit by Hegel, who presented the normativity of modernity through a narrative unfolding between two epistemological standpoints, namely, that of consciousness and “we.” Just like Hegel, in order to defend the idea of a Lernprozess, Habermas too must presuppose a unified subject called “we;” furthermore the development of such subjectivity unfolds in a homogeneous temporal process that is then assumed to be the same for all mankind. I call this a form of “historicism,” and juxtapose recent historical writing that presents the narrative of modernity and the emergence of world-society as a much more diverse and fractured process than Hegel’s and Habermas’s methodology. “Die Einbeziehung der Anderen,” I argue, must involve including the voices of those others who do not experience the normative of modernity as a process like the one unfolding between faith and reason in the West. Nevertheless, I conclude that this plea for a more complex narrative that “provincialises Europe,” is not a rejection of the normative legacy of modern rationality and freedom that are based on the ideals of fallibilism, refutability and revisability through a rational community of inquirers. (shrink)