This chapter contains sections titled: References.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” by Michael N. ForsterGünter ZöllerMichael N. Forster. Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xi + 661. Paper, $30.00.Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) has remained an enigmatic and controversial work. Typically it has been studied and appropriated selectively, by focusing on a few topics or sections of this (...) immense opus. There are also several commentaries on all or part of the work that immerse the reader in plenty of detail, but often with insufficient attention paid to the work’s overall design. Forster’s book is thematically focused but has sufficient scope to provide the reader with an overall orientation about the Phenomenology. Moreover, it is written in a clear, accessible language, with plenty of genuinely philosophical material to balance the more narrowly exegetical aspects of the study. Forster’s work stands in the tradition of a number of German and French studies that seek to unravel the “genesis and structure” (Hyppolite) of the Phenomenology as a key to understanding and assessing the import of Hegel’s singular work. Forster discusses those earlier readings, subjects them to a thorough critique, and develops original positions on a number of key issues in scholarship on the Phenomenology.The entire first half of the book (Parts One and Two) is concerned with the “official project of the Phenomenology,” which Forster reconstructs as three sets of philosophical tasks. First are the pedagogical tasks designed to introduce the reader to the superior viewpoint of Hegel’s system and its ability to overcome the ills specific to modern culture. In particular, Hegel is shown to further advance Herder’s and Schiller’s philosophical project of replacing the multiple, unreconciled dualisms of the modern intellectual and moral outlook with a unified, monistic account of natural and social reality. In a strong interpretive move, Forster attributes a naturalism of sorts to Hegel’s integrationist account of mind and body or self and world.Second are the epistemological tasks designed to justify the cognitive claims of Hegel’s [End Page 541] system (“science”) against those of all other philosophical and popular viewpoints. In particular, Forster shows Hegel’s indebtedness to the ancient (Pyrronic) skeptical strategy of equipollence, i.e., the method of setting into opposition equally strong arguments on both sides of any issue and thereby producing an equal balance of justification on all sides of the issue. Of all possible viewpoints only Hegel’s own, which is not subject to any external opposition, eludes the scope of the method of equipollence.The third, specifically metaphysical set of tasks of the Phenomenology centers around the work’s social and (on Forster’s reading) naturalist conceptions of God, meaning and truth, in which transcendent warrants are replaced by communal consensus. Forster concludes the first half of his study with a detailed consideration of the relation between the Phenomenology and Hegel’s system proper. He stresses that the work is only the “appearance” (Erscheinung) of the philosophical science itself and that it remains systematically independent of the latter.Part Three examines the role of history and historicism in the Phenomenology. Forster distinguishes between teleological or normative historicism and intellectual or descriptive historicism, and limits his investigation to the latter as the philosophically defensible of the two enterprises. He argues extensively for a one-to-one correlation between the various “shapes of consciousness” to be found in the core of the Phenomenology (from the chapter on Consciousness through the chapter on Reason) and specific periods in human history. This chronological history of consciousness is shown to be supplemented by two further accounts of the history of consciousness (in the chapter on Spirit and in the chapters on Religion and Absolute Knowledge, respectively), in which the first history’s focus on individual consciousness is enlarged to include supra-individual mind (“spirit”).In Part Four Forster explains the tripling of the history of consciousness with a shift in the plan of the Phenomenology, away from the more limited project of the original or “Ur-Phenomenology”—to lead individual consciousness to the viewpoint of (Hegelian) science—to the more ambitious goal... (shrink)

A propositional logic of explicit proofs, LP, was introduced in [S. Artemov, Explicit provability and constructive semantics, The Bulletin for Symbolic Logic 7 1–36], completing a project begun long ago by Gödel, [K. Gödel, Vortrag bei Zilsel, translated as Lecture at Zilsel’s in: S. Feferman , Kurt Gödel Collected Works III, 1938, pp. 62–113]. In fact, LP can be looked at in a more general way, as a logic of explicit evidence, and there have been several papers along these (...) lines. A major result about LP is the Realization Theorem, that says any theorem of S4 can be converted into a theorem of LP by some replacement of necessitation symbols with explicit proof terms. Thus the necessitation operator of S4 can be seen as a kind of implicit existential quantifier: there exists a proof term such that…. In this paper, quantification over evidence is introduced into LP, and it is shown that the connection between S4 necessitation and the existential quantifier becomes an explicit one. The extension of LP with quantifiers is called QLP. A semantics and an axiom system for QLP are given, soundness and completeness are established, and several results are proved relating QLP to LP and to S4. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against InauthenticityChristopher S. SchreinerScars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity, by Geoffrey Hartman; xii & 260 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. $17.95 paper.Geoffrey Hartman is now an emeritus faculty member at Yale. All but the youngest readers of this journal will recognize him as a member of the now defunct Yale School of Criticism, which in its glory days included (...) Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Among these accomplished individuals, Hartman distinguished himself as the one most engaged with discussing the role of style in theoretically propelled criticism, and this remains his lasting contribution. The question he kept asking was the following: what demands do the books we read and the theories we use make on our own critical practice, and in particular, on our style? Works such as Criticism in the Wilderness (1980) and Saving the Text (1981) were concerned with promoting a philosophical criticism that is as creative as the literature it seeks to criticize, in opposition to the Arnoldian standard of a disinterested criticism that respects and preserves the canonical hauteur of literary classics and doesn't seek to imitate them. Yet over the decades Hartman's own prose, except when it lapsed into copying Derrida's, seemed more that of the Doctor and less the Explorer, to borrow the terms Lionel Trilling used to describe Matthew Arnold's criticism. This is an irony we are grateful for.Hartman's most recent book, Scars of the Spirit, takes up the problem of authenticity in the context of postmodern culture, seeking to reestablish its legitimacy as a serious topic and unmask what merely poses as authentic in the global marketplace. Today his agenda ignominiously crosses paths with the likes of Jane Fonda, whose autobiography is replete with New Age claims to recover "the authentic me." One of the issues never resolved by Hartman's book and which taunts his project behind its back is whether his Continental erudition makes his project any more authentic than Fonda's celebrity psychobabble. Authenticity was the Heideggerian concept that Adorno ruthlessly and ironically attacked in his The Jargon of Authenticity, and it has an old-fashioned existential ring to it to this day. For those readers who haven't read Being and Time lately, authenticity (Jemeinigkeit) was the resolute impetus of making time one's own, taking it back from the instrumental public world that had appropriated it so that one can live a sincerely mortal life and die one's own death, as it were properly. Professors valiantly conjured an ethic out of this retrieval of selfhood, of one's personal property of time and destiny in the Lost and Found of culture, not fully cognizant of its Nietzschean roots. The absence of altruism in this existential ethic inspired Emmanel Levinas's patient attempt to persuade us to demote our egoism in an insatiable responsibility to and for others, for whom we can never do enough.There is surely irony in the fact that the anachrony of authenticity as a concept was accelerated by the deconstructive theory that Hartman helped [End Page 501] promulgate. Hence his new book reads a bit like someone having to gingerly retrace his steps in a field of landmines planted by the Yale School of Criticism. The question of propriety, what is right and proper, what is one's own, stamped with one's unique or authentic properties, was deconstructed by Derrida, and Hartman reverently recorded the results in the incongruously titled Saving the Text, an analysis of Derrida's attempt to promote textual intercourse between Hegel and Jean Genet by setting them in parallel columns on one page. In a nutshell, the original source of an event or text, its material advent, is untraceable due to its derivativeness, the forces of semiosis (or textuality) at play in and between texts. In parallel to this discovery, Jean Baudrillard spoke of the simulacrum as a media-generated version behind which the original "thing itself" was forever irrecoverable. The very idea of authenticity came to sound illusory, denoting a mirage sought in a hopeless regressive inquiry or Ruckfrage which Husserl (with... (shrink)

The article is aimed at comprehending the perception of J. Wahl’s philosophy in Russia. The central role is assigned to the notion of “unhappy consciousness” in Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit” and to the interpretation of this notion in J. Wahl’s philosophy. The analysis of Russian–language studies dealing with his philosophy allows to outline two primary strands of engagement with it: within the framework of “French Neo–Hegelianism”, and within the framework of existentialism. Th e need to (...) renounce this established characteristic of his philosophy is shown. Two arguments are stated in favour of this, conceptual and substantial. As for the former, the restriction of J. Wahl’s philosophy to the two aforementioned frameworks narrows the real horizons of his research. For the latter, the “unhappy consciousness” in J. Wahl’s philosophy besides the tragic–religious interpretation of Hegel’s ideas also contains pluralistic criticism of Hegel’s “monism” as a part of J. Wahl’s own philosophical project of “metaphysical empiricism”. It is argued that treating the entire corpus of J. Wahl’s writings will allow for a more thorough insight into the history of 20th century French philosophy, in particular “French Neo–Hegelianism” and the Franco-German debates concerning phenomenology and existentialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 134-135 [Access article in PDF] Allen Speight. Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 154. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $18.95. Hegel's notorious use of literary references in his Phenomenology of Spirit has been a source of numerous interpretive difficulties, sparking disagreements not only about the actual referents of Hegel's (...) literary allusions, but also—and more importantly—about the meaning and purpose of such allusions. In this insightful, highly readable new book, Allen Speight challenges the stale orthodoxies that have pitted the Phenomenology's systematic/philosophical readers against its literary/historical ones, and offers an innovative interpretation that takes seriously the work's literary structure and allusions, while also giving due consideration to its systematic philosophical aims. Combining the rich sensibility of a literary mind with the careful rigor of a philosophical mind, Speight deftly shows how Hegel's Phenomenology is a work whose very aim, in part, is to transcend the traditional, but often limiting, dichotomy between philosophy and literature.As Speight explains it, the general purpose of this book is to make "a contribution to understanding the philosophical project of the Phenomenology and why that project requires Hegel's appropriation of literary works and forms as it does" (9-10). The book's philosophical point of departure is the critical mass of recent scholarship that sees Hegel's epistemological task in the Phenomenology as essentially Sellarsian in its critique of the "Myth of the Given." For Speight, the Hegelian critique of the myth of the given implies that all knowledge claims are essentially corrigible and socially mediated, and this implies—in turn—that any attempt to draw rigid lines of demarcation between a purely "systematic" and a purely "historical" or "anthropological" approach to philosophy and its problems must ultimately fail. From this interpretive vantage point, Speight holds, a strong case can be made for the essentially literary character of Hegel's Phenomenology, and the essentially philosophical purpose of his literary allusions. As Speight is careful to acknowledge, his own distinctive approach to the Phenomenology is not meant to rule out other, divergent emphases or interpretations, but only to provide "a way of better understanding the role that literature plays within the philosophical enterprise of the work as a whole" (18).Speight begins to deliver the details of his promised "better way" by investigating what he calls the "literary turn" or the seemingly sudden "eruption of the literary" that starts to motivate the Phenomenology's transition from the section on "Reason" to the section on "Spirit." For Speight, the shapes of Active Reason that are crucial in this transition begin to raise a new set of problems concerning human agency. Furthermore, it is not at all a coincidence that Hegel's heightened concern with agency at this juncture of the Phenomenology [End Page 134] is accompanied by an unmistakable burst of literary references. Rather, it is an indicator of Hegel's careful, deliberate, and self-conscious strategy of using literature to make a philosophical point about agency, since it is literature—according to Speight's Hegel—that gives us privileged access to the philosophical problems of agency and their potential resolution.For Speight, Hegel's use of tragedy gives us special insight into the retrospectivity of all human action; his use of comedy points to the theatricality (or what we might call the socially mediated expressivity) of all human action; and his use of the romantic novel points to the necessity (and eventually opens up the possibility) of the forgiveness implied by all human action. While Hegel had already made use of both tragedy and comedy in the Reason section of the Phenomenology, it is only in the Spirit section, Speight argues, that these literary-philosophical shapes are taken up (e.g., in Antigone and Rameau's Nephew) in a historically self-conscious way that can lead (via the "beautiful soul" novel) to the possibility of forgiveness and thereby instigate the transition to the Religion section.Speight's "better way... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Hegel's Project of Phenomenology Kant and the Infinite Within‐and‐Without Experience The Phenomenology of Infinite Conflict Hegel and Witnessing to the Traces of Unacknowledged Absolutes Conclusion.

Context: The burgeoning field of consciousness studies has recently witnessed a revival of first-person approaches based on phenomenology in general and Husserlian phenomenology in particular. However, the attempts to introduce phenomenological methods into cognitive science have raised serious doubts as to the feasibility of such projects. Much of the current debate has revolved around the issue of the naturalisation of phenomenology, i.e., of the possibility of integrating phenomenology into the naturalistic paradigm. Significantly less attention has been (...) devoted to the complementary process of the phenomenologisation of nature, i.e., of a transformation of the theoretical and existential underpinnings of the naturalist framework. Problem: The aim of this article is twofold. First, it provides a general overview of the resurgence of first-person methodologies in cognitive sciences, with a special emphasis on a circular process of naturalising phenomenology and phenomenologising nature. Secondly, it tries to elucidate what theoretical and practical implications phenomenological approaches might have for the current understanding of nature and consciousness. Results: It is argued that, in order for the integration of phenomenological and scientific approaches to prove successful, it is not enough merely to provide a firm naturalistic grounding for phenomenology. An equally, if not even more important, process of phenomenological contextualisation of science must also be considered, which might have far-reaching implications for its theoretical underpinnings and our existential stance towards nature and consciousness reflection and experience. Constructivist content: The introduction of first-person approaches into cognitive science and consciousness studies evokes the fundamental circularity that is characteristic of second-order cybernetics. It provides a rich framework for a dialogue between science and lived experience, where scientific endeavour merges with the underlying existential structures, while the latter remains reflectively open to scientific findings and proposals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Background Theory of Delusion and Existential PhenomenologyRichard G. T. Gipps (bio) and John Rhodes (bio)KeywordsPhenomenology, psychological explanation, epistemology, schizophreniaSituating and Clarifying the PaperThe commentaries of Nassir Ghaemi and Giovanni Stanghellini help to sketch out the intellectual landscape of philosophical perspectives in psychiatry, and situate our paper within it. A happy convergence between the analytical philosophy perspective from which we were writing, and the existential–phenomenological paradigm described (...) by both authors, is the result. Stanghellini in particular carefully describes three main theories of existential deformations, tracing delusion formation back to either (i) a disturbance of meaning synthesis conceived as a dysfunction of a Husserlian consciousness, (ii) a disturbance of pre-reflective self-consciousness resulting in a kind of paralyzing hyperreflexivity, and (iii) (Stanghellini’s preferred model) a disturbance of embodiment. This final account views delusion as springing from a failure in the subject’s corporeal and praxical being-in-the-world. As the subject’s practical, pre-reflective grip on the world is loosened, so their minds become unconstrained by that understanding and practical rationality immanent within that grip, and thought, now unconstrained, starts to travel through delusional worlds. Stanghellini accordingly views our model as an example of a disembodiment theory, which allows it to overcome the disadvantages of the first two models, which may both, in their own ways, overvalue the rôle of (disturbances of) reflective consciousness in the formation (and delusional deformation) of everyday understanding.Being situated within a preexisting landscape has both its benefits and its disbenefits, the principle example of the latter being the potential assimilation of anything new to what has already been said. Thus, although we are grateful to our commentators for placing us on the larger historical and conceptual map, it may be helpful to briefly rehearse our motivations for drawing on the philosophical ideas of the Bedrock and Background in our theory of delusion. Our paper was primarily motivated by a concern that current, psychologically mainstream, cognitive models of delusion, although helpfully drawing our attention to common reasoning and perceptual deficits in the person with psychosis, fail to adequately account for what is delusional about delusions. It was, in [End Page 321] particular, to account for the certainty with which the deluded person clings to often quite extraordinary beliefs that we drew on the epistemological notion of the background. And although this epistemological notion fits quite neatly with ontological concerns regarding the embodied and praxical character of human existence, it is the particular epistemic rôle that it played in our theory—to do with the extraratiocinative constraint on judgement provided by the Background—that we wish to stress here.We return to this shortly, but first wish to comment briefly on two specific considerations raised by the commentaries. The first concerns Stanghellini’s claim that, for us, “when studying delusions, the focus should be on providing an adequate framework for understanding, rather than providing empirical hypotheses to be tested” (2008, 311–314). It seems to us, however, that both are equally important. What we wished to stress, however, was that empirical hypothesis testing may be led astray if it is not informed by an adequate framework for understanding. For example, most cognitive psychological experiments on delusions concern themselves with the individual’s ability to make appropriate guesses (e.g., regarding the color of beads in a bag), and their tendency to jump to conclusions; they do not concern themselves with the kinds of extraordinary conviction and certainty met with in delusion. The risk run by empirical researchers of cognitive factors in delusion is that a lack of a prior adequate theorization of delusion makes for accounts that are ultimately only of the formation, not of delusion in particular but rather of false or unusual beliefs more generally. An analytical approach, however, can help to explicate the ways in which the psychiatric concept of delusion fails to be adequately characterized by the quite general ‘external criteria’ of delusion (as Jaspers [1963] called them: falsity, stubbornness, uncommon), and aids in the construction of empirical hypotheses this time constrained by an understanding of the true ‘internal criteria’ of psychotic belief. Such an approach helps to spell out the... (shrink)

Finally, the first book started Peirceana. Peirceana is expected as a new series that provides access to both Peirce’s mostly unpublished late works and secondary papers, in which ideas of this American philosopher are developed. This edition is opened with three volumes on Peirce’s manuscripts on “Logic of the Future.” The thinker gave this definition to his theory of existential graphs, i.e., a diagrammatical logical project that includes three sections. The sections can roughly correspond to propositional logic, (...) first-order logic and modal logic. The theory of existential graphs is a particular conception. It predicts ideas of proof theory, mathematics of continuity, and cognitive sciences. Besides, it has an impressive philosophical foundation and perfectly emphasizes the importance of diagrammatic notations. Since many writings are published here for the first time, the edition per se is a significant event for the history of logic. However, Peirceana can do more than this. It urges to think of how the logic of 20‒21st centuries would have looked like if Peirce’s intentions were discovered earlier. At the same time, it clarifies the ground for contemporary investigations. Today we have a bunch of papers about various non-classical modifications, extensions, restrictions, and applications of the original theory. Peirceana is projected as the publication that can gather specialists (logicians, philosophers, as well as IT and cognitive science scholars) who are interested in the development of Peirce’s approach. It lets the readers reconsider our ordinary logical conceptions (e.g., reasoning, logical and language analysis, and others) as well as the conventional understanding of the evolution of modern logic. The current paper has two objectives: firstly, it estimates this diplomatic partly critical edition with its several thoroughly elaborated introductions, and secondly, it briefly introduces the existential graphs theory. A set of examples demonstrates the basic principles of this system. (shrink)

Purpose. To examine the existential anthropology of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in order to demonstrate the necessity of distinguishing the universal-spiritual, as human in human being, apart from the individual-existential in him, and to reveal the hierarchical correlation of biosocial, existential and spiritual spheres in personality. Theoretical basis. Within existential philosophy the author differentiates two separate traditions and proceeds from the insufficiency of the distinction of existential sphere, proposed by phenomenological tradition, showing the necessity (...) of its correlation with the spiritual sphere as a sphere of humanity, proposed by non-phenomenological tradition of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski. Originality. The author presents the anthropological conception of G. Marcel and E. Minkowski, in which human personality is understood as unity of individual-existential and universal-spiritual, which requires a special trans-empirical field of culture, which contains senses, images and symbols of humanity. Also, the author presents the recent developments of existential thinkers in distinguishing existential and spiritual dimensions, both not reducible to the physical and social dimensions. Conclusions. In both existential traditions, the specifically human was founded as a trans-biological and trans-social phenomenon, which appears as indefinable and non-predetermined. But in first tradition, humanity is understood as an existence, as a unique individuality, "project", variant of humanity, equivalent to other variants, and universal is understood as a community of human condition in the world. While in the second tradition, the universal is understood as spiritual. Thus, horizontal level of our private existence, as the process of movement from birth to death, is supplemented by vertical of human, universal ideals and images. Humanity appears as a task, on the way to which human being transcends beyond the limits of his individual "self" to the "super-individual", through inclusion into spiritual community, into universal culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition by Robert R. WilliamsLawrence S. StepelevichRobert R. Williams. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Pp. xviii +433. Cloth, $60.00.The eminent Hegel scholar, Vittorio Hoesle, perceived the major weakness of Hegel’s philosophy in its seeming failure to adequately deal with the issue of interpersonal relations. Hardly a new objection, as Hoesle’s critique has a lineage (...) that reaches at least as far back as Schleiermacher. Against this thesis, Robert Williams had earlier developed a counter-argument which he presented in his work, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (1992). In this foundational work, Williams drew out and clarified Hegel’s concept of recognition from its inchoate source in Fichte; and by so doing defended “Hegel against charges that his thought violates intersubjectivity and difference by reducing the other to the same.”(1) In the present work, the conceptual and textual grounds established by Williams in his first work on the topic allow for a more extensive extrapolation of Hegel’s doctrine, and argues that “The story of recognition is a story about Fichte and Hegel. Fichte introduced the concept but did not make it the basis of either his ethics or his politics. Hegel appropriated and transformed the concept of recognition and regarded it as the fundamental intersubjective structure of ethical life.” (26)After a brief introductory critical survey of some of the more or less misleading contemporary views of both Hegelians and non-Hegelians regarding Hegel’s concept of interpersonal recognition, Williams proceeds to present its historical genesis, of how it emerged from its early and unfocused appearances in the philosophies of Fichte and Schelling. Williams then traces the further development and elaboration of this concept as it gains expression in the course of Hegel’s own ethical theory, not only as it is found in such major works as the Phenomenology of Mind and The Philosophy of Spirit, but also as it appears in his earlier and lesser known Jena Manuscripts of 1805. After this preliminary doctrinal and historical introduction, Williams turns to the most substantial section of his study, that work of Hegel’s in which the concept of recognition would be expected to and does indeed play its most evident ethical role: The Philosophy of Right.Almost every category within The Philosophy of Right is examined not only for the appearance of the concept, but for the defining role which it plays in the construction of that category. Such an examination is necessary for Williams, since “Reciprocal recognition in its various determinate types and instances is the general structure of ethical life and the embodiment of social reason that underlies and supports the concepts of law and state.” (364) Among the categories considered, categories that Williams discusses within the context of contemporary issues and each of which is taken up in a separate chapter of his work, are Family, Crime and Punishment, Poverty, and the State. In every instance considered he argues that an understanding of the defining role of recognition is a necessary prerequisite not only for a clear and correct comprehension [End Page 174] of Hegel’s ethical theory but of all ethical theory. Certainly, after this scholarly tour de force Hegel’s concept of recognition will have to be taken into account in any credible discussion of his ethical theory. In a final chapter Williams turns to some contemporary ethical theorists who have not taken that concept into consideration, or if they have, have either misunderstood or have rejected it. For Williams, such thinkers as Kojeve, Sartre, Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas, in their misunderstanding or rejection of the ethically mediating concept of recognition, have all contributed toward the “disrupted and fragmented cultural situation at the end of the twentieth century.” (412)In sum, Williams’ presentation and support of Hegel’s ethical employment of the concept of intersubjective recognition cannot but encourage theorists to reconsider the subject, and to see in it not only a conceptual tool which can serve to lucidly contextualize Hegel’s ethical theory into the matrix of his total philosophical system, but also as a needed ethical concept able to transcend both... (shrink)

In this article I analyze talk in a political setting to demonstrate how disagreement-relevant practices are fitted to context to accomplish a kind of argumentative strategy. I propose that in the British Parliament’s House of Lords, interlocutors deal with dilemmas of disagreement by doing something I refer to as ‘talking around the issue’, a practice involving 1) institutional positioning, 2) display of emotionality, and 3) orientation to the issue. I suggest that these practices are indicative of institutional norms, (...) but also comprise some of the argumentative resources available to interactants in everyday argumentative practice. These practices also reflect key areas of interest in disagreement and conflict research related to context, style, and issues in conflict. (shrink)

In Chapter 1 I discuss the basic problem which made me undertake the issue of human death. That problem was the dualism in the depiction of human nature which has not been fully overcome yet, the dualism which leads to the emergence of new difficulties in contemporary attempts at adequately solving the problem of human death. They include the separation of soul from the body in the moment of death, and the borderline between the moment of death and the moment (...) of resurrection. Chapter 2 is devoted to the presentation of a new anthropological perspective, of an anthropology build “from the bottom up”, that is “from foundations”, and taking into account man’s rooting in the biological environment, and thus also in the genetic heritage taken over from our pre-human ancestors. That anthropology brings new aspects into traditional anthropology by extending it to include new ways of explaining the genesis of the human body and spirit, and new depictions of man’s death. In Chapter 2 I will also present the concept of evolution proposed by P.T. de Chardin, which I appreciate for its comprehensive evolutionary perception of the world. This concept has provoked various responses, but it certainly provides a creative inspiration for further attempts at applying the idea of evolution to various issues. The general framework of the evolutionary model proposed by the French researcher turns out to be useful also when applied to the evolutionary understanding of human death. Chapter 3 contains a discussion of the principal premises of the evolutionary concept of human death taken from analyses carried out by T. Wojciechowski concerning the issue of time, space, and the structure of variable material beings. A being is variable because it has a temporal structure, and the changes that occur are the derivatives of that structure. The temporal structure may be seen as endless, in which a being, even though its existence had a beginning, will exist for ever. Material substance should not be seen statically, but in dynamic and evolutionary terms. In evolution, time becomes a driver of development, an element shaping and directing the evolution of the entire cosmos. Man’s substance has been made capable of two levels of being and acting: the spatial and temporal level, and the endless and immanent level. Together, they form the one essence of man. Thus, the human person is partially immersed in the material cosmos, and partially elevated above it. Chapter 4 presents the evolutionary approach to the moment of man’s death. The views of T. Wojciechowski will be presented in which the moment of death is seen as a moment of transformation and perfection of the structure of the essence of human existence. Furthermore, the issue of the relationship existing, according to T. Wojciechowski, between man’s death and resurrection will be discussed. Understood in evolutionary terms, the moment of death is the time when the structure of human existence is transformed. Death transfers man fully into eternity and enables his life on a higher level of existential being. The element of flesh is retained, but changes its nature. Such view of death allows it to be understood as the moment of resurrection and the culmination of the evolutionary process of life. Death is therefore an “invention” of the evolution and should be seen as a natural and positive phenomenon. At this point, I also propose a solution to the question about reconciliation between temporal and endless existence. In Chapter 5 I take up the issue of consequences flowing from the postulated understanding of human death. They have been pointed to by T. Wojciechowski, but need to be further developed and clarified. He believed two lines in man’s development need to be recognized: that of natural and that of supernatural evolution. Both have the same direction, while occurring on different planes. In each of these lines, death is a natural element of life, pre-planned and, so to say, “encoded” in the cosmic matter. Therefore, the treatment of biological death as the consequence of sin is not only contrary to the evolutionary understanding of life, but in addition artificially combines that which is natural with that which is supernatural. Man’s authentic experience of his own present is a condition of his achieving full existential perfection in the moment of this death. Full engagement in the present is, in a way, a harbinger of the future; thus, the life “here” and “there” may not be inherently inconsistent. In the light of the evolutionary concept, death is not a punishment, but the most positive experience of man’s life in that it enables him to achieve full existential perfection. Chapter 6 is devoted to a substantiation of the possibility of evolutionary transformation of the structure of human existence in the moment of death. An adequate cause needs to be identified which could substantiate that transformation and achievement of perfection. I believe an appropriate substantiation can be found in God’s creative act, interpreted in evolutionary terms. The process of evolution, with its subsequent stages, is only a necessary condition for that “transformation” and “elevation”. The sufficient condition is fulfilled by the continuous creative intervention of God. The concept of God’s creative activity in the moment of man’s death finds its continuation in Chapter 7, where I present a detailed analysis of God’s activity at the time of man’s death. The concept of God’s creative activity extended over the entire process of evolution makes it possible to consider the moment of death as the moment of man’s resurrection. The moment of death is thus a moment of creation in evolutionary terms. Thus, as long as man is related to temporal and spatial elements, his development, or creation, continues. Death is only the completion of the final stage of creation, which may be painful and evoke fear, but in fact should give hope, for it involves resurrection. I also propose that the creative act in the moment of man’s death-resurrection be considered a basic action of God, which explains the manner in which God’s activity is contained within the framework of the creative act, encompassing also the moment of death-resurrection. The final Chapter 8 describes a didactic model illustrating the concept proposed here. I use the analogy of white light dispersion effect in the prism, and compare the incident ray to the creative act, and the dispersed rays going through the prism to the line of man’s natural and supernatural evolution. This model also shows the difference in the perspectives from which the phenomenon of death is seen by God and by man. (shrink)

Infinite Phenomenology builds on John Russon’s earlier book, Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, to offer a second reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Here again, Russon writes in a lucid, engaging style and, through careful attention to the text and a subtle attunement to the existential questions that haunt human life, he demonstrates how powerfully Hegel’s philosophy can speak to the basic questions of philosophy. In addition to original studies of all the major sections of (...) the Phenomenology, Russon discusses complementary texts by Hegel, namely, the Philosophy of Spirit, the Philosophy of Right, and the Science of Logic. He concludes with an appendix that discusses the reception and appropriation of Hegel’s Phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy. As with Russon’s earlier work, Infinite Phenomenology will remain essential reading for those looking to engage Hegel’s essential, yet difficult, text. (shrink)

In §69.b of BT Heidegger attempts an existential genetic analysis of science, i.e. a phenomenology of the conceptual process of the constitution of the logical view of science (science seen as theory) starting from the Dasein. It attempts to do so by examining the special intentional-existential modification of (human) being-in-the-world, which is called the "mathematical projection of nature"; that is, by examining that special modification of our being, which places us in the state of experience that presents (...) the world to us as taught by, e.g., Galileo and Newton. The idea he puts forward is that modern mathematical physics and the corresponding experience of the real is the result of the mathematical projection of nature. Modern science, Heidegger says, stands out because it is mathematical. But we cannot get the answer to what this mathematicality consists in from mathematics, because mathematics is only a special manifestation of mathematicality. Here is what Heidegger means by "mathematicality" and, accordingly by "mathematical projection of nature." If one were to let two bodies of different weights fall simultaneously from the top of the tower of Pisa, Heidegger notes, both Galileo and an Aristotelian would see that the two bodies would reach the ground with as little time difference as possible, and not at exactly the same moment. Galileo, however, does something decisive: he claims that under conditions that would be impossible to ensure (if we removed absolutely all resistance to the motion of the bodies), the two bodies would reach the ground absolutely simultaneously. This is not something that he or the Aristotelian sees happening empirically. How, then, does Galileo insist so firmly on his position? How exactly does it happen that he has before him such a view of things? Heidegger's answer is that Galileo is mathematically projecting nature. In his Dialogues Galileo says "I conceive with my mind" (mente concipio) a body thrown to move on an infinitely extending horizontal plane, having eliminated from its path every possible obstacle. Finally, I argue that from the detailed interpretation of Heidegger's points of the mathematical and of the notion of mathematical projection of nature, we can arrive at the conclusions I had arrived at in my doctoral dissertation (2000) as regards the meaning and function of thought experiments in physics as seen from a Husserlian phenomenological point of view as intentional acts. In a nutshell, in thought experiments physics constitutes the special metaphysics (to use the Kantian term) of the primordial ontological region it investigates as well as attempts to make natural sense of the mathematical formalism in cases it proves necessary. (shrink)

This chapter argues that in addition to being a hilarious stoner comedy, one of the most beloved cult films of all time, and a trenchant genre critique of film noir detective cinema, as well as American Westerns, Ethan and Joel Coen’s film, The Big Lebowski (1998, TBL), also presents reflections on several important philosophical themes. First, as a matter of feminist and gender philosophy, TBL examines and criticizes prominent ideals of masculinity, especially as they appear in US cinema, exploring the (...) question of what a better kind of man might be. Second, that project is woven together with an investigation of virtue as exemplified by the film’s protagonist, Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski. TBL portrays in The Dude a man whose virtues include Epicurean-like excellences related to contented poverty, equality, community, and friendship. Friendship is also a virtue among Aristotelians, and The Dude’s culture of friendship, from an Aristotelian perspective, bears significant political import. By positioning The Dude at a mean between the extremes of his friend Walter Sobchak’s excess and the nihilists’ deficiencies, TBL explores the way rules and rule-following properly fit into virtuous moral life. In The Dude, the film shows how moral virtue not only requires intellectual excellences but also the right kind of character. And third, perhaps most centrally, TBL engages the problem of modern European nihilism and the effect it has had upon US culture. By means of the “abiding” virtues it valorizes, existential repetition, comedy itself, and the way its characters inhabit time, TBL confronts the death, despair, and disillusionment nihilism yields. (shrink)

Heidegger’s reading of Kant is deciphered to have illuminated his own project concerning the basic question of Ontology, Time, Space and History [Temporality, Spatiality and Historicity] embodying the novel description of Human reality in terms of Mit-Dasein and Mit-welt [Subjectivity with the public face]. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason led Heidegger develop his own project of Existential Phenomenology contrary to Husserilian Phenomenology. We will discuss the Kantian Heidegger following the two main issues: one, Heidegger (...) appreciates Kant on his identifying and exploring the difference of ontic/ontological. Two, Kant prioritizes time over space. Heidegger would explore the subject of ontic/ontological difference in the sense that ontic knowledge is the knowledge of particular beings, whereas ontological knowledge is described as the a priori condition inferring the ontic knowledge. In this sense ontological knowledge pertains to question of being rather than beings. This is how Heidegger’s Kant interpretation would differ from the Neo-Kantianism of Marburg School which argued that Critique of Pure Reason is a work of epistemology. In contrast to this position, Heidegger held that Critique is a unique work of transcendental philosophy; it is theory of ontological knowledge but not ontic knowledge. Ontic knowledge of beings must conform to Being of beings [ontological foundation]. Heidegger holds that this should be Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”. However, Heidegger would appropriate the Kantian notion of time in the form of temporality of Dasein. Being manifests itself on beings through Being-there [Human reality] who purely understands Being. For Heidegger, temporality of Dasein is the foundation of ontological knowledge indeed. (shrink)

This essay initiates a fundamental discussion about education’s nature and character, and raises the questions: Is education reliant on other disciplines as, for example, psychology, sociology and philosophy? Or may education be thought of independently, without being reliant on other disciplines? These questions are discussed in the light of Theodor Litt’s educational reading of Hegel’s understanding of dialectics, as it appears in the book Phenomenology of Spirit, in order to support that education has a relational and dialectic nature. (...) In the second part, we connect the concept of ‘Hegelian dialectic structure’ with scientific theory. More specifically, we introduce a theoretically oriented concept, based on semantic theory construction; namely, ‘relational parameter bundles’. This concept clarifies the difference between education and other ‘scientific,’ often more empirically based disciplines, such as psychology, on which education, or rather, educational researchers, traditionally rely. Through our theoretical approach we aim to uncover fundamental differences within different disciplines’ scientific thinking, and their use of theories and models, which then manifest themselves in the discipline’s scientific assessments and practical actions. An uncritical integration of other disciplines in education may destroy the ‘true’ nature of education, and thus pose a danger to education’s character, problem areas and ways of conducting research. That does not mean that education shall be isolated from other disciplines, it is rather a question of when perspectives from other disciplines should be included in educational matters. Not before the educational questions are raised and worked through will it be appropriate to obtain knowledge from other disciplines, if, that is, it is deemed necessary based on educational judgment. (shrink)

The paper brings existential temporality, as developed in the work of phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Husserl, into dialogue with historical materialism. What results is the development of a theoretical background for what the author terms futural materialism, which is taken to be a complimentary logical extension of historical materialist projects. To this end, it is suggested that the past and the future are best understood as materially existing in the present in an immanent way, mediated by conscious beings (...) in the form of memory, projection, residual effect, and affect. Put differently, the present's presence in the past and future play a determining roll in those temporal dimensions, which subsequently fold back into the configuration of the present. Following Nietzsche and drawing influence from Guattari and Deleuze, it is argued that past and future are relatively fluid tools to be purposively deployed in the present for particular purposes rather than being transcendent facts which subjectivity must merely contend with. It is further asserted that as part of a broader non-reductive material monist project of social transformation, both futural and historical materialism are necessary considerations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical ReadingRichard A. S. Hall William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical Reading. Ed. H. G. Callaway. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.In 1907 William James was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford. Initially he was reluctant to do so since he feared undertaking them would divert him from developing rigorously and systematically some metaphysical ideas (...) of his own that had preoccupied him for some time. [End Page 130]In the end, however, he relented and in the spring of 1908 gave the lectures which were subsequently published as A Pluralistic Universe.As it happened, though, in the course of these lectures James presented some of those metaphysical ideas, though in a popular and informal style appropriate to lecturing. Later on he did get down to working out a systematic metaphysics in proper academic style, but the project was cut short by his untimely death in 1910. The incomplete Some Problems of Philosophy,posthumously published in 1911, recapitulates some major themes of A Pluralistic Universe.When James addressed his Oxford audience, the time was ripe for the advancement of his own brand of metaphysical pluralism and radical empiricism in opposition to the still-regnant forms of monistic idealism as represented by Bradley, Green, and Royce. The hegemony in the philosophical world long enjoyed by idealism was beginning to break up—something noted by James in his first lecture—due in no small part to the very ideas aired in his lectures and the then newly emerging schools of pragmatism and realism. The period between 1914 and 1918 not only rings the death knell of European imperialism but also, significantly, marks the watershed between nineteenth-and twentieth-century philosophy.The argument of A Pluralistic Universerevolves around the Parmenidean conundrum of the one-and-the-many. It is the solution to this problem that was the main bone of contention between James and absolute idealists like F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green, and Josiah Royce. For them, the world in reality is but one thing, though appearing illusorily as many, with a pervasive unity throughout—it is a "block-universe," to use James's expression for it; for James, by contrast, the world is irreducibly many things whose unities are partial and shifting. The gravamen of James's objections to absolute idealism was its monism, though he objected no less strenuously to other ideas associated with it: its doctrine of internal relations; its determinism; and, in particular, its deprecation of experience in favor of concepts (what James condemns as "vicious intellectualism"). James proposed, against this monolithic idealism, the alternative hypothesis of metaphysical pluralism. Here he affirmed the reality of external relations (particularly conjunctions) among things and the continuities within experience, thereby making his empiricism "radical." He approached experience phenomenologically, finding it, not concepts, to be constitutive of reality, the value of concepts being more practical than theoretical. He conceived of the universe as being open-ended, where human agency can make a difference for the better.A subtext of A Pluralistic Universeis James's advocacy of something like [End Page 131]traditional theism in contradistinction to the pantheism of absolute idealism. He rightly notes that the Absolute is not the God of Christianity. He believes that his pluralistic ontology allows for, and the religious experiences of people abundantly attest to, the existence of a personal God, albeit a finite one, with whom communion and commerce is possible. At a deeper, psychological level, though, A Pluralistic Universeis an expression of James's own desire to feel "at home" in the universe, a desire, I should add, that he shares with many protagonists of classic American fiction, and which is perhaps intensified by the experience of inhabiting and accommodating one's self to the relatively unfamiliar New World. He complains about the "foreignness" of the Absolute in objective idealism and of that sovereign God, in traditional theisms, subsisting beyond all human influence or effects.Howard Callaway's recent edition of James's Hibbert Lectures joins the Harvard edition of them, with a foreword by Richard J. Bernstein, as an indispensable volume of James's... (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief sketch of Fichte’s account of the self and discuss it as significant contribution to the modern theory of the selfhood. This discussion focuses on thinkers’ Jena projects of Wissenshaftslehre, including the 1794/95 Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre and Wissensftslehre novo methodo (1796/1797). For Fichte, the Jena period is a time of profound search for the ground and structure of his philosophical system. He finds such ground in a uniquely formulated conception of (...) the self. Furthermore, beginning with the self as a direct intuition and ending with the self as a necessary idea, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre become an immense description of the development of the selfhood. Providing a conceptual outline of the main points of Fichte’s account of the self, the paper shows it as a unique philosophical result that is key to the emergence of post-Kantian German idealism. (shrink)

orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and so called "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflec tion in which all the above-mentioned work has either its (...) core or its source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it), uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by philosophers (e. g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the youngergenerationofphilosophers today. (shrink)

Constitutional federalism is usually suggested as an appropriate and effective form of government for a country that is characterized by significant levels of ethnic diversity. Hence, where destructive ethnic mobilization has resulted in state failure, the suggestion has usually been for the country to adopt some form of constitutional federalism as a way to more effectively manage diversity and minimize further violent conflict. While Somalia is, today, a clear example of a failed state, its governance problems, however, do not emanate (...) from its inability to effectively manage its diverse ethnic populations since the country, essentially, is the most ethnically homogenous country in Africa. Instead, the origins of state failure in Somalia can be traced to violent mobilization by clans and sub-clans for control of the apparatus of governance. This paper puts forth several strategies that can be used to reconstruct and reconstitute the Somali State and provide the country with the types of institutions that will enhance peaceful coexistence and promote long-term and sustainable economic growth and development. The first line of business must be to secure the peace-and this will require external intervention-and then to engage all relevant stakeholders in negotiations to construct and adopt an appropriate system of government. Constitutional federalism, however, may not be well-suited for Somalia, especially given the expressed desire of many of the country's factions for autonomy. A more fitting alternative is the functional overlapping competing jurisdictions governance model, under which regional political units are defined by their physical boundaries but the delivery of public goods and services is provided jointly by various overlapping jurisdictions. Under the FOCJ, an individual can choose to belong to more than one political jurisdiction, for example, establishing his residence in one jurisdiction and purchasing water, electricity and other services from another. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.1 (2001) 17-35 [Access article in PDF] Late Antiquity and the Florentine Renaissance: Historiographical Parallels Christopher S. Celenza Aulus Gellius, at the end of the second century, shows us the type of writer who was destined to prevail, the compiler. In his Noctes Atticae he compiles without method or even without any definite end in view.... After him there is only barrenness. The (...) third century is a literary Sahara.... Thoughtless admiration for mathematics keeps up or reintroduces the mentality of magic.... In the fourth century ad Iamblichus had his brain almost turned by the science of numbers. 1 --Ferdinand Lot The rapid progress of humanism after the year 1400 paralyzed native impulses. Henceforth men looked only to antiquity for the solution of every problem, and consequently allowed literature to sink into mere quotation. 2 --Jacob Burckhardt Various aspects of late antiquity in western Europe and the Florentine Renaissance bear certain similarities which, if properly examined and contextualized, can lead to a deeper understanding of both periods--of their social as well as intellectual significance, of the manner in which politics relates to culture, and [End Page 17] of the relationship between urban life in a specific sort of milieu to the mechanisms of religious and philosophical dynamism. 3 The parallels are not always exact, but various underlying patterns are present. Here the main line of argument will be that a number of aspects of late ancient thought and of Renaissance thought (especially Renaissance Latin literature of all genres) went ignored by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars, thanks to certain underlying assumptions concerning what was appropriate to investigate. These assumptions were themselves related to the combination of two major factors: romantic essentializing ideas about the nature of language, inherited from the Enlightenment, and the development in the nineteenth century of nationalist, evolutionary historiographies. The results of these developments persisted into the twentieth century and can be seen to an extent even today. Nationalist Historiographies and the Problem of Language "Gentlemen, nations are thoughts of God." So Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) used to begin his history courses in Berlin, as Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97) later remembered. 4 While Ranke himself was concerned primarily with documentary history and the evolution of the modern state, he was also part of a larger trend in the German speaking world which sought to identify, in the study of the past, the spirit, or Geist, of a given era or people, a project which had been theorized by Hegel. Ranke and others, like Johann Gustav Droysen and August Böckh, taking their point of departure from Barthold Niebuhr and, more immediately, from Wilhelm von Humboldt, saw themselves as self-consciously transcending Hegel, basing their ideas on documentary sources as opposed to a priori theorizing. 5 But certain assumptions were similar, none more so than presuppositions relating to the Volksgeist. It is not that Ranke was relentlessly teleological; [End Page 18] history was made in the process of the unfolding of events. His primary mission was the documenting and understanding of modernity, a task which, despite their later divergences in practice, Burckhardt shared. 6 The goal was, following Niebuhr's approach in classical studies, to present history in an appealing way and in a manner useful to modernity. 7 This was bound up with a larger set of movements, encompassing the search for national identity and a tendency toward locating essential characteristics of a "people." 8 One of these characteristics was language, and a central preoccupation of scholars became the manner in which culture expressed itself through language, even as philology was becoming "the first historical discipline, the model for all other historical sciences" and the general view of scholarly fields as separate, specialized entities was growing. 9In their concern with language as a vehicle for cultural transmission and as a defining characteristic of a people, nineteenth-century scholars were the heirs of the Enlightenment. Ideas of a plurality of cultures had flourished; as it was put in the Encyclopédie, language expressed the "genius of a people." If... (shrink)

This is a new translation, with running commentary, of what is perhaps the most important short piece of Hegel's writing. The Preface to Hegel's first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, lays the groundwork for all his other writing by explaining what is most innovative about Hegel's philosophy.This new translation combines readability with maximum precision, breaking Hegel's long sentences and simplifying their often complex structure. At the same time, it is more faithful to (...) the original than any previous translation.The heart of the book is the detailed commentary, supported by an introductory essay. Together they offer a lucid and elegant explanation of the text and elucidate difficult issues in Hegel, making his claims and intentions intelligible to the beginner while offering interesting and original insights to the scholar and advanced student. The commentary often goes beyond the particular phrase in the text to provide systematic context and explain related topics in Hegel and his predecessors.The commentator refrains from playing down those aspects of Hegel's thought that are less acceptable in our time, and abstains from mixing his own philosophical preferences with his reading of Hegel's text. His approach is faithful to the historical Hegel while reconstructing Hegel's ideas within their own context. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception - a canonical text of twentieth-century philosophy - concludes with an appeal to 'heroism' by citing a series of enigmatic sentences drawn from Saint-Exupe;ry's Pilote de guerre. Surprisingly, however, these lines are antithetical to the philosophical thrust of Merleau-Ponty's project. This book aims to explain this situation. Foregrounding liminal themes in Merleau-Ponty's thought that have been largely overlooked - e.g., sacrifice, death, myth, faith - and showing how these themes support Merleau-Ponty's reinterpretation of (...) Husserlian phenomenology, Smyth shows that Merleau-Ponty's appeal to 'heroism' represents an extra-philosophical appeal to a historical purposiveness as a universal feature of human nature, and that Merleau-Ponty makes this appeal in virtue of his recognition of the intrinsic methodological limitations of philosophy as a theoretical endeavor. The book thus recovers the 'militant' dimension of Merleau-Ponty's thought. This sheds considerable new light on his work. It does so in a way that challenges some of the basic parameters of existing Merleau-Ponty scholarship by illuminating the intrinsic normativity of his existential phenomenology, and its epistemic reliance on forms of non-reason such as faith and myth. (shrink)

The project of all philosophy may be to gain reconciliation with time, even if not every philosopher has dealt with time expressly. A confrontation with the passing of time and with human finitude runs through the history of philosophy as an ultimate concern. In this genealogy of the concept of temporality, David Hoy examines the emergence in a post-Kantian continental philosophy of a focus on the lived experience of the "time of our lives" rather than (...) on the time of the universe. The purpose is to see how phenomenological and poststructuralist philosophers have tried to locate the source of temporality, how they have analyzed time's passing, and how they have depicted our relation to time once it has been--in a Proustian sense--regained. Hoy engages with competing theoretical tactics for reconciling us to our fleeting temporality, drawing on work by Kant, Heidegger, Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Sartre, Bourdieu, Foucault, Bergson, Deleuze, Žižek, and Derrida. Hoy considers four existential strategies for coping with the apparent flow of temporality, including Proust's passive and Walter Benjamin's active reconciliation through memory, Žižek's critique of poststructuralist politics, Foucault's confrontation with the temporality of power, and Deleuze's account of Aion and Chronos. He concludes by exploring whether a dual temporalization could be what constitutes the singular "time of our lives.". (shrink)

Like Henry Harris, I began doing intensive research on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the mid-sixties. I recall going through all the chapters as a graduate student during one academic year, and looking around for commentaries. The only English-language commentary available was Loewenberg's Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues in the Life of Mind, which was suggestive of the dialectic taking place in the book, but not much help in getting over the “rough spots”. This gave me an incentive (...) to work through Jean Hyppolite's commentary, not yet translated into English, with my basic reading-knowledge of French. My 1976 Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary was one of the first in a long line of Anglophone commentaries. Harris in his introduction to Vol. I. mentions this effort at “analysis”, along with Findlay's “analysis” accompanying the 1977 Miller translation of the Phenomenology, as incentives for the inclusion of his own improved running analysis in the present commentary. I have included discussions of numerous partial or complete commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology in review articles published in 1971 in the American Philosophical Quarterly and Teorema, in 1979 in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and in 1981 in Hegel-Studien. Harris has the advantage of producing the most recent of all these commentaries, and in a way offers us a compendium of everything that has been done on the Phenomenology. His analysis and commentary includes a survey of the literature, in which almost all previous laborers in the field can find themselves commended or criticized in the endnotes. Thus I find comments like “Kainz has completely misunderstood the argument here”, “This is a point which Kainz has grasped more definitely than most commentators”, “[Kainz] does not deserve the brickbat Flay hurls at him”, and so forth. Other commentators, living and dead – Flay, Pöggeler, Navickas, Kenneth and Merold Westphal, Heidegger, Lauer, Werner Becker, Kojève, Wahl, Hyppolite, Labarrière, Bonsiepen, Forster, Shklar, Solomon, Werner Marx, and Robert Williams — are similarly discussed and critiqued. For some of us Anglophone commentators, such remarks may seem like red marks on essays from a patient professor. But certainly no one will mind, since Harris has spent more time and energy on this very specialized project than any of us. In fact, some former commentators almost have a “conflict of interest” in reviewing Harris' work, since so many of us have benefited at various points in our research from Harris' personal support and criticism. But in academics, as in life, mentors cannot always be assured of loyalty. (shrink)

Like Henry Harris, I began doing intensive research on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the mid-sixties. I recall going through all the chapters as a graduate student during one academic year, and looking around for commentaries. The only English-language commentary available was Loewenberg's Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues in the Life of Mind, which was suggestive of the dialectic taking place in the book, but not much help in getting over the “rough spots”. This gave me an incentive (...) to work through Jean Hyppolite's commentary, not yet translated into English, with my basic reading-knowledge of French. My 1976 Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary was one of the first in a long line of Anglophone commentaries. Harris in his introduction to Vol. I. mentions this effort at “analysis”, along with Findlay's “analysis” accompanying the 1977 Miller translation of the Phenomenology, as incentives for the inclusion of his own improved running analysis in the present commentary. I have included discussions of numerous partial or complete commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology in review articles published in 1971 in the American Philosophical Quarterly and Teorema, in 1979 in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and in 1981 in Hegel-Studien. Harris has the advantage of producing the most recent of all these commentaries, and in a way offers us a compendium of everything that has been done on the Phenomenology. His analysis and commentary includes a survey of the literature, in which almost all previous laborers in the field can find themselves commended or criticized in the endnotes. Thus I find comments like “Kainz has completely misunderstood the argument here”, “This is a point which Kainz has grasped more definitely than most commentators”, “[Kainz] does not deserve the brickbat Flay hurls at him”, and so forth. Other commentators, living and dead – Flay, Pöggeler, Navickas, Kenneth and Merold Westphal, Heidegger, Lauer, Werner Becker, Kojève, Wahl, Hyppolite, Labarrière, Bonsiepen, Forster, Shklar, Solomon, Werner Marx, and Robert Williams — are similarly discussed and critiqued. For some of us Anglophone commentators, such remarks may seem like red marks on essays from a patient professor. But certainly no one will mind, since Harris has spent more time and energy on this very specialized project than any of us. In fact, some former commentators almost have a “conflict of interest” in reviewing Harris' work, since so many of us have benefited at various points in our research from Harris' personal support and criticism. But in academics, as in life, mentors cannot always be assured of loyalty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading Hegel’s PhenomenologyTom RockmoreJohn Russon. Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 299. Cloth, $50.00. Paper, $27.95.Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been increasingly studied in ever-greater detail in recent years. In John Russon's interpretive study of Hegel's theories in this book, explanation is tightly constrained by the core argument of its various sections. The text is divided into (...) an introduction and fifteen chapters concerning different aspects of Hegel's great treatise.Russon describes and justifies his strategy in a detailed introduction. Unlike other commentators, Russon focuses on the methods, premises, evidence, reasons and conclusions of Hegel's argument without consideration of the language, allusions and cultural context in which the book was composed. Russon further proceeds through separate studies of the separate sections of Hegel's treatise, which he treats as independent arguments about various aspects of human experience, as opposed to a continuous commentary on the work as a whole.These methodological innovations give Russon's discussion a distinctive character. Hegel stresses the intrinsically historical character of all thought. According to Hegel, all philosophical positions, including his own, belong to the history of philosophy. Treating Hegel's argument without reference to the specific context in which it was formulated makes it more difficult to grasp Hegel's claims. It further creates the illusion that Hegel's theories do not belong to their time and place, or historical moment. Russon's strategy of discussing each section of the Phenomenology as if it stood alone suggests that each is independent of the other and that the overall argument, which other commentators often strive to bring out, is non-existent. Russon emphasizes precisely this point in suggesting that a good reader of the Phenomenology must learn to treat each chapter autonomously. That is a useful hint if it means that Hegel's readers need to take each part of the book seriously and on its own terms. But if it also means that his readers should not be attempting to discern a deep but often elusive structure in the work as a whole, then for many this suggestion would appear to be seriously misleading.Since Hegel is one of most difficult authors in the Western tradition, it is hardly surprising that there is little agreement and much controversy about even basic moves in his arguments in the Phenomenology. Yet one of the more surprising traits of Russon's discussion [End Page 493] is that he simply does not mention well-known accounts of the Phenomenology by such authors as Q. Lauer, H. S. Harris, T. Pinkard, A. Kojève and J. Hyppolite. Russon insists that his intention in writing this book is pedagogical. He suggests that his study is intended to serve as a companion volume in a one-semester course on Hegel's Phenomenology. Each chapter intends to provide a lesson for someone concerned to grasp the argument of the book. Yet the lack of any reference to other such studies makes it not easier but more difficult for the student to evaluate the specific utility of Russon's approach with respect to available alternatives.Russon says that the basic themes of his approach are stated in chapter 11, and his distinctive approach is best brought out in chapter 5. Chapter 11 considers the existential drama of the "Struggle to the Death" as the foundation of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness and intersubjectivity are rooted in the lived body, which Russon regards as central to the development of spirit. According to Russon, unlike many later thinkers, for Hegel, the fact that the themes of language and embodiment are paired, not separable, is central to his position. Russon goes on to argue that the famous discussion of master and slave turns on the problem of communication. He extends this approach to Hegel's treatment of Antigone, which he interprets as depicting the way a social system takes the place of the individual ego in pointing to what he calls an absolute, or dialectical, reading.Chapters 9–11 analyse the argument of Hegel's chapter on spirit. Chapter 9 focuses on "Spirit and Skepticism"; chapter 10... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading Hegel’s PhenomenologyTom RockmoreJohn Russon. Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 299. Cloth, $50.00. Paper, $27.95.Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit has been increasingly studied in ever-greater detail in recent years. In John Russon's interpretive study of Hegel's theories in this book, explanation is tightly constrained by the core argument of its various sections. The text is divided into (...) an introduction and fifteen chapters concerning different aspects of Hegel's great treatise.Russon describes and justifies his strategy in a detailed introduction. Unlike other commentators, Russon focuses on the methods, premises, evidence, reasons and conclusions of Hegel's argument without consideration of the language, allusions and cultural context in which the book was composed. Russon further proceeds through separate studies of the separate sections of Hegel's treatise, which he treats as independent arguments about various aspects of human experience, as opposed to a continuous commentary on the work as a whole.These methodological innovations give Russon's discussion a distinctive character. Hegel stresses the intrinsically historical character of all thought. According to Hegel, all philosophical positions, including his own, belong to the history of philosophy. Treating Hegel's argument without reference to the specific context in which it was formulated makes it more difficult to grasp Hegel's claims. It further creates the illusion that Hegel's theories do not belong to their time and place, or historical moment. Russon's strategy of discussing each section of the Phenomenology as if it stood alone suggests that each is independent of the other and that the overall argument, which other commentators often strive to bring out, is non-existent. Russon emphasizes precisely this point in suggesting that a good reader of the Phenomenology must learn to treat each chapter autonomously. That is a useful hint if it means that Hegel's readers need to take each part of the book seriously and on its own terms. But if it also means that his readers should not be attempting to discern a deep but often elusive structure in the work as a whole, then for many this suggestion would appear to be seriously misleading.Since Hegel is one of most difficult authors in the Western tradition, it is hardly surprising that there is little agreement and much controversy about even basic moves in his arguments in the Phenomenology. Yet one of the more surprising traits of Russon's discussion [End Page 493] is that he simply does not mention well-known accounts of the Phenomenology by such authors as Q. Lauer, H. S. Harris, T. Pinkard, A. Kojève and J. Hyppolite. Russon insists that his intention in writing this book is pedagogical. He suggests that his study is intended to serve as a companion volume in a one-semester course on Hegel's Phenomenology. Each chapter intends to provide a lesson for someone concerned to grasp the argument of the book. Yet the lack of any reference to other such studies makes it not easier but more difficult for the student to evaluate the specific utility of Russon's approach with respect to available alternatives.Russon says that the basic themes of his approach are stated in chapter 11, and his distinctive approach is best brought out in chapter 5. Chapter 11 considers the existential drama of the "Struggle to the Death" as the foundation of self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness and intersubjectivity are rooted in the lived body, which Russon regards as central to the development of spirit. According to Russon, unlike many later thinkers, for Hegel, the fact that the themes of language and embodiment are paired, not separable, is central to his position. Russon goes on to argue that the famous discussion of master and slave turns on the problem of communication. He extends this approach to Hegel's treatment of Antigone, which he interprets as depicting the way a social system takes the place of the individual ego in pointing to what he calls an absolute, or dialectical, reading.Chapters 9–11 analyse the argument of Hegel's chapter on spirit. Chapter 9 focuses on "Spirit and Skepticism"; chapter 10... (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel's first masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit, is one of the great works of philosophy. It remains, however, one of the most challenging and mysterious books ever written. Michael Inwood presents this central work to the modern reader in an intelligible and accurate new translation. This translation attempts to convey, as accurately as possible, the subtle nuances of the original German text. Inwood also provides a detailed commentary that explains what Hegel is saying at (...) each stage of his argument and also discusses the philosophical issues it raises. This volume will therefore prove invaluable to those who want to get to grips with Hegel's thought processes and to follow his complex argument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 226-227 [Access article in PDF] Will Dudley. Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 326. Cloth, $60.00. Clear and concise statements are among the virtues of Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom, beginning with its title. The book develops an account of human freedom through close attention to Hegel's (...) and Nietzsche's thinking. That account affirms philosophy as a liberating activity that makes freedom ever more "comprehensive" by overcoming external constraints, both actual and theoretical. Hegel takes the project of realizing freedom over from Kant, who had himself advanced it beyond the legacy of "liberalism," and Nietzsche is read here as advancing beyond Hegel's perspective. A very considerable clarification of the structure and content of Hegel's thought about freedom is offered in the first four chapters, and many plausible imputations are made in the second four that illuminate important dimensions of Nietzsche's work. Finally, the role of philosophy as liberating activity is revealed in both "systems," albeit in very different conceptions of what that philosophical activity is like.The greatest strength of the book lies in its erudite and lucid unpacking of Hegel's adamantine thought. Abstract expositions of arguments are often accompanied by helpful examples taken from simple, familiar contexts. Unfortunately, the scope of this review is entirely inadequate to even a summary account of the many dialectics which Dudley reveals [End Page 226] in structural transparency, from the freedom of willing in the Philosophy of Right to freedom beyond willing in absolute Spirit. The body of this book contributes an excellent new commentary on Hegel's conception of freedom, while in his footnotes Dudley offers a rich counterpoint to his own themes in frequently lengthy excurses on much of the relevant literature.However, although Dudley notes at the outset (10-11) that Hegel's and Nietzsche's styles are so different as to require a different style of interpretive treatment, he seems to have forgotten this promise by the time he reaches his discussion of Nietzsche. Instead, Dudley breaks arguments down into their various elements, revealing symmetries to obtain between and among these, in the service of a quasi-dialectical method that sees Nietzsche's thought advance by overcoming its own internal inadequacies. Such a method of analysis seems well suited to Hegel, but it is less persuasive in treating Nietzsche's much more amorphous work, especially as any chronological approach to Nietzsche, which might ground such a developmental claim, is explicitly eschewed. Frequent extended quotation of Nietzsche throughout makes that incongruity of styles particularly strident.Dudley's admittedly Hegelian reading (176) of Nietzsche describes an arc of development in strategies for obtaining freedom: from the enslavement to simple material needs in "disgregation" (a coinage of Werner Hamacher's, apparently, who is cited, but not as the source of this term), through the partial freedom of the moral will, to the self-determined noble will, which itself is aufgehoben by the tragic will. The dynamics of this process are complicated, and laying them out constitutes the lion's share of the analysis. One must forge one's own will, we read, by "giving birth to oneself as a living whole," something accomplished by "integrating the chaos that results from the destruction of the moral will." This feat of "integration" is itself first accomplished by giving oneself "customs" which, however, soon become a new form of unfreedom; what ultimately is needed is "a complementary combination of nobility and modernity, of setting oneself apart from and holding oneself open to the chaotic stimuli beyond one's measure" (177). These are just the barest bones on which Dudley hangs a lot of flesh—not all of which appears natural there. Dudley articulates Nietzsche's ideas in sentences like these: "Recall that the sovereign, noble will is the offspring of the genius of giving birth applied by the individual to herself. Now the transformative destruction of this will results from such a reflexive application of the genius of impregnation; the individual transgresses... (shrink)

Michael Forster’s latest book is a comprehensive and illuminating treatment of the basic tasks and strategies of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As the title indicates, Forster is more concerned to elucidate the aims and structure of the Phenomenology as a whole than to reconstruct the claims of specific sections or to provide a chapter-by-chapter commentary. Forster is correct that a coherent and sympathetic account of the Phenomenology’s “official project” is badly needed, and he succeeds admirably (...) in the task he has set for himself. In explicating Hegel’s project Forster draws on an impressive knowledge of Hegel’s early, lesser-known writings, as well as those parts of the history of philosophy that matter most to the Phenomenology. These virtues alone suffice to make the book an indispensable resource for Hegel scholars, as well as for those who are new to his philosophy. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

The Continuous Parameter Estimation Model is applied to develop individual genomic-level heritabilities for the latent hierarchical structure and developmental dynamics of Life History (LH) strategy LH strategies relate to the allocations of bioenergetic resources into different domains of fitness. LH has moderate to high population-level heritability in humans, both at the level of the high-order Super-K Factor and the lower-order factors, the K-Factor, Covitality Factor, and General Factor of Personality (GFP). Several important questions remain unexplored. We developed measures of (...) genome-level heritabilities employing an American sample of 316 monozygotic (MZ) and 274 dizygotic (DZ) twin dyads and a Swedish sample of 863 MZ and 475 DZ twin dyads. This novel heritability index measures individual genetic transmissibility, therefore opening new avenues for analyzing complex interactions among heritable traits inaccessible to standard structural equations methods. For these samples: (1) moderate to high heritability of factor loadings of Super-K on its lower-order factors is demonstrated, evidencing biological preparedness, genetic accommodation, and the gene-culture coevolution of biased epigenetic rules of development; (2) moderate to high heritability of the magnitudes of the effect of the higher-order factors upon their loadings on their constituent factors, evidencing genetic constraints upon phenotypic plasticity; and (3) that heritability of the LH factors, of factor loadings, and of the magnitudes of the correlations among factors are weaker among those with slower LH speeds, demonstrating that inter-individual variation in transmissibility is a function of individual socioecological selection pressures. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Spirit, first published in 1807, is G. W. F. Hegel's remarkable philosophical text that examines the dynamics of human experience from its simplest beginnings in consciousness through its development into ever more complex and self-conscious forms. The work explores the inner discovery of reason and its progressive expansion into spirit, a world of intercommunicating and interacting minds reconceiving and re-creating themselves and their reality. The Phenomenology of Spirit is a notoriously challenging and arduous text (...) that students and scholars have been studying ever since its publication. In this long-awaited translation, Peter Fuss and John Dobbins provide a succinct, highly informative, and readily comprehensible introduction to several key concepts in Hegel's thinking. This edition includes an extensive conceptual index, which offers easy reference to specific discussions in the text and elucidates the more subtle nuances of Hegel's concepts and word usage. This modern American English translation employs natural idioms that accurately convey what Hegel means. Throughout the book, the translators adhered to the maxim: if you want to understand Hegel, read him in the English. This book is intended for intellectuals with a vested interest in modern philosophy and history, as well as students of all levels, seeking to access or further engage with this seminal text. (shrink)

Hegel's 1821 classic offers a comprehensive view of his influential system, in which he applies his most important concept--the dialectics--to law, rights, morality, the family, economics, and the state. The philosopher defines universal right as the synthesis between the thesis of an individual acting in accordance with the law and the occasional conflict of an antithetical desire to follow private convictions. The state, he declares, must permit individuals to satisfy both demands, thereby realizing social harmony and prosperity--the perfect (...) synthesis. Further, Hegel renounces the French Revolution and republican government in favor of an idealized form of a constitutional monarchy, in which ultimate power rests with the sovereign. (shrink)

The following pages attempt to develop the main outlines of an existential phenomenology of law within the context of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phe nomenology of the social world. In so doing, the essay addresses the rather narrow scholarly question, If Merleau-Ponty had written a phenomenology of law, what would it have looked like? But this scholarly enterprise, although impeccable in itself, is also transcended by a more complicated concern for a very different sort of question. Namely, if Merleau-Ponty's (...) phenomenological descriptions of the social world are correct-as I believe they largely are-then what are the philosophical consequences for an adequate understanding of law? Such a project may well occasion a certain surprise amongst observers of the contemporary philosophical landscape, at least in what concerns the terrain of continental thought, and for two different reasons. The first is that, although interest in Merleau-Ponty's work remains strong in the· United States and Can ada, his philosophical standing in his own country has been largely eclipsed! by that of, first, his friend/estranged acquaintance, Jean-Paul Sartre; by various Marxist philosophies and critical social theories; and finally by those doing her meneutics of language. In my view, current neglect of Merleau-Ponty's thought in France is most regrettable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scientific Method in PhilosophyAuthor's note: Thanks to Gregory Landini for helpful clarifications.Gregory Landini. Repairing Bertrand Russell's 1913 Theory of Knowledge. (History of Analytic Philosophy.) London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. x, 397. isbn: 978-3-030-66355-1, us$139 (hb); 978-3-030-66356-8, us$109 (ebook).The title of this book might suggest a rather narrow study of a problem with Russell's Theory of Knowledge and a proposed solution. But as with Landini's first book, Russell's (...) Hidden Substitutional Theory, the title does not capture the full scope of the work. That work did not just point out the lingering substitution theory in Principia, but gave a sweeping view of Russell's overall development from Principles to Principia and one of the most detailed accounts of the formal system in Principia in any work. This work gives a sweeping overview of Russell's philosophy up to 1918, including not just Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgment, but the whole project of what Russell called scientific method in philosophy, which was the subtitle to his 1914 Our Knowledge of the ExternalWorld. Landini thinks this is the height of Russell's philosophy and proposes a fix to the problems which led Russell to abandon the project.Landini does not just present Russell's views during this period, but vigorously defends them, and not just the multiple-relation theory of judgment mostly associated with Theory of Knowledge, but also the views that logic should be understood as synthetic a priori, Russell's doctrine of acquaintance, including the acquaintance with universals as the grounding of synthetic a priori knowledge, and Russell's view that logic is the essence of philosophy. The book contains a wide range of discussions, including issues in philosophy of mind, theories of representation, theories of universals, evolution in philosophy, and the metaphysics of time and space.The book opens with an overview of some main themes, including Landini's view of the three main phases of Russell's post-idealist philosophy and his discussion of what he calls the revolutions in logic and mathematics. The three phases Landini has in mind are the Principles phase, the Principia phase [End Page 81] (which includes The Problems of Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge) and the neutral monist phase, which Landini sees as a mistake Russell made when he didn't see how to repair his 1913 work. According to Landini, the Principles era ends with the failure of the substitution theory from the po /ao paradox, the Principia era ends by 1918 with the abandonment of the attempt to finish the project of the 1913 Theory of Knowledge, and the neutral monist era begins in 1919 and continues through 1948. Landini wants to concentrate on repairing the view in the Principia era. Any remarks of Russell's from later rejecting, for example, his view of the subject, of acquaintance, of neutral monism, and remarks concerning logic as consisting of tautologies are to be rejected. Landini firmly believes that after abandoning the 1913 project, Russell took a wrong turn. Landini's discussion of the multiple-relation theory of judgment is therefore quite different from the other discussion in the literature, in that most commentators have thought Russell was correct in abandoning the theory and most think there is something to Wittgenstein's criticism. Landini thinks Wittgenstein's criticism was based on his new vision of logic, and that Russell should have rejected it and proceeded with the project of Theory of Knowledge.Given the controversies involved in these claims, I think the best way forward is an explication of Landini's new emphasis on the revolutions in logic and mathematics and some of the key claims Landini makes concerning the Principia era. Then we can look at the details of Landini's repairing of the project.the two revolutionsWhat is striking about Landini's more recent work is his emphasis on these two revolutions. One is the revolution within logic, which originates with Frege; the other a revolution in mathematics which originates with Weierstrass, von Staudt, Pieri and Cantor. While most historians of this period are aware of the important shifts... (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse called the preface to Hegel's Phenomenology "one of the greatest philosophical undertakings of all times." This summary of Hegel's system of philosophy is now available in English translation with commentary on facing pages. While remaining faithful to the author's meaning, Walter Kaufmann has removed many encumbrances inherent in Hegel's style.

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions (...) of Self-Consciousness can be considered as having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel. (shrink)

Michael Forster’s latest book is a comprehensive and illuminating treatment of the basic tasks and strategies of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As the title indicates, Forster is more concerned to elucidate the aims and structure of the Phenomenology as a whole than to reconstruct the claims of specific sections or to provide a chapter-by-chapter commentary. Forster is correct that a coherent and sympathetic account of the Phenomenology’s “official project” is badly needed, and he succeeds admirably (...) in the task he has set for himself. In explicating Hegel’s project Forster draws on an impressive knowledge of Hegel’s early, lesser-known writings, as well as those parts of the history of philosophy that matter most to the Phenomenology. These virtues alone suffice to make the book an indispensable resource for Hegel scholars, as well as for those who are new to his philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going to our Happy Place: Idealism, Realism, and Nishida's Eutopia: A Response to Christian UhlChristopher S. Goto-JonesWords can be tricky things; their significance is often found in unexpected places. The word 'utopia,' for example, is usually considered to have originated in the early sixteenth century in Louvain when Thomas More fused two Greek words (ou, 'not,' and topos, 'place'). The result was a new, Greek-sounding compound, utopia, translatable as (...) 'Noplace.' Apparently, it was a small, newly discovered island where people did things differently from Europeans. By a happy coincidence, utopia was almost homophonous with another Greek compound, eutopia, which might be translated as 'Happyplace.' The word has come to be used to describe models of nonexistent societies that are imagined to be better than the ones in which we live.In his stimulating, thorough, and carefully crafted review of my recent book, Political Philosophy in Japan: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and Co-Prosperity, Christian [End Page 482] Uhl makes a great deal of my claim that Nishida's political project was utopian. He also takes issue with my characterization of Nishida as a political idealist. In the interests of clarification and in the spirit of engaged debate, I think that it is important to consider what these important (and often complicated) terms mean. In particular, the idea that 'idealist' and 'utopian' are coterminous should not be allowed to stand unchallenged. In a related way, it may be helpful to clarify what is meant by 'realist' in political thought, since Uhl claims that, far from being an idealist, Nishida was actually a realist "in a very fundamental sense of the word."Uhl is quite right to observe that I identify Nishida's political scheme as utopian in the sense that he provides a model of an ideal society as a means of demonstrating the problems in the society in which he lived.1 However, when it comes to the effectiveness of Nishida's utopian vision qua dissent in wartime Japan (or simply qua practice), the key problem slides from being utopianism itself to idealism. A utopia is an ideal society; the method required to realize that society is not necessarily part of the vision itself, although it may be implied in the structure. Consider a socialist utopia: for Marx, the road to this perfect society was paved by historical materialism; for a number of other socialists (including many Japanese socialists), the route to a broadly similar society was defined in humanist or even idealist terms. In a rather casual sense we might label the later Marx a realist and, say, Kawakami Hajime as an idealist. Nishida's utopia is no simpler,2 although it does, in fact, contain a sense of process: it is defined as a type of self-realization and it is premised upon an underlying faith in the power of the mind to transform both the self and the everyday world.I would contend that Nishida was an idealist (a thinker who works on the principle that the reality in which we live is somehow mind-correlative), although not a simple idealist, and also a political utopian. A number of his students, for example Nishitani and Kōyama, broadly shared their mentor's goals but differed in their construction of the paths to them. The quotation from Nishitani that Uhl selects reveals this clearly: he argues that if we do not "have both feet firmly grounded in the consciousness of the past as well as in the practice of the present, any idea will remain a mere concept, a utopian ideal."3 Nishitani is not taking issue with the utopia; he is challenging the process appropriate to its realization. He argues (in common with many of the other second-generation members of the Kyoto School) that an idealist philosophy that pays no attention to the significance of history can offer no blueprints for the achievement of its ideals in reality. The implied challenge to Nishida's thought here is to his understanding of the forces of historical change: idealist self-power (jiriki) is laid bare as ahistorical and inadequate as an engine for social change. Having said that, however, Nishitani does not make... (shrink)

OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel’s philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of Kant’s critical project. This emphasis on Hegel’s Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions (...) of Self-Consciousness can be considered as having made one of the most influential contributions to this shift. Pippin’s “nonmetaphysical” interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to “thought’s attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at all.” For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating “Kant’s claim about the ‘self-conscious,’ ultimately the ‘spontaneously’ self-conscious, character of all possible experience.” I agree with Pippin that one cannot understand Hegel unless “one understands the Hegelian investment, the original engagement with Kant’s critical philosophy.” I would hold, however, that Pippin’s interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel’s philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the “original source of Hegel’s hermetic claim about thought’s self-determination,” Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that Kant’s transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 33 (summer 2013): 59–94 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036–01631; online 1913–8032 oeviews PRINCIPIA’S SECOND EDITION Russell Wahl English and Philosophy / Idaho State U. Pocatello, id 83209, usa [email protected] Bernard Linsky. The Evolution of Principia Mathematica: Bertrand Russell’s Manuscripts and Notes for the Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2011. Pp. vii, 407; 2 plates. isbn: 978-1-10700-327-9. (...) £96; us$159. ussell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica was a pioneering work which was in many ways overtaken by the success of the new discipline it helped found. There is little doubt that Principia Mathematica was one of the most important works in the development of symbolic logic, as even Quine, one of the critics of the foundations proposed in it, said: “This is the book that has meant the most to me.”Yet few mathematicians or logicians follow the theory of types proposed in Principia as the foundation of mathematics, nor the logicist project of which it is a variant. While much of Principia ’s notation has been incorporated into modern formal logic and set theory, much of it also is dated and not easy for contemporary mathematicians and logicians to read. Among those who were dissatisfied with the philosophical foundations of the first edition were the authors themselves.1 During 1923 and 1924 Russell revised and updated Principia, and the second edition of the first volume appeared in 1925 with the other two volumes appearing in 1927. What resulted was a new edition with the philosophical underpinning modi- fied, but with the superstructure, that is, the resulting theorems of the three volumes, unchanged. Russell wrote a new Introduction and added three Appendices, but other than that made only minor changes.The new philosophy of logic had as its core idea a principle of extensionality which Russell expressed as the view that “functions of propositions are always truth-functions and a function can only occur in a proposition through its values” (PM2 1: ______ 1 Russell wrote the new material for the second edition, but it is clear from a letter to him byWhitehead on 24 May 1923, quoted by Linsky, that he, too, thought the foundational system needed tweaking: “I don’t think that ‘types’ are quite right” (p. 16). o= 60 Reviews xiv). It is interesting that at times Russell seems to have been hesitant about even endorsing this change.2 The second edition of Principia has not been well received; by and large it has either been ignored or scorned. Linsky cites especially negative remarks by Monk, but others have dismissed the second edition additions and it has generally been thought a failure since 1944, when Gödel pointed out an error in the Appendix B proof that mathematical induction can be “rectified” even without the axiom of reducibility. The Evolution of Principia Mathematica makes available to scholars Russell’s notes and manuscripts of the new material added to the second edition. Linsky also seeks to redress the indifference to the second edition, to set the record straight about several misunderstandings, and to give an account of the new material.The book he has produced will be very valuable to scholars of Russell and to anyone interested in the development of type theory and indeed of logic as a whole during this time. This is also a difficult book, both because the material can get quite technical at times and also because the new material included in the introduction to the second edition is somewhat sketchy, and there are philosophical and technical points about which Russell himself is less than clear. As a result there have been disagreements about how the second edition is best to be interpreted. Linsky recognizes that the interpretive issues are under-determined by the text and wants to stay relatively neutral with respect to the different alternatives about the various controversies. At times it can be difficult to keep the various positions straight.The difficulty lies with the material, and Linsky does a very good job of explaining the issues to the layman. The work is divided into... (shrink)

Alfred Schutz identified two different approaches to the problem of intersubjectivity. The first is the transcendental, which maintains the primacy of subjectivity, and identifies the problem of the other as a transcendental problem. For example, in Husserl’s phenomenological idealism, all meaning is relative to a transcendental constituting subject. Hence the “problem of intersubjectivity” is to show how the other comes to be constituted, comes to be meant as a sense. The difficulty with such an approach is that if the (...) other is a meaning relative to and analogous to the constituting subject, the transcendence and irreducibility of the other to consciousness seem to be undermined. Transcendental idealism never reaches the “other” because the other is precisely what I do not constitute, but can only encounter. The recognition of the inadequacy of the transcendental approach leads to a second, namely, the other is encountered on the basis and background of the natural attitude and/or life-world. When the transcendental approach is abandoned, the “problem of the other” turns into a series of descriptions of either encounters or social situations. Ontology is replaced by critical theory of society. In either case, an ontology of intersubjectivity seems to be excluded. (shrink)

This paper explores the human significance of crack cocaine abuse by submitting its manifestation (logos) to existential-phenomenological analysis. The author conducted over fifty, first-hand interviews of recovering and active crack cocaine abusers toward disclosing the meaning of his to-be.What is revealed is the way the addiction reacts upon the with-structure of existence. Active crack cocaine addiction is being-high-and-free-of-craving. The singularity of this event eclipses the interhuman significance that substantially constitutes concern, as the meaning and Being of There-being, and (...) radicalizes existence such that the “other” is unceasingly projected as a means to free transcendence. The crack abuser forsakes the existentials being-with and There-being-with-others, ways of to-be that accommodate and gear into the existence of “others,” to being-with-crack, a way of Being that is exclusively for the sake of the dependent’s “self.”. (shrink)