A project conceiving of political assemblages as anything larger than just an object of intellectual history will have to face a question—what is the potential scope and entailments of the idea of political assemblages outside of the very specific late twentieth-century milieu that it was conceived in? And given the present moment, there is also is much more specific question that should well be taken up: what place any project organized as a political assemblage could have in an era of (...) global capitalist accelerated economic inequalities and anthropocentric warming? Drawing on debates in contemporary social and cultural anthropology about Dumont, hierarchy, actor-network theory, and ontology, this essay... (shrink)

This paper outlines and defends a notion of ‘tragic-remorse’. This moral emotion properly accompanies those actions that involve unavoidable moral wrongdoing in general and dirty hands scenarios in particular. Tragic-remorse differs both phenomenologically and conceptually from regret, agent-regret and remorse. By recognising the existence of tragic-remorse, we are better able to account for our complex moral reality which at times makes it necessary for good persons to act in ways that although justified leave the agent with a (...) moral stain and a particular emotional response. (shrink)

This paper outlines and defends a notion of 'tragic-remorse'. This moral emotion properly accompanies those actions that involve unavoidable moral wrongdoing in general and dirty hands scenarios in particular. Tragic-remorse differs both phenomenologically and conceptually from regret, agent-regret and remorse. By recognising the existence of tragic-remorse, we are better able to account for our complex moral reality which at times makes it necessary for good persons to act in ways that although justified leave the agent with a (...) moral stain and a particular emotional response. (shrink)

Is it possible to preserve national security through ethical policies? Richard Ned Lebow seeks to show that ethics are actually essential to the national interest. Recapturing the wisdom of classical realism through a close reading of the texts of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Hans Morgenthau, Lebow argues that, unlike many modern realists, classic realists saw close links between domestic and international politics, and between interests and ethics. Lebow uses this analysis to offer a powerful critique of post-Cold War American foreign policy. (...) He also develops an ontological foundation for ethics and makes the case for an alternate ontology for social science based on Greek tragedy's understanding of life and politics. This is a topical and accessible book, written by a leading scholar in the field. (shrink)

After 350 years of continual social transformations under the push of industrialization, capitalism, world-wide social revolutions, and the development of modern science, what reasonably remains of the traditional faith in divine transcendence and providential design except a deep-felt, almost 'ontological' yearning for transcendence? Torn between outmoded religious traditions and an ascendant secular world, the contemporary celebration of individuality only makes more poignant the need for precisely that religious consolation that public life increasingly denies. People must now confront the meaning of (...) their lives without the assured aid of transcendent purpose and direction. The resulting sense of absence profoundly marks the contemporary world. Confronted with the theoretical problems posed by the absence of absolute values, and the historical problems posed by contemporary social movements, Camus dramatized the urgency of developing guides to humane conduct in a world without transcendence. He continued to believe that only when the dignity of the worker and the respect for intelligence are accorded their rightful place can human existence hope to realize its highest ideals, and our life find the collective meaning and purpose that alone can truly sustain us in the face of an infinite and indifferent universe. (shrink)

Human existence is a reality built on paradoxical structures. Existence takes place in the state of balance between these structures on its ground. Since man is in a constant state of being the states of equilibrium that take place on the ontological ground are constantly pregnant with new states of equilibrium. Whatever the subject of human-related research is to be done, it is necessary to look for a basis in these structures the issue of sin or existential crime is also (...) based on these structures in terms of its ontological background. In our study, the processes by which the rhythm states of the structures in question, which occur in situations of conflict and harmony, produce an unreal existence, that is, existential crime, have been handled. The issue of existential crime is mostly depicted from the perspective of the existentialist approach and in its onto-theological context. The main motive that makes the study important for us is related to the relation of existential crime and/or sin to human existence itself from an existential perspective. While dealing with the issue of existential crime, the picture of the issue has been tried to be presented with a more descriptive method, and various analyzes have been made where necessary. The freedom-destiny paradox has attached the tragic to human existence, and as a result, the sin situation caused by the hopelessness and anxiety in the tragic has been encountered. The dynamic-form conflict has attached the dramatic to human existence, and the sinfulness that seeks pleasure from the meaninglessness and emptiness caused by the pain in the dramatic has emerged. The conflict of individuality-participation, on the other hand, has attached the tragicomic to human existence, and the sinfulness of the ego based on self-deception arising from the identity problem caused by the tragicomic has emerged. The argument that all this is based on and that we want to be seen is that sin does not originate from some superficial motives, but from its dyadic structure, which is the ground of human existence, and on the other hand, an ontological background that expresses necessity for its existence. To sin can make a person guilty, but the existence of the possibility to sin is an existential vacancy that makes man a free being and expresses necessity for the realization of existence. (shrink)

Matthew Tones examines the early ontological development of the tragic disposition in Nietzsche's analysis of the pre-Platonic Greeks and its influence on Nietzsche's quest to discover a future nobility. This book fuses the popular reading of Nietzsche as a naturalist with noble creative impulses to reveal further complexities in his mature work.

There are those who say that the changes in the position of Jean-Paul Sartre from the publication of L'Être et le néant to the appearance of Critique de la raison dialectique constitute a “radical conversion”. Some attribute this conversion to the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Sartre has given support to this claim by acknowledging that Merleau-Ponty taught him politics and in doing so helped to move Sartre from the fierce individualism of his early period to the position which culminated in (...) CRD, a position informed by a much greater appreciation for social entanglement. But what is not clear is that Merleau-Ponty's influence upon Sartre extended to Sartre's fundamental convictions, particularly to his fundamental ontological theses. Kwant tells us that Merleau-Ponty's objections to Sartre in the last days of his life indicate that he believed that Sartre had not altered his ontological views. Sartre has not commented upon that issue. It is of vital interest because Merleau-Ponty explicitly claimed in Les Aventures de la dialectique that Sartre's mistaken political views were a consequence of his mistaken ontological principles. Were this true and were it true that Sartre had not made significant alterations in his ontology, one would expect that Merleau-Ponty would have to have said that Sartre's political views in CRD were similarly mistaken. We know that he did make some comments to that effect but, since Merleau-Ponty's tragic death prevented the full articulation of his latest opinions, we cannot be certain. (shrink)

The prevalence of dementia is increasing worldwide but there is still no hope of a cure. Huge resources go into biomedical research, whose reductive ‘enactment’ has severe consequences for women, who are predominantly affected by dementia. To challenge such tragic enactment, this article considers ‘multiple ontologies’ of the most common type of dementia – Alzheimer’s disease – in the popular fictional film adaptations Still Alice and A Song for Martin. Using a post-humanist account of feminist visual studies of technoscience, (...) this comparative film analysis reveals how gender supersedes AD oversteering the hierarchical dualisms between health and pathology, human and nonhuman, and biomedical and artistic modes of knowing about Alzheimer’s. The author argues that these films stress the potential of the arts, as a multisensorial post-humanist embodied state of becoming with AD, to challenge hierarchical dualisms and innovatively contribute to dementia care. (shrink)

Important to the essays here is the possibility of using logos without the negative, restricting and violent aspects of logos. In this respect I speak about affirmation and about tragic awareness rather than about the tragic itself or tragic conflict, as I read texts of a literary democracy that is already here, texts by Don DeLillo, Tomas Transtromer, John Ashbery and Thanasis Valtinos, or see arrangements by Lo Snofall. Indeed it is all about arrangements, about knowing how (...) to affirm and doing it rather than using language and its codes in order to transcribe, however accurate this might be. Arrangements say yes, since they do not raise any absolute boundaries. The arrangement is a logos without logos: it is a cosmos, where affirming is a tragically aware cosmetics. Cosmos is neither the world nor any ordering or embellishment of this world, but an openness as the incalculable accumulation of arrangements that say yes in their awareness that they do not amount to an ontology. (shrink)

Throughout his work Hegel distinguishes between the notion of an act from the standpoint of the agent and that of all other standpoints. He terms the formerHandlung and the latterTat. This distinction should not be confused with the contemporary one between action andmerebodily movement. For one, bothHandlungandTatare aspects of conduct that results from the will,viz. Tun. Moreover, Hegel's taxonomy is motivated purely by concerns relating to modes of perception. So whereas theorists such as Donald Davidson assert thatallactions are events that (...) are intentional under some description, Hegel reserves the term ‘action’ for those aspects of behaviour that are highlighted by a specific set of agent-related descriptions. This is not an ontological category, since there are no such objects as actions-under-specific-descriptions.Sophocles'sTheban Trilogyreveals the central role that these notions must play in any Hegelian understanding of tragic drama. Indeed the contrasts that matter most to Hegel's general take on both epic and tragic poetry are more closely related to the study of action than the standard theory attributed to Hegel would seem to allow. It is more fruitful, then, to incorporate Hegel's insights into such tragedies to the model of action employed by him than it is to try to make them fit whatever ‘theory’ of tragedy might appear to be hinted at in hisAesthetics. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Cornelius Castoriadis both understood Greek tragedy in relation to a political rupture in the Athenian world, a rupture containing insights into the ontological grounding of human beings. This paper critically explores the role of 'the Greeks' in Heidegger and Castoriadis' political thought, drawing implications for the availability of the Greeks for any philosophical thinking. After his infamous Rectoral Address in 1933 Heidegger turned explicitly to Greek tragedy in his lectures at Freiburg ( Introduction to Metaphysics and Hölderlin’s (...) Hymn ) to search for resources that might prove fundamental to instigating a new political era. However, he constructed a transcultural notion of 'the Greeks' at the expesnse of seeing tragedy as the development of a public institution that facilitated the criticism of the shared values and ideas of a particular historical epoch. Castoriadis, on the other hand, saw tragedy not simply as an awareness of the groundlessness of human society, but as the ceaseless questioning of what society is for. For Castoriadis, the Greeks are present to us in the same political rupture we experience today. In this paper I will argue that Castoriadis is more successful than Heidegger in developing an account of human creativity that holds open the problematic relation between the created world and human beings, though not without significant problems. I will conclude by suggesting that Euripides, a tragedian overlooked by Castoriadis, can supply some critical recouses for addressing them. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger and Cornelius Castoriadis both understood Greek tragedy in relation to a political rupture in the Athenian world, a rupture containing insights into the ontological grounding of human beings. This paper critically explores the role of 'the Greeks' in Heidegger and Castoriadis' political thought, drawing implications for the availability of the Greeks for any philosophical thinking. After his infamous Rectoral Address in 1933 Heidegger turned explicitly to Greek tragedy in his lectures at Freiburg to search for resources that might (...) prove fundamental to instigating a new political era. However, he constructed a transcultural notion of 'the Greeks' at the expesnse of seeing tragedy as the development of a public institution that facilitated the criticism of the shared values and ideas of a particular historical epoch. Castoriadis, on the other hand, saw tragedy not simply as an awareness of the groundlessness of human society, but as the ceaseless questioning of what society is for. For Castoriadis, the Greeks are present to us in the same political rupture we experience today. In this paper I will argue that Castoriadis is more successful than Heidegger in developing an account of human creativity that holds open the problematic relation between the created world and human beings, though not without significant problems. I will conclude by suggesting that Euripides, a tragedian overlooked by Castoriadis, can supply some critical recouses for addressing them. (shrink)

If, as I propose, Hecuba represents fate and Medea contingency, taken together they constitute as well as reveal the tragic within the tension between the ontological and empirical status of man as it is embodied in the clash between necessity and freedom. Viewing this tension within the perspective of the unconditional status of the love of the mother, I will show how both narratives belong to the realm of possibilities and cause, what Ricoeur calls “suffering for the sake of (...) understanding”. I will argue that the phenomenon of the unconditional love of the mother is in itself tragic and open to both the appearance of both Medea and Hecuba. (shrink)

If, as I propose, Hecuba represents fate and Medea contingency, taken together they constitute as well as reveal the tragic within the tension between the ontological and empirical status of man as it is embodied in the clash between necessity and freedom. Viewing this tension within the perspective of the unconditional status of the love of the mother, I will show how both narratives belong to the realm of possibilities and cause, what Ricoeur calls “suffering for the sake of (...) understanding”. I will argue that the phenomenon of the unconditional love of the mother is in itself tragic and open to both the appearance of both Medea and Hecuba. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 285 than" which is both immanent and transcendent, a kind of "coincidentia oppositorum" beyond logic and definition. It is the realm of the "person" within which, although the tragic conflict is not resolved, there arises the free self from whose non-dual perspective the unity and eternity of life are seen. Within this realm the individual gains an illumination the result of which is "amor fad," his (...) free decision to affirm his being. In this act of decision lies the "meaning" and "value" of life. The substance and point of Miss Bauer's book is to show the connection between the metaphysical ground of Simmel's concept of the tragic and its manifestations in different aspects of human experience. Her account is especially interesting in her chapter on the "tragic opposition" in which as an example of a tragic personality she cites Socrates who, by his refusal to flee from his prison, freely embraced his fate and, by choosing to die, confirmed his decisive, binding truth that the heavenly powers remain silent to the questions asked by a doubting and despairing humanity. His act declares that the individual must really stand alone in the world, taking counsel only from himself. Miss Bauer's book is written with a sympathetic understanding of Simmel's philosophy. By opening our eyes to the significant in human existence she succeeds in showing file relevance of his thought to our time. RIA STAVR1DES Vassar College Dialogo con Maurizio Blondel. By Michele Federico Sciacca. (Milano: Carlo Marzorati Editore, 1962. Pp. 159. L. 1300.) Sciacca has gathered here various articles which he had written about Blondel as well as new notes about this French thinker. Blondel struggled against the cult of science seeking to vindicate man's religious needs. Man longs for an end which transcends the natural order. Hence philosophy cannot ignore religion which points to a supernatural human destiny. According to Blondel, God is the only Word which answers the search of man and makes his action both fruitful and progressive. PAUL T. FUHRMANN Columbia Theological Seminary Essays in Ontology. By E. G. Allaire, M. Brodbeck, R. Grossman, H. Hochberg, R. G. Turnbull. Vol. I, Iowa Publications in Philosophy. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. Pp. 216.) Essays in Ontology is the introductory volume of a new series of monographs to be published by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. The first volume, as its title indicates, is a collection of essays whose authors are closely affiliated with the Iowa Philosophy Department, being faculty members there now (Allaire and Turnbull) or former students (Hochberg, Grossman, and Brodbeck). Considered as a representative display of talent, the collection is somewhat unbalanced, since twelve of the fourteen papers are by three of the contributors, Allaire, Grossman, and Hochberg, while the other two are contributed by Brodbeck and Turnbull. It is also a matter of some disappointment that eleven of the fourteen papers have seen the light of print elsewhere; although this feeling is somewhat offset by the impact of sustained inquiry into one philosophical problem which the papers make when brought together in this way. The three new papers are "Particulars and 286 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Time" and "Common Names" by Grossman, and "The Tractatus: Nominalistic or Realistic?" by Allaire. With the exception of May Brodbeck's elegant analysis of John Dewey's philosophy, Edwin Allaire's article on Berkeley, and Herbert Hochberg's disquisition on Quine's supposed rejection of mental entities, all the essays concern themselves, in one way or another, with the problem of universals. Sometimes the problem is looked at independently of any historical context--as in the first seven papers---or as emerging from such a historical setting, as in Robert Turnbull's tightly argued discussion of Ockham's logic, Reinhardt Grossman's investigation into Frege's ontology, and Herbert Hochberg's article on the status of the "non-natural properties" mentioned by G. E. Moore in his early works. There is thus a common core of subject matter in the collection; but even beyond that, the papers reveal a tightly knit community of philosophical opinion. The writers share a common outlook on what the problem of universals is... (shrink)

A review of U. Mäki (ed.). Fact and Fiction in Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. pp. xvi 384. ISBN 0521 00957. As people interested mainly in theory, methodologists and philos...

A review of Patrick O’Connor’s Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned. O’Connor argues that McCarthy is a literary philosopher of tragic ontology. While acknowledging that tragic ontology is a powerful lens for analyzing McCarthy, whose characters are unwitting heirs of generations of human and a-human forces, the review also points to the problems with reading McCarthy as a philosopher of mitigated salvation or redemption, proposing that he is better understood as a pessimist who (...) reveals the lie of progress. (shrink)

The paper begins with a more carefully stated version of ontologically neutral (ON) logic, originally introduced in (Hailperin, 1997). A non-infinitistic semantics which includes a definition of potential infinite validity follows. It is shown, without appeal to the actual infinite, that this notion provides a necessary and sufficient condition for provability in ON logic.

The ontological status of sport: Weiss, P. Records and the man. Schacht, R. L. On Weiss on records, athletic activity, and the athlete. Fraleigh, W. P. On Weiss on records and on the significance of athletic records. Stone, R. E. Assumptions about the nature of movement. Suits, B. The elements of sport. Kretchmar, S. Ontological possibilities: sport as play. Morgan, W. An existential phenomenological analysis of sport as a religious experience. Fraleigh, W. P. The moving "I." Fraleigh, W. P. Some (...) meanings of the human experience of freedom and necessity in sport. Keenan, F. W. The concept of doing.--The ethical status of sport: Keating, J. W. The ethics of competition and its relation to some moral problems in ahtletics. Sadler, W. A., Jr. A contextual approach to an understanding of competition: a response to Keating's philosophy of athletics. Osterhoudt, R. G. On Keating on the competitive motif in athletics and playful activity. Suits, B. The grasshopper: a thesis concerning the moral idea of man. Broekhoff, J. Sport and ethics in the context of culture. Zeigler, E. F. The pragmatic (experimentalistic) ethic as it relates to sport and physical education. Roberts, T. J. and Galasso, P. J. The fiction of morally indifferent acts in sport. Osterhoudt, R. G. The Kantian ethic as a principle of moral conduct in sport and athletics. Thomas, C. E. Do you "wanna" bet: an examination of player betting and the integrity of the sporting event.--The aesthetic status of sport: Kuntz, P. G. The aesthetics of sport. Keenan, F. W. The athletic contest as a "tragic" form of art. Osterhoudt, R. G. An Hegelian interpretation of art, sport, and athletics. (shrink)

One of the most enigmatic and inevitably most suggestive words that Hölderlin’s philosophical work delivers to us is the neologism introduced in the summer of 1799: aorgisch, aorgic. A principle that is both ontological and mimetic, the aorgic undoubtedly represents the presence of the sublime in Hölderlin, albeit concealed terminologically, but also a particular declination that makes it not always easy to assimilate to the theories of the eighteenth-century and romantic sublime. This paper attempts to probe the role played by (...) the aorgic in the configuration of an aesthetics of the tragic by considering two precise moments: the writing, Grund zum Empedokles, which seeks to give speculative legitimacy to the unfinished tragedy on Empedocles, and the notes that accompanied the translations of Sophocles that Hölderlin published in 1804. Interpreted as the dimension of the formless, but also of the possible, the aorgic is necessarily thought by Hölderlin always next to its opposite pole, the organic, that is the dimension of the human in the broad sense (art, culture, history). The relationship between these two poles is not only dialectical, along the lines of Fichte’s Wechselwirkung, but also analogical, recovering that relationship between physis and techne that Aristotle had already indicated in the second book of Physics. The aorgic therefore represents the necessary alienation to which nature is subjected in order to become culture (or art), a passage that, from the point of view of traditional aesthetic categories, could be read as the transition from the (natural) unrepresentability of the sublime to the (cultural) configuration of the beautiful: from chaos to form. (shrink)

The article examines the French philosopher Jean Brun’s perception of the contemporary world, by analyzing the three pivotal components of Brun’s work, i.e., technology, language and sacredness. Modern people’s desperate attempts to escape their tragic destiny by trying to conceal the sacred lull human beings into an illusion of becoming creators of a technology-ruled space. In an attempt to escape the web of metaphysical anxiety associated with regrets, ontological Absence and separation, modern people hope to shelter behind the shield (...) of materialism, horizontality and relativism. The article shows that, according to Jean Brun, technology and science are nothing but a veil, a painted veil with a sophisticated image of human deification. In an attempt at self-transformation, human beings, enslaved by technology, become the measure of all things. In their pursuit of absolute and ultimate knowledge, people focus their self-transformation on being rather than on cognition. Technology nurtured by excessive knowledge inevitably provokes alienation and robs humankind of humanistic, philosophical and religious sense. Finding themselves in an artificial, virtual reality where consumption and greed prevail, people easily reject objective reality. The instrumentalization of language enables standards and programs to plan all human activity. However, asking the question “Who am I?” instead of “What am I?”, human beings can cease seeing themselves in the center of the universe, can stop the process of alienation, can assess the world’s reality and the appeal of Everything Else. (shrink)

Lukács' last work, The Ontology of Social Being (written between 1963 and 1968, rewritten since and left incomplete) is a monumental and tragic document of an era that seems long past, that of the rebirth of Marxism. De-Stalinization provided Lukács with a fresh dynanism. During those years, he returned to his Heidelberg Aesthetics, a large, systematic effort started during his youth. The first of the three volumes projected on Marxist aesthetics, The Specificity of the Aesthetic, was completed around (...) 1960 and published in 1963. A project on ethics followed immediately. But in a letter May 10, 1960, to Ernst Fischer, Lukács wrote of a difficult transition to the new work: “I now find myself in the transition phase that follows giving birth. (shrink)

This article focuses both on the multifarious personality of Jos Decorte and on the primary themes that recur throughout his writings in light of his death in a tragic traffic accident fourteen years ago. Being a scholar in medieval philosophy, Decorte’s main purpoie was not only to rehabilitate the pivotal role that each of the aforementioned thinkers played within the evolution of medieval philosophy, but to apply their insights to contemporary problems as well. To that end, he wished to (...) transform Henry of Ghent’s ontology of relations and Cusanus’ conjectural ontology into subtler forms that could be adjusted to the predicaments of twentieth century philosophy. Wavering between the tradition of metaphysics and that of negative theology, he defined his own project as striving towards an ideal that, albeit not rationally grounded, could give rise to different and interrelated ramifications of rationality. Finally, it is shown how that ideal was reflected in his strong engagement, alike in his personal and in academic life. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe (...) that Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

Ever since Plato, a tragic conception of the human self has been the point de depart of moral and political philosophy: the I and the we belong to one another yet oppose each other. Ancients such as Aristotle contended that the we is ontologically prior and moderns such as Hobbes that the I is ontologically prior. I make the case that Jesus Christ realised an ontology which collapses this dichotomy: the human self is neither I nor we, but (...) fundamentally I-we. I demonstrate that this is an ontology of gift-dynamics, made explicit in the mythical complex of the cult centring on Jesus Christ, and engraved unto this cult's heart through ritual. (shrink)

Ever since Plato, a tragic conception of the human self has been the point de depart of moral and political philosophy: the I and the we belong to one another yet oppose each other. Ancients such as Aristotle contended that the we is ontologically prior and moderns such as Hobbes that the I is ontologically prior. I make the case that Jesus Christ realised an ontology which collapses this dichotomy: the human self is neither I nor we, but (...) fundamentally I-we. I demonstrate that this is an ontology of gift-dynamics, made explicit in the mythical complex of the cult centring on Jesus Christ, and engraved unto this cult's heart through ritual. (shrink)