In Modern Isonomy distinguished political theorist Gerald Stourzh develops the idea of "isonomy" or a system of equal rights for all, as an alternative to the concept of "democracy." The ideal for Stourzh is a state, and indeed a world, in which individual rights, including the right to participate in politics equally, are clearly defined, and possessed by all, as the core of a real democratic system. Stourzh begins with ancient Greek thought contrasting isonomy--which is associated with the rule (...) of the many--with oligarchies and monarchies, pursuing the implications of these different forms for the rights accorded to individuals. He moves on through history to discuss the American experiment with the development of representative democracy as well as the French revolution, after which the idea that rights should not be influenced by the status of the individual became the bedrock of a democratic system. But progress on the creation and protection of individual rights for all has been uneven. Democratic systems themselves often limit the scope of rights, particularly rights to participate in the political system. Stourzh brings this learned exploration forward to the discussions of human rights and democracy in the postwar period, with the end of the colonial empires and the fall of fascist dictatorships. He demonstrates how deeply intertwined equal rights for all, under law, as a concept and practice are with the development of democracy. He then explores the challenges to the idea of equal rights posed by economic inequality and the demands of the "security state" and concludes with a discussion of universal human rights which, under his idea of isonomy, will require bodies superior to nation-states to enforce. (shrink)

This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a (...) very different idiom and intellectual context. Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the 'three H's' - Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the 'three masters of suspicion' - Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The 'internal' intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill's best-known work is On Liberty. In it he declared that Western society was in danger of coming to a standstill. This was an extraordinarily pessimistic claim in view of Britain's global dominance at the time and one that has been insufficiently investigated in the secondary literature. The wanting model was that of China, a once advanced civilization that had apparently ossified. To understand how Mill came to this conclusion requires one to investigate his notion of the stages (...) from barbarism to civilization, and also his belief in imperialism as part of the civilizing process. Here India plays a central role, as both Mill and his father worked for the East India Company. This study, then, investigates the relationship between Mill's liberalism and his justification of imperialism. It takes us into the Utilitarianism of his family background, and such other influences as Romanticism, Scottish political economy and such key French thinkers as Saint- Simon, Guizot, Comte and Tocqueville. Mill, then, provides the focus of a debate on the origins, meaning, and consequences of Western civilization. It encompasses discourses on colonialism and orientalism, on Enlightenment optimism and conservative despair, on the need for leadership and the advance of democracy; in short, on the blessings, curses and dangers of modernization from approximately the time of the American and French revolutions to that of the so-called mid-Victorian calm in which On Liberty was written. Furthermore, current political issues concerning the West and Islamic countries have heightened interest in just the kind of question that this book discusses: that of how the West relates to, and assesses, the rest of the world. (shrink)

This is a critical introduction to modern French philosophy, commissioned from one of the liveliest contemporary practitioners and intended for an English-speaking readership. The dominant 'Anglo-Saxon' reaction to philosophical development in France has for some decades been one of suspicion, occasionally tempered by curiosity but more often hardening into dismissive rejection. But there are signs now of a more sympathetic interest and an increasing readiness to admit and explore shared concerns, even if these are still expressed in a (...) very different idiom and intellectual context. Vincent Descombes offers here a personal guide to the main movements and figures of the last forty-five years. He traces over this period the evolution of thought from a generation preoccupied with the 'three H's' - Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, to a generation influenced since about 1960 by the 'three masters of suspicion' - Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. In this framework he deals in turn with the thought of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the early structuralists, Foucault, Althusser, Serres, Derrida, and finally Deleuze and Lyotard. The 'internal' intellectual history of the period is related to its institutional setting and the wider cultural and political context which has given French philosophy so much of its distinctive character. (shrink)

The contents of Brahmajnaana, the Buddhism, the Jainism, the Sabdabrahma Siddhanta and Shaddarsanas will be discussed to present the true meaning of individual’s identity and I. The influence of spirituality contained in Upanishadic insight in the development of Sanskrit language structure, Indian culture, and individual identity formation will be developed. The cultural and psychological aspects of a civilization on the formation of its language structure and prominence given to various parts of speech and vice versa will be touched upon. These (...) aspects will be also compared and contrasted with German, French, Telugu and Hindi and their respective influence on cultural and identity formation and vice versa. A cognitive science interpretation of advaita and dvaita phases of mind and bhakti and vibhakti modes of language acquisition and communication in terms of physics and electronics will be given and be clubbed to present an inclusive and comprehensive modern scientific and social scientific understanding and interpretation of Brahmajnaana, the Buddhism, the Jainism and rest of current theistic and atheistic awareness of I and its spiritual, linguistic, cognitive scientific and rationalistic ideas and opinions. The use of this study for national integration and oneness of Indians will be highlighted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophers and the Bible: The Debate on Sacred Scripture in Early Modern Thought ed. by Antonella Del Prete, Anna Lisa Schino, and Pina TotaroPiet SteenbakkersAntonella Del Prete, Anna Lisa Schino, and Pina Totaro, editors. The Philosophers and the Bible: The Debate on Sacred Scripture in Early Modern Thought. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 333. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Pp. xiv + 303. Hardback, €135.16.This volume has (...) its origins in an international conference held in May 2019 in Rome and Viterbo. In its scope and approach, it surpasses the average volume of conference proceedings, owing to the editors' wise decision to invite additional papers to enhance its thematic coherence. Even with this expansion, they managed to get the book published within fifteen months—a remarkable achievement. Apart from chapters 12 and 13, which are in French, the volume is entirely in English. Most authors are proficient enough, but there are occasional slips, for instance, redundant definite articles ("the scripture" [61], "truths of the faith" [251]) or mistranslations ("prevent men from attacking and killing themselves" instead of "… killing each other" [87]).The generous bibliographies, one for every chapter, are a treasure trove. They are up to date and mostly well balanced. Taking into account that all but two of the authors are Italian, the literature referred to is impressively international in scope—more so than one usually sees in edited volumes, where English rules supreme. Chapters 1 and 3, which deal with Italian philosophers, have few non-Italian titles, and chapter 9 (on Pascal) few non-French titles.Textbook histories of philosophy pay little or no attention to what philosophers have said about the Bible: as a matter of course, the subject is assigned to the realm of theology and religion. As the editors rightly point out in their introduction (1–2), that is to ignore the massive presence of Scripture in Western culture. They even speak of the "biblical foundations" of early modern and contemporary thought (2). While that appraisal may seem exaggerated, they certainly have a point when they insist on the far-reaching and lasting influence of the Bible on Western thought—science and philosophy included. That the subject has been overlooked by historians of philosophy may in part be due to the academic division of labor with its rigid demarcations between disciplines and a near absolute divide between sciences and humanities. This distorts our view of the early modern period, when these qualifications had not yet been coined and demarcations between what would become separate disciplines were altogether fluid. Those who are now called "scientists" were formerly known as "natural philosophers." The present volume therefore deals not only with [End Page 325] Ficino, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Conway, Pascal, Wolff, and other thinkers now primarily classified as philosophers, but also with Galileo (though not directly addressed, "the 'Galileo affair' constitutes the background of the book" [8]), Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, as well as with influential figures who defy our habitual classifications, for example, Biddle or Mersenne. The book boldly situates itself in what has gradually become a broad tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship, cultivated by luminaries such as Eugenio Garin, Paul O. Kristeller, Amos Funkenstein, and Anthony Grafton.The subtitle of the book, The Debate on Sacred Scripture in Early Modern Thought, may conjure up images of a historical debate among philosophers, along the lines of, say, the German Pantheismusstreit (pantheism dispute) of the 1780s. A curious aspect of the involvement of philosophers (in the broadest sense) in matters related to the Bible, however, is that the "debate" was a confrontation of philosophers with theologians, clerics, ecclesiastical and very often also civil authorities, rather than a mere philosophical dispute. This also means that individual philosophers' freedom of expression varied considerably depending on their denomination and environment. Thus, Galileo clashed head-on with the Roman Catholic Church, Descartes sought the approbation of the theologians of the Sorbonne, the Jesuits who inveighed against Pascal did so with little or no interest in the biblical text (see D'Agostino's chapter 9, 169). The Reformation took the Word of God for its foundation, so that Protestant settings (England, the Dutch Republic, and the Lutheran countries) were... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A New Reading of Six Thinkers by Henry Somers-HallClayton CrockettSOMERS-HALL, Henry. Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy: A New Reading of Six Thinkers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 264 pp. Cloth, $99.99Henry Somers-Hall's book examines how French philosophers in the twentieth century develop a logic of thinking based on sense that is both influenced by (...) but also counters Kant's paradigm of thinking, which is based on judgment. Beginning with Kant and German idealism, including the German responses to Kant in the work of Hölderlin, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, this book then carefully draws out the ways that Bergson, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze all work against this understanding of thinking as judging by showing how our experience and our thought precede the categories of judgment.In chapter 1, Somers-Hall carefully sets out Kant's model of thinking and shows how the categories of philosophical thought are fundamentally based on how we judge our sensible intuitions. Judgment is at the center of Kant's thought, and this is apparent in the Critique of Pure Reason, including the famous Transcendental Deduction. Our knowledge has a legislative function in relation to objects, and conscious synthesis takes the form of a judgment. Despite their criticisms of Kant, later German idealists do not fundamentally depart from this modality of judgment that takes place at the center of their philosophy. Even though they put Kant's concepts in motion, it remains a structure of judgment that is understood as dynamic.Chapter 2 turns to Bergson, to show how his emphasis on immediate experience precedes categorical judgement. Bergson distinguishes between temporal and spatial multiplicities, and argues that temporal multiplicities that are expressed in terms of duration underlie the spatial ones that contribute to judgment. Duration is a deeper experience of time that is associated with life. Somers-Hall in chapter 3 examines Sartre's writings on imagination to show how consciousness is a pure relation and an affective mode of thinking that underlies the categorial mode of judgment.Most of these French philosophers develop their accounts of noncategorial sense in either explicit or implicit relation to Kant's philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is no exception, and in chapter 4 we see how it is the organization of perception that gives sense to the world, and this precedes and generates "our reflective categories of judgement." Judgment emerges out of perception, although Merleau-Ponty grounds perception in the embodied person. Derrida does not ground sense or [End Page 365] thinking in a body, but looks for noncategorial grounds that make possible "surface structures of thinking." In chapter 5, Somers-Hall elaborates Derrida's famous nonconcept of différance, which underlies and makes possible our concepts of voice and writing that appear to be oppositions but in fact are not because they rely on each other. Différance is not a concept; it is prior to conceptual determination, and it "operates as an 'origin' that has none of the traits of the structure of judgement."Foucault relies on Kant for his three epistemes of resemblance, representation, and the human being, modern man. Chapter 6 shows how Foucault is concerned in both his archaeology and his genealogy with opening up the structures of power that make any juridical ordering possible. Here a productive biopower works beneath what we recognize more explicitly as "juridico-discursive power" in both positive and negative ways that escape the grasp of a philosophy that is solely based on judgment.In chapter 7 Somers-Hall shows how Deleuze's concept of intensity underlies all forms of representational judgment. Intensity operates according to a process of differentiation that produces a logic of sense, which we miss when we grasp onto a "dogmatic image of thought" that "prevents a genuine encounter with the world [that] conditions us to understand it in terms of unified subjects who make sense of the world in terms of judgements." We think in response to a shock or an encounter with something in the world that forces us to think and to make sense. We form judgments retroactively, by reducing differences to... (shrink)

The Baltic philosopher Vasily Sesemann (1884-1963), rooted in the Classics and influenced but not dominated by Kant, Herder, Bergson, Husserl, and Lossky, was a first-rate scholar in the fields of aesthetics, epistemology, logic, and history of philosophy. But he is still relatively unknown internationally because he wrote mostly in Lithuanian and some of his many works are only now being translated into English. This successor volume to his Aesthetics collects eight noteworthy essays, ranging from the scholarly to the popular, on (...) aesthetics, aesthetic education, national culture, and theory of knowledge. They reveal a sympathetic and responsive mind equally at home in Ancient Greek and modern French, German, and Russian philosophy; and capable both of untendentiously expounding their dominant ideas and fruitfully anticipating newer developments even as the latter began to take shape in early-to-mid-20th-century Western European philosophy. Hallmarks of Sesemann's thought are the Heraclitean preference for becoming (dynamism, change) over being (stasis, timelessness) and the idea that any culture, in order to survive and grow, must be intellectually deep and open to foreign influences. This insight has crucial relavance to the debates about multiculturalism today. Does it make sense to refer to the social and political existence of the Baltic countries as to being between civilizations of East and West, or as being on the boundary of two worlds? What are the most characteristic features of modern moral imagination? How does it manifest itself in the politics and cultures of the Baltic countries? These will be the main foci of the book series intended and launched as a critical examination of identity, politics, and culture in the Baltic countries. We are not going to confine this series to Soviet and post-Communist studies. By offering a wide scope of the social science and humanities disciplines, we would like to encourage intercultural dialogue and also to pursue interdisciplinary research in the field of Baltic studies. (shrink)

Summary Despite his repudiation of antisemitism, Renan influenced the development of antisemitic ideologies in both France and Germany. His typology of ?Semite? and ?Aryan? was adopted especially in Germany and and combined with biological concepts of race to become the foundation of the concepts of ?Semitism? and ?Antisemitism?. Renan, however, always insisted on a linguistic/cultural definition of race and regarded the biological conception, while it might have had some primitive reality, as outmoded and immoral in European civilization. After 1870 the (...) growth of German racial antisemitism led Renan to elaborate repeatedly on race as a civilisational phenomenon that in modern Europe should have lost its biological origins. His argument that modern Jews were integral members of the French ?nation? and ?civilization? was profoundly influential on the emergence of the theory of the modern ?nation? as the liberal state. Gobineau's theory of race also lent itself to exploitation by racial antisemites, though it was not overtly antisemitic. Unlike Renan, however, Gobineau in his later years inclined to a vague personal antisemitism. The main difference was one of temperament as well as devotion on Renan's part to a liberal idea of the nation, as opposed to Gobineau's aversion to liberalism and modern civilization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PostfacePhilippe-Joseph Salazar, Guest Editor"France: Current Writing in Philosophy and Rhetoric" could be a subtitle for this volume. As guest editor I have chosen the genre of the postface rather than that of the preface. I wanted to let writings speak for themselves, unhindered by the added filter of an introduction. Prefaces are either congratulatory or a contribution in disguise—or, worse, a puerile attempt to overshadow the rest. However, by (...) way of a summation, a few, brief remarks are in order.Some thirty years ago it would have been impossible to seek out and secure authors to write on this subject. Since then a sea change has taken place, attracting into the circles of the "rhetorical turn" many a willing partaker. In this new game, two circles gyrate and now and then rotate in unison or collide.One circle, let us call it belletristic, was set in motion by Marc Fumaroli when he released, in 1980, his epoch-making Âge de l'éloquence. It was as if a new chord had been struck, catching most by surprise, heralding the sudden irruption of new thinking about the mainstay of French culture, the "classical age," that is, the seventeenth century, the sacrosanct age of Racine, Descartes, Louis XIV, and Nicolas Poussin. Fumaroli's work in rhetoric, aesthetics, and social commentary went to the heart of French literature and culture: it offered an hermeneutic opportunity to run against the grain of structuralism and Bourdieusian analyses, while it simultaneously brought to [End Page 424] light "rhetorical" layers, both religious and civil, of French culture that militant secularism and social positivism had long cast aside as pernicious or preposterous. It also served as a powerful antidote to "cultural studies." His influence is deep and wide and long lasting. Nancy Struever, who alongside Fumaroli founded the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, draws on her intimate knowledge of the French school to provide here a profound and critical account of his work in which she underscores how Fumaroli transformed, from the standpoint of the history of rhetoric, the study of Western European culture and social life forms—the award of the Balzan Prize to Fumaroli came on the heels of his Histoire de la rhétorique dans l'Europe moderne. He has, for all intents and purposes, created the French school of rhetoric studies, which has nurtured an ever-growing circle of scholars, now in its second generation, with a relief cohort at the ready (Salazar 2007).The other circle took a while longer to gain balance and establish momentum. It concerns itself with the complex relation between philology and philosophy. Indeed, French classical philology had long been resistant to the presence of philosophy and so too philosophy to philology. This uneasy and reciprocal indifference or even distrust can be traced back to the Discourse on Method, in which Descartes invented French philosophical prose, as Pierre Cahné puts it, a situation later aggravated by the spell German metaphysics cast over French philosophy in the nineteenth century. However, it was the enduring presence of Hegel in the 1930s, together with the material and intellectual rescue French philosophers offered Heidegger after 1945, and a sustained interest in Nietzsche and Husserl, that created the conditions for a new dalliance between philology and philosophy. It has been a multifaceted game: some Hellenists, like Nicole Loraux and Marcel Detienne, chose to develop an anthropological meditation on ancient Greece, bringing forth, in the process, rhetorical categories that before them were mere indicators (mètis, epitaphios). On the periphery stood Émile Benveniste with his philological enquiry into Indo European words as mental structures—his Vocabulaire remains a constant source of inspiration. Latinists had a problem of their own: their commonly shared notion that Latin was not a philosophical language, together with their vociferous prejudice against non-Ciceronian Latin, had consigned medieval and Renaissance thinkers and modes of thinking to the bogs of impure language. However, Latin scholars such as Alain Michel sought to unravel the Roman aesthetics inherent in a rhetorical way of life; this school of new Latinists propelled a remarkable revival of Neo-Latinity, which has [End Page 425] had a long-lasting influence on Renaissance studies... (shrink)

This is an informative, well-written, spritely, and sympathetic survey of the development of Marxism in France from the late nineteenth century to Sève's An Introduction to Marxist Philosophy. Although Kelly does not characterize it this way, his work may be seen as a history of the dialectical evolution of French Marxism. By tracing the historical background of the variety of theoretical works on Marx's writings and on Marxism in general and sketching the systolic and diastolic movements of the (...) class='Hi'>French communist party as well, Kelly has produced an indispensable propaedeutic to a deeper study of the fertile writings of the leading French Marxist thinkers. He is careful and patient as he traces the twists and turns of theoretical perspectives. The relation between Hegel and Marx is a thread which runs through his exposition. Guterman and Henri Lefebvre's attempt to analyze the nature of the dialectic and the central idea of contradiction in the 1930's is discussed clearly, with emphasis upon Lefebvre's aim of attributing a non-materialistic dialectic to Marx, of characterizing historical materialism as "the unity of idealism and materialism." Stalin's exposition of dialectical and historical materialism is shown to have inaugurated an era of dogmatic Marxism. Kelly shows us how things picked up during the post-war years and how the theoretical richness of French Marxism gained momentum up to 1980. The influence of Lefebvre's Dialectical Materialism is traced up to the early anti-Hegelian standpoint of Althusser. In a later chapter, we are offered a fairly detailed exposition and commentary on Althusser's criticism of the view that Marx inverted Hegel, his analysis of the structure of the dialectic, and his belief that the issue of the exteriority of the dialectic to its possible objects is a "question of the application of a method" which "poses a pre-dialectical question... which... has no meaning for Marx." Among other things, Kelly traces the writings of, and career of, Garaudy, discusses the innovative notion of Godelier's cybernetic dialectic, briefly sketches the contributions of Tran Duc Thao, the responses to Sartre's Critique, examines Sève's original studies of contradiction and "negation of the negation," and probably introduces most non-French readers to Jaeglé's renovation of dialectics in relation to contemporary natural science. Finally, Labica's attempt to show that philosophy is jettisoned by Marx in favor of a "science of history," D'Hondt's analyses of difference and contradiction, and Mercier-Josa's circling back through Hegel for a fresh understanding of Marx are briefly discussed. It should be said that Kelly's running commentary is always informed, judicious and independent. His work serves as an excellent introduction to modern French Marxism.--George J. Stack, The State University of New York, College at Brockport. (shrink)

The London and Bauer monograph occupies a central place in the debate concerning the quantum measurement problem. Gavroglu has previously noted the influence of Husserlian phenomenology on London's scientific work. However, he has not explored the full extent of this influence in the monograph itself. I begin this paper by outlining the important role played by the monograph in the debate. In effect, it acted as a kind of 'lens' through which the standard, or Copenhagen, 'solution' to the measurement problem (...) came to be perceived and, as such, it was robustly criticized, most notably by Putnam and Shimony. I then spell out the Husserlian understanding of consciousness in order to illuminate the traces of this understanding within the London and Bauer text. This, in turn, yields a new perspective on this 'solution' to the measurement problem, one that I believe has not been articulated before and, furthermore, which is immune to the criticisms of Putnam and Shimony. (shrink)

This article explores the role of deliberative democracy in political modernization and the dynamic relationship between civil society and the state. It aims to elucidate the essence of deliberative democracy as a mechanism for civil society’s influence on the state, and systematically analyze the conceptual studies of deliberative democracy in the context of civil society’s power potential, both in Ukraine and globally. The study reflects on the evolution of civil society, highlighting its transformation from a state-dominated concept to one of (...) parity with government institutions. The research emphasizes the significance of public discourse in legitimizing government decisions and examines the roles of various scholars in developing the concept of deliberative democracy.Deliberative democracy, a post-classical theory, is contrasted with electoral democracy, focusing on public discourse as a key legitimacy source for legislative acts. The paper delves into the historical origins of deliberation and deliberative democracy, crediting political scientist J.Bessette with coining the term. It discusses the critical elements of deliberative democracy, including public dialogue, rational discourse, and institutionalized exchange of opinions for decision-making. The model incorporates elements of representative, direct, and participatory democracy, highlighting its basis in public consultation and discourse.The article also examines various forms of the deliberative process, including open public discussions and behind-closed-doors exchanges, underscoring the importance of information, argumentation, and persuasion. It critiques the liberal interpretation of democracy and stresses the need for citizen involvement in governance, spotlighting the role of political civil society organizations in fostering democratic deliberation. (shrink)

This study focuses on Charles Renouvier’s Manuel de philosophie moderne, in which he first sketches a philosophical systemSystem in dialogue with the “great men of learned Germany” presented as “DescartesDescartes, René’s disciples”. I argue that, although RenouvierRenouvier, Charles aims to present France as the “mother of all philosophies”, these great German men do have a significant and unique influence on the development of his early thought. Ultimately, in fact, although RenouvierRenouvier, Charles wishes to claim that he later turns his back (...) on his early HegelianismHegelianism because of his rejection of “philosophies of the infinite”, this rejection in fact only reinforces the FichteanFichte, Johann Gottlieb and HegelianHegelianism influences on his philosophy. (shrink)

English summary: G.W. Leibniz's philosophy represents a fundamental chapter in the constitution of what we mean by modernity. Leibniz can be considered a source of inspiration for both the moment of the emergence of modernity as well as for the moment of the crisis of Enlightenment. Despite his influence on various authors, Leibniz does not let himself be identified with the core of Enlightenment thinking that was prevalent in the Western world in recent centuries. We are therefore faced with a (...) thinking that in its development depends neither on the enlightened modernity, nor on the principal alternative, hermeneutics. Thus, the span of Leibniz's thought ranges from the time before the Enlightenment through to post-hermeneutics. This volume presents a selection of articles from the "IV Congreso Internacional Leibniz: G. W. Leibniz entre la genesis y la crisis de la Modernidad" which was selected by the "Sociedad Espanola Leibniz" held in Granada. German, English, & French text. German description: Die Philosophie G. W. Leibniz stellt ein grundlegendes Kapitel fuer die Konstituierung dessen dar, was wir unter Modernitat verstehen. Leibniz kann als eine Inspirationsquelle sowohl im Moment der Entstehung der Modernitat als auch im Moment der Krise der Aufklarung verstanden werden. Trotz seines Einflusses auf verschiedene Autoren lasst sich Leibniz nicht mit dem Kern des aufklarerischen Denkens identifizieren, das in der westlichen Welt in den letzten Jahrhunderten vorherrschend war. Wir stehen also vor einem Denken, das in seinem Werdegang weder von der aufgeklarten Modernitat noch von deren hauptsachlicher Alternative, der Hermeneutik, abhangt. Somit spannt sich der Bogen des Denkens Leibniz von der Zeit vor der Aufklarung bis hin zur Post-Hermeneutik. Dieser Sammelband prasentiert eine Auswahl der Beitrage auf dem IV Congreso Internacional Leibniz: G. W. Leibniz entre la genesis y la crisis de la Modernidad, der von der Sociedad espanola Leibniz in Granada abgehalten wurde. Die Studien umfassen vier thematische Bereiche: Leibniz und die Entstehung der Modernitat, die Prinzipien der Philosophie und der Naturwissenschaften, die Sprachphilosophie und die Erkenntnistheorie, Ontologie und Theodizee. (shrink)

English summary: G.W. Leibniz's philosophy represents a fundamental chapter in the constitution of what we mean by modernity. Leibniz can be considered a source of inspiration for both the moment of the emergence of modernity as well as for the moment of the crisis of Enlightenment. Despite his influence on various authors, Leibniz does not let himself be identified with the core of Enlightenment thinking that was prevalent in the Western world in recent centuries. We are therefore faced with a (...) thinking that in its development depends neither on the enlightened modernity, nor on the principal alternative, hermeneutics. Thus, the span of Leibniz's thought ranges from the time before the Enlightenment through to post-hermeneutics. This volume presents a selection of articles from the "IV Congreso Internacional Leibniz: G. W. Leibniz entre la genesis y la crisis de la Modernidad" which was selected by the "Sociedad Espanola Leibniz" held in Granada. German, English, & French text. German description: Die Philosophie G. W. Leibniz stellt ein grundlegendes Kapitel fur die Konstituierung dessen dar, was wir unter Modernitat verstehen. Leibniz kann als eine Inspirationsquelle sowohl im Moment der Entstehung der Modernitat als auch im Moment der Krise der Aufklarung verstanden werden. Trotz seines Einflusses auf verschiedene Autoren lasst sich Leibniz nicht mit dem Kern des aufklarerischen Denkens identifizieren, das in der westlichen Welt in den letzten Jahrhunderten vorherrschend war. Wir stehen also vor einem Denken, das in seinem Werdegang weder von der aufgeklarten Modernitat noch von deren hauptsachlicher Alternative, der Hermeneutik, abhangt. Somit spannt sich der Bogen des Denkens Leibniz von der Zeit vor der Aufklarung bis hin zur Post-Hermeneutik. Dieser Sammelband prasentiert eine Auswahl der Beitrage auf dem IV Congreso Internacional Leibniz: G. W. Leibniz entre la genesis y la crisis de la Modernidad, der von der Sociedad espanola Leibniz in Granada abgehalten wurde. Die Studien umfassen vier thematische Bereiche: Leibniz und die Entstehung der Modernitat, die Prinzipien der Philosophie und der Naturwissenschaften, die Sprachphilosophie und die Erkenntnistheorie, Ontologie und Theodizee. (shrink)

From the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth centuries, French writing is especially concerned with analysing human nature. The ancient ethical vision of man's nature and goal survives, even, to some extent, in Descartes. But it is put into question especially by the revival of St Augustine's thought, which focuses on the contradictions and disorders of human desires and aspirations. Analyses of behaviour display a powerful suspicion of appearances. Human beings are increasingly seen as motivated by self-love: they are (...) driven by the desire for their own advantage, and take a narcissistic delight in their own image. Moral and religious writers re-emphasize the traditional imperative of self-knowledge, but in such a way as to suggest the difficulties of knowing oneself. Operating with the Cartesian distinction between mind and body, they emphasize the imperceptible influence of bodily processes on our thought and attitudes. They analyse human beings' ignorance of their own motives and qualities, and the illusions under which they live their lives. Their critique of human behaviour is no less searching than that of writers who have broken with traditional religious morality, such as Hobbes and Spinoza. A wide range of authors is studied, some well-known, others much less so: the abstract and general analyses of philosophers and theologians are juxtaposed with the less systematic and more concrete investigations of writers like Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld, not to mention the theatre of Corneille, Molière, and Racine. (shrink)

After a thorough classical education, Chen Duxiu went on to be a pioneering reform writer and activist, leader of the New Culture movement, Dean of the Arts and Sciences at Beijing University, and cofounder of the Chinese Communist Party. His writings are usually brief and polemical, and he rarely pauses to expound on the meanings of central theoretical terms. He is nonetheless an astute and coherent author, not easily pigeonholed as "nationalist," "individualist," "cosmopolitan," or any of the numerous other categories (...) under which scholars have filed him. Prior to 1921 his writings regularly touched on rights and human rights; the following well-known essay provides a flavor of his concern for equality and individual self-determination. Chen moved away from talk of human rights during his career as a leader in the Chinese Communist Party, although he did return to the ideas of freedoms and rights later in life, after expulsion from the Party. (shrink)

Modernity and the other: a story of inequality -- Locating the other in the political debates of early modernity -- Thinking and rethinking the equality of the other: Vitoria, Sepúlveda and the true barbarians -- Las Casas and the other: the tension between equality and cultural othercide -- From the civilizing mission to irreconcilable alterity: the changing perception of the Indians in the French Enlightenment -- The other side of modernity: legitimizing the transition from cultural othercide to physical othercide (...) -- Looking to the future. (shrink)

Various approaches to civil society research are considered. Two key problems caused by impact of post-modernism are discussed, that are: crises of identification with the society and problems of personal identity. A particular personality crisis that is specific for contemporary Russia is noticed. The crisis is caused by the combination of two factors. They are: social abandonment, atomization and loneliness and total relativism produced by expansion of post-modernism. The second factor influences the Western citizenship as well. That’s why “re-emergence” (...) of civil society is discussed in the Western world, though civil society institute has never died in the Western countries. Personality-oriented civil society is considered to be a prologue for re-emergence of the wholeness that seems to fall apart because of the loss of all universalistic values. The alliance between the heritage of the Russian thinker V. Rozanov and philosophical discourse by M. Foucault is tracked, the latter being a champion of personality-oriented civil society as opposed to “gregarious” politicallystructured one. Rozanov demonstrates his life to us as a process of a personality’s creative work which makes life experience a basis for the creation of universal values. Post-modernism represented by Fucault makes this experience as a basis in the process of the reflexive discourse-analysis this demonstrating his moving away from it. Both authors removed “interdict” from a number of so called "private themes" that had had ambiguous marginalized/sacral status in public discourse. The two thinkers transformed the problem of the “private discourse” into meta-language fit to conceive and describe the essence of the societal life and epoch as a whole. They drew attention to personality-oriented social communications and emergence of new types of societal communities. Both figures are ofa great importance for now-a-days discussions on civil society development in the epoch of a post-modernism. The fact that comparison of their views will contribute to better understanding of the controversies which are inherent in civil society is demonstrated. (shrink)

This Key Concepts pivot examines the fundamental Chinese ideas of ‘Civilization’ and ‘culture’, considering their extensive influence both over Chinese society and East Asian societies. The pivot analyses the traditional connotations of those two concepts and their evolution in the Sino-Western exchanges as well as their renewed interpretation and application by contemporary Chinese scholars. It analyses how the years 1840-1900 which mark a period of major transition in China challenged these concepts, and highlights how the pursuit of innovation and international (...) perspective gave birth to new values ​​and paradigm shifts, and culminated in the May Fourth New Culture Movement. Considering the underlying humanistic ideas in the key concepts of traditional Chinese civilisation and culture, this pivot contributes to this series of Chinese Key Concept by offering a unique analysis of the conceptual evolutions brought about by the change of values in 21st century China. (shrink)

How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did our ways of thinking, and our moral, political, and social values, come to be modelled around scientific values? Stephen Gaukroger traces the story of how these values developed, and how they influenced society and culture from the 19th to the mid-20th century.

It is difficult to overestimate the influence of Descartes on his contemporaries and following generations. While still alive he had followers and detractors, and after his death, numerous books and pamphlets, with his name prominently featured in their titles, adopted and developed his ideas, twisted them to fit into a wide variety of intellectual agendas, or argued passionately against them. While he may not deserve the title of father of modern philosophy, in many circles he was considered the iconic (...) modern philosopher from the 1640s on.The subject of Tad Schmaltz's book is Cartesianism, philosophy and science as done by Descartes and his followers. But from the beginning, Schmaltz appreciates the difficulty... (shrink)

The actuality of the research topic is that for the development of Ukraine it is necessary to take into account the indisputable fact that globalization together with the information revolution has created new conditions for all types of life. Humanity continues to grow quantitatively and increase the number of independent states whose citizens use the national languages. The purpose of the study is a critical analysis of the reasons for the unprecedented complexity of language changes in Ukraine after the collapse (...) of the Soviet Union and the restoration of its independence. Objectives of the study - to identify the deep causes of the loss of the truth of Ukrainians about their linguistic past; to prove on the basis of the latest scientific discoveries the peculiarity of the linguistic contribution of the ancestors of Ukrainians to the emergence of the Indo-European linguistic family thousands of years ago; to fulfill the forecast for the future of international languages. The methodology of the research is the noointegral, systemic and noohistorical methods that allow a newer way to analyze the affinity of the Ukrainian language with English and to make a forecast of changes in the role of the English language in the future. Presenting main material: the result of the study is the discovery of evidence that the Ukrainian language is not just a little branch of the Russian language, but a transformed primary Indo-European language. The scientists from the West were proved that Ukrainians were the part of the inventors of agriculture in Levant. During the movement on the West they chose life on the black earths of Ukraine, joined with the Arians and created the civilization "Trypillya-1". Trypillians domesticated a horse, invented a wheel, created a metallurgy of bronze and formed the economic zone of the Greate Trypillya between the Carpathians and Western Siberia. All the common words of today about 400 Indo-European languages are a cloud of tags spread from the Great Trypillya. The article is devoted to the concept of "international language". The analysis of contemporary world language changes is carried out in order to assess the possibility of converting English into a global international language. Examples of the growth and decline of languages of certain peoples in the past are considered. The data on evolution and changes in the international language ranking in the New Times are given. The facts of the temporary leadership of the French, German and Russian languages are revealed and the main reasons for their retreat and decline are indicated. The reasons for the global use of English in the twentieth century are explained, but the assumption about the impossibility of its transformation into the universal language of humanity in the future is expressed. A forecast of the influence of progress in computer technologies and artificial intelligence on the ways of using English and other languages is made. The fact of the appearance of the first version of the computer multilingual translator Travis-1 is noted and its rapid improvement and inclusion in the software of near-future mobile devices, which spread on the planet in billions of copies, is envisaged. Conclusions - formulated suggestions for plans for the development of the education system in Ukraine. It is proposed to use positive experience in Scandinavian countries - Sweden and Finland in modernizing the teaching of English and other foreign languages. (shrink)

The article deals with the issue of initial impossibility of performance of an obligation and the influence of such impossibility of performance on the validity of the legal transaction that establishes such an obligation. The legal doctrine convincingly demonstrates that for Roman lawyers the rule Impossitionbilium nulla obligatio est merely meant that nobody can be obliged to perform something that cannot be performed; however, it did not necessarily follow that a contract establishing such an obligation was void. Modern civil (...) codifications overlook another significant feature of the Roman law – the uncontested application of the principle Impossibilium nulla obligatio est only in case of stipulatio, whereas modern contract law has its origins in the Roman law of consensual contracts. (shrink)

This paper seeks to establish that Bernard Mandeville's ideas on courage and honour shaped the Scottish debate about ancients and moderns by formulating a perspective how eighteenth-century civil societies grew large, luxurious and feminine without losing their ability to wage war. My focus is on Mandeville's positive influence on David Hume, whose writings were a springboard for many Mandevillean ideas in Scotland. In contrast to a recent claim in scholarship, Hume aimed to discredit, instead of developing, Shaftesburyan ideas of ancient (...) courage. The concluding part of the paper will discuss Andrew Millar and Adam Ferguson in this context. (shrink)

The article outlines some aspects of the civil law in Lithuania, an Eastern European country, which underwent an essential transformation in the last decades. The author outlines the development of the Lithuanian civil law from the oldest written sources up to the adoption of the new Civil Code of the Republic of Lithuania in 2000. The author is critical about the denomination of Lithuania as a “new” state and draws attention to the history of Lithuanian law, which spans hundreds of (...) years. The article emphasizes the continuity of the legal tradition and the heterogeneity of law – the coexisting of several legal systems in the territory of one state. The article discusses the role of Roman Law in the legal system of Lithuania. Even though Roman Law has never been applied in Lithuania, the author argues that it nevertheless had an indirect influence on Lithuanian private law. Roman Law and Canonical Law were among the main sources while drafting the three codified acts, the Statutes of Lithuania, in 1529, 1566 and 1588. The knowledge of Roman Law acquired by lawyers at universities in other European countries was transmitted through drafting of the laws and the jurisdictional and administrative practices. (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)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project by Ann HartleVicente Raga RosalenyHARTLE, Ann. What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne's Modern Project. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2022. ix + 178 pp. Cloth, $100.00; paper, $30.00Why are we witnessing increasing social polarization in Western societies? What has happened to make our liberal democracies so ideologically charged? (...) Professor Ann Hartle's book tries to answer these and other questions in line with the concept of civility that, according to her thesis, Michel de Montaigne created in early modernity and that is about to disappear in our day. Not in vain is Montaigne the protagonist of this book, given that Professor Hartle is a world-renowned specialist on the author of the Essays, although in this case she is interested in the transformations that gave rise to modernity in order to understand our present day. She reads Montaigne for a better interpretation of some central problems of our time, such as the difficulty to speak freely that is experienced on university campuses and, in general, the increasing politicization of our civil societies.Thus, in the first place, Professor Hartle's work interrogates the origins of civility, the social bond created in modernity. To this end, she exposes what happened in the time of Montaigne, when societies, based on the classical and Christian tradition, were plunged into a general crisis. This is what the French essayist detected, and it led him to propose a new type of bond. For this, it is necessary to free oneself from tradition, which had legitimized the division between masters and slaves, the source of all conflicts.Montaigne's movement is philosophical in character: It consists of a split carried out in his Essays between the natural human being and the philosophical observer, which leads to a break with traditional moral standards, identified with Nature. The new human being, thus unfolded, can choose his own hierarchy of values and address the good he chooses with his own will (although this will be a will purified of particularisms, without excessive self-esteem). Such self-awareness, achieved by Montaigne as an accidental philosopher, is concretized in the predominance of the concept of judgment, in the ability to freely choose our possibilities (and not ends dictated by Nature).The new world thus created, Hartle explains, gave rise to the liberal order. It is true that Montaigne was not a theorist, but in his work it is possible to find the rupture of the traditional hierarchy between masters [End Page 351] and slaves, now considered as equals before the law, which is above all, and which is the fruit of reason. In this civil society, human beings no longer dominate each other, and each peacefully pursues his purposes. It is the state, as the embodiment of the law, that regulates everything, except the space of freedom gained with the emergence of the modern public sphere.In this context, the concept of authenticity makes sense, which, according to Professor Hartle, is the best reflection of the breakdown of the traditional order and the disappearance of its moral community. Now each individual pursues his purposes and is no longer to fulfill the ends of a universal human nature. That is why the bond of civility, in which the absolute autonomy of the subject is recognized, as well as his equality before the law, replaces the moral ties of the traditional community and its hierarchies. It is the French thinker who best exemplifies this transit, by showing himself openly in his Essays as a common subject who pursues his purposes and who relates to others as equals, no longer as someone superior, capable of disputing merit, and dominating others.However, this new society and its civil bonds are in crisis; civility fades, or that is Professor Hartle's pessimistic conclusion. Today we are witnessing an ideologization of previously depoliticized areas, such as the university, with the demand for the use of politically correct language and the fear of expressing oneself freely, especially when one's own opinions do not align with the current political trends. The failure... (shrink)

This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James’s father and Calvinism, on (...) the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot’s novels, and Herbert Spencer’s ‘unknown,’ revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James’s work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of ‘religion.’. (shrink)

From the scholarship available we can gather that fraternity has been subjected to several interpretations and linked with several virtues. For a few, it stands close to the actualities of solidarity, humanity, compassion, companionship, and brotherhood. For others, it is the “glue that binds equality and liberty to the civil society” and “presents a sense of continuity with the past and the future”. Omvedt replaces the word fraternity with “community” as an important component of a human vision for the new (...) millennium along with equality and justice. Historically, ‘liberty, equality, and fraternity became a major influence on political thought since the French Revolution. The Revolution marked the triumph of the people and pronounced the Declaration on Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789. In modern societies, although there are many differences in interpretation, the idea of fraternity is less directly accepted, but the principles of collective action and social responsibility are widely recognized’. According to Johnston, 'fraternity' was rather less central to the preconceptions of the enlightenment predecessors of the revolutionary era, their emphasis being given rather to the 'rights of man' and to the equality of entitlement to those rights. To date, our pre-occupation with liberty and equality has left vacant a conceptual upbringing of fraternity in the postcolonial context. (shrink)

This paper seeks to establish that Bernard Mandeville's ideas on courage and honour shaped the Scottish debate about ancients and moderns by formulating a perspective how eighteenth-century civil societies grew large, luxurious and feminine without losing their ability to wage war. My focus is on Mandeville's positive influence on David Hume, whose writings were a springboard for many Mandevillean ideas in Scotland. In contrast to a recent claim in scholarship, Hume aimed to discredit, instead of developing, Shaftesburyan ideas of ancient (...) courage. The concluding part of the paper will discuss Andrew Millar and Adam Ferguson in this context. (shrink)

In the Qur’ān the most significant words used to indicate settlement are diyār, qarya, madīna, miṣr and balad. Among these, qarya and madīna are the most important ones. While Qarya means, county, city, urban, land and settlement, madīna means town. Miṣr is used for a city as well as for a specific name of a country. Diyār indicates a geographic border and the places of a settlement, and balad infers a political unity of a number of settlements. Due to this (...) use in ‘Arabic, the word balad is used as a country and a state at the same time. Recently, there are some studies focusing on examining the terms of qarya and madīna. Hovewer, we cannot encompass the semantic area of these words only by looking up their dictionary meaning and how they were used in the Qur’ān. Therefore, in this study the old cities are examined as they exist in their places. In this study, we have utilised from the modern and contemporary scientific findings which were made for urbanization and its history. For a better understanding of the concept of urbanization, some prophets’ stories have been revised. In Qur’ān the words indicating urbanization are related to society, nature, place, human, art, economy, politics and reconstruction. Therefore, the concepts of the diyār, qarya, madīna, miṣr and balad used to describe the settlements point to the relationship of society with different elements and activities.Summary: Cities, the birth of the cities, sociology, history, anthropology and cultural history are the major subjects in social science. Among them, the birth of cities are especially important for history, anthropology and sociology. For some researchers, cities are the most important revolution of humanity. Cities do not merely mean the places where the human settle down or form a society. In many human languages there is a strong relation between the words expressing civilization and settlement. There is a strong connection between cities and civilization. In Turkish, the word civilization/uygarlık comes from Uygurlar/Uighurs which means those who settled down first. Again in Turkish, the word of madaniyet which is originally Arabic is derived from madīna which means city. In English and French, civilization derives from civitas which is originally Latin. Civitas means a settlement and also the people who live within it. In ‘Arabic, the word hadārī, means settling in a place, is used for civilization, In this study, the words related to urbanization to which social science like sociology, history, anthropology and cultural history attribute a great importance are investigated from the mufassirs’ perspective. As a result of the researches, it was observed that the words qarya, madīna, diyār miṣr and balad were used in the Qur’ān in close terms with the city. Before examining the words which refer to city in the Qur’ān like qarya, madīna, diyār, mıṣr and balad, the approaches of sociology, history and anthropology are investigated for comparative purposes. According to modern and contemporary researches, jobs like art writing, music and architecture appeared after urbanization. The evolution of humanity from primitive period to modernity is because of urbanization. Cities are the crops of social relationships between people. Urbanization caused wider social interactions and the formation of more complicated societies. People who constitute societies and complicated relationships founded cities. With the increase of specialization and jobs, people of one or more job were able to meet the needs of each other through social cooperation.Before the urbanization the human-nature relation was more important but in cities human-human relation got more important. Cities caused social status to be a result of human-human relations. In these social categories, jobs like managers, merchants, guilds, soldiers and religious groups like religious leaders and darvīsh appeared. The physical features of a city are as important as their social structure. A city firstly has walls, administration, bazaar, laws, and the sense of common belonging among people.In the Qur’ān, it can be noticed that the history of settlement is developed chronologically. In the Qur’ān, the words qarya, madīna, diyār miṣr and balad are used in the meaning of the city. These words have a close relationship with people and society. For example, because societies and cities were not formed during the time of Adam, there is no word in the stories that evokes society and the city. The same is true for Idrīs. When we look at the narratives about Noah, for the first time there are words like the people, mala/the leaders of the community, erāzil/shameless, and the ship. Although no word meaning city or city is used in these stories, it is seen that society and social strata are formed. In the Hoad period, the word house, palace, building and Irem were used in addition to the word peoples/tribe. In addition to the words that express the civilized developments in the stories of Noah and Hoad, the existence of the words diyār and madīna draws attention during the reign of Ṣāleḥ. In the Qur’ān, the first terms related to urbanization were mentioned in the story of Hoad, and the words meaning settlement and city were mentioned in the story of Ṣāleḥ. Moreover, the words realm and madīna were used in the story of Ṣāleḥ. In the periods of Abraham and Moses, the words qarya and miṣr were added to this. The word Midian was used specifically for the city of Shu‘ayb, and the word balad was used for Mecca during the time of Prophet Muhammad.As mentioned in Noah’s era peoples and the states of people were present; in Hoad’s era, vineyard, garden, agriculture, houses, buildings and small scale settlements started to be constructed. In the Qur’ān, during the era of prophet Hoad, words like: vineyard, garden, agriculture, houses, building and palace, were used, however there is not a single word which means city. In Ṣāleḥ’s era the words dār and diyār were used in a general meaning? Therefore, it can be safely said that urbanization seriously started in Ṣāleḥ’s era. Additionally, dār also means house, vineyard, garden, grassland, region and home. Descriptions of dār, diyār and madīna in Ṣāleḥ’s parable point out the three directions of Thamūd peoples about urbanization. The word dār refers to the architectural features of their houses; the word diyār refers to their vineyards, gardens, houses and lands; and the word madīna refers to the largest and most important settlement in their homes. As modern and contemporary science has argued, according to the commentators, madīna is used for the settlements surrounded by walls, with its bazaar, army, ruler, tradesman and merchant.In the Qur’ān, the word qarya is closer to diyāri even if its used as madīna in some of the parables. Nevertheless, qarya is different from diyār due to its two distinctive features of political structure and intimacy. Qarya is a city or city state in some way, but it is not only a center but also a city or city state with a political structure with villages, towns, mountains, slopes and plains. So today, it refers to a city which has political integrity with its provincial borders or environment. Diyār was used for the places which were suitable for agriculture, while qarya was used for the cities of Sāmī people as a common word in Sāmī languages. For this reason, qarya was never used for the settlements of Copti, which are African communities; instead, the misr, which is a common word in Coptic and Arabic, was preferred. Even the word miṣr which means city in the Coptic language was used as a country name in the Egyptian regions. The word Balad indicates more a political formation, so it only means country. In the time period of Jahiliyyah they used balad for Mecca which owned a political formation.In the Qur’ān the words qarya and balad are used for Mecca but words like diyār, madīna and miṣr were never used for it. The use of the name qarya for Mecca indicates that it was established by a non-Arab like Abraham on the one hand and that it was the common place of all people. The word of madīna is not used to describe it because Mecca has not embody walls, bazaar, army or craftmanship. The reasons for not using diyār is because there are no vineyards or gardens. The lack of the word miṣr for Mecca also indicates that there is no influence of North African races such as Hāmī in Mecca.Briefly, Qarya is a settlement with its village and towns which is under administration. Madīna is a important center which exists inside qarya with walls, bazaar and architecture. Diyār is a settlement of the city center with houses, vineyards and gardens. Miṣr is a city where the Northern Africans are residing and Balad is a settlement where is prominences as political organization. (shrink)

The theme of this issue of Ethical Perspectives is the French tradition in liberal thought, and the unique contribution that this tradition can make to debates in contemporary liberalism. It is inspired by a colloquium held at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in December of 2008 entitled “In Search of a Lost Liberalism: Constant, Tocqueville, and the singularity of French Liberalism.” This colloquium was held in conjunction with the retirement of Leuven professor and former Dean of the Institute of (...) Philosophy, André Van de Putte, who found much inspiration in this tradition. A revised version of his valedictory lecture from the conference serves as the final contribution to this issue. Much contemporary liberal political philosophy is currently done in conversation with a line of liberal thinkers starting with John Locke, running through Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, and culminating in the work of John Rawls and his followers. The reasons for the enormous appeal of this philosophical tradition are, among other things, the combination of the central role of the intuitively appealing value of individual liberty with a strong rationalistic, universalistic, and normative character. The thread running through most of these liberal theories is a commitment to what the French liberal Benjamin Constant referred to as “the liberty of the moderns,” that is, liberty in a negative sense, as a lack of interference in one’s activity from others and from government. This focus has expanded over time to include a richer body of civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights, for instance, in the work of liberal thinkers who have tried to integrate the insights of communitarian thought and discourse ethics in their work. However, the emphasis on individual liberty in the negative sense continues to be the normative and theoretical touchstone and default position for many contemporary liberal theories. The limitation of the canon of liberal thought to the aforementioned authors and themes deprives the contemporary debate of a rich source of ideas: the French liberal tradition. Montesquieu, considered to be the father of this tradition, provides a good example of how it can enrich current debates in liberal theory. Montesquieu’s work evinces a keen eye for the dynamics of power relations and the limitations of the power of the better rational argument. His insight that power can sometimes only be checked by an equal and opposing power, so that a system of separation and balance of powers is necessary in order to preserve liberty, is reflected in the foundations of most modern democracies. Montesquieu also argues that contingent environmental, historical, social and economic conditions play a dramatic role in determining what kind of government is appropriate for a particular society. On his view, ignoring these facts when framing a government can inadvertently end in despotism. Montesquieu’s observations challenge us to reexamine some of contemporary liberalism’s universalist and rationalist claims. Benjamin Constant is most famous for his distinction between two kinds of liberty: the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. The ancient form of liberty manifested itself in the active political participation of citizens in the ancient republic. While this form of government and decision-making was suitable for small, homogeneous city-states, Constant argues that it is impracticable for large modern nation-states. Hence, the concept of modern liberty shifts to an emphasis on the rule of law and the non-interference of the state in private matters. This form of liberty is familiar to us from contemporary liberalism – and Constant cherishes this form of freedom as much as any liberal does today. However, his position is complex: he also argues that the liberty of the ancients should not be neglected. Active political participation is needed to ensure that the government is executing its duty of preserving the modern form of liberty by publicly pointing out violations. The contemporary relevance of Constant’s work is clear when we consider the alleged “democratic deficit” that plagues the EU and international institutions such as the UN, the IMF, and the World Bank. Not only does this democratic deficit threaten the modern form of liberty by placing decision-making processes out of sight of the people, it also threatens citizens’ sense of self-respect derived from self-governance. Constant’s argument for the necessity of combining the liberty of the ancients with that of the moderns provides a fruitful resource for confronting these contemporary issues. Tocqueville’s work on liberalism benefits from his opportunity to observe a society founded on liberal democratic principles – the United States of America – in action. In his Democracy in America, he examines the social consequences, both intended and unintended, of building a society on ‘the equality of conditions’, as he defines ‘democracy’. Tocqueville sees a tension between the democratic value of equality and the aristocratic value of the rule of the best. He observes that democratic societies do not necessarily choose the best leaders and instead promote mediocrity instead of virtue, talent, and excellence. Democracy also confronts citizens with the threat of ‘soft despotism’, where a government that preserves the outer signs of the liberty of the moderns nevertheless controls the behavior of its citizens in minute detail through a system of detailed rules ostensibly aimed at their welfare. This paternalism is an even more insidious threat to liberal values than the hard variety of despotism, since it is so difficult to detect and done in the name of liberal values themselves. Taking Tocqueville’s observations seriously would add complexity to attempts to theorize about the modern social-democratic welfare state. The contributions to this issue supplement and critique mainstream liberal thought and its relation to contemporary issues through a serious engagement with the French liberal tradition. Annelien De Dijn’s contribution discusses Bertrand de Jouvenel, a lesser-known 20th Century representative of the French political tradition she terms ‘aristocratic liberalism’. This tradition has its roots in the work of Montesquieu, and emphasizes the importance of intermediary bodies, most importantly the aristocracy, in providing a check to the top-down power of despotic state authorities and the bottom-up power of revolutionary leveling tendencies, both of which threaten liberty. De Dijn situates Jouvenel in this tradition, but then indicates an important difference between his thought and that of his predecessors: his most significant work, On Power, is not only on French history, but on European history. Pointing to the enthusiastic reception of this work in the Anglophone world, she suggests that the rise of totalitarianism in Europe gave the anti-totalitarian features of aristocratic liberalism a broader appeal. Valentino Lumowa’s paper concerns Constant’s classic text, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns. Lumowa argues that in order to understand Constant’s piece, we must be aware that its two parts were written under different historical circumstances and decipher the argumentative thrust inherent in the text. Following Stephen Holmes, he argues that to understand the shift Constant made in the second part of the text, we should read it within the context of the increasing influence of the ultra-Royalists in the legislature during the Bourbon Restoration. However, in contrast to Holmes, he contends that the spirit of both civic and individual freedom, which enlivens representative system, is the backbone of the text in its unity. Demin Duan’s essay investigates an apparent ambivalence between liberal and imperialist tendencies in the work of Alexis de Tocqueville, which has already drawn some attention from Tocquevillian scholars. These interpretations of Tocqueville and his writings on empire generally agree that Tocqueville stands in a recognized tradition of liberalism, which is characterized by respect for human rights, individual freedom and a sense of universal humanism. On this standard view, Tocqueville’s support of imperialism represents nothing but an unfortunate breach of his own otherwise consistent liberal thinking. Duan’s article questions this standard position. By questioning the assumption of Tocqueville’s liberalism in the first place, he tries to gauge the influence of both the old republican tradition and the new liberal perspective on his thinking. In conclusion, he argues that Tocqueville’s overall thought, especially his notion of freedom, is very much informed by an old republican tradition. His support of French imperialism could be better understood from this perspective rather than be rendered simply as a deviation from liberal norms. Pawel Marczewski’s contribution is an attempt to show that Tocqueville’s conception of liberty transcends the divisions between negative and positive aspects of freedom. He begins by juxtaposing this conception with the opposition drawn by Constant between liberty of the ancients and liberty of the moderns. While Tocqueville and Constant shared a concern for the preservation of individual rights, Tocqueville was much more reluctant to accept the modern loss of the communal dimension of liberty. He did not accept the view that jouissances privées, private pleasures, are the main compensation that the modern world has to offer for the lost ancient treasure of political participation. The essay then looks into the relevance of Tocqueville’s standpoint for current debates between liberal defenders of negative freedom and republican advocates of freedom as non-domination. Participants on both sides of the debate seem to be so devoted to showing that their particular approach provides the best guarantees against actual and possible threats to liberty that they overlook the fact that their definitions of freedom remain significantly similar. By arguing that ‘to be free is to be guided by one’s own will’, contemporary republicans, as well as their liberal counterparts, move along the lines drawn by Constant towards private pleasures. By questioning the inevitability of this turn, Tocqueville provides us with a valuable contribution to these discussions in contemporary political philosophy. Finally, André Van de Putte’s contribution, an adaptation of his emeritus speech that closed the conference on French Liberalism, appeals to Tocqueville in order to draw attention to the importance of intermediary, dialogical bodies in mitigating the implicit despotic tendencies of the democratic drive to equality. In Tocqueville’s view, the transition from the feudal corporate inequality to democratic individual equality was not a clean break. Rather, this transition is a continual process of democratization that is driven by a desire for equality, or egalité des conditions. This dissolution of distinctions of estate, class and status has the unintended consequence of concentrating the diffuse power of these entities into a centralized state, which is responsible for ensuring the equality of all under the law. This process leaves increasingly isolated and atomized individuals to face the power of a monolithic state in defense of their freedom, and moves toward a soft, paternalistic despotism. Constant’s freedom of the moderns is not sufficient to protect individuals from this centralized power. Democracy also requires the political freedom of the ancients. Van de Putte argues for a system in which atomized individuals organize themselves into intermediary bodies that, in a Montesquieuian balance of powers, can enter into dialogue with each other and the state on more equitable terms. Van de Putte’s contribution closes with a plea for a conception of democracy as a regime of dialogue. (shrink)

In eighteenth-century France, scientific progress and its spreading met a growing interest among public, an enthusiasm that was to be reflected in literature. Fictional works including scientific knowledge in their narrative made their appearance, paving the ground for a genre promised to a growing success in the following centuries—science fiction. The article presents three eighteenth-century French literary works, each one centered on a different domain of science: Voltaire’s Micromégas, Charles-François Tiphaigne’s Amilec, or the Seeds of Mankind and François-Félix Nogaret’s (...) The Mirror of Current Events, or Beauty to the Highest Bidder. The first one, an iconic Enlightenment work that promotes critical thinking, relies on discoveries made in astronomy and optics. Tiphaigne de la Roche is far from sharing the fame of Voltaire, but his odd Amilec is noteworthy as it is possibly the very first science-fiction work in which biology is central. Written in the unique atmosphere of the French revolution, Nogaret’s work The Mirror of Current Events depicts androids-like interacting with humans. Our purpose is to show that these works were a precursor of the science fiction genre in literature, to describe how and what science or technology was depicted in them, and how they influenced the view of Man in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

In his main work, The Science of Legislation , the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri proposed a set of extensive political and cultural reforms. These reforms were necessary to free eighteenth-century societies from the remnants of feudal institutions that obstructed international peace and economic growth. Filangieri's ideas were shaped by the international political climate between the seven Years’ War and the eve of the French Revolution. Reinterpreting Montesquieu and Genovesi through the influences of French radical and Enlightenment thought , (...) as well as the economics of Hume, Verri and the Physiocrats, he concluded that European modernity was inherently contradictory.From this perspective Filangieri set out to force a clean break between the technical horizons of mercantilism and enlightened absolutism and a society based on civil rights, a fair distribution of wealth and resources, and free trade. Proper ‘scientific’ knowledge of the rules and principles of legislation would allow governments to balance out the natural and cultural factors that characterise individual states, and to identify the appropriate model for social and economic development. If all states acted on their proper interest, international free trade and peaceful competition between states would emerge and the potential for general economic growth be materialised. Thus, the natural equilibrium and ‘universal consensus’ among nations could be restored. (shrink)

Being rude is often more gratifying and enjoyable than being polite. Likewise, rudeness can be a more accurate and powerful reflection of how I feel and think. This is especially true in a political environment that can make being polite seem foolish or naive. Civility and ordinary politeness are linked both to big values, such as respect and consideration, and to the fundamentally social nature of human beings. This book explores the powerful temptations to incivility and rudeness, but argues that (...) they should generally be resisted. Drawing on early Chinese philosophers who lived during great political turmoil but nonetheless sought to “mind their manners,” it articulates a way of thinking about politeness that is distinctively social. It takes as a given that we can feel profoundly alienated from others, and that other people can sometimes be truly terrible. Yet because we are social neglecting the social and political courtesies comes at great cost. The book considers not simply why civility and politeness are important, but how. It addresses how small insults can damage social relations, how separation of people into tribes undermines our better interests, and explores how bodily and facial expressions can influence how life with other people goes. It is especially geared toward anyone who feels the temptation of being rude and wishes it were easier to feel otherwise. It seeks to answer a question of great contemporary urgency: When so much of public and social life with others is painful and fractious, why should I be polite? (shrink)

The point of departure in this work is a defense against that view which would hold Hegel to be a glorifier of the Prussian state, a reactionary, and an enemy of freedom. Hegel, as the work illustrates, recognized that the French Revolution only annihilated what was already in itself destroyed; and he saluted it with "rapture" as the coming of a "new dawn" in the preface of the Encyclopaedia. He continued to celebrate its anniversary even while at the same (...) time and with no less intensity holding before himself an awareness of the dangers and horrors which it occasioned. In fact, Ritter submits that one might well understand the idea of freedom brandished by the Revolution to be the fundamental element of Hegel’s entire philosophy. Hegel disengages the notion of freedom from all previous connections which, over the centuries, have distorted it, and recovers the classic definition of Aristotle : "free is the man who is for himself and not for another." Political order must guarantee this possibility. The problem posited by the Revolution is: how? Hegel, the supposed "reactionary," in all his writings, both public and private, was consistently opposed, and occasionally with passion, to any political restoration. Yet one should also take notice of Hegel’s extreme and profound antipathy for the associations of students and demagogical movements, which he saw had no rapport with the real political and historical events of the time. Both the romantic liberal and the romantic conservative united in "hatred against the law." They were concerned not with freedom as such, but with political activity which pretended to be in its service, spewing platitudes which would renounce all searching knowledge and make truth an affair of the heart, the soul, or enthusiasm. Hegel alone, with perhaps the exception of Goethe, perceived the profound danger of anarchy revealed in these movements, a danger menacing to all, when one elevates pure subjectivity and sentiment to the rank of norm for political structures. The Revolution was accompanied by the dissolution of all the representations, concepts, and norms of the previous world as if they had been the fabric of dreams. In the face of this event, along with that of the constant danger of anarchy, philosophy must furnish the ideas which can determine that which can be conserved and that which can no longer survive. For both the advocates of restoration and the revolutionaries the Revolution was understood to be the end of previous history, the severing of man from his past: one wanted merely to recover it, the other to bury it. This scission, together with the real power which it has exerted on man and his conscience, is the fundamental structure of the new age. The remainder of the current study pursues the development of this scission, revealing the inner contradiction of the poles when taken alone: the scission itself to be the unity of historic existence in the form of subjectivity and objectivity; and the scission to find its objective expression in modern civil society. There is an on-going enrichment in the notion of freedom until it finds its fulfillment in the modern State, which assures freedom by providing the structures through which it can exist. Most of what should be said is said, although Ritter’s presentation occasionally harbors some confusion, a common and probably inescapable fate when one cuts in on the dialectic to forage for an isolated topic. Still, the book achieves its goal with admirable success, and is certainly a valuable tract on Hegel vis-à-vis the notion of political freedom. The main work is a translation from the German original; it is followed by an address which develops the material in the Philosophy of Right, § 34-81; and the book concludes with a rather amazing fifty-page bibliography citing the influence exercised by Hegel’s political theory throughout the nineteenth century.—R. J. G. (shrink)

Republicanism and imperialism are typically understood to be located at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Imperial Republics, Edward G. Andrew challenges the supposed incompatibility of these theories with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in England, the United States, and France. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Roman state on the ideology of republican revolutionaries, especially in the model it provided for transforming subordinate subjects into autonomous citizens. Andrew finds an equally important parallel between Rome's expansionary (...) dynamic — in contrast to that of Athens, Sparta, or Carthage — and the imperial rivalries that emerged between the United States, France, and England in the age of revolutions. Imperial Republics is a sophisticated, wide-ranging examination of the intellectual origins of republican movements, and explains why revolutionaries felt the need to 'don the toga' in laying the foundation for their own uprisings. (shrink)

During the Algerian struggle, Fanon warned us about the influence on politics of ‘the few European colonialists, powerful, intractable, those who have at all times instigated repressions, broken the French democrats, blocked every endeavor within the colonial framework to introduce a modicum of democracy into Algeria’. Is this remark still pertinent? How does Frantz Fanon help us understand current reactionary politics in France? Is his analysis of the French Left still pertinent? How does colonial discourse weigh on the (...) postcolonial present? In this article, I explore current expressions of French postcolonial reactionary politics focusing on an event in Reunion Island, a French postcolonial territory. I argue that it is important to observe what is happening in French postcolonial territories because they remain laboratories for repressive policies and discourses. What I call the discourse of ‘French Algeria’, a mix of revisionist history, resentment, wounded narcissism and racism, embodies a political trend that seeks to counter the small progress made in rewriting history from the point of view of the colony in France. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the European debate on commercial nobility at the beginning of the Seven Years War in the light of the intense reform debates over French absolutism in the 1730s and 1740s and Montesquieu's rigid refutation of noble trade in The Spirit of the Laws. In early 1756, Montesquieu's position against noble trade had come under severe attack by Gabriel François Coyer's Noblesse Commerçante. Claiming that the royal absolutist system had transformed the nobles into an idle (...) class without any political, economic, or military function that stood in sharp contrast to the dynamism of modern commercial society, Coyer perceived noble enterprises in maritime, wholesale, and even retail trade as a necessary means to help France compete with commercially more advanced states such as England and Holland. Coyer's pamphlet roused heated controversies in Paris and beyond and soon engaged the leading minds of the time in debates over the actual and desired role of the hereditary aristocracy in monarchies. Coyer's strongest opponents, like the Chevalier d’Arc, vehemently defended Montesquieu's contention that the upkeep of the non-commercial status of the nobility was a political necessity. Yet they, too, conceded that the nobility had to undergo severe reforms not to hamper France's military standing and future economic success. The article finally turns to Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, the most interesting commentator on the debate in Germany, who, by October 1756, had translated Coyer's and d’Arc's texts into German and written an own treatise on the same issue. Justi's pamphlet reveals that his political theory was deeply shaped by the debate and thus disproves the long-held assumption in the literature that German cameralism, with Justi as its main representative, was an allegedly isolated current of thought that neither received significant external influences, nor exerted any considerable impact beyond the boundaries of the Germanic world. (shrink)

Using the lives of the three outstanding French intellectuals of the twentieth century, renowned historian Tony Judt offers a unique look at how intellectuals can ignore political pressures and demonstrate a heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time. Through the prism of the lives of Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron, Judt examines pivotal issues in the history of contemporary French society—antisemitism and the dilemma of Jewish identity, (...) political and moral idealism in public life, the Marxist moment in French thought, the traumas of decolonization, the disaffection of the intelligentsia, and the insidious quarrels rending Right and Left. Judt focuses particularly on Blum's leadership of the Popular Front and his stern defiance of the Vichy governments, on Camus's part in the Resistance and Algerian War, and on Aron's cultural commentary and opposition to the facile acceptance by many French intellectuals of communism's utopian promise. Severely maligned by powerful critics and rivals, each of these exemplary figures stood fast in their principles and eventually won some measure of personal and public redemption. Judt constructs a compelling portrait of modern French intellectual life and politics. He challenges the conventional account of the role of intellectuals precisely because they mattered in France, because they could shape public opinion and influence policy. In Blum, Camus, and Aron, Judt finds three very different men who did not simply play the role, but evinced a courage and a responsibility in public life that far outshone their contemporaries. "An eloquent and instructive study of intellectual courage in the face of what the author persuasively describes as intellectual irresponsibility."—Richard Bernstein, _New York Times_. (shrink)

Modern dialogue of society and science proceeds in the conditions of social media distribution and the convergence of scientific knowledge. This processes change system of mass information and communication channels between scientific actors, leaders of public opinion and organizers of public initiatives. The conflict between an elite normativity of a scientific discourse and an egalitarian normativity of a public discourse takes the new forms. Authors show how in large quantities extending practice of civil expertise, based on civil journalism (a (...) blogosphere and social networks), interrupt into procedures of scientific examination. Active inclusion of civil experts became an attribute of transdisciplinary science. The main feature of this type of science is operational decision making in the conditions of uncertainty. However transition of transdisciplinary science to a phase of the technoscience defines convergence borders of the formal and informal knowledge. Technoscience takes root into the vital world as a magic “black box” for the inhabitant. Authors believe that the transdialogue formed by transdisciplinary scientific experts and deprofessionalized leaders of civil journalism is complicated by deficiency of epistemological competence of civil experts. One of the problem is inclusion the electronic media practices in production and the social circulation of scientific knowledge. Using rather known, but not yet entered in the field of philosophical scientific research examples of direct influence of civil experts on processes which in a former communication order were intra scientific, authors realised a research of the new aspects of modern science expanding a traditional subject of philosophy of science and technology. (shrink)

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism.Tracing the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is to return to those historical "crossroads" at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to (...) this outcome. His aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicative rationality. As The Theory of Communicative Action served to place this concept within the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history of philosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about the appropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range of past and present critics and theorists.The lectures on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note since they are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French and German thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault - begun in person as the first of these lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciative yet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoretical reception of Derrida in America - launched at Cornell in 1984 - issues here in a long excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. The lectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and first published in Germany in the fall of 1985.Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy. (shrink)