While discussions of the debate between Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg over ‘secularisation’ focus primarily on the methodological utility of the concept, the difference between them was also one of the philosophical commitments and substantive claims about modernity. This difference is not always obvious. One way of bringing it out is to address the different contexts in which they produced their most famous statements about secularisation. But another, and one that will be pursued here, is to consider the critical dialogue (...) that both thinkers engaged in with Nietzsche. Put briefly, while Löwith thought that Nietzsche misunderstood the ancients, Blumenberg thought that he misunderstood the moderns. For Löwith, Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return is not Greek, but an aggressive countergospel that owes much to the Christian culture it seeks to oppose; for Blumenberg, Nietzsche assumes, wrongly, that the self-belittlement of man by theology has been succeeded by the self-belittlement of man by science. In addition, Blumenberg – unlike both Nietzsche and Löwith – thinks that he can mount a robust defence of both modern science and progress. (shrink)

The relationship between Christians and Muslims underwent drastic fluctuations in the former Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and the modern Republic of Turkey in the twentieth century generally. The dynamic can be described as having been one of sanctioned political communion under the Ottoman regime, outright violence and antagonism in the shadows of WWI, and today reflected in a type of social equilibrium, albeit precarious. Specifically, the paper focuses on adumbrating the modus vivendi that facilitated coexistence between Christians and (...) Muslims over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how the Christian communities have subsequently remained to this day. For this purpose the three following regions of East Anatolia are examined: Hakkari, Bohtan, and Turabdin. The history of the Christians, once a legally protected and acknowledged minority under the status of dhimma, is first demonstrated in a historical outline of the confederations of Syriac-Nestorian Christians and Muslim Kurds in the Hakkari region. These socio-political compacts – in Kurdish bazikê çepê and bazikê rastê – provided the bulwark for regional stability and security in the nineteenth century. The dawn of colonialism and the coming of American and British Christian missionaries tolled the knell for this positive mechanism for practical coexistence. Second, the Bohtan region is observed. Here, the history of Anatolia’s Christians reflects a similar negative development. For example, during WWI the Aghas protected the Christians from extermination, whereafter the Christians found themselves to have become the personal property of their Muslim protectors. As chances for emigration from Anatolia to Istanbul and Europe opened up, Christians fled their servitude thereby emptying entire towns of Christians. Lastly, in the Turabdin region, parallels can be made with the Hakkari region: Christians and Muslim Kurds also coexisted through confederations. Yet, like Hakkari and throughout East Anatolia, the massacre of Christians by the Kurdish Emir of Cizre in the mid-nineteenth century and mass murders in 1914–1915 precipitated the decline in Christian population in the twentieth century. The paper concludes that the current relationship between Christians and Muslims is one of living next – yet not equal – to one another. (shrink)

Much of Nietzsche’s work questions modes of thought, notably Platonism, that posit a dualism between a true world outside time and an apparent world of change, becoming, and semblance. It also raises doubts about a sharp separation between philosophy and literature.1Many have followed Nietzsche’s lead, seen philosophy’s modes of generalization and conceptualization as limited resources for the understanding of human conduct, and turned to literature. Thinkers as different from one another as D. Z. Phillips and Martha Nussbaum and post-Nietzschean philosophers (...) like Derrida, Bataille, and Blanchot have turned to literature for accounts of ethical experience in general and, in particular, for an understanding of what.. (shrink)

In this study the relationship between philosophy and literature is explored by means of an examination of ideas about language, the subject and ethics in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Robert Musil and Oğuz Atay.

This book is about the philosophy or nature of aesthetic values and beauty.

ABSTRACTThis article explores Nietzsche’s approach to the fundamental question of “how to live one’s life”, and more specifically his view of the role of the past in seeking an answer to this question. By discussing Nietzsche’s views of how different nations and cultures relate to their history, I suggest some comparisons with how individuals might do so. Common to both is the relationship between the past as a resource and as a burden: the burden of single events or periods and (...) the burden of the abundance of facts. Key to Nietzsche’s thinking on these questions is his account of the relationship between remembering, promising, and forgetting. He considers “active forgetting” paradoxically as both a form of forgetting and a way of taking full responsibility for the past. (shrink)

Nicht nur mit Engelszungen: Beiträge zur semitischen Dialektologie—Festschrift für Werner Arnold zum 60. Geburtstag. Edited by Renaud Kuty; Ulrich Seeger; and Shabo Talay. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. xx + 412. €118.

Neuaramäische Texte in den Dialekten der Khabur-Assyrer in Nordostsyrien. By Shabo Talay. Semitica Viva, vol. 41. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009. Pp. xv + 712. €148.

Monographic issue on the Philosophy of Emotions. Contents: Resentment, Empathy and Indignation; Jacqueline Taylor / Compassion without Cognitivism; Charlie Kurth / “I Don’t Want Your Compassion!”. The Importance of Empathy for Morality; Manuel Camassa / Making sense of emotional contagion; Carme Isern-Mas, Antoni Gomila / On Pride; Lorenzo Greco / Envy and its objects; Alessandra Fussi / Admiration, moral knowledge and transformative experiences; Maria Silvia Vaccarezza / Fear as Related to Courage: An Aristotelian-Thomistic Redefinition of Cognitive Emotions; Claudia Navarini, Ettore (...) De Monte / On Courage. The Sense Of θυμός; Tiziana Migliore / Shades of Schadenfreude. A phenomenological account of pleasure at another’s misfortune; Danilo Manca / Concern and the Structure of Action; Alexander A. Jeuk / On Sexual Lust as an Emotion; Larry A. Herzberg / Emotions and Literature in Musil; Zeynep Talay Turner. (shrink)