Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed (...) on a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

Bourdieu’s thought is disturbing. Provocative. Scandalous even, at least for those who do not easily tolerate the unmitigated truth about the social. Nonetheless his ideas, among the most important and innovative of our time, are here to stay. This thought has taken form in the course of a career and through works on diverse subjects that have constructed a far-reaching analytical model of social life, which the author calls more readily an anthropology rather than a sociology. In their totality, they (...) constitute today an original and powerful proposal to explain human practices. In the face of criticisms commonly leveled at Bourdieu’s thought (notably the charge that it reduces everything to a single schematic model), it is important to identify the spirit of his enterprise. Early on, it is true, his thought drew on a few fundamental concepts—the trilogy habitus, field (champ), practice (pratique)—to which it constantly returned, and followed a clearly defined trajectory. At the same time, however, he continually reformulated, adapted, and refined his analytical model, depending on the operations to which he subjected new objects of inquiry. The regenerative and transformative force of his thought was supported by two convictions. First, that there being nothing more vain than theory for theory’s sake, it is preferable that theoretical production originate in the study of concrete and occasionally very specific cases. Second, that in order to escape stereotypical classifications, boundaries separating disciplines are best transgressed, thereby favoring new constructions of the object of inquiry. (shrink)

Disturbed by these acrimonious arguments, the authors - former colleagues and university-press board members - embarked on an ambitious project to reexamine a number of major literary and philosophical works dealing with the liberal arts and education. With their discussions ranging from Plato to Rousseau, from Cicero to Vico, from Erasmus to Matthew Arnold, Sousa and Weinsheimer offer not a history of education philosophy but an examination of the present.

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.

Platonic mysticism -- Mapping mysticism -- The eclipse of Platonic mysticism -- The externalist fallacy -- On literature and mysticism -- Transcendence -- Contemplative art, contemplative science.

Expectation is a major volume of Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English. More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature’s relation to philosophy. Nancy pursues such questions as literature’s claims to truth, the status of narrative, the relation of poetry and prose, and the unity of a book or of a text, and he addresses a number of major European writers, including Dante, (...) Sterne, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot. The final section offers a number of impressive pieces by Nancy that completely merge his concerns for philosophy and literature and philosophy-as-literature. These include a lengthy parody of Valéry’s “La Jeune Parque,” several original poems by Nancy, and a beautiful prose-poetic discourse on an installation by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani that incorporates the Faust theme. Opening with a substantial Introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté that elaborates Nancy’s importance as a literary thinker, this book constitutes the most substantial statement to date by one of today’s leading philosophers on a discipline that has been central to his work across his career. (shrink)

Preface -- I. WELCOME TO THE WAR -- Introduction -- The war of the worldviews -- Who will be God? -- II. WORLDVIEWS IN PHILOSOPHY -- Introduction -- Thomas Aquinas -- The first battle front -- René Descartes -- John Locke -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Karl Marx -- Ralph Waldo Emerson -- The second battle front -- Jeremy Bentham -- Charles Darwin -- Friedrich Nietzsche -- John Dewey -- Jean-Paul Sartre -- III. WORLDVIEWS IN LITERATURE -- Introduction -- (...) The third battle front -- William Shakespeare -- Nathaniel Hawthorne -- Mark Twain -- Ernest Hemingway & John Steinbeck -- IV. WORLDVIEWS IN CULTURE -- Pandora's machine -- Glossary -- List of images. (shrink)

In this provocative new examination of the philosophical, moral and religious significance of literature, Michael Weston explores the role of literature in both analytic and continental traditions. He initiates a dialogue between them and investigates the growing importance of these issues for major contemporary thinkers. Each chapter explores a philosopher or literary figure who has written on the relation between literature and the good life, such as Derrida, Kierkegaard, Murdoch and Blanchot. Challenging and insightful, Philosophy, (...) class='Hi'>Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature. (shrink)

“The only form of the philosophy-literature distinction which we need is one drawn in terms of the contrast between the familiar and the unfamiliar, rather than in terms of a deeper and more exciting contrast between the representational and the non-representational, or the literal and the metaphorical.” This is the first of the points urged by Richard Rorty in his article on ‘Deconstruction and Circumvention’ published in Critical Inquiry, vol. II, no. I, Sept. 1984. In what follows I (...) shall be trying to explain why, despite the large number of points on which I should be inclined to agree with Rorty, I do not agree with this one; trying to produce arguments to justify my disagreement; and trying too, no doubt, in perhaps more ‘literary’ than ‘philosophical’ fashion, to give to my explanation some force of persuasion. (shrink)

The goal is to isolate points of philosophical interest in the preceding articles on narrative medical ethics in order to focus subsequent dialogue between the two disciplines. Ethics is an enterprise that has over the centuries developed a somewhat malleable structure, comprising characteristics, methods, lines of reasoning, rules, principles, assumptions, and arguments. This structure provides the framework within which many disciplines contribute to ethics through the exercise of their particular interests, skills, and methods. Challenging or changing the structural components requires (...) arguments of a traditional sort appropriate to the discipline of ethics. Three tenets are proposed as comprising the “received view” or credo of the literature and ethics movement. Each is examined. Then the individual articles in this issue are explored to the end of ferreting out points that would be fruitful points of discussion between philosophy and literature folks pursuing their mutual interest in ethics. (shrink)

Challenging existing methodological conceptions of the analytic approach to aesthetics, Jukka Mikkonen brings together philosophy, literary studies and cognitive psychology to offer a new theory on the cognitive value of reading fiction. -/- Philosophy, Literature and Understanding defends the epistemic significance of narratives, arguing that it should be explained in terms of understanding rather than knowledge. Mikkonen formulates understanding as a cognitive process, which he connects to narrative imagining in order to assert that narrative is a central (...) tool for communicating understanding. Demonstrating the effects that literary works have on their readers, he examines academic critical analysis, responses of the reading public and nonfictional writings that include autobiographical testimony to their writer's influences and attitudes to life. In doing so, he provides empirical evidence of the cognitive benefits of literature and of how readers demonstrate the growth of their understanding. -/- By drawing on the written testimony of the reader, this book is an important intervention into debates on the value of literature that incorporates understanding in new and imaginative ways. (shrink)

The essays in this collection honor Professor Ellis Sandoz, Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Louisiana State University, and founding director of the Eric Voegelin Institute for American Renaissance Studies, an institute located at Louisiana State University and devoted to research and publication in the fields of political philosophy, constitutional law, and Voegelin studies. Without the tireless leadership—both academic and economic—of Ellis Sandoz, who was one of Eric Voegelin’s early students and his first American doctoral candidate at (...) the University of Munich, the thirty-four volumes of _The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin _would never have neared completion within only twenty years of Voegelin’s death. The authors of the essays, some of the most respected scholars in the field of political philosophy, hail from Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, and the United States. They have known Sandoz in a variety of ways: as former students, as beneficiaries of his work on constitutionalism, as fellow participants in the publication of _The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin_, as philosophical colleagues, as participating members of the Eric Voegelin Society, and finally as friends. The essays, each written especially for this volume, are grouped into the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and politics and range widely across these subjects, exploring writers as diverse as Xenophon, Natsume Soseki, Freud, and George Santayana and topics ranging from the leadership style of François Mitterrand and the Velvet Revolution to the nature of the Law and of the Political. _Philosophy, Literature, and Politics _is a fitting tribute to a man whose life’s work has been formed by commitment to the philosophical enterprise and by a conviction in Eric Voegelin’s contribution to that enterprise. The seventeen essays in this collection will be of particular interest to scholars of politics, comparative government, Japanese studies, political philosophy, and literary criticism. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Bence Nanay has argued against what he calls the Discontinuity Thesis: the claim that literature (along with all other nonabstract art forms) can never count as genuine philosophizing. I first claim that Nanay’s argument either proves too much or rests on heavy-duty premises that he does not adequately defend. I then present my own strategy for resisting Discontinuity, which argues that the proper response to both literature and philosophy can include emotional engagement coupled (...) with reflection. (shrink)

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy and literature both as forms of writing and thinking, but also (which is a more original contribution) as historically specific instititutions of enquiry. The argument is that part of the historical and cultural situatedness of philosophy is as a written form of cultural production, but one located within institutions (Universities above all) that already have a different 'department' specialising in understanding written forms of cultural production. This suggests that there might (...) be an overlooked reciprocal influence. In particular, what new challenges for its own thinking can philosophy discover in the contemporary practices of literary analysis? A case study is detailed concerning recent forms of ecological criticism. (shrink)

This chapter considers the relationship between philosophy and literature both as forms of writing and thinking, but also (which is a more original contribution) as historically specific instititutions of enquiry. The argument is that part of the historical and cultural situatedness of philosophy is as a written form of cultural production, but one located within institutions (Universities above all) that already have a different 'department' specialising in understanding written forms of cultural production. This suggests that there might (...) be an overlooked reciprocal influence. In particular, what new challenges for its own thinking can philosophy discover in the contemporary practices of literary analysis? A case study is detailed concerning recent forms of ecological criticism. (shrink)

_Silence in Philosophy, Literature, and Art_ demonstrates how silence as a form of indirect discourse provides us with access to hitherto inaccessible aspects of human experience.

Contemporary debates within analytic philosophy regarding the relation between literature and philosophy focus on the capacity of some literary works to engage with philosophical problems. While some philosophers see literature as a welcome contribution to philosophy, or as an alternative to pursuing philosophical questions, some are more sceptical with respect to its capacity to tackle philosophical concerns. As a contribution to this debate, in this paper I look at similarities and dissimilarities between the two practices, (...) with the aim of mitigating some views which see them as too diverse to allow for literary treatment of philosophical issues. As points of contact, I focus on the shared thematic concerns of the two practices, i.e. on the fact that literature and philosophy both deal with issues that humans generally care for. I argue that both practices, despite the stylistic, linguistic and methodological differences in their approach, manage to fulfil ‘the recognition requirement’, namely, recognize and engage with those issues, situations and context of human predicament in the world which are in need of intellectual refinement. I then move on to dismiss arguments which purport to discredit literary treatments of philosophy on the basis of literature’s alleged subjectivity and emotional dimension, which are contrasted with philosophical objectivity and rationality. I end by emphasizing the impact of academic constraints on professional philosophy, in order to suggest that pursuing philosophical concerns is not an invention of the practice, but a natural inclination of reflective, inquisitive human mind. (shrink)

A review of Jukka Mikkonen's 'Philosophy, literature and understanding: On reading and cognition' (2021).

Starting from the position of the ancient Stoa, these two interdisciplinary collections examine the influence of Stoic thinkers from late antiquity to modernity. Following an introductory overview, the 42 essays examine central Stoic themes and consider their cultural significance.

Frank Palmer, Richard Eldridge, and Martha Nussbaum explore the contributions that imaginative literature can make to ethics. From three different moral philosophical perspectives, they argue that reading literature can help persons to achieve greater moral understanding. This essay examines how each author conceives of moral understanding, particularly in its emotional dimension, and how each thinks that reading literature can promote moral understanding. The essay also considers some implications of this work for religious ethics.

Presents an original theoretical system to explain and contrast modernism and postmodernism.

Assesses a distinct style of thinking in twentieth-century Spanish writing, one in which literature plays a central role in reaching behind philosophy to essential sources of life and meaning.

This précis gives an overview of my book Philosophy, Literature, and Understanding: On Reading and Cognition which is the subject of a book symposium in Philosophia. The overview covers the book’s four chapters that explore i) the nature of literary imagination, ii) the epistemic value of narratives, iii) the concepts of cognition, knowledge and understanding with regard to fiction, and iv) evidence for claims about the epistemic impact of literary works on their readers.

George Pattison provides a bold and innovative reassessment of Kierkegaard's neglected Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses and reading of his work as a whole. The first full length assessment of the discourses in English, this volume will be essential reading for philosophers and theologians, and anyone interested in Kierkegaard and the history of philosophy.

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out. Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary (...) events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown. (shrink)

George Pattison provides a bold and innovative reassessment of Kierkegaard's neglected _Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses_ and reading of his work as a whole. The first full length assessment of the discourses in English, this volume will be essential reading for philosophers and theologians, and anyone interested in Kierkegaard and the history of philosophy.

This chapter contains sections titled: Reference and Literary Language The Second Inheritance: Revealing the World through Metaphor and Paradox Initiation into the World: Appreciating the Adequacy of Words The Continuum between Philosophy and Literature Conclusion.

Untying Things Together helps to clarify the stakes of the last fifty years of literary and cultural theory by proposing the idea of a sexuality of theory. In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud’s title to take up the sexuality of theory—or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found (...) in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, “theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it. Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or “encyst” on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a “return to theory,” Santner’s book simply employs theory as a way of further “tying together” the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more. (shrink)

This is an edited collection of original essays that combine philosophy, phenomenology, and literature to reflect on modern ideas about orientation and disorientation, grounds and groundlessness.