Focusing on Nietzsche’s madman parable from The Gay Science, this essay shows how the language/imagery of aphorism 125 draws on a Cynical critique ofmorality that has far-reaching consequences for understanding Nietzsche’s notions of nihilism, transvaluation of values, and amor fati. My claim is that the work ofDiogenes of Sinope will shape both the rhetorical structure and the philosophical thematics of The Gay Science. As the “Socrates gone mad,” Diogenes/the madman brings his lantern to the marketplace to seek a (...) God who has fled, the deus absconditus. Countering Christian-Platonic metaphysics with Diogenean satire, Nietzsche advocates the embrace of physis as the sphere of human creation and valuation. Against this Cynical background we can see how the madman parable’s announcement of God’s death has less to do with atheism or the argument about the existence of God than it does with the existential concerns of the human being. (shrink)

Focusing on Nietzsche’s madman parable from The Gay Science, this essay shows how the language/imagery of aphorism 125 draws on a Cynical critique ofmorality that has far-reaching consequences for understanding Nietzsche’s notions of nihilism, transvaluation of values, and amor fati. My claim is that the work ofDiogenes of Sinope will shape both the rhetorical structure and the philosophical thematics of The Gay Science. As the “Socrates gone mad,” Diogenes/the madman brings his lantern to the marketplace to seek a (...) God who has fled, the deus absconditus. Countering Christian-Platonic metaphysics with Diogenean satire, Nietzsche advocates the embrace of physis as the sphere of human creation and valuation. Against this Cynical background we can see how the madman parable’s announcement of God’s death has less to do with atheism or the argument about the existence of God than it does with the existential concerns of the human being. (shrink)

I. Hardly any other mythical creature has enjoyed the ubiquity of the clown: “There are few other myths such as this one about which it can be affirmed without any doubt that they involve the most ancient modes of human expression,” wrote Paul Radin in his famous essay on the figure of the clown among primitive American Indians. “There are few myths which have retained their original characters with so few changes.” The character of the Fool, the Jester, the Joker (...) appears in a clearly identifiable fashion in the most primitive as well as the most highly cultivated groups: among the Greeks as well as the Chinese; in Japanese civilization as well as the Semite world. The medieval juggler is the embodiment of this figure of many aspects who perdures in the theater, especially puppet theater, and in the guise of the circus clown. (shrink)

Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries, culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre’s most famous example, composed in 1488 by Tsangnyön Heruka, or the ...

Even though the philosophy of common sense is not justifi able as such, the assump- tion upon which it rests, namely that there are things which we are not in position to doubt is correct. The reason why Thomas Reid was unable to bring this assumption out in a justifi able manner is that his views, both on knowledge and nature, are to be considered dogmatic. American pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey on the other hand, may (...) be seen as offering us a ‘critical’ and post-Darwinian philosophy of common sense. (shrink)

Translation (French to English) of Emmanuel Falque's "Le fou désincarné." I also wrote a translator's note, placed at the conclusion of the article. Phenomenology must begin to acknowledge the organic, animal nature of the body instead of focusing only on the pure subjectivity of the flesh. Mediating between Descartes's extended body (a mere object that is entirely distinct from the self) and Husserl's lived body (the flesh that is the self), the spread body is the organic body that I have, (...) that is not simply myself and yet is mine. This essay reveals the steep cost of phenomenology's neglect of the body, which produces a discarnation, or dissolution of the flesh itself. The "flesh without body" vanishes into transparency, exemplified by Descartes' "madmen" who lose all connection to their organic bodies, to the point of supposing that their bodies are glass. Because organicity is in fact proper to us, denying or rejecting its import can lead only to madness. (shrink)

Friedrich Jacobi (1743-1819) is known mainly as a representative of the “philosophy of feeling and faith” and as one of the first critics of Kant, who drew attention to the fundamental contradiction in his system: without the concept of “thing in itself” (or “thing in oneself”) it is impossible to enter into his “Critique of Pure Reason”, but it is equally impossible to remain in it with this concept. The consistent development of the transcendental philosophy system leads to the elimination (...) of its own initial, fundamental premise. The discovery of this contradiction and the indication of its significance for the evaluation of critical philosophy was often seen as almost the only contribution of Jacobi to world philosophy. In the historical and philosophical literature, the opinion prevails is that Jacobi, by and large, simply did not understand Kant and was in comparison with him, just a “grumpy scoundrel” (Heinrich Heine) and a “lower monad” (Kuno Fischer). This pejorative assessment significantly simplifies and distorts both Jacobi’s philosophy and Jacobi’s actual attitude towards Kant, which was not so unambiguous. It should be considered in a much broader historical and problematic context. The study briefly examines the history of the long and difficult relationship between the “privileged heretic” and the “gray eminence” of the German philosophical classics with the creator of the transcendental philosophy system. The main directions of a deeply thought-out and well-founded serious criticism of Kant’s philosophy (i.e. its inconsistency, idealism, rational intellectualism, subjectivism, “speculative egoism”, etc.) are outlined and analyzed from the positions of radical realism, common sense, Christian faith, metaphysical “sense of the supersensible”, direct knowledge of the most important truths for a person, the absolute values of life, moral intuition, freedom, and dignity of the individual. (shrink)

The film Nosferatu (1922) has graffiti created by the character of the madman Knock on the walls of his cell. This motif, which I call the ‘madman’s wall’, has accompanied depictions of lunatics since the beginning of the eighteenth century. This article examines the origin, transformations and functions of this motif. The popularisation of the motif originates with the longitude diagram in the last plate of A Rake’s Progress (1735) by William Hogarth, which subsequently found its way into (...) the works of Hogarth’s plagiarists and influenced illustrations of asylum interiors in the first half of the nineteenth century. The madman’s wall also appears in literature, such as the popular novel The Father and Daughter (1801) by Amelia Opie, which was plagiarised and dramatised, and the legend of the poet Charles Smart, who allegedly wrote his poem on the walls of his cell. The main prerequisite for the madman’s wall is the dungeon-like image of the asylum—presenting it as a prison. It is usually the author of the graffiti who displays the signs of madness, not the wall itself. As society distanced itself from the image of the asylum as a dungeon, the madman’s wall disappeared after the 1850s. Paradoxically, many reports about the authentic wall art of asylum patients emerged in the press after the 1850s. The madman’s wall in Nosferatu is the first example after an approximately seventy-year absence and could be a product of the period interest of avant-garde artists in the art of the mentally ill. (shrink)

This article discusses madness and saintliness in Dostoevsky’s novels and investigates how the madman and the saint discern between good and evil. I first explore the metaphysical, spiritual, and moral universe of Dostoevsky’s characters by drawing on William Desmond’s philosophy of the between. Second, I argue that the madman’s misconstrual of reality can be grasped as an idolatrous, divisive, and parodic imitation of the good. Third, I reflect on disembodied discernment. In some cases, due to the weakness of (...) the moral agent, the good cannot be properly embodied in space and time, even if a person exhibits ethically sound discernment. Fourth, I look at examples of holy discernment and examine how, through love, the genuinely good person is able to transform idolatry into a universal and cosmic sacramentalism. (shrink)

Whether your scepticism is as absolute and sincere as you claim is something we shall learn later on, when we end this little meeting: we’ll then see whether you leave the room through the door or the window; and whether you really doubt that your body has gravity and can be injured by its fall—which is what people in general think on the basis of their fallacious senses and more fallacious experience. What Could Be more dissimilar than a well-argued philosophical (...) thesis and a psychiatric delusion? Compare, for instance, Hume’s (1739) view that the self is nothing more than a “bundle” of perceptions with the psychiatric patient’s view that the thoughts in his head belong to someone else. Or, compare the .. (shrink)

The slogan ‘anything goes’ first appears in Paul Feyerabend’s book Against Method at the end of the first chapter. Since that time, philosophical literature has been peppered with criticism and cries of outrage towards Feyerabend’s call for anarchy. Many have speculated on what exactly was meant by the slogan and even more philosophers and scientists have quickly discarded Feyerabend’s antidote as the obvious ramblings of a madman.In this essay, I will argue that Paul Feyerabend does not promote complete anarchy, (...) contrary to his critics. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that Feyerabend promotes methodological and theoretical pluralism, and does not call for total chaos. First, I will briefly outline the overwhelmingly cynical yet popular reading of Feyerabend’s anarchical ideas. Unlike other contemporary perspectives, I willthen argue for what I believe to be a much more fair reading of his anarchy as a prescription for the scientific discipline. I will conclude with postulating an overarching and interesting possibility, namely that Feyerabend’s call for anarchy is an attempt to distance philosophy from the scientific domain. (shrink)

One hundred years ago the expression "God is dead" was first used by Nietzsche. Now, Nietzsche was reared in a christian home, but at the university he decided there was no god.Now, this philosophy began to pervade German thought. And I believe that history is going to say that this philosophy … contributed to a religious, moral and intellectual vacuum, and into that vacuum came Nazism and the concept of the super race that produced Hitler and the second World War.Now, (...) if we in America reject the idea of god and all that that means, we're going to have a vacuum in which either a fascist type or a communist type of ideology is going to come in … that could eventually lead, in my opinion, to anarchy and chaos.The... (shrink)

This paper examines the role of the imagination in the Zhuangzi. There are many avenues through which the various types of imaginations in the Zhuangzi could be investigated, but this paper will concentrate on only one, namely the use of imagination to criticize Confucius’ way. Specifically, the Zhuangzi finds Confucius’ views on virtuosity, moral cultivation, and social roles to include exceedingly limited imagined restrictions. The Daoist classic thereby creates stories to inspire the imagination of its readers, with the goal of (...) broadening the ways in which people understand morality, society, and themselves. Accordingly, the Zhuangzi suggests that people can ‘zigzag’ through life, temporarily taking on different perspectives or roles, without cultivating a corresponding sense of self. Imagination is key for promoting this type of existential mode of existence—what the Zhuangzi calls ‘genuine’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:494 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in the Haller Zeitung; it will probably not appear at all--it has, among other short, comings, the fault to be too long." In a letter to Schtitz, Niethammer writes from Bamberg on 23 March 1807: "I repeat my urgent demand... to send the review of Salat's book submitted by Prof. Hegel as soon as possible to Jena to hand it in to Hofrat Voigt.... " (...) The volume contains almost 1,000 valuable notes which explain the philosophical and historical background of the newly edited material. HENRY WALTERBRANN Takoma Park, Maryland Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev: Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman. Trans. with Intro. by Mary-Barbara Zeldin. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969. Pp. 203. $7.50) Mary-Barbara Zeldin's translation into English of the Philosophical Letters and the Apology of a Madman, by the enigmatic Russian intellectual leader of the early nineteenth century, Peter Yakovlevich Chaadayev makes available in English for the first time the thought of this figure whose small corpus of writings circulated mostly in manuscript during his own lifetime and waited over a hundred years after his death for their complete translation in their original French. Historically Chaadayev is important as a mediator between Westernizers and Slavophiles in this initial period of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual awakening. Chaadayev himself remained aloof from either of these parties, was appealed to by both of them and became himself a kind of martyr to intellectual freedom. His own view of Russian-Western relationships incorporates this problem most remarkably into a theological vision of the "education of the human race." Philosophically Chaadayev stands as a unique and somewhat eccentric synthesizer of German idealism with the Christian concept of salvation history. Perhaps the most remarkable insight to be gained by reading these long-buried essays is the ease with which an Eastern Orthodox Christian versed in Patristic hellenism could fuse the ideas of a paedagogy of the human race in Lessing, Herder and Schiller and read this as an expression of an Irenaean doctrine of the progressive development of a mankind through the mediation of the primordial Logos; an Alexandrian idea of the paedagogy of Christ in history and a Eusebian doctrine of Christian universal empire. In so doing this Russian thinker also reveals to what an extent the German idealist movement itself was grounded on much older syntheses of Christian thought. In the process, however, Chaadayev also shows that nineteenth-century men could only appropriate this heritage anew by taking the great credal themes of revelation, Christi, the church and the Kingdom of God and reissuing them in a secularized, humanistic dress, as a philosophy of history. Chaadayev's basic thesis is that knowledge is a divinely-given deposit of certain fundamental primordial ideas, which man would not have arrived at through his own unaided powers, but rather possesses as an imprint upon the mind of the first man implanted by the Creator. Chaadayev weds the western philosophical concept of a fundamental a priori with a doctrine of primordial revelation, revealing the foundation of man himself in the divine Logos. This primordial deposit of ideas existed in BOOK REVIEWS 495 the first man only as a rudimentary 'image' of God. It is only through historical development that man grows to full stature in these truths whereby he attains to the completed 'likeness' of God. These truths, together with their historical development, are passed down by a historical succession, which is not an ecclesiastical succession, but a succession of the human family. These truths are periodically renewed by the advent of certain extraordinary individuals who exemplify them to a high degree, and by certain elect nations who are divinely designated as their culture-bearers. The Jews of the Old Testament were that culture-bearer in antiquity, and, since the time of Jesus Christ, it is Christendom which stands for and bears the development of this primordial truth as it has been renewed and set forth in archetypal perfection by Christ. Chaadayev sharply down grades the role of the Greeks in this development, but does so in a manner remarkably similar to the ancient Christian apologists who stole Greek fire in order to bathe the... (shrink)

125. The madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lighted a lantern at the bright sunshine of the morning, ran to the market, and began ceaselessly screaming: "I seek God! I seek God!"?This present essay is a shortened and adapted version of the first chapter of a large book of mine devoted to a comparison between ancient Greece and Christianity, shortly to be published in English by Michigan State University Press. Its theoretical core is the idea (...) of mediation, that is to say, the intangible connective element acting as a medium capable of linking humans to the world and the divine sphere that made the world possible in ancient times2. All this is related to our experience of object meant not only as a... (shrink)

This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy. Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his (...) life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas. Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the "will to power" was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation. He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity. Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker. Featuring a new foreword by Alexander Nehamas, this Princeton Classics edition of Nietzsche introduces a new generation of readers to one the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJohn Locke is famous for popularizing the method of the philosophical thought experiment in discussions of personal identity; the cases introduced in the second edition of An Essay Concerning Understanding are still employed by contemporary philosophers. Here I argue that Locke’s method is nonetheless importantly different from later efforts in ways that can help us better appreciate his larger projects. Rather than pumping the reader’s intuitions in support of his preferred account, Locke’s thought experiments serve to illustrate common errors in (...) assessments of identity that he sees as particularly prevalent and problematic. Locke defends his idea of ‘person’ otherwise, through what I call his ‘lived experiments’: observations about linguistic usage that serve to illustrate the term’s role in practical reasoning. I focus especially on Locke’s example of the forensic status of the madman. Examples like these do not, for Locke, demonstrate the intuitiveness of his analysis, but rather bolste... (shrink)

This chapter defends the thesis that feeling conviction is sufficient for belief: if you feel conviction that p, then you believe that p. I begin with a neutral characterization of belief in terms of its normative profile: belief is a state that is subject to certain distinctive norms of rationality. The main argument of the chapter is that feelings of conviction are beliefs because they are subject to the same norms of rationality that govern our beliefs. Functionalists often deny that (...) feelings of conviction constitute beliefs when they play dysfunctional causal roles, as in cases of mad belief or delusion or implicit bias, but this only serves to obscure the kind of irrationality involved in such cases. These are dysfunctional beliefs, rather than non-doxastic states, or "in-between" cases. (shrink)

In his comprehensive survey of the work of William Herschel, published in the Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes for 1842, Dominique Arago argued that the life of the great astronomer ‘had the rare privilege of forming an epoch in an extended branch of astronomy’. Arago also noted, however, that Herschel's ideas were often taken as ‘the conceptions of a madman’, even if they were subsequently accepted. This fact, commented Arago, ‘seems to me one that deserves to appear in the (...) history of science’. From the time Herschel published his first paper in the Philosophical transactions in 1781, he was subjected to the suggestion of lunacy. His patron and friend William Watson, told him that after his claims for the extraordinary power of his telescopes, ‘your prognosis that some would think you fit for Bedlam has been verified’. On learning of Herschel's supremely accurate new micrometer, the astronomer Alexander Aubert exclaimed to Herschel that ‘we would go to Bedlam together’: Aubert wrote to Herschel in January 1782 that he should ‘mind not a few jealous barking puppies: a little time will clear up the matter, and if it lays in my power you would not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I incline much to be of the party’. (shrink)

Images and concepts of the 'posthuman' go back at least as far as the famous 'madman parable' in F. Nietzsche's The Gay Science, and their 'roots' go back much further still. In turn, the image or theme of the posthuman has played an increasingly important role in recent literature, film, and television, where the notion of humanity as a 'larval being' (G. Deleuze) that transforms itself or is being transformed into something else, for better or worse, has become increasingly (...) common. This book explores these concepts in relation to biblical texts, particularly texts from the gospel of Mark but also from the books of Daniel, Jonah and Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes), and the Acts of the Apostles. At the same time, texts from recent popular culture are examined, including novels by J. Morrow, C. Miéville and G. Ryman, the movies Local Hero and Lars and the Real Girl, and the Heroes TV series among others. Through a kind of inverted causality, recent texts in various media such as these transform earlier and otherwise unrelated ones, including biblical texts, into precursors, giving them new, postmodern meanings, just as the older texts once signified in still other ways before the advent of the familiar modern world. As a result, biblical texts signify in remarkably different ways in relation to the posthuman. Posthuman beings appear in both biblical and non-biblical texts, and the biblical phrase 'sons of men' (in both plural and singular versions) plays a crucial role, where it too takes on meanings that range far beyond the conventional or traditional ones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE FOUNDING MURDER IN MACHIAVELLI'S THEPRINCE Jim Grote Archdiocese ofLouisville One ofthe doctors ofItaly, Nicholas Machiavel, had the confidence to put in writing, almost in plain terms, "That the Christian faitii had given up good men in prey to Üiose who are tyrannical and unjust." (Francis Bacon) A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian ofdie Cross calls the tìiing what it actually is. (Martin (...) Luúher) René Girard has written eloquently ofthe founding murder described by Friedrich Nietzsche in aphorism 125 from The Gay Science (Girard 1988). In aphorism 125, Nietzsche reflects on the modem prophecy that "God is dead." The crowd, who surrounds the Madman in this aphorism, assumes that God has died ofnatural causes. As Girard says: "Nietzsche is taken to be the great prophet ofthe natural death ofGod" (Girard 1988, 232). The belief in God remains in modernity as a vestige ofthat senility to which God succumbed a long time ago. Unlike the crowd, the Madman cannot keep from hysterical outbursts about the unnatural death of God. "We have killed Him—you and I! All of us are his murderers!" According to Girard, the Madman's ravings are clues to an original collective murder that human culture JimGrote119 has been unable to repress despite its artistic and philosophic endeavors to the contrary. In fact, this founding violence is the foundation ofculture itself. It is surprising that Girard has written little about another modem prophet, Niccolo Machiavelli. A comparison and contrast of Girard's thought with Machiavelli's sheds an interesting light on both ofthem. IfNietzsche is the modern prophet (however misunderstood) of the unnatural death of God, Machiavelli is the modem prophet concerning the unnatural death ofhuman beings. A recent translator ofMachiavelli's The Prince argues that the heart ofhis teaching can be summed up in die simple adage: "you can get away with murder."1 One might summarize Girard's thought in a similar manner: "You cannot get away with murder." In order to better understand the role of the founding murder in modem thought it is useful to turn to the thought ofNiccolo Machiavelli. According to the political philosopher, Leo Strauss, the modernity that culminated in the work of Nietzsche was bom in the work of Machiavelli.2 Strauss describes Machiavelli as the founder ofmodernity. For Machiavelli all foundings entail violence. No enduring society can come into being without the equivalent of Romulus' murder of his brother Remus. Political order is established by a crime that necessarily transcends the boundaries of that order because it creates that very order. Morality is founded by immorality. Girard articulates the founding violence as a cultural rather than a political phenomenon. Machiavelli's political foundings presuppose Girard's cultural founding. In Girard's view of the founding murder, the original chaos or Hobbesian war of all-against-all is replaced by the sacrificial order of allagainst -one. Consider Gil Bailie's description ofthe founding murder: Primitive religion is bom at this moment, the moment when, as Girard puts it, "the atmosphere of terror and hallucination that accompanies the primordial religious experience" reaches its climax, and "the detente that follows only heightens the mystery of the whole process." In the beginning was the hush. Human culture as such begins with 1 See Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.'s translation ofNiccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (vii). All quotations in the present essay cite both the chapter from The Prince and the page number from Mansfield's translation. Quotations from Machiavelli's Discourses are from Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov's translation, NiccoloMachiavelli: Discourses on Livy. 2 See Leo Strauss, "The Three Waves ofModernity" in Hilail Gildin, An Introduction to PoliticalPhilosophy: TenEssays byLeo Strauss. The three waves are Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. 120The FoundingMurder the community of victimizers looking at the corpse of its victim in solemn astonishment at the miracle of camaraderie that hasjust taken place. Whereas but a moment before strife had prevaüed, now there is a unanimous religious awe focused on the corpse ofthe victim. (22) This original sacrifice is not a rational decision or social contract. It is an unconscious mechanism. "There is no such thing as conscious scapegoating. Conscious... (shrink)

In 1980, the late French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, a long-time sufferer of manic-depressive illness, murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Never allowed to stand trial, he was eventually released and spent the years until his 1990 death in fitful obscurity. The posthumous publication of his autobiography, especially when taken in tandem with the first volume of the biography by his friend Yann Moulier Boutang, allows his readers hitherto unavailable insights into the man, and even into (...) the possible interpenetration of the man and his philosophy.Contrary to the claims of his editors, however, Althusser's autobiography is far from a portrait of madness from the inside. The author's attempt at an "objective" self-portrait, even with its objective mistakes and ellipses, is at a very far remove from the depiction of madness as experienced by the madman. The entire thrust of Althusser's self-interpretation, moreover, with its psychoanalytic excavation of neurotic determinants, appears to aim at the reduction of psychosis to more readily comprehensible mental turbulence. A similar reduction is at work in the author's seeming inability, or unwillingness, to trace the links between the institutional and political contexts of his life and the more intimate, personal sphere--and that remains the case even when he seems to be tracing those very connections.The question remains--and it is the overriding question of this article--whether any relationship can be traced between Althusser's interpretation of Marxist philosophy and his selfinterpretation. The answer lies in Althusser's ultimately fissured and fragmented account of the social "whole" as a "structure of structures," in which psychic factors are irrelevant to historical understanding and vice-versa.The limitations of Althusser's self-understanding are thus seen to parallel the limitations of his conception of Marxism. (shrink)

"This concise, elegant essay on the roots and historical justification of philosophy marks a decisive step in posing the problem of what philosophy is. With consummate clarity and the charisma that distinguished him as a lecturer, Jos Ortega y Gasset re-creates ""that moment when Parmenides began talking about something exceptionally strange, which he called 'being.'"" How and why, he asks, did such a surprising adventure come about?Considering the human qualities that prompt a curiosity about existence and eternity, Ortega examines philosophy's (...) etymology, its connection to poetry, and its differentiation from religion and other modes of thought. He lucidly delineates radical differences of doctrine and style among early Greek thinkers, especially the ""madman of reason"" Parmenides and the ""absolute individual"" Heraclitus. He also considers philosophy's fundamental task of revealing the latent world poised behind the manifest world and discovering the relations between them.""Unable to find lodging among the philosophies of the past,"" Ortega observes, ""we have no choice but to attempt to construct one of our own."" The Origin of Philosophy argues for the vital importance of philosophy as a human endeavor, even while noting that each generation of thought reveals the past as ""a defunct world of errors.""". (shrink)

From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime (...) teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe. (shrink)

Hobbes in Leviathan, chapter xv, 4, makes the startling claim: “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no such thing as justice,’” paraphrasing Psalm 52:1: “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.” These are charges of which Hobbes himself could stand accused. His parable of the fool is about the exchange of obedience for protection, the backslider, regime change, and the tyrant; but given that Hobbes was himself likely an oath-breaker, it is also self-reflexive (...) and self-justificatory. For, Hobbes’s fool is not a windbag, or one of the dumb mob, led astray by priests. He is, in the terminology of Psalm 52, an insipiens, a madman or raving lunatic, whose rebellion against God the King is his own destruction and that of his people. A long iconographic tradition portraying the fool as insipiens, Antichrist, heretical impostor and tyrant king, was at Hobbes’s disposal. (shrink)

According to the Rationality Constraint, our concept of belief imposes limits on how much irrationality is compatible with having beliefs at all. We argue that empirical evidence of human irrationality from the psychology of reasoning and the psychopathology of delusion undermines only the most demanding versions of the Rationality Constraint, which require perfect rationality as a condition for having beliefs. The empirical evidence poses no threat to more relaxed versions of the Rationality Constraint, which only require only minimal rationality. Nevertheless, (...) we raise problems for all versions of the Rationality Constraint by appealing to more extreme forms of irrationality that are continuous with actual cases of human irrationality. In particular, we argue that there are conceivable cases of “mad belief” in which populations of Lewisian madmen have beliefs that are not even minimally rational. This undermines Lewis’s claim that our ordinary concept of belief is a theoretical concept that is implicitly defined by its role in folk psychology. We argue that introspection gives us a phenomenal concept of belief that cannot be analyzed by applying Lewis’s semantics for theoretical terms. (shrink)

According to one of the rivals, “poets do not create from knowledge but on the basis of certain natural talents and guided by divine inspiration, just like seers and the singers of oracles.”1 There is “a form of possession and madness, caused by the muses, that seizes a tender and untouched soul and inspires and stimulates it so that it educates by praising the deeds of ancestors in songs and in every other mode of poetry. Whoever knocks on the door (...) of poetry without the madness of the muses trusting that technique alone will make him a whole poet does not reach his aim; he and his poetry of reason disappear before the poetry of the madman.”2 Even knowledge cannot arise in a purely rational way. In his seventh letter Plato explains how “from a long and dedicated pursuit of the subject and from close companionship, [understanding] suddenly, like fire being kindled by a leaping spark, is born in the soul and straightaway finds nourishment in itself.”3 Thus understanding or building a work of art contains an element that goes beyond skill, technical knowledge, and talent. A new force takes hold of the soul and directs it, toward theoretical insight in one case, toward artistic achievement in the other.The view adumbrated in these quotations is very popular today. Interestingly enough it seems to receive support form the most rigorous and most advanced parts of the sciences. This rigor, it is pointed out, is but a transitory stage in a process which has much in common with what Plato envisaged. Of course, it is necessary to make some changes: Plato’s knowledge was stable while scientific knowledge progresses. Plato assumed that outside forces—madness, divine inspiration—impinge on the soul while the moderns let the appropriate ideas, images, emotions arise from the individual soul itself. But there seem to exist many reasons to recommend a Platonism that has been modified in this way.In the following essay I shall try to show that the reasons that have been given are invalid and that the view itself—the view that culture needs individual creativity—is not only absurd but also dangerous. To make my criticism as concrete as possible I shall concentrate on e specific group of arguments in its favor. And to make it as clear as possible I shall use arguments trying to show the role of individual creativity in the sciences. If these clear and detailed arguments fail, then the rhetoric emerging from more foggy areas will altogether lose its force. 1. Plato, Apology of Socrates 22c. Translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own2. Plato, Phaedrus 245a.3. Plato, Epistles 341c, d. Paul Feyerabend studied singing and opera production in Vienna, history of theater and theatrical production at the Institute for the Methodological Reform of the German Theater in Weimar, and physics, astronomy, and philosophy in Vienna. He has lectured on aesthetics, the history of science, and philosophy in Austria, Germany, England, New Zealand, and the United States. At the moment he holds a joint appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His books include Against Method , Erkenntnis für freie Menschen , and Philosophical Papers . Forthcoming works are Farewell to Reason and Stereotypes of Reality. (shrink)

[R]eflection is a system of thought no less closed than insanity, with this difference that it understands itself and the madman too, whereas the madman does not understand it.– Merleau-Ponty, Phen...

Introduction -- What is platonism? -- Schleiermacher's pedagogical interpretation of Plato -- What's wrong with the current debate -- The romantic rediscovery of Plato's ineffable ontology -- Conclusions: Ineffability and dialogue form -- Untying Schleiermacher's gordian knot -- Metaphysical ineffability : the argument from language and human finitude -- Spiritual ineffability: the argument from self-transformation -- Existential ineffability : the argument from life choice -- Platonism reconsidered -- The context of Heidegger's interpretation of Plato -- What it all means and (...) why it matters -- Stage one: the realm of shadows -- Stage two: the fire -- Stage three: the realm of light -- The good : Heidegger's Plato is the later Heidegger -- Stage four: the return to the shadows -- The virtues of heidegger's plato -- Heidegger's crisis and opportunity -- Setting the stage -- Heidegger's crisis -- Understanding Heidegger's crisis : Nietzsche -- Heidegger as reformed madman -- Revolutionary thinker or utopian social engineer -- The Greeks and university reform -- Theoria and fundamental ontology -- A community of similarly striving researchers -- University reform and nihilism -- Back from Syracuse : four reasons to rethink Heidegger's politics -- The ontological problem -- The epistemological problem -- The moral problem -- The political problem -- What was plato doing in Syracuse -- Back from Syracuse or Eros Tyrannos -- How Heidegger should have read Plato -- Plato anticipate Heidegger's critique of technology -- Plato's problems with periclean Athens -- Alcibiades as embodiment of periclean Athens -- Alcibiades as inverted image of Socrates -- Conclusions: What Heidegger missed. (shrink)

In this classic work, best-selling author Harry Frankfurt provides a compelling analysis of the question that not only lies at the heart of Descartes's Meditations, but also constitutes the central preoccupation of modern philosophy: on what basis can reason claim to provide any justification for the truth of our beliefs? Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen provides an ingenious account of Descartes's defense of reason against his own famously skeptical doubts that he might be a madman, dreaming, or, worse yet, deceived (...) by an evil demon into believing falsely.Frankfurt's masterful and imaginative reading of Descartes's seminal work not only stands the test of time; one imagines Descartes himself nodding in agreement. (shrink)

We attribute the capability of imagination to the madman as to the scientist, to the novelist as to the metaphysician, and last but not least to ourselves. The same, apparently, holds for thought experimentation. Ernst Mach was the first to draw an explicit link between these two mental acts; moreover -in his perspective- imagination plays a pivotal role in thought experimentation. Nonetheless, it is not clear what kind of imagination emerges from Mach’s writings. Indeed, heated debates among cognitive scientists (...) and philosophers turn on the key distinction between sensory and cognitive imagination. Generally speaking, we can say that sensory imagination shares some processes with perception, cognitive imagination with the formation of belief. Both the vocabulary used in the literature on thought experiments and what I refer to as “Machian tradition” indicate imagination as a notion of central importance in the reasoning involved in thought experiments. However, most authors have really focused on sensory (in particular, visual) imagination, but have neglected the second kind. Moreover, some authors attribute to Mach the idea that it is visual imagery that is primarily at work in thought experiments. I claim another interpretation is possible, according to which Mach can be said to deal with cognitive imagination. The main aim of this paper is to retrace Mach’s original arguments and establish a connection with the cognitive literature on imagination. I will argue that imagination tout court could play a role in thought experimentation. Once imagination is seen as the key to the “cognitive black-box” of the thought experiment, we will have moved a step closer to a simulative imagining-based account of thought experimentation. (shrink)

In The Gay Science Nietzsche famously writes that “God is dead.” Modern atheists, including “Internet Atheists,” have taken this as their epithet. I argue that the perpetuation of the statement “God is dead” contradicts the atheistic core, such that Internet Atheists parallel theists in identity construction. Insights from Nietzsche, Jean Luc Nancy, Sigmund Freud, and Christopher Hitchens allow for an exploration of the theistic underpinnings of Internet Atheists. The doctrine of Internet Atheism, as it is represented in humorous online depictions (...) of God, suggests an inability to confront the consequences of the death of God, an inability which Nietzsche warns against in the Parable of the Madman. (shrink)

Rather than proclaiming the "death of God," in the fashion of Nietzsche's madman, F. LeRon Shults proudly proclaims the "birth of God" in his incendiary, radically iconoclastic book Theology after the Birth of God. Shults argues, drawing on the multidisciplinary findings of the biocultural study of religion, that the commonplace belief in supernatural agents is the result of a variety of evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms that cause human beings to overdetect agency and that contribute to in-group cohesion—traits that (...) would have been selected because they aided the survival of early hominids living in hunter-gatherer societies, but that are maladaptive in our contemporary context. In his most recent book... (shrink)

David Friedman posed a number of libertarian philosophical problems (Friedman 1989). This essay criticizes Walter Block’s Rothbardian responses (Block 2011) and compares them with J C Lester’s critical-rationalist, libertarian-theory responses (Lester [2000] 2012). The main issues are as follows. 1. Critical rationalism and how it applies to libertarianism. 2.1. How libertarianism is not inherently about law and is inherently about morals. 2.2. How liberty relates to property and can be maximized: carbon dioxide and radio waves. 2.3. Applying the theory to (...) flashlights. 2.4. Applying the theory to the probability of imposed risks. 2.5. “Homesteading” or initial acquisition. 2.6 What is “essential” for a “true libertarian.” 2.7. Crime and punishment. 2.8. Extent of punishment. 2.9. The libertarian response to a madman with a gun. 2.10. How contradictions in rights are possible. 2.11. The draft. 3.1. Utilitarian libertarianism and “nose counting”. 3.2. How interpersonal comparisons of utility are possible and utility monsters are not a threat. 3.3. Why it is not utilitarian in practice to kill an innocent prisoner to prevent a riot. 3.4. Why David Friedman should not be forced to give up one of his eyes. 3.5. How utilitarians can be libertarians. Conclusion: a proper theory of liberty combined with critical rationalism offers superior solutions to Friedman’s problems. Appendix: replies to two commentators. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eichmann, Empathy, and LolitaLeland de la DurantayeISometime in late 1960 or early 1961 Adolf Eichmann, jailed and awaiting trial in Jerusalem, was given by his guard a copy of Vladimir Nabokov's recently published Lolita, as Hannah Arendt puts it, "for relaxation." After two days Eichmann returned it, visibly indignant: "Quite an unwholesome book"—Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch—he told his guard. 1 Though we are not privy to, (...) and nor does Arendt speculate upon this officer's intentions, it is difficult to imagine that they were limited to procuring Eichmann a little "relaxation." The tale of a homicidal madman writing under observation and awaiting a trial that will consign him either to death or prolonged imprisonment—which fate spares him by felling him with a heart attack—could hardly have been very relaxing for someone at that moment writing his own memoirs and himself awaiting a trial with similar stakes.We might imagine other intentions on the part of Eichmann's guard. Could the gesture have been ironic? Or was it motivated by a dark curiosity—something of the order of an experiment? The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's book was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960. 2 Might Eichmann's guard have seen Lolita as a sort of litmus test for radical evil, and wanted to see whether the real-life villain—he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents—would coldly, even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation?This is all only speculation. In Arendt's account, she congratulates Eichmann for his indignation and moves on to other matters. In any event, given Eichmann's radical conventionality one could hardly imagine him liking—or even very well understanding—much of the book. As [End Page 311] Eichmann himself avowed, during his adult life he had read only two books, one of them being Theodor Herzl's The Jewish State. But whatever the motivations of Eichmann's guard, whatever Eichmann's degree of comprehension, and whatever congratulations Eichmann might have deserved for his disgust, the incident raises a question for the study of Nabokov's finest work which has yet to be answered.IIBefore turning to this question, let us remain with Arendt and her notorious reader for a moment. Arendt notes elsewhere that it appeared to her that Eichmann was nearly "aphasic." She comments that, "when he did succeed in constructing a sentence of his own, he repeated it until it became a cliché," and that, "his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else." Arendt offers here nothing less than a definition of thought itself. "To think" is glossed ("... namely") by Arendt as, "to think from the standpoint of someone else." Though as a definition of thought, it is hardly impressive, it nevertheless expresses something essential about Arendt's conception of thought and thinking. (3) In her view, thought is to be placed under the sign of intellectual empathy, under the sign of living in the strangeness and wonder of another's world. (Though Arendt does not mention the connection, both the language she wrote Eichmann in—English—and her native one—German—make special provision for such a sense, as he or she who is "thoughtless" is not her or she who is incapable of some form of cognition or calculation, as "thoughtless" people can indeed be very clever and very clever people have been capable of great "thoughtlessness.")Thought is thus a communal, not individualistic, thing. 4 This point is important as, though Adolf Eichmann was unlikely to have seen much of himself in the irreverent and urbane genius of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, nor in the latter's strange eloquence, Eichmann the man and Humbert the character of the first part of the novel (to leave the repenting Humbert of the book's last pages out for the moment), share an essential trait. What Eichmann the man shares with Nabokov's literary creation is the inability or unwillingness "to think from the standpoint of somebody else." The evil they share is the... (shrink)