Gunter Anders' Philosophy of Technology is the first comprehensive exploration of the ground-breaking work of German thinker Gunter Anders. Anders' philosophy has become increasingly prescient in our digitised, technological age as his work predicts the prevalence of social media, ubiquitous surveillance and the turn to big data. Anders' ouevre also explored the technologies of nuclear power and the biotech concerns for the human and transhuman condition which have become so central to current theory. Babette Babich argues that Anders (...) offers important resources on streaming digital media through his writings on radio, television and film and is, unusually, both a comprehensive and profound thinker. Anders' relationship with key philosophers like Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin and his thinking on Goethe, Nietzsche and Rilke is also explored with a focus on the deep impact he made on his peers. It reflects specifically on the intersection of Anders' thought Heidegger and the Frankfurt school and how influential a figure he was on the landscape of 20th century philosophy. A compelling rehabilitation of a thinker with profound contemporary relevance. (shrink)

On the political nature of the analytic - continental distinction in professional philosophy and the general tendency to discredit continental philosophy while redesignating the rubric as analytically conceived.

Hermeneutic philosophies of social science offer an approach to the philosophy of social science foregrounding the human subject and including attention to history as well as a methodological reflection on the notion of reflection, including the intrusions of distortions and prejudice. Hermeneutic philosophies of social science offer an explicit orientation to and concern with the subject of the human and social sciences. Hermeneutic philosophies of the social science represented in the present collection of essays draw inspiration from Gadamer’s work as (...) well as from Paul Ricoeur in addition to Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault among others. Special attention is given to Wilhelm Dilthey in addition to the broader phenomenological traditions of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger as well as the history of philosophy in Plato and Descartes. The volume is indispensible reading for students and scholars interested in epistemology, philosophy of science, social social studies of knowledge as well as social studies of technology. (shrink)

This article argues that the limited influence of Ludwik Fleck's ideas on philosophy of science is due not only to their indirect dissemination by way of Thomas Kuhn, but also to an incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework of history and philosophy of science and Fleck's own more integratedly historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to understanding the evolution of scientific discovery. What Kuhn named "paradigm" offers a periphrastic rendering or oblique translation of Fleck's Denkstil/Denkkollektiv , a derivation that may also account (...) for the lability of the term "paradigm". This was due not to Kuhn's unwillingness to credit Fleck but rather to the cold war political circumstances surrounding the writing of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Following a discussion of Fleck's anatomical allusions, I include a brief discussion of Aristotle (on menstruation and darkened mirrors) and conclude with a reference to the productivity of error in Mach and Nietzsche. (shrink)

This richly textured book bridges analytic and hermeneutic and phenomenological philosophy of science. It features unique resources for students of the philosophy and history of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation, cognitive theory and the psychology of perception, the history and philosophy of art, and the pragmatic and historical relationships between religion and science.

Beginning with Jürgen Habermas's 1968 reflection on Nietzsche's criticisms of knowledge and science, the essays in this volume engage Nietzsche's challenge to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory as well as other social and political theories of modernity and postmodernity. Juxtaposing Habermas and Nietzsche for the sake of the "future" of critical theory, the essays in this collection draw variously on Marx and Weber as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and others. The distinguished authors in this book (...) argue that critical theory is best served by responding to challenges such as those associated with identity politics and globalization and including an authentic engagement with Nietzsche. This important volume features contributions by Babette E. Babich, Karin Bauer, Howard Caygill, Rebecca Comay, Fred Dallmayr, Josef Früchtl, Jürgen Habermas, Dominique Janicaud, Alexander Nehamas, David Owen, Max Pensky, Holger Schmid, Tracy B. Strong, James Swindal, and Bernhard Taureck. (shrink)

N'y aurait-il de pas de différence notable entre les philosophies analytique et continentale? La première serait la bonne philosophie, la seconde une philosophie non rigoureuse, de comptoir. Ce jugement est l'apanage des philosophes analytiques, qui considèrent leurs confères de formation continentale, à l'instar de Jacques Derrida, comme des " astrologues ", des non-philosophes. L'auteur approfondit ici le débat, en identifiant de façon rigoureuse les différences importantes qui divisent les deux philosophies.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche, Biology and MetaphorBabette E. BabichGregory Moore. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 228. Cloth, $55.00.Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor is a well-written book on a topic of growing importance in Nietzsche studies. Not only concerned with offering an interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of biology and metaphor, Moore's approach offers a literary contextualization of Darwinism in the history of (...) ideas but also in terms of an important reflection on the idea of decadence so important to Nietzsche and so influential in theorizing public health and law in the twentieth century, most perniciously in its deadly expressions in Nazi propaganda. Moore is thus able to bridge the fields of the more specifically linguistic study of metaphor and source-scholarship. To Moore's great credit, he seeks to emphasize the extent to which Nietzsche's thought was developed in active correspondence with the scientific literature and debates of his age. But this reviewer thinks it important to warn those with classical or traditional interest in metaphor that the text presupposes that the reader (and this is also to say that Moore) knows a Nietzschean metaphor when he sees one.Moore begins with the question of Nietzsche's Darwinism, focusing on the physiology of power to explore the relations between Darwin, Spencer, Lamarck, and Rolph, but also Nietzsche's favorites, Malthus and Lange, etc. The discussion of the history of the reception of Darwin's ideas is careful and extensive and offers an insightful clarification of Darwin (necessary to distinguish Darwin from Darwinism, "social" and otherwise). Some readers will find it even more Anglophone than seems justified by Darwin's heritage, despite Moore's passing references to Cuvier and (at rather greater length) Haeckel and Roux.This reviewer notes that the latter references have been well-discussed in the German literature and to some great part Moore is fair to this tradition even if it is also true that the discussion never enters the level of the history of science as this reader, for one, might have wished. In the case of Moore's interpretation of Nietzsche's texts, the readings sometimes suggest a reprise of what has come to be the consensus (and not just among Nietzsche scholars) of views on Nietzsche's thinking. Thus where certain secondary authors are in force in Moore's well-documented account (Pick, Moles, and Ruse), others are missing. Indeed, in the case of Nietzsche and Darwinism, Frederick Gregory's Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992) offers an important supplement. Another book that seems to have been overlooked is Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, 1982), and those interested in von Baer and other proponents of teleology in biology will find Lenoir's broader account useful.The second half of the book addresses degeneration and like most contemporary discussions, Moore's book is charged with the political history of the last century. Moore reviews the association of decadence with jazz music and—via physiognomy as its external signifier—to the ugly, the Jew, the Black, and, of course, to women who broke with the family role. As an instantiation, Moore uncovers the nineteenth century antipathy to "allegedly aberrant behavior such as masturbation and homosexuality" in Nietzsche's "restrictive" [End Page 348] (133) view of sexuality and precocious eroticism (134) as degeneration. However, the issue of masturbation is complicated. The nineteenth-century perspective on masturbation was less a matter of prudishness than a judgment backed with considerable social and medical force, which equated the practice with sickness or criminality, the counterpart to which today would be our judgment with regard to an addiction to cocaine or heroine. This censure drove Wagner's "exposure" of Nietzsche's personal dependence on this practice. Readers interested in this question can either take themselves to the easy-to-find because eponymous chapter in Marc Wiener's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, 1995) or to David B. Allison's account of this as the occasion for the break between Nietzsche and Wagner in Reading... (shrink)

Nietzsche's creative and fundamental account of chaos in both its cosmic, universal as well as its humane context, recalls the ancient Greek meaning of chaos rather than its modern, disordered, decadent significance. In this generatively primordial sense, chaos corresponds not to the watery nothingness of Semitic myth or modern, scientific entropy but creative, uncountenancedly abundant potency. And in such an archaic sense, Nietzsche's chaos is a word for both nature and art. Nietzsche's creative conception of chaos equates it with the (...) will to power: as the foundational essence of the world "to all eternity." This same correspondence is also the stylistic prerequisite for creating oneself as a work of art. /// O artigo começa por demonstrar até que ponto a mais fundamental explicação criadora dada por Nietzsche a respeito do caos, em seu contexto tanto cósmico e universal como meramente humano, constitui uma evocação do antigo sentido que Ihe foi dado pelos Gregos, mais do que uma adesão à significação moderna do mesmo, desordenada e decadente. Para Nietzsche, com efeito, o caos em seu sentido generativo mais primordial, não corresponde nem à ambiguidade do nada inerente ao mito semítico nem ao sentido moderno, científico, da entropia, mas sim a uma potência criadora assinalada por uma abundãncia inesgotável Mostra-se, assim, até que ponto, em conformidade com o sentido arcaico do termo, o caos em Nietzsche constitui um nome que se dá tanto à natureza como à arte. Mais, o presente artigo mostra ainda até que ponto a concepqao nietzschiana do caos o transforma em algo equivalente à vontade depoder, ou seja, na essãncia fundadora do mundo " para toda a eternidade". Desta correspondência, aliás, resulta a condição estilistica para que cada um se crie a si mesmo como verdadeira obra de arte. (shrink)

In what follows I offer a parodic brief against analytic style philosophy just as it is that style characteristic of professional philosophy of science. I discuss the ad hoc resilience and sophisticated disdain variously operative in analytic discourse, including reviews of the maverick rhetoricism of the late Paul Feyerabend and others towards a critique of the postmodern condition in science and philosophy. What I name continental style philosophical thinking primarily regards the historical and expressly hermeneutic style of thinking found in (...) the reflections on science characteristic of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Other continental approaches to the philosophy of science growing out of the phenomenological critiques of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty may be expected to be more congenial to analytic sensibilities as suggested by the recent resurgence of interest in the common roots of continental and analytic style philosophic thinking in Husserl and Frege. An approach combining both hermeneutic and phenomenological styles with a sensitivity to the themes of mainstream or analytic philosophy of science is characteristic of the essays and books of, for one important example, Patrick A. Heelan, but also Joseph Kockelmans and Ted Kisiel, Robert Crease and Joseph Rouse, and so on - among rather not a lot of others. Although scholars advocating continental approaches to the philosophy of science routinely refer to traditional adherents of analytic style philosophy of science, there is no reciprocal recognition on the part of analytical philosophers of science. And as a result there is no received tradition of continental scholarship within the professional establishment of the philosophy of science. Thus the philosophy of science remains an analytic discipline, with continental perspectives excluded by the sovereign expedient of disregard, an absence of critical reference which effects the professional annihilation of scholarship. It is this factor that accounts for - that commands - the mixed style of the present essay. (shrink)

By now it is clear that the word postmodern has a settled into an insurmountable usage in the field of architecture and this in addition to its continuing currency for art critics and theorists, social analysts, and political and literary theorists, not to mention journalists and philosophers. Nevertheless no one less influential for the real or built presence of postmodernism than Charles Jencks could complain that with respect to architecture, critics apply the term as a kind of catchall, so that (...) postmodernism is used for "everything that was different from high modernism, and usually this meant skyscrapers with funny shapes, brash colors, and exposed technology."1. (shrink)

Nietzsche's discovery of the "breath" or spirit of music in the words of Greek tragedy was his testament to oral culture in antiquity and it is significant that his theoretical account of the prosody of ancient Greek endures to this day. Drawing little emaphatic resonance from his readers , Nietzsche reprised yet another tradition of poetic song composition, namely the art of the troubadours in order to rearticulate his argument in The Gay Science. I here explore the passion of the (...) 'knightly art', of poetic song and explore in addition Nietzsche's conception of Wissenschaft . The art of poetry was less an antiquarian rhetorical concept than a practical guide for those of us who seek to be "the poets of our lives".Mit der Enteckung des Geistes oder 'Artems' der Musik in den Worten der grichischen Tragödie deutete Nietzsche die orale Kultur in der Antike auf eine neue Weise. Bisher wurden diese Entdeckung und ihre Konsequenzen für Verständnis der modernen Kultur aber kaum beachtet. Die Abhandlung untersuchtd Nietzsches Auffassung der 'gaya scienza' am Beispiel des Troubadours und der mit ihm verbundenen, jedoch verlorengegangenen mündlichen Tradition von poetischer oder liedhafter Komposition. Nietzsches Deutung der Leidenschaft der ritterlichen Gesangskunst wird en einen Zusammenhang mit seiner Auffassung von Wissenschaft gebracht, und diese wird mit der provençalischen scienza sowie der englischen und französischen science verglichten. (shrink)

Das vorliegende Buch bietet hermeneutische und phänomenologische Reflexionen über das Kunstwerk aus der Sicht sowohl des Künstlers - als Schaffendem - als auch des Publikums. Die Materialität des Kunstwerks, lebensgrosse antike griechische Bronzen, Naturgeschichte und Archäologie sowie die Frage nach Nietzsches Artistenmetaphysik werden erörtert. In einem Kernkapitel wird eine neue Lesart von Nietzsches Zarathustra und seiner plastischen Begriff des Erhabenen vorgestellt. Auf Basis von Elementen der klassischen kritischen Theorie werden Nietzsche und Marx gegeneinander gelesen. Die letzten Kapitel zeigen ein geradezu (...) erotisches Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Nietzsche und dem Willen zur Chance von Georges Bataille und der - auf ein Nietzsches Konzept zurückgehenden - Erfindung der Frau bei Simone de Beauvoir, um dann mit einem Blick auf Nietzsches Lehre von der Ewigen Wiederkunft zuschliessen. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s imperative call, Werde, der Du bist - Become the one you are - is, to say the least, an odd sort of imperative: dissonant and yet intrinsically inspiring. Thus Alexander Nehamas in an essay on this very theme names it the “most haunting of Nietzsche’s haunting aphorisms.” 1 Expressed as it is in The Gay Science, “Du sollst der werden, der du bist” (GS 270, KSA 3, p. 519) - Thou shalt -.

In what follows, I seek to offer a Nietzschean complement to Jacques Taminiaux's reading of Heidegger's first lecture course on Nietzsche, The Will to Power as Art. Because what Taminiaux calls Heidegger's "connivance" with Nietzsche reflects the engaged affinity of one thoughtstyle for another, from the explicit perspective of the first, Taminiaux's reading presumes without raising the question of relation between thinkers.

This work presents truth as an aesthetic value in Nietzsche's epistemic account of Western morals and scientific culture. An expression of Nietzsche's special, selective style as a deconstructive hermeneutic in and among texts and readers is offered to facilitate this reading. ;Nietzsche's claim that the world is Will to Power construes all events as mutually interpretive expressions. Where truth is determined as a perspectival expression, the Real must be thought to incorporate multiple truths reflecting its ambiguous, ambivalent abundance. ;The existing (...) tradition in the philosophy of science takes science to approximate ideal knowledge. As an interpretive position, science takes the measure of opposing perspectives: the efficacy of theory and computation testifies to the power of the scientific project. This project has its special advantage from the dynamic difference between evaluative structures seeking to overpower disparate perspectives. As the scientific focus is claimed to be exclusive, or accurate, it is a falsification. ;Beyond the computational efficiency which requires a life-denying , preservative life-orientation, Nietzsche moves towards a broader aesthetic: affirming life in its very chaotic ambivalence. As an active Will to Power, this expressive aesthetic opposes the reactive Will to Power of the ascetic aesthetic of science and religion. This is an uneven contest, for while the Will to Power can be active or reactive, the active will becomes reactive if it once encounters and resists--neither absorbing nor succumbing to--a reactive will. Given the insistent superiority of indigent Will to Power as a conservative, acquisitive will, the full possibility of a perspectival aesthetics of truth including an affirmative aesthetic is only rarely to be realised. This affirmative aesthetic articulates a life that is neither acquisitive nor fearful but purely expressive in the grand style. Finally, assumed from the perspective of such a grand style of life, the thought of the Eternal Return is prophylactic against the deadening rule of nihilism. (shrink)

At the extreme limit of suffering [ Leiden: pathos] nothing indeed remains but the conditions of time or space. At this moment, the man forgets himself because he is entirely within the moment; the God forgets himself because he is nothing but time; and both are unfaithful. Time because at such a moment it undergoes a categoric change and beginning and end simply no longer rhyme within it; man because, at this moment, he has to follow the categorical..

Quelle est la politique de Heidegger? Y a-t-il une éthique chez Heidegger? En développant ces thèmes, ce livre considère un politique brisé, conséquent à l'expérience d'une guerre sans précédent comme il le souligne dans sa "Lettre sur l'humanisme" et surtout dans les Cahiers Noirs. Ces considérations soulèvent en conséquence la question de Heidegger et "ses" juifs.

Nietzsche and Heidegger pose important philosophical questions to science and its technological projects. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and the author argues that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. More than a thoughtful reflection on science, however, the heart of philosophy is also at stake in such reflections. The author defends that if Nietzsche proposes the resources of art to defend (...) us against truth and the deadly insights of tragic knowledge, then Nietzsche's more arresting claim is his equation of science and art, just as Heidegger aligns techne and poiesis. For Nietzsche, science and art draw upon the same creative powers and both science and art are directed to the purpose of life. /// O ponto de partida deste artigo é o reconhecimento de que Friedrich Nietzsche e Martin Heidegger são dois filósofos que colocam questões profundamente relevantes acerca da Ciência e dos seus projectos tecnológicos. Neste sentido, o plano da autora consiste em demonstrar a viabilidade e a importância do modo não-analítico, ou continental, de fazer Filosofia da Ciência, argumentando que uma reflexão genuinamente filosófica acerca da Ciência não se pode dispensar de um confronto com o modo crítico de fazer filosofia representado tanto por Nietzsche como por Heidegger. Para a autora, os pensamentos críticos destes pensadores acerca da Ciência são bem mais do que uma mera reflexão filosófica acerca da Ciência; na verdade, o que aqui está em causa é propriamente saber de que se trata quando a questão é a da própria Filosofia. Assim, e na medida em que Nietzsche propõe os recursos da arte para nos defender contra as invectivas da verdade e as intuições fatais do conhecimento trágico, a autora do artigo defende que o mais interessante na posição nietzscheana tem a ver com o seu modo de equacionar a relação entre Ciência e Arte, tal como Heidegger acabará por alinhar techne e poiesis. O fundo da questão está em que para Nietzsche tanto a Ciência como a Arte recorrem aos mesmos poderes criativos, para além de que a Ciência e a Arte estão orientadas para a defesa do mesmo propósito: a Vida. (shrink)

This collection dedicated to and including David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," offers a much needed resource for students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, political reflection, value and judgments, economics, and art. The authors include experts in the philosophy of art, aesthetics, history of philosophy as well as the history of science. Contributors include Babette Babich, Howard Caygill, Timothy M.Costelloe, Andrej Démuth / Slávka Démuthová, Bernard Freydberg, Peter Kivy, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Christopher MacLachlan, Emilio Mazza, Roger Schiner, Roger (...) Scruton, and Dabney Townsend, . (shrink)