George Eliot's Daniel Deronda advances a conception of freedom with clear Spinozist affinities. The development of Eliot's characters, and of their relationships to one another, can be understood fruitfully in terms of growth toward freedom or contraction to bondage, where the notions of freedom and bondage are very much in accord with Spinoza's views in the Ethics. A close reading of specific scenes and an analysis of the title character's arc in the novel discloses a view of human freedom which (...) is at once an attractive interpretation of Spinoza and a significant component of Eliot's ethics. (shrink)

Perhaps the best known criticism of Pascal’s wager is the many Gods objection. As so often with anglophone criticisms of Pascal, the many Gods objectiontypically treats the wager in isolation from the rest of Pascal’s thought. In this case, the truncated reading has issued in the view that Pascal was indifferent toor ignorant of the possibility that Gods other than the one described by Catholic theology might exist. This view is false. Even a cursory glance beyond the wagerfragment reveals that (...) Pascal considers a number of religious and philosophical positions and argues that, given the nature and needs of the human being, onlya God of a specific description could count as God for the human being and, so, be the object of the wager. This essay sketches Pascal’s view to show that the many Gods objection is not sufficient to address his argument meaningfully. (shrink)

This work is a study of Blaise Pascal's Pensees. It proposes to show the way in which Pascal's philosophy of mind---his conception of order and the relation of reason, the emotions, and the will to the self---which emerges from his skepticism, can be used to draw out his views on morality, despite the fragmentary state of the work. The thesis begins with a consideration of the three major philosophical precursors to Pascal's project: Augustine, Montaigne, and Descartes. It continues with an (...) account of order in the Pensees, centering on the heart, the two minds, and the three discontinuous orders, connecting Pascal's views to those of a number of 20th century analytic philosophers. It goes on to consider the order of the body and the order of charity in specific detail, showing how Pascal discusses each of these through a dialectical process that begins in a pre-critical, unreflective state, moves through a first, rational and philosophical, criticism, and finally turns that criticism against philosophy itself. The thesis concludes by briefly considering three figures whose ideas, to some extent, carry on and expand those of Pascal: Rousseau, Maistre, Tocqueville. (shrink)

This essay rejects two common views of Pascal: (a) that he holds only temporal and contingent standards of justice to be available to human beings and (b) that he is indifferent to all but eternal standards of justice. Against these reductive misunderstandings, I provide a detailed reconstruction of Pascal's political thought, drawn from the Pensées and other texts. I show that Pascal develops an account of two distinct and hierarchized orders of justice: a temporal order and an eternal order. Pascal (...) recognizes the integrity of the temporal order of justice, as expressed in local, particular custom and the historical development of positive law and, at the same time, holds that the axiological and ontological condition of this temporal order is an eternal order, a horizon beyond history which serves to ground it. Pascal's politics, rather than a tragic pessimism or a passion for the absolute, is simply a limited specification of his moral and metaphysical realism. (shrink)

The author of this collection of essays is known as managing editor and regular contributor to the New Criterion, a substantial monthly that has been appearing for twenty-one years and was founded in order to bring a voice of reason and balance inside the agitated and disoriented activities of American intellectual and academic life. The New Criterion sees as one of its central duties the defense of “high-modernist” literature and art against deconstructive “post-modernist” tendencies. Nevertheless, it is also successful in (...) providing readings of older and classical literature, thought, and art. It seems to be often Kimball’s task to provide a kind of integration between this classical modernism and the actual traditional canon, to build between them the kind of bridge that T.S. Eliot and others had long before tried to build. This volume is composed out of texts of this kind, many of them originally review articles. The authors treated by Kimball are primarily philosophers, with a minority of fiction writers ; most of them are English and German, with just a few exceptions. (shrink)

ROMANIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY do not constitute themselves in an orderly and continuous system of their own. Nor are they indispensable to the serious student of central human reflections and searches for truth. Their real interest is a historical one and, in the light of the globalized civilization of the twentieth century, one of cultural geography. A national community placed at the margins of Western culture, pertaining to it, but not quite able to synchronize its intellectual or (...) socioeconomic development with that of the West, while definitely unwilling to accommodate itself to non-Western modes of existence and thought-such were the circumstances that invited the discovery of philosophical discourses in which some key Western dilemmas and concepts could be qualified. Romanian philosophizing was and remained largely Western in its orientation, but Byzantine and Russian influences are acknowledged. Even more powerful was the sense that the experience of the Carpathian-Danubian area entitled the intellectual members of this community to speak not only for the values of a continuously progressing West, but also for a humanity that was pre-Western or even pre-Christian, a humanity that had not yet advanced from a "culture of shame" to a "culture of guilt", and a humanity whose ways of behavior and thinking were more "natural," and still widespread over large parts of the globe. Unconsciously first, but often consciously, Romanian philosophers saw themselves as bridges over the wide chasm separating Western and non-Western intellectual behavior and as mediators between both sides. Similar intentions can of course be detected among other practitioners of philosophy in Asia, South America, or Eastern Europe. Arguably, however, Romanian philosophy can be seen as exemplary in its earnest effort to transpose Western values and concepts into a language intelligible and acceptable to non-Western and traditional readers, while at the same time rehabilitating archaic and traditional beliefs and behaviors, or making them palatable to modern and Western audiences. This was a worthy communicative effort, one that remains of great interest to the contemporary intellectual community which is sometimes puzzled or discouraged when trying to discover the best ways and means for a common, worldwide philosophical language at the end of the twentieth century. Even a cursory examination of Romanian philosophers should be helpful in this respect. I will first present a few early examples of this effort of communication, connection, and qualification by Romanian philosophers; thereafter I will enumerate the main features of a modern Romanian school of philosophy as it crystallized from 1930 on. Finally I will examine in some more detail the writings of Mihai Sora, not only because he seems the most significant living Romanian philosopher, but also because he typifies the questionings of Romanian philosophers, modifies in original and lucid ways the themes of its tradition and, indeed, supplies a kind of retrospective coherence to this tradition. (shrink)

*An examination of the survival of cultural values in a postmodern environment*.

Vladimir Soloviev should probably not be described as a philosopher or theologian of the highest rank. However his importance in the intellectual history of Russia and of Eastern Orthodoxy in general is peerless. This fact is now slowly beginning to seep into Western scholarship. He was and remains relevant and interesting as a formidable animator, a man of enormously diverse interests, and a genuine ecumenicist. Without him the Russian theological school in twentieth century France would not have been possible. Moreover, (...) the curious debate about his repeated conversions and reconversions and his strongly pro-Jewish essays contribute to this interest. (shrink)

This essay aims to reconstruct and defend Pascal’s account of divine hiddenness. In the first section I explain Pascal’s view that divine hiddenness is primarily a function of human volitional aversion and only secondarily a result of God’s intentional action. In the following section I evaluate the primary sense of hiddenness by considering Pascal’s response to the objection that divine goodness requires and divine power makes possible God’s provision of evidence sufficient to overcome human volitional indisposition. While Pascal does think (...) it possible for God to provide such evidence, he argues that this would unjustly harm human freedom and endanger human intellectual understanding. I conclude by addressing a weaker form of the objection through consideration of the second sense of divine hiddenness and Pascal’s surprising view that God’s intentional “hiding” is in fact a progressively deeper entry into the particulars of human history. (shrink)

The book of Mackey is actually a collection of analytical articles framed by a couple of explanatory theoretical essays. He writes with varying degrees of judiciousness about critics like Northrop Frye and I. A. Richards, and writers like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, about science fiction and courtly love. Unfortunately, the foundation of these explorations is less than clear and firm. Mackey is convinced that philosophy at some point supplanted literature by positing a “naturalistic and conceptual” language to the vatic, (...) dissembling, and mythical utterances of traditional narration and subsequently of poetry. He is careful to repeat that he does not aim to “prove” anything but just “converge upon a proof”. Curiously, he emphasizes with equal energy that literature is falsehood, in a kind of vulgarization of Platonic arguments. (shrink)

This is essentially a study in the philosophy of culture, which tries to define the specific East-Central European modes of thinking as dimensions of a "peripheral" identity. The first chapter argues that an "anthropological conservatism" underlies much of the intellectual evolution of the Danubian area in the last two hundred years or so. Nyíri traces five successive waves of conservatism beginning with the circle of St. Clemens Maria Hofbauer and Friedrich Schlegel soon after 1800 and going all the way to (...) Friedrich Hayek and Robert Musil between the two world wars. Common to these successive waves of conservative theorizing was their moderation, or the attempt to combine liberal and conservative values. They often took their cue from English, rather than from the more radical or utopian French and German models. They also used a nonpolitical language and Nyíri sketches out tantalizingly the conservative implications of Musil's novels and Freud's psychoanalytical essays. Marginality is seen as the belated or muted response of all these thinkers to initiatives coming from a more remote "center." One of the most valuable passages for the Western reader should be the one describing the thought of Jozsef Eötvös, a kind of Hungarian Tocqueville. (shrink)

To begin with the bad news. Mahoney does not write well. He moves in perplexing ways from the stylistic register of the journalistic, to that of the scholarly, to political philosophy and back again. His knowledge of Russian seems shaky or doubtful. The key work of Georges Nivat is given a handsome accolade but is never engaged seriously. It is not clear whether he is aware of the publication of the third volume of The Red Wheel, March 1917, in the (...) original, but also in French translation. This volume would have strengthened Mahoney’s argument. (shrink)

Spariosu, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, is really a philosopher of culture. In this book, in his earlier Literature, Mimesis, and Play: Essays in Literary Theory, and in different articles, he outlines a theory influenced by Eric Havelock, E. R. Dodds, Werner Jaeger, and Rene Girard, but which in fact is quite original. The author argues in the first half of his book that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western culture accommodates two opposing concepts (...) of play. The first, the aesthetically moderated view of Kant and Schiller, is more rational and mediated. While this model of play is a reaction against the repression of the play instinct by the rationalist and post-Aristotelian tradition, it stops short of a full return to Dionysus. According to Spariosu this type of moderation merely intends to provide some flexibility to the empirical-rationalist mainstream of Western thought and to enrich it. (shrink)

Dávila, one the few truly interesting thinkers of contemporary South America, was born and died in Bogota, Colombia. He led the life of a gentleman of leisure and wrote very little. His production is reduced to three books, with almost identical titles, a couple of essays, and little else. His work was virtually out of print until the publication of the current anthology, and it is little known in the West. Small publishers in Austria and Italy brought out about 10 (...) years ago an exceedingly slim selection of Gómez Dávila’s work; in the United States the original volumes cannot be acquired even in second-hand bookstores. Nevertheless, we are dealing with a man of depth who brought a significant contribution to the conservative philosophy of the century, from the ethical and political to the metaphysical and religious. (shrink)

Probably the first striking feature of this book is to be found in its title. “Late modernity” is incomparably more adequate and philosophically more intelligent than “late capitalism/imperialism” which means nothing except a pointless bow in the direction of an intolerable form of totalitarianism. The second feature is the name of the author herself, one of the few true political philosophers at a time when “consultants” and pundits active in the so-called field of politology are a dime a dozen. Serious (...) readers in the field are undoubtedly already quite aware of the massive and highly meritorious work of Chantal Delsol, which includes surveys of political doctrine in the twentieth century, a deep-going work on the much disputed concept of “subsidiarity” and others. (shrink)

There are several attempts to build a theory of art starting from analytical philosophy, the best of which is probably the one provided by Nelson Goodman. Pavel's work is the first attempt to write a theory of literature from the premisses of analytical philosophy. Pavel, whose earlier work was influenced among others by Eco, Greimas, Hrushovsky and Brooke-Rose, begins with an analysis of recent philosophical positions regarding fiction and distinguishes on one side the hard-line "segregationist" position of Bertrand Russell which (...) denies "nonexistent individuals any ontological status" and maintains that any "statements on such individuals are false on logical grounds", a view more moderately followed by P. F. Strawson and G. Ryle. On the other side he finds the more tolerant and "integrationist" theories, derived from the views of Alexis von Meinong, according to which every kind of object is "equally endowed with being, although not necessarily with existence". Pavel clearly inclines towards broadly Meinongian theories but he would like to qualify them in a number of ways. First he finds it useful to speak, like premodern cosmologists, of "degrees of being". Furthermore he outlines a "speech-act theory of fiction" in which the measure of a genuine statement would be the epistemological adherence to the linguistic practice of a community or the correspondence to a "coordinate system" as Quine would say. (shrink)

It is a good while since French intellectual life has seen the publication of a one-volume history of modern philosophy. The author of the present book is young. He has previously written on Tocqueville, Schopenhauer and Bataille, and has also proposed a renewed version of humanism, based upon a combination of science, ecologism, and the traditional values of literary culture. The present volume is interesting both in its structure and in its overall intentions. Up to a point Besnier accepts the (...) postmodernist thesis on the demise of "grand narratives," of all-encompassing and all-explaining theoretical systems. Nevertheless, he seems to think that on pragmatic grounds we can continue to treat the history of philosophy as a valid and coherent object of research. The secret is, Besnier suggests, to look back upon the historical unfolding of philosophical conversation from the vantage point of topics and thematics important to our contemporary curiosity and urges. (shrink)

The body of poetry published by Coleridge during his lifetime was comparatively small. Its importance in terms of innovative merit was recognized almost immediately and so critical discussions are abundant. It took a good while even for specialists, let alone for the wider audiences, to recognize that his poetic output was just a fraction of his theoretical prose; it took even longer to get the latter completely in print; it took longest to admit that Coleridge was a quite significant thinker (...) and that his theories were integrated in a much more coherent fashion than was originally believed. We are finally there, and the current book is a good example of uninhibited common use of the whole body of Coleridge’s work with the purpose of positioning him in the historical flow of European thinking. In fact, Haney may a go a little too far in dealing with Coleridge as a philosopher rather than as a poet. (shrink)

One of the most adroit movements of the ideological “establishment” in the United States is to have occupied the channels of communication between national groups of intellectuals. By this arbitrary maneuver a certain impression of isolation is given to those who have the forlorn courage to oppose prevailing intellectual idola. The reader may know about philosophical oppositions inside America, but he rarely hears about similar movements outside. Yet, ironically, these are alive and very eloquent.

Although Plesu started his career as an art historian, he soon came under the influence of Constantin Noica, a major Romanian thinker who had tried to combine Platonism with a rather idiosyncratic form of existentialism. Plesu was briefly a minister for culture in the first post-revolutionary Romanian cabinet, and thereafter worked as an editor and as an educator; he is currently the president of a small private graduate international college in Bucharest. He is the author of a number of books (...) in which he draws intriguingly from material in art, religion, philosophy, and sometimes politics. The current volume, his most recent, is a case in point. (shrink)

Sheehan deals with relatively recent authors—Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Beckett. He is critical of humanism, by which he seems to understand a kind of anthropocentric and limitative image of human beings, imposed on the public by narrative, among other things. As against this, he is setting the animal, the mechanical, and the transcendental, but the definition of the latter is, to say the least, bizarre—“the ability to evade compromise and contingency”. Reformulating narrativity is, according to Sheehan, the best (...) attempt or search by the moderns to define a new kind of human. His whole project is, to put it bluntly, rather confused. There are some intelligent and original commentaries on Schopenhauer, for instance but Sheehan soon falls back under the spell of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Terry Eagleton and seems to contribute rather few original comments to the discussion. In a word, this is a good example of how the interface philosophy/literature ought not to be visited. (shrink)

Franco’s book is meticulous and objective, but it does underline two points. The first is that Oakeshott cannot be portrayed simply as a “conservative”; thus T. S. Eliot was a more typical conservative than Oakeshott, the latter being rather a conservative Whig, in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Sir Robert Peel. The second is that throughout his life, Oakeshott, far from being an agnostic and religious indifferentist, interacted with religious theories and responded to them, even though this is not (...) always visible in his published writings. (shrink)

In my previous short review of the Balthasar guide penned by the Dominican Prior of Blackfriars, Cambridge, I had included the complaint that no reference to Theodramatik is made in the discussion of the great Aesthetics. The criticism was vain, as the current book must have been well underway. In many respects this is perhaps an even better study than the previous one, and will most certainly contribute in great measure to our in-depth understanding of the innovative vision proposed by (...) the major and increasingly influential Swiss theologian. Readers and scholars are beginning to understand better why Urs von Balthasar is so well beloved by so many, not least by the current Pope, who did all that was possible to include him in the College of Cardinals. (shrink)

Patapievici is rather young as philosophers go, barely forty. He gained a wider audience in Romania by his philosophical column in the intellectual weekly quaintly called “22,” as well as by a couple of books written mostly in the mode of the “philosophical journal.” The present book triggered enormous and passionate controversy upon its publication, not least because it revealed fully and openly what had been sensed only by relatively few specialized readers until then: namely that Patapievici may be said (...) to be the leading original conservative thinker in his native country. (shrink)

Marga is the Dean of the school of philosophy at the University of Cluj, and his study seems to mark an interesting change in Romanian philosophy. In the last sixty or seventy years philosophy had been in that part of the world primarily Platonic, Hegelian, or existentialist, with an undisguised suspicion towards technological and rationalist orientations. There are a number of signs that the almost exclusive commitment to idealist modes of argument is being replaced in Romania by a much more (...) diverse intellectual landscape. (shrink)

This book constructs a theory of ruins that celebrates their vitality and unity in aesthetic experience. Its argument draws upon over 100 illustrations prepared in 40 countries. Ruins flourish as matter, form, function, incongruity, site, and symbol. Ruin underlies cultural values in cinema, literature and philosophy. Finally, ruin guides meditations upon our mortality and endangered world.

Vladimir Soloviev should probably not be described as a philosopher or theologian of the highest rank. However his importance in the intellectual history of Russia and of Eastern Orthodoxy in general is peerless. This fact is now slowly beginning to seep into Western scholarship. He was and remains relevant and interesting as a formidable animator, a man of enormously diverse interests, and a genuine ecumenicist. Without him the Russian theological school in twentieth century France would not have been possible. Moreover, (...) the curious debate about his repeated conversions and reconversions and his strongly pro-Jewish essays contribute to this interest. (shrink)