Transitions: introduction -- Ethics and the aesthetic -- Ethics and the metaphysical -- Ethics and interpretation -- Ethical friendships. Conclusion.

Starmaking brings together a cluster of work published over the past 35 years by Nelson Goodman and two Harvard colleagues, Hilary Putnam and Israel Scheffler, on the conceptual connections between monism and pluralism, absolutism and relativism, and idealism and different notions of realism -- issues that are central to metaphysics and epistemology. The title alludes to Goodman's famous defense of the claim that because all true representations of stars and other objects are human creations, it follows that in an important (...) sense the stars themselves are made by us. More generally, the argument moves from the fact that our right representations are constructed by us to the claim that the world itself is similarly constructed. Starmaking addresses the question of whether this seeming paradox can be turned into a serious philosophical view. Goodman and Putnam are sympathetic; Scheffler is the critic. Although many others continue to write about pluralism, relativism, and constructionalism, Starmaking brings together the protagonists in the debate since its beginnings and follows closely its still developing form and substance, focusing sharply on Goodman's claim that "we make versions, and right versions make worlds.". (shrink)

A comprehensive look at the intellectual and cultural innovations of the Weimar period During its short lifespan, the Weimar Republic witnessed an unprecedented flowering of achievements in many areas, including psychology, political theory, physics, philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, and the arts. Leading intellectuals, scholars, and critics—such as Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Martin Heidegger—emerged during this time to become the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century. Even today, the Weimar era remains a vital resource for (...) new intellectual movements. In this incomparable collection, Weimar Thought presents both the specialist and the general reader a comprehensive guide and unified portrait of the most important innovators, themes, and trends of this fascinating period. The book is divided into four thematic sections: law, politics, and society; philosophy, theology, and science; aesthetics, literature, and film; and general cultural and social themes of the Weimar period. The volume brings together established and emerging scholars from a remarkable array of fields, and each individual essay serves as an overview for a particular discipline while offering distinctive critical engagement with relevant problems and debates. Whether used as an introductory companion or advanced scholarly resource, Weimar Thought provides insight into the rich developments behind the intellectual foundations of modernity. (shrink)

As its founder Imamichi Tomonobu repeatedly stressed, eco-ethics focuses on comprehending what a new ethics for our new times requires. Today, under very dark totalitarian skies, I suggest here several points for further eco-ethical critical discussion on three cardinal themes for such an ethics: human rights, a common good, and social justice. After a short introductory section elucidating my figurative title, I propose in each of the three following sections a summary question and a tentative working hypothesis. The titles of (...) the sections are: 1. Why the idea of human rights lacks general consensus; 2. Why most everyday notions of a common good are equivocal; and 3. Why even strong accounts of social justice are probably unreliable. The presentation concludes with a return to the figurative starting point in the widely suggestive metaphor of a trembling world. (shrink)

Moral naturalism in Europe and elsewhere today is the view that only the natural sciences can satisfactorily analyze the ethical value of persons. Many thoughtful people appear still to believe that the natural sciences can “reduce” the distinctive ethical value of persons ultimately to microphysical terms. Such an apparently widespread belief in part of the EU cultural environment today, however, raises serious questions. - In this EU context and in the Symposium contexts of Tomonobu Imamichi’s (1922-2012) eco-ethical concerns about “a (...) new ethics for our new times,” I would like to offer here two sets of critical observations in support of non-naturalistic accounts of the ethical value of persons. The first group comprises reasons why even some impressive contemporary forms of scientific ethical naturalisms of the person continue to be surprising. And the second, briefer set comprises several elements only of what a non- naturalistic ethics of the person might require. (shrink)

This article focuses on the extremely poor, on those who, if they are to live decent lives, are most in need of assistance. Like those suffering today from extremely severe famine in Yemen and elsewhere, very many of those suffering from extreme poverty will die not only prematurely; probably they will die before the end of the year. They will die if, among many others, thoughtful and resourceful persons including some philosophers continue to fail to engage themselves to assist them. (...) My aim is to underline several of the philosophical elements in some recent discussions of both monetary and non-monetary extreme poverty. With these elements freshly in view, I would then like to examine critically yet constructively the most salient ones from the perspective of a certain understanding of the cardinal notion of ethical engagement. I will conclude with a summary of the main argument and a formulation of several key questions which still need further reflective discussion today. (shrink)

Politics and ethics are closely linked in many ways. One such link is the central but still contentious notion of the person. Take the case of today’s European Union. Most basically, member states disagree on what and who persons are. This EU paradox may be resolved when political debates about sovereignty’s limits expand to include ethical discussions of the nature of persons. The aim of this paper is to point in the direction of an account of the person that will (...) support proper understandings of those ethical, and not just political, values that the Preamble of any eventual European Union constitution will need to entrench tomorrow. (shrink)

Fundamentally, ethics may be understood as having to do with what and who acting persons are. Persons, however, act variously. Some persons are basically individualists. They characteristically act as if they are as wholly independent as possible from other persons. Other persons are collectivists. They act as if they are as much a dependent part of some larger community of persons as possible. Accordingly, one cardinal issue for any philosophical ethics is whether almost all persons are, fundamentally, independent entities. That (...) is, are almost all persons independent entities, or are almost all persons dependent ones? The idea I pursue here briefly is that, fundamentally, persons are neither independent nor dependent entities but interdependent ones. They are so in the senses of not being essentially prior to, or not being ontologically more basic than, or not having their ontological identity apart from other persons. (shrink)

Talk of fictions is usually problematic. One reason is our habitual difficulty in distinguishing clearly between discourse about fiction and fictional discourse. And part of our problem is understanding more clearly what such various discourse refers to. In this paper I would like to examine critically a recent influential account of "fictional discourse" with a view towards offering several proposals for reconstructing that account.

Talk of fictions is usually problematic. One reason is our habitual difficulty in distinguishing clearly between discourse about fiction and fictional discourse. And part of our problem is understanding more clearly what such various discourse refers to. In this paper I would like to examine critically a recent influential account of "fictional discourse" with a view towards offering several proposals for reconstructing that account.

This paper focuses on four brief points only: first, the general character of today’s understandings of globalization; then, one substantive danger that arises from this general understanding of globalization; third, by contrast, the universal character of just one of the most important traditional understandings of cosmopolitanism; and, finally, on what might bring together a certain globalization and a certain cosmopolitanism into something more than either just a so-called European or African “anthropocentric ethics.” The key conceptual resource highlighted is that of (...) friendship. (shrink)

IN a collection of essays devoted to Jean Baufret, Heidegger has published the long awaited text of his 1962 Freiburg lecture, ‘Time and Being’: ‘To think the question of “Being” [“Sein”] properly requires that our reflection follow the direction that makes itself manifest in what allows the presencing of Being [Anwesenlassen]. In what lets Being become present this direction [Weisung] shows evidence for the end of a concealment [Entbergung]. Out of this revelation speaks a granting, an it is granted [Es (...) Gibt]’. (shrink)

La méditation la plus importante d'Heidegger sur le langage s'intitule « Le chemin vers le langage » ; c'est le dernier chapitre d’Unterwegs zur Sprache. Si nous considérons la possibilité que le dernier Heidegger a quelque chose à apporter aux problèmes philosophiques du langage, nous devons déterminer exactement ce que Heidegger pense dans cette méditation. C'est pourquoi ma communication se bornera à une lecture détaillée et très restreinte de ce texte. La tâche plus intéressante mais, compte tenu de l'état des (...) études sur Heidegger, moins prioritaire, c'est-à-dire l'évaluation des propos heideggeriens, et leur incorporation dans une optique plus large sur la philosophie du langage, m'occupera à une autre occasion. Je prendrai comme points d'appui l'introduction prolongée de la méditation heideggerienne et sa conclusion. Dans un troisième et plus court moment, je mettrai ensemble les résultats de ces deux premières analyses pour faire le point sur les éléments de base du dernier Heidegger sur le langage. Partout, mon intention serait d'ouvrir la possibilité d'une discussion dont les éléments essentiels seraient en fin délimités.Heidegger's most important meditation on language is " The Way to Language," the final chapter of Unterwegs zur Sprache. If we are to decide whether Heidegger has anything of substance to contribute to present concerns with philosophical problems of language, we need to determine what he is saying. This paper is concerned with the latter point. My central concern here will be to formulate as carefully as I can just what Heidegger seems to be saying about language. The more interesting task of evaluating claims, and this icorporation into a larger view of the philosophy of language, will concern me on another occasion. Althought Heideggeir's meditation falls into three sections, I sha'H confine my analysis to his extended introduction and conclusion. For the priority here is clearly on the side of understanding Heidegger's starting point, aims, and procedures. After examining closely then Heidegger's programatic statements in his introduction and conclusion I shall combine the first with the second to formulate both Heidegger's central claims in this essay and their assumptions. (shrink)

One virtue among the several vices in recent philosophy of art, whether in Anglo-American or continental terms however various, is careful work on the interactions among theory, history, and practice. Thus, philosophers as diverse as Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, and Francis Sparshott, on the one hand and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, and François Lyotard, on the other, continue to elaborate their sustained reflections on art in the context of repeated and closely detailed case studies within the (...) individual arts of literature, painting, dance, cinema, and so on. My purpose here is not to survey the complex character of this widespread resurgence of interest in a less general and more finely grained approach to recurring problems in the philosophy of art. Rather, I would like to put on exhibit two case studies of this striking new work. And my initial interest is to call attention to its central, repeated, and yet problematic reliance on what I will argue is an insufficiently critical grasp of the seminal notion in modern aesthetics of interpretation. I shall take my examples here from two currents only in contemporary philosophical reflection on the arts, analytic aesthetics in the recent work of Arthur Danto and hermeneutic aesthetics in that of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In each case I will try to suggest briefly without attempting to demonstrate in detail that the interpretive practices of these representative and distinguished contemporary philosophers of art seriously undermine their theoretical views about interpretation. Specifically I will argue that the recurring tension in each account between theory and practice derives largely if not exclusively from very different and yet similarly uncritical accounts of both historical and systematic uses of interpretation. Finally, in my conclusion, with the help of some reflections on aesthetics in the late Heidegger, I will try to confront both Danto’s and Gadamer’s view briefly in order to generate a series of still unresolved issues about interpretation that call for further reflection. (shrink)

AT the conclusion of his 1962 letter to William Richardson, Heidegger speaks about language and the thinking of Being. ‘In proportion to the intrinsically manifold matter of Being and Time all words which give this matter utterance…are always ambiguous. Only a manifold thought succeeds in uttering the heart of this matter in a way that corresponds with it. This manifold thought requires, however, not a new language but a transformed relationship to the essence of the old one’.

Ethics has to do basically with what and who acting persons are. Persons however act variously. Some persons are basically individualists. They characteristically act as if they are as wholly independent as possible from other persons. Other persons are collectivists. They act as if they are as much a dependent part of some larger community of persons as possible. - Accordingly, one cardinal issue for any philosophical ethics like eco-ethics is whether almost all persons are, fundamentally, independent entities. That is, (...) are almost all persons independent entities, or are almost all persons dependent ones? - The idea I try to pursue here briefly is that, fundamentally, persons are neither independent nor dependent entities but interdependent ones. They are so in the senses of not being essentially prior to, or ontologically more basic than, or having their ontological identity apart from other persons. (shrink)