Foucault never presented a systematic history of tragedy, but reflections on the relationship between tragedy and the will to truth are scattered throughout his writings. Given the Nietzschean inspiration of his work, this is not surprising. Yet Foucault rarely referenced The Birth of Tragedy, preferring to draw on Nietzsche’s later genealogical writings. In this paper I highlight the importance of The Birth of Tragedy for understanding Foucault’s entire corpus, suggesting that it can be read as a sustained consideration on the (...) political significance of the madness of Orestes from Aeschylus to Racine. (shrink)

Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction surveys the main trends of European philosophy from Kant to the present. It is clearly written and accessible to students. In a novel approach, Andrew Cutrofello looks at continental philosophy through the lens of four questions that derive from Kant: -How is truth disclosed aesthetically? -To what does the feeling of respect attest? -Must we despair, or may we still hope? -What is the meaning of philosophical humanism? Cutrofello shows how these questions (...) have been taken up by (1) phenomenologists, (2) continental ethicists, (3) hermeneuticians and critical theorists, and (4) existentialists and their critics. In the introduction and conclusion, he explains how the questions raised by continental philosophers differ from their analogues in the analytic tradition. With its frequent references to Shakespeare, Cutrofello's style is lively and engaging. His remarkably comprehensive book will be of interest not only to students but to anyone seeking a reliable overview of the continental tradition. (shrink)

_Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction_ is ideal for students coming to the topic for the first time. It introduces the origins and development of the tradition, tracing it from Kant to the present day. Taking a clear thematic approach, Andrew Cutrofello introduces and assesses continental philosophy’s relation to fundamental questions in philosophy, such as ethics, humanism, phenomenology, politics and metaphysics, centring the book around the following questions: What is knowledge? What is moral obligation? For what should we hope? (...) What is ‘man’? What is critique? Andrew Cutrofello’s style is lively and engaging. He also introduces the major as well as the lesser-known thinkers of the continental tradition: from Kant, Mill and Nietzsche and Husserl to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre Levinas, Bataille and Kristeva. (shrink)

Recasts Kantian philosophy along poststructuralist lines, particularly showing how Kantian ethics can be reformulated to take into account criticisms leveled by Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, and others.

In this paper I suggest that one of Kant's motives in framing the account of artistic genius that he presents in the Critique of Judgment was to respond to Herder's veneration of Shakespeare. Kant agreed with Herder that Shakespeare was an exemplary artistic genius, but he disagreed with him about the relationship between genius and philosophy. Herder shared Kant's view that beautiful art should not infringe on the boundaries of the sciences, but in Kant's view Herder's own speculative metaphysics violated (...) this principle. Kant accused Herder of allowing his genius to interfere with his philosophy – that is, of philosophizing in a Shakespearean manner. Instead of attempting to adjudicate this debate, I try to show how Herder could have defended his position by reading Kant through the lens of Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1. I conclude by briefly indicating how the debate between Kant and Herder came to inform the analytic/continental division, which in light of this debate can be understood as a meta‐argument about the nature of philosophical arguments. (shrink)

The act of confession plays a crucial and recurring role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Alienation between individuals, Hegel suggests, can be overcome only through a mutual confessing and forgiving between two alienated consciousnesses. Thus the dramatic climax of the text occurs at the close of the “Spirit” section, with the breaking of the hard heart and the reciprocal acts of confession and forgiveness on the parts of the acting and judging consciousnesses. Leading up to this act of mutual confession (...) are a series of confessional scenes, whose insufficiency arises from one of two failings: Either they fail to be direct, or they fail to be mutual. The paradigmatic cases of each of these types of failure can be found, respectively, in the section on the unhappy consciousness and in the section on the ethical realm. The unhappy consciousness’s admission of misery to the mediating consciousness is a type of confession. Presumably, both the subjugator and the subjugated confess at this point. However, they do not confess directly to each other; they confess only to the mediator. Thus the gesture of confessing to the other remains something merely intended and not yet carried out in the deed. This failure is compensated for at the level of the ethical realm, where the defender of the divine law performs a double deed: First, she carries out the deed of violating the human law, then the deed of confessing directly to the antagonist from whom she is alienated. However, the defender of the human law does not recognize his own guilt and so refuses either to confess or to forgive. The structure of this latter scene of confession is eventually repeated at the level of spirit. For so long as the judging consciousness refuses to recognize his own evil, he remains stubbornly Creonic. Only when he recognizes that he too is evil does the hard heart reciprocate the confession of the other. Mutual and direct confessing now takes place. (shrink)

The struggle for self-consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit is fraught with false achievements. In sense-certainty, consciousness is aware of itself as consciousness of an object, but this awareness of self is thoroughly mediated by the object, which remains the essential element in the relation until this view collapses with the untenability of the theory of force. As self-certainty, consciousness then becomes immediately aware of itself, and so seems to have achieved real self-consciousness. But such is not the case, since (...) self-consciousness requires the recognition of others; certainty of self must be raised to the level of truth. This is easier said than done. The ensuing dialectical passage from the life-and-death struggle through the unhappy consciousness seems to end in failure - at least up until the very end, when, out of despair, the individuals sacrifice their sense of self only to regain it through the action of the mediating counselor. In renouncing their one-sided claims to self-consciousness, the alienated consciousnesses who confess their misery gain precisely what had seemed irredeemably lost just a moment before. It is a dialectical irony that, though the struggle for recognition began with the individuals’ willingness to risk everything for the sake of self, they achieve genuine self-recognition only when they are willing to risk their sense of self for the sake of everything else. (shrink)

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were originally presented at the fifty-eighth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 31 to November 2, 2019. The meeting was hosted by Duquesne University. It featured two outstanding plenary presentations that bear mentioning even though they are not reproduced in these pages: Susan Stryker's "How Being Trans Made Me a Philosopher!" and Robert Brandom's "Magnanimity, Heroism, and Agency: Recognition as Recollection." (...) Stryker explained in her talk how she came to recognize and enact her identity as a trans woman, and to publish her pathbreaking paper, "My Words... (shrink)

This work sets out to perform a psychoanalytic inversion of transcendental philosophy, taking Kant's synthetic a priori judgments and reading them in terms of a foreclosed Kantian category, that of the analytic a posteriori.

In Bamboozled (2000), Spike Lee’s satire about a modern TV minstrel show, an auditioning actor named Honeycutt tells the show’s writer, Pierre Delacroix, “I even do Shakespeare shit. . . . To be or not to be, you know? That’s the motherfuckin’ question. . . . There’s a scene where this brother was—Laertes was asking the king, that he wanted to go to Paris and shit. The king asked his daddy, and his daddy say, ‘He hath, my lord, wrung from (...) me by laboursome petition. . . .’” Impatiently, Delacroix interrupts: “Was there any more to it, or was that pretty much . . . ?” Delacroix’s interruption of Honeycutt’s Polonius ironically echoes Polonius’s interruption of the speech of the First Player: “This is too .. (shrink)

Because there is no formal procedure for determining to which language a given expression belongs, it is impossible to limit indeterminacy and inscrutability "at home" by appealing to the principle of ontological relativity. Not only is it impossible to ostend a unique language to which a particular expression would belong, it is impossible even to determine rigorously the boundaries which separate one language from another. Languages are themselves inscrutable.

On October 26–27, 1962, the first meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy took place in Evanston, Illinois. Seven months earlier, on March 19, 1962, Columbia Records released the debut album of a young folk singer from Hibbing, Minnesota. Topics discussed at the SPEP meeting included the "phenomenology of perception, existential aesthetics, value theory, the life-world, the emotions, and expressive meaning."1 Songs on the album included two originals—"Talking New York" and "Song to Woody"—and covers of several gospel and (...) blues songs, including "In My Time of Dyin'," "Fixin' to Die," and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." The SPEP archives don't indicate whether anyone at the meeting in... (shrink)

(1998). Speculative imagination and the problem of legitimation: On David Ingram's Reason, History, and Politics: The communitarian grounds of Legitimation in the modern age. Social Epistemology: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 117-126.

Questions concerning the legacy of Hegel have haunted philosophy for some time. These questions concern not just Hegel but the idea of a legacy in general. In this essay, I will ask why Hegel in particular should have occasioned philosophical reflection on the concept of a legacy. Section One begins from Lawrence Stepelevich’s assessment of how the Young Hegelians, especially Max Stirner, saw themselves in relation to the Hegelian legacy. This assessment is used as a backdrop for contrasting Jacques Derrida’s (...) and Benedetto Croce’s questions concerning the Hegelian legacy. Section Two draws a connection between the way Hegel treats the legacy of the Greek ideal in art and Sigmund Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia. This connection is used to draw certain conclusions about what exactly makes a legacy in general problematic. Section Three suggests a way in which these conclusions might be used to negotiate an impasse in contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

A present-day continuation of the philosophical narrative presented in G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit that confronts every major post-Hegelian philosophical position and arrives at an original reconception of the purpose of dialectical phenomenology.

This accessible new book provides a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the defining problems of contemporary philosophy. Its unique feature is to focus on problems that cut across the established divide between analytic and continental philosophical traditions. Instead of segregating the two traditions, as is usually done, the authors offer a critical orientation and guide for readers who are not exclusively affiliated with either approach and who want to understand the increasingly shared questions philosophers are asking and addressing today. Each (...) chapter starts with a fundamental overarching question: (1) What and how can we know? (2) What is the structure of the world? (3) What goes beyond the physical world? (4) What is to be done? (5) What does it mean to orient oneself philosophically? Under these headings, the authors critically examine the disciplines most fundamental problems. Their approach reveals deep and unexpected connections across the analytic/continental divide, and opens up new ways of thinking about critique itself. No other book about contemporary philosophy is as comprehensive and cosmopolitan. The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy provides newcomers and seasoned philosophers alike with an entertaining, engaging, and far-reaching portrait of todays philosophical landscape. It is an exemplary instance of thinking across and beyond the analytic/continental divide. (shrink)

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here (...) bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today. (shrink)

This forward-thinking collection presents new work that looks beyond the division between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—one that has long caused dissension, mutual distrust, and institutional barriers to the development of common concerns and problems. Rather than rehearsing the causes of the divide, contributors draw upon the problems, methods, and results of both traditions to show what post-divide philosophical work looks like in practice. Ranging from metaphysics and philosophy of mind to political philosophy and ethics, the papers gathered here (...) bring into mutual dialogue a wide range of recent and contemporary thinkers, and confront leading problems common to both traditions, including methodology, ontology, meaning, truth, values, and personhood. Collectively, these essays show that it is already possible to foresee a future for philosophical thought and practice no longer determined neither as "analytic" nor as "continental," but, instead, as a pluralistic synthesis of what is best in both traditions. The new work assembled here shows how the problems, projects, and ambitions of twentieth-century philosophy are already being taken up and productively transformed to produce new insights, questions, and methods for philosophy today. (shrink)

Buku berjudul The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy: A Critical Guide for the Unaffiliated patut dibaca untuk memahami perdebatan dalam filsafat kontemporer. Buku ini ditulis oleh dua profesor filsafat yang berlatarbelakang dari tradisi analitik maupun tradisi kontinental. Paul Livingston adalah profesor filsafat di University of New Mexico. Ia mendalami filsafat kesadaran (mind), filsafat bahasa, fenomenologi, filsafat politik, serta menaruh minat besar pada filsafat ilmu. Beberapa karyanya: The Logic of Being: Realism, Truth, and Time (Northwestern, 2017); The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, (...) and the Consequence of Formalism (Routledge, 2011); Philosophy and the Vision of Language (Routledge, 2008); serta Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness (Cambridge, 2004). Penulis kedua, Andrew Cutrofello, adalah profesor filsafat di Loyola University of Chicago. Cutrofello mengkhususkan ranah penelitiannya pada Kant, Hegel, dan filsafat kontinental. Saat ini, Cutrofello sedang menggeluti soal titik temu antara filsafat dan kesusasteraan, khususnya puisi-puisi berbahasa Inggris. Karya-karya Cutrofello di antaranya: Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide: Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2015)—buku yang disunting bersama Jeffrey Bell dan Paul Livingston; All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity (MIT, 2014); dan Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2005). Dalam ranah filsafat kontemporer, Livingston dan Cutrofello berupaya mengembangkan suatu filsafat “majemuk,” yang berupaya melampaui pemisahan antara tradisi analitik dan tradisi kontinental. Proyek itu pulalah yang mewarnai dan menjadi tema utama buku The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy—selanjutnya disingkat PCP...... Sebagai catatan, keterbatasan PCP sebagaimana diakui oleh Livingston dan Cutrefello sendiri terletak pada fokus dan pembatasan mengenai persoalan-persoalan filosofis itu sendiri. Kedua penulis tersebut memusatkan perhatian pada beberapa persoalan mendasar yang menarik perhatian para filsuf kontemporer. Karena itu, Livingston dan Cutrefello tidak menawarkan sebuah pemetaan komprehensif dan utuh mengenai semua persoalan filosofis. Keterbatasan lainnya juga terletak pada pembahasan yang berorientasi seputar filsafat Eropa dan Anglo-Amerika sehingga meminggirkan tradisi-tradisi lainnya. Bahkan, pembahasan Livingston dan Cutrefello secara eksklusif terpusat pada filsafat-filsafat yang ditulis atau diterjemahkan ke dalam bahasa Inggris saja sehingga mengecualikan berbagai kajian filsafat di luar bahasa Inggris. (Yulius Tandyanto, Alumnus Pascasarjana Sekolah Tinggi Filsafat Driyarkara, Jakarta). (shrink)

What a pleasure to have such subtle thinkers and scholars as Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello reflect on the relation of irony and comedy to politics and philosophy through their commentary on my new book. To set the tone, Martin begins with a koan, or a parody of one, “What if a tree told a joke in the woods and there was no one there to hear it?” He means, I believe, to sound a warning on the limits (...) of irony in our serious, or perhaps, Martin would say, our seriously idiotic, times. By the end of his discussion, Martin wonders if perhaps a politics of irony might not lead to greater cynicism in our morally upside-down times and if those Wall Street rip-off artists merit something more than satire—they may .. (shrink)

This collection maintains a dialogue between the analytic and continental traditions, while aspiring to situate itself beyond the analytic-continental divide. It divides into four parts, Methodologies, Truth and Meaning, Metaphysics and Ontology, and Values, Personhood and Agency, though there is considerable overlap among the categories. History and temporality are recurrent themes, but there is a lot of metaphysics generally, with some philosophy of language, philosophy of social science, ethics, political philosophy and epistemology. Less prominent is a pragmatic, deflationary attitude, and (...) at a number of points I argue for the virtues of such an approach. (shrink)