Language -- Image -- Time -- Body -- Dream -- Myth -- Baudelaire -- Rescue -- Remembrance.

This work seeks to shed light on one of the most enigmatic masterpieces of twentieth-century thought.

The field of my inquiry is the field of judgement. I focus primarily on the difficulties involved in the act of judging. What I emphasize, after Kant, is the absence of preexisting rules for judgement in its purest form. ;I interpret Cavell's discussion of Rawls' theory of justice as probing the implications of the fact that there will always be for the individual a judgement to be made of the distance between our own society and the ideal well ordered society. (...) It is here I claim that the concept of the example comes into play. To elaborate this I show how Rousseau uses his experience of consent to the Republic of Geneva to provide an example, or a standard of judgement to the individual's seeking whether and how to express consent to their society. ;In my paper on the Kant's Third Critique I argue that what is most central in the judgement of taste is that it is the reflection and expression the individuality of the judge of taste and its function is to provoke one to rely on one's own sense of the world. It is primarily through the analysis of the relation of genius to taste that I elaborate the centrality of individuality but my claim is that this relation manifests itself also between the judge of taste and a community of taste. ;The concept of exemplarity leads me to the distinction between what can be said and what can be shown. In the paper on Wittgenstein's Tractatus I want to combat what I take to be a false understanding of the distinction between showing and saying which makes what is shown to be some property of the world that cannot be stated in language. I explain what Wittgenstein means by the notion of form and how it is that form only shows itself through language. I further see the overall design of the text as an exemplary reworking of Wittgenstein's philosophical experience. I thus interpret the idea of throwing away the ladder as a claim that the propositions of the book are of use only as an example to provoke one to thoughts of one's own. (shrink)

In this paper I want to argue that a unified set of concerns constituting a new dimension—a realignment of our sense of language, self, and world—emerges in the progress of the Tractatus as we turn to inquire into the inner connection between language and such notions as world, limits, life, and ipseity. The most elusive step in that progress, and the one most necessary to recognize as part of the argument of the Tractatus, is the transition from an understanding of (...) language in terms of logic, sense, and meaning to a perspective in which language becomes the primary locus of significance or meaningfulness. It is also the pivot from the logical to the ethical concerns of the book. An ethics that appeals to the notion of meaningfulness is elaborated in terms of the dimension of existence, namely in terms of the very possibility of agreement of disagreement with what has ultimate reality. (shrink)

In my commentary, I argue that Ginsborg’s understanding of the primitive normativity in reflective aesthetic judgement should be broadened to account for further characterizations of the judgement of taste given in Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’. In particular, I stress the distinction between the consideration of universal communicability, on which Ginsborg focuses, and Kant’s account of common sense. Understanding how the latter notion has an equiprimordial place in the account of taste may allow us to see that aesthetic judgement is (...) not inconsistent with conceptual articulation, as long as we properly distinguish what it means to have something fall under a concept and what it is to recognize something to exemplify a fitting place in what can become a systematically explicit space of concepts. (shrink)

Kant’s The Critique of Judgment laid the groundwork of modern aesthetics when it appeared in 1790. Eli Friedlander’s reappraisal emphasizes the internal connection of judgment and meaning, showing how the pleasure in judging is intimately related to our capacity to draw meaning from our encounter with beauty.

In this chapter I trace a number of thematic connections between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Notebooks on the one hand, and his ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ on the other. Pointing to this continuity will, I hope, bring out how the dimension of significance, central to the ‘Remarks on Frazer’, plays a role in the progress of the Tractatus, as well as elucidate how metaphysics is an expression and a distortion of the spiritual, similar to the one we find in magic (...) and mythology. It would explain, as Wittgenstein puts it, “metaphysics as a kind of magic”. (shrink)

Eli Friedlander reads Rousseau's autobiography, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, as philosophy. Reading this work against Descartes's Meditations, Friedlander shows how Rousseau's memorable transformation of experience through writing opens up the possibility of affirming even the most dejected state of being and allows the emergence of the innocence of nature out of the ruins of all social attachments. In tracing the re-creation of a human subject in reverie, Friedlander is alive to the very form of the experience of reading the (...) Reveries by showing the ways this work needs to--and in effect does--generate a reader, without betraying Rousseau's utter solitude. Friedlander's book provides an afterlife for the Reveries in modern philosophy. It constitutes an alternative to the analytic tradition's revival of Rousseau, primarily through Rawls's influential vision of the social contract. It also counters the fate of Rousseau's writings in the continental tradition, determined by and large by Derrida's deconstruction. Friedlander's reading of the Reveries, a work that has fascinated generations of readers, is an incomparable introduction to one of the greatest thinkers in Western culture. (shrink)

In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation (...) of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought. (shrink)

The essay provides a commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “News from Flowers”, a review of the album of plant photography of Karl Blossfeldt. I place Benjamin’s account of Blossfeldt’s achievement both in relation to Goethe’s studies of the vegetal realm as well as to the fantasy world of Grandville’s Animated Flowers. This juxtaposition allows me to interpret Benjamin’s understanding of the possibilities opened by photography and the transformation it brings to the relation of art to science and the imagination.