Many fans of Diogenes of Sinope laud his parrhesia, free speech used for critique. However, Diogenes abused not only the powerful but also the socially marginalized. We argue that interpreters of Diogenes cannot explain away the undeniably troublesome things that Diogenes said about those at the margins. But we also argue that Diogenes ought nonetheless to be preserved. Some of his chreiai can be reminders of how to be courageous and fight for the downtrodden, and others can serve as reminders (...) of how easily those aspirations can be forgotten. We offer a variety of ways to interpret Diogenes, especially since the figure of Diogenes is an historical composite from centuries of sources. But we arrive at a position of loving antagonism toward Diogenes, loving Cynic commitments to autarkeia and against wealth and power, and disapproving when Cynics fell short of their commitments and critical aspirations. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, to conceive transcendence, Levinas retrieves the Platonic concept of “separation” and deploys it in three ways: metaphysically, semantically, and affectively. Levinas finds in the interaction between being and the Good beyond being of Republic VI 509b a certain “formal structure of transcendence”—one in which a term is conditioned by another while remaining absolutely separated from it. This formal structure is subsequently deployed metaphysically, in the relation between creator and creature; semantically, in the relation between (...) meaning and sense; and affectively, in the relation between the desiring self and its desired aim. (shrink)

The role of intensity in Aristotelian philosophy is obscure. The problem has historically been approached through his logic and categorical sense of motion. Scholars have largely failed to consider the role of intensity in psychology and ethics, the consideration of which greatly clarifies the situation. To this end, I identify three types of intensity present in the corpus Aristotelicum: comparative, modal, inceptive. I show that the intensity of physical contraries is primary in nature but is different from those found in (...) organic processes. I then show that the intensifications found in life, produced by the soul, are of paramount importance to Aristotle’s philosophy. Inceptive intensity is the backbone of psychical activities: concoction, sensation, pleasure, perception, effort, attention, and self-awareness. I outline two essential characteristics of these intensifications: (1) they imply an intransitive causality that is intrinsic to the entity’s nature or form; (2) that they involve an interaction of many parts which mutually amplify each other so that the whole is beyond (irreducible to) the totality of the parts. I end by comparing Aristotle’s views on intensity to contemporary ideas of emergence: feedback, holism, intentionality, and supervenience. (shrink)

Most scholars have not assigned much interpretive importance to the specific use of the term ‘persuasion’ in the cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus. This paper suggests understanding cosmological ‘persuasion’ in conjunction with ‘force,’ another trait of divine agency in the Timaeus. It analyses the nature of intelligent causation in the cosmology of the Timaeus, particularly in the construction of the cosmic body and soul. Then, it gives a detailed characterization of the causation of necessity, appearing in the Timaeus in three different (...) versions, and relates it to the complex notion of intelligent agency. Ultimately, it claims that the cosmic music in the Timaeus, the primary agent of ordered causation in the cosmos, functions on two levels of conflict with the disorder of the sensible aspect of the world. (shrink)

No one who reads Derrida closely could accuse him of “technophobia.” More than any other contemporary thinker, on the contrary, he has shown the limit of attempts to protect thinking and even being itself from technē. Yet, Derrida nevertheless insists that “deconstruction” is neither a “technique” nor the technology of thinking that modern philosophy calls “method.” What allows Derrida to exclude “technique” and “method” when he himself shows, in relation to Heidegger above all, that a certain technicity and methodicity always (...) remain irreducible? After outlining its stakes (§I), this article seeks to raise this question by reconstructing Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger concerning the questions of technology (§II) and of method (§III) before turning to the techno-methodicity that Derrida attempts to dissociate from deconstruction in turn (§IV). (shrink)

This is my translation of Gadamer's 1990 lecture "The Diversity of Languages and Understanding of the World." "In his lecture, Gadamer presents his views of language and world in a distinctively hermeneutical key. For example, he emphasizes language as that which 'belongs to conversation.' That is, language as conversation helps to bring about understanding and involves the play of dialogical exchange. 'Language is not proposition and judgment; rather, it is what it is, only when it is question and answer.' Language (...) involves another; it is on-the-way [unterwegs] to another. In fact, when addressing his question—what does world mean—Gadamer clarifies that humans and world are intimately connected; the world is that in which we are 'in the midst' and 'understanding is understanding oneself in the world.' But we are also in-the-world with others, and understanding ourselves in the world, means to understand ourselves with others. Gadamer goes so far as to say that our self-understanding as achieved in relation to others, as well as our understanding of others, should be taken in a moral and political sense. That is, the other is not there as merely a means to our ends or to exploit. Rather, 'the other indicates a principal limit to our self-love and self-centeredness. This is a general moral problem. It is also a political problem.' He goes on to emphasize the difficult task of achieving genuine solidarity with those from different cultures. Such a task requires language as conversation, the back-and-forth of dialogical exchange in which we come to understand the other and the other comes to understand us. Again and again, Gadamer underscores the task that each of has in light of our pluralistic world “to learn to bridge and reconcile the distances and differences between us and that means that we respect, look after, care for the other, and give one other a new hearing.” In contrast with the story of the Tower of Babel in which the people sought a pseudo-unity or 'oneness' driven by a will to dominate, Gadamer embraces both cultural and linguistic diversity and warns against reducing these multiple horizons 'by any special contrivance of unity [Einheitsmechanik].' He encourages us to seek out the open spaces that arise in our interactions with one another, to resist the levelling of language that information technology tends toward, and to 'cultivate language in its most distinctive possibilities.' In our present age of disinformation warfare, which threatens democracies worldwide and is a direct challenge to truth and the possibility of a meaningful dialogue with others, we would do well to linger with Gadamer’s hermeneutical and ethical insights and contemplate how we might bring these insights to bear on the global and political crises that we face today—Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, our climate catastrophe, and ever new forms of technical sophistry and disinformation that seek to erode our trust in truth, reality, and language itself.". (shrink)

Hegel’s chief criticism of Kant in his early essay Faith and Knowledge is that Kant’s philosophy introduces the dichotomy between intuition and concept, between being and thought. As a result, Kantian philosophy fails to explain how the synthesis between concepts and intuitions in experience is possible. Kant’s theory of ideas is symptomatic of this failure: Kant’s idea refers to the concept of totality, the highest expression of reason, which is nonetheless not accessible to human experience. Yet, Hegel recognizes another conception (...) of an idea in Kant’s philosophy: the aesthetic idea in the Critique of Judgment is, according to Hegel, the “most interesting point in the Kantian System.” Kant describes the aesthetic idea as an intuition that contains much thought (conceptual content): in the aesthetic idea, then, the concept-intuition dichotomy falls away. And while Kant reduces the aesthetic idea to the subjective framework of reflective judgment, I argue that Hegel treats the aesthetic idea as something like a precursor of the speculative idea: the original unity between thought and being. (shrink)

I argue that Goethe’s philosophy of nature can be presented in a vertical order of stages. By reading his natural philosophy as a system of hypostases, Goethe’s accentuation of a divine ground can be taken seriously. Related to the Neoplatonic hypostasis models, for Goethe the living organisms rest on a divine and metaphysical entity. It is a guiding argument of this article that the enigmatic and inexhaustible ‘Bildungstrieb’ (nisus formativus) of all-nature expresses itself in the respective primordial phenomena (Urphänomene). For (...) this purpose, the ‘Bildungstrieb’ uses the two authoritative laws of polarity (Polarität) and increase (Steigerung). These laws form the second level of the graduaded order. The sphere of the diverse Urphänomene can thus be marked as the third level. They are themselves dependent on the Bildungstrieb and the principles of increase and polarity. (shrink)

Is Heidegger a temporal idealist or a temporal realist? That is, does he believe that time is supplied by the human standpoint, or that we derive it from the structure of the world around us? Blattner makes a compelling case that Heidegger is a temporal idealist, but a failed one. Rousse, however, argues that Heidegger’s position is more promising when he is interpreted not as an unsuccessful idealist, but as an underdeveloped realist. In contrast, we offer arguments grounded in German (...) Idealist treatments of time that Heidegger is a successful idealist who can derive sequential time from nonsequential human temporality. (shrink)

In this article, I provide an interpretation of Heidegger’s critique of Hegel. Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics is often taken to be the core strength of his Logic. In his critique of Hegel, Heidegger attempts to show that Hegel in fact smuggles in a decisive presupposition concerning being. Building on the recent work of Robert Pippin, I argue that we can understand this critique by situating it in terms of their common understanding of problems of first principles. Once (...) we do, we can fully appreciate a point that Pippin misses, that Heidegger develops his methodology and concept of ground in order to avoid the problems that he locates in Hegel. The upshots of my interpretation are that it (1) allows us to appreciate the systematicity and radicality of Heidegger’s mature ontology, and (2) forces those sympathetic to Hegel to reevaluate Hegel’s ability to provide a presuppositionless metaphysics. (shrink)

In this article I examine Nietzsche’s commentaries on the discipline of classical philology in relation to twentieth century philosophical hermeneutics. I argue that Nietzsche frequently made use of the concept of “life” to reflect ‘meta-critically’ on philology and nineteenth century hermeneutics, and that this use is much better represented by Heidegger and Gadamer than representatives of the standard Lebensphilosophie reading. Whereas the standard life-philosophical reading suggests that Nietzsche viewed the activity of interpretation as a mere symptom of biological, psychological life, (...) the hermeneutic reading suggests that Nietzsche uses the concept of “life” to refer to the effective reality of interpretation, i.e., the “hermeneutic situation.” By this reading, Nietzsche’s interest in “life” is in fact an interest in deciphering the meaning content behind our own interpretations, and thus implies a commitment to interpretive pluralism—an interpretive pluralism which Nietzsche recognized as being essentially ontological in character. (shrink)

This article aims to sketch a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis. In understanding Ereignis as the presencing of being, the fun­damental question is whether and how this presence of being, i.e., presence as such, can be experienced. While this experience is incompatible with a transcendental ap­proach, the suggestion here is that Ereignis can be experienced not as my own, but as an anonymous presence. To flesh out this suggestion, a close reading of Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity in the (...) Contributions will elaborate on why presence can belong neither to humanity nor to being. In a second step, a motif in Heidegger’s reception of Schelling is discussed which clarifies that the experience of Ereignis involves a necessity that goes beyond subjectivity. In a third step, the idea of “letting-presence” shows how the coming into being of experience has to remain anonymous in order to be the experience of Ereignis. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new interpretation of Gadamer’s problematic appropriation of Platonic metaphysics. It argues that Gadamer, attempting to respond to the challenge posed by Heidegger’s interpretation of Platonic metaphysics and of its role in the history of Being (Seinsgeschichte), downplayed the transcendence of Platonic Forms. Gadamer achieves a reconfiguration of this transcendence and its transposition into what I call here a plane of immanence through two hermeneutic gestures: 1) interpreting Forms in light of Greek mathematics and especially in light (...) of the structure of the sum-number; 2) introducing temporality and historicity in the Medieval doctrine of transcendentals by giving priority to the Beautiful over the Good. I contend that, Platonically speaking, this amounts to the rejection of νοήσις in favor of διάνοια, and that this raises issues concerning the problem of finitude and the potential limits of linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit). (shrink)

In Heraclitus’ time, thymos and psyche carried highly similar or even identical meanings, because both could refer to life, courage, personality, emotions, and reason. Heraclitus probably worked with all of these meanings. He may have been partly inspired by Homer and post-Homeric literature, where the two terms were likewise placed side by side and often used interchangeably. In Heraclitus, thymos and psyche are not opposites in terms of signification. Oftentimes, they can be “swapped,” and their meaning and “costs” exchanged. The (...) source and cause of this special exchange is desiring or wanting (thelein), which connects all these senses but is also the source of conflict and fighting. Desire—regardless of what it is and what is desired—is simultaneously the acquisition of the desired object or person and a way of paying for it. This struggle for the desired object is difficult not only because of its consequences (the price), but also because it is not possible to permanently stop desiring, which is why this struggle cannot be brought to an end. (shrink)