Continental Philosophy

One of the most interesting debates in Hegel scholarship today comes from the question of how to interpret Hegel’s treatment of contradiction in the Science of Logic.1 Some interpreters claim that Hegel defiantly disregards the basic law of noncontradiction, which states that something cannot both be and not be in the same time, manner, or place, proposing instead that for Hegel true contradictions really do exist, and not only in rational conception but equally in the very fabric of reality. However, (...) other interpreters propose less direct readings of Hegel’s thesis from productive contradiction, either by limiting Hegel’s conception of contradiction to only certain forms, such as only in... (shrink)

Philosophy emerged for the first time in ancient Greece and, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, it arose decisively with Plato through a triple transformation. Even today, the thought and creation of philosophy still require a triple transformation, despite the fact that the historical preconditions under which a philosopher pursues his or her task have changed since Greek antiquity. In this article, I introduce the concept of the triple transformation, which ensues from my examination of What is Philosophy?, the (...) last jointly authored book of Deleuze and Guattari. Therein they define philosophy as the activity that consists of creating concepts in order to bring forth new events... (shrink)

In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo has Salviati express his admiration for mathematics, in the context of certain historical philosophical schools:That the Pythagoreans held the science of numbers in high esteem, and that Plato himself admired the human understanding and believed it to partake of divinity simply because it understood the nature of numbers, I know very well; nor am I far from being of the same opinion.It is no accident that Aristotle is not among those (...) named here by Salviati; indeed, Aristotle’s name comes up frequently in the Dialogue, as well as that of his contemporary followers, and rarely with a positive connotation. This essay will explore the possibility that... (shrink)

Teresa Brennan was born in 1952 in Australia and died in South Florida, following a hit-and-run car accident in December 2002. In the ten years between her doctorate and her death, Brennan published five monographs, the most famous posthumously. The Transmission of Affect begins with a question that readers often remember: “Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?” Here and throughout her work, Brennan challenges the self-contained subject of Western modernity, (...) whose affects are presumed to be possessions of that self, underscoring the historical emergence of this egoic construction.I never met Teresa Brennan; I did not know her name until a decade after she... (shrink)

In his 1950 lecture entitled “Language,” Martin Heidegger announces a turn in the philosophy of language: for the opening theme, “man speaks,” he substitutes a countervailing theme: “language speaks”. Heidegger saw himself living in an era in which the historical determination of the inquiry into language that began with the Greek conception of human being as the animal with language had developed into a relentlessly technical way of thinking that viewed language instrumentally. By abandoning this conception, displacing the occurrence of (...) language away from “man” and toward language itself, Heidegger enacts a dehumanization of language that attempts to open a different avenue for thought.... (shrink)

In a 2006 interview, Bruno Latour, distancing himself from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, casually remarks, “I’m the only French pragmatist, so it winds up that I have absolutely no contact with the French”. Latour’s remark is curious insofar as the work performed by the coupling reveals his own dissociation of French philosophy with pragmatism. If Latour is French, he cannot possibly be a pragmatist, but if he is a pragmatist, he cannot possibly be French, so better to refer to (...) himself by this new hybrid, “French pragmatist.”Perhaps it is not so peculiar for Latour to describe himself as a “pragmatist,” since references to classical pragmatist figures like William James and John... (shrink)

It is the aim of this contribution to question the two conceptions of violence in the later Levinas. One of the face, the other the violence that must be overcome by the face. The article argues that this cannot be understood fully without taking into account Levinas’ Talmudic philosophy. By focusing on the notion of trauma in the later work of Levinas, it is argued that Levinas’ idea of the human subject is understood as radical vulnerability. This idea is evaluated (...) on the basis of short comparisons with the thinking of Lacan, Žižek and Camus. The claim is made that to Levinas, violence is not a phenomenon to be eliminated by rational ethics, but one that forms the very notion of humanity itself. This is elaborated by showing how the Bible takes on a central role in Levinas’ thought. (shrink)

This paper speculatively reconstructs the unique intervention that Pyotr Chaadaev, the early nineteenth-century Russian thinker, made into the political-theological debate. Instead of positioning sovereignty and exception against each other, Chaadaev seeks to think the (Russian) exception immanently, affirming its nonrelation to, and even nullity or nothingness vis-à-vis, the (European, Christian-modern) world-historical regime—and to theorize the logic of sovereignty that could arise from within this nullity. As a result, we argue, nothingness itself becomes, in Chaadaev, operative through and as the sovereign (...) act and the figure of the sovereign, exemplified for him by the Russian emperor Peter the Great (1672–1725). (shrink)

Violence is essential to religion, while religion holds the promise of transcending violence. The designation religious refers not to a type of violence, but to a specific issue of violence, namely the claim to higher justification. This religious aspect is not confined to religion; it is also evident in the secular domain. A critique of religious violence needs to show the gap between violence and its justifications, experienced affectively in horror. This horror in response to the unspeakable is structurally akin (...) to mystical experience, the temporal structure of which indicates the failure of the theodical justification for violence. (shrink)

In this article, I shall advance an interpretation of G.W.F. Hegel's category of reason [Vernunft] and its affinities with Maurice Blanchot's literary theory. In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, reason’s sense-making power develops along a trajectory that takes in perception (chapter 2), self-consciousness (chapter 4), and the actualization of reason [Verwirklichung des Selbstbewusstsein] (chapter 5). This movement of self-conscious actualization toward reason is the immediate precondition for the mind [der Geist]. Hegel depends upon literary examples for part of his argument in (...) this analysis. In this article, I will argue that these literary examples form a major turning point in Hegel’s account of how the human mind becomes capable of grasping human activity and actuality [Wirklichkeit]. Artists strive neither for a momentary ordering of the world nor a supreme mapping. Far from trivializing the power of language, literary or poetic language puts forth an experience that can “no longer belong to the whole” or entertain a world without difference. I will derive a feminist aesthetics of literary reason from both Hegelian actualizing reason and Blanchot’s space of literature, an aesthetics that keeps the world and its future radically open, and is outside the bounds of authors and authorities of all kinds. (shrink)

Summary and brief critique of Oord's book.

This article highlights the mathematical structure of Henri Bergson’s method. While Bergson has been historically interpreted as an anti-scientific and irrationalist philosopher, he modeled his philosophical methodology on the infinitesimal calculus developed by Leibniz and Newton in the seventeenth century. His philosophy, then, rests on the science of number, at least from a methodological standpoint. By looking at how he conscripted key mathematical concepts into his philosophy, this article invites us to re-imagine Bergson’s place in the history of Western philosophy.

Despite his unassailable heritage, the passionate thinker to whom Levinas dedicated Totalité et infini has today nearly been forgotten outside France. This forgetting is the shared premise of two books published in recent years. The first is William C. Hackett and Jeffrey Hanson’s edition and translation of Wahl’s Existence humaine et transcendance : Human Existence and Transcendence, and the second is a volume of selections from Wahl’s philosophical writings edited by Alan D. Schrift and Ian Alexander Moore: Jean Wahl: Transcendence (...) and the Concrete Selected Writings. (shrink)

Here I review Richard Kearney and Matthew Clemente's edited volume "The Art of Anatheism.".

In Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason, Penelope Deutscher explores the “suspended reserves” in Foucault’s writing, “absent concepts and problems [that] can be given a shape in potentially transformative ways within philosophical frameworks which have omitted them Deutscher.” Deutscher pays particular attention to neglected figures of children in Foucault’s works and she develops the notion of “responsibilization,” processes of dividing populations into legible and illegible reproductive moral agents. This review of Foucault’s Futures considers Deutscher’s methodological innovation as it relates (...) to Foucault’s own method of genealogy. While the notion of “suspended reserves” risks privileging the academic over the “wide cultural surfaces” of power, Foucault’s Futures provokes a queer critical ethics against ongoing violence of responsibilization. (shrink)

The kind of collective improvisation attained by free jazz at the beginning of the sixties appears interesting from the perspective of contemporary debates on collective intentionality for several reasons. The most notable of these, is that it holds a mirror up to what analytical philosophers of action identify as “the complexly interwoven sets of collective intentions” that make a group more than the sum of its parts. But at the same time, free jazz poses a challenge to these philosophical theories (...) of collective intentionality, because what happens is not planned in advance but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. The second and no less decisive reason is that jazz musicians act together in a very distinctive way, which casts into clear relief the interplay between togetherness and agonism, individual freedom and group commitment, which is contained in every human interaction. In other words, in free jazz we find what Hannah Arendt calls the “paradoxical” or “twofold” character of “human plurality.” Starting with the analysis of two paradigmatic case studies—Charles Mingus’s Folk Forms No. 1 and Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation—my main concern in this paper is to provide a phenomenological account of the individual-yet-plural intentionality that emerges and runs through the improvisatory process in the free jazz case. After having made the negative point that this phenomenon represents a challenge to the analytical theories of collective intentionality, I shall argue that it can be accounted for from a phenomenological perspective. My basic thesis is that the overall cohesiveness of the improvisatory process must be regarded as a meaningful realization of an overall feeling, shared and shaped together by musicians over time—and not as the execution of an advanced plan. (shrink)

Normative reconstruction is a form of immanent critique which judges society in terms of values which are already institutionalized and implicitly expressed across everyday forms of interaction. Honneth, for his part, reads the value of social freedom into the normative grammar of modern institutions and anticipates further advances towards its institutionalization. Many have voiced doubts over the extent to which the model of normative reconstruction which Honneth proposes is solidly anchored in social reality: at worst, it is argued, this reality (...) is resistant to reconstruction in terms of the value of social freedom; at best, it is too susceptible to multiple readings to allow for such a reconstruction. I seek to respond to these charges, while also testing the reach of Ricoeur’s understanding of the philosophical anthropological idea of indebtedness to the past, by following up on Honneth’s appeal to a horizon of social memory in response to his own uncertainties over the viability of normative reconstruction. More generally, I seek to arrive at a better understanding of the capacity of memory to orientate social critique within a shifting historical landscape. (shrink)

Resumo: Com o fito de compreender as noções de história e juízo político, este artigo pretende mostrar a peculiar interpretação que Hannah Arendt faz da mais conhecida e discutida personalidade filosófica: Sócrates. Assim como outras ideias, tais como a de banalidade do mal, a natureza do terror totalitário e de espaço público, sua estrita pintura do filósofo grego nos demanda a tarefa de discriminar a diferença entre pensamento e ação. Seria acaso o juízo a ponte entre as atividades de pensamento (...) e da ação política? A preocupação, neste ensaio,é a de mostrar como Hannah Arendt estava procurando por um modo autêntico de filosofia política, cujo maior exemplo seria Sócrates. No mesmo sentido, também se debruça acerca do significado do juízo reflexionante, ideia bastante fecunda em sua obra que permanece ainda bastante alusiva.: In order to understand Arendt’s conceptions of history and political judgment, this article discusses her peculiar interpretation of Socrates. As with her other ideas, such as the banality of evil, the nature of totalitarian terror, and the public space, her portrayal of the Greek philosopher demands that we discriminate between thinking and acting. Would judgment by chance be the bridge between the activities of thought and political action? My aim in this essay is to show how Arendt, from beginning of her work, was looking for an authentic mode of political life, the major example of which is Socrates. I also address what Arendt meant by her idea of a reflexive judgment, an idea that has proved enormously suggestive yet which remains elusive. (shrink)

Resumo: O século XX viu ganhar forma um efervescente debate travado em torno do Ensaio sobre a origem das línguas de Rousseau, sobretudo quanto à sua gênese, ao período em que foi escrito e às suas possíveis relações com o Discurso sobre a origem da desigualdade. O presente artigo, ao repassar a literatura crítica sobre o tema, propõe uma cronologia consonante com a produção especializada, colocando em foco os temas que, porventura, teriam guiado Rousseau, desde a redação da versão originária (...) e inicial do texto até a versão definitiva: de um texto originalmente inscrito nas polêmicas musicais entre Rousseau e Rameau, o Ensaio foi paulatinamente enriquecido, abarcando de maneira unificada as reflexões do autor sobre as sociedades, as línguas, as linguagens e os sistemas musicais.: The twentieth century saw an effervescent debate about Rousseau’s Essay on the origin of languages, especially with regard to its genesis, the period in which it was written, and its possible relations with the Discourse on the origin of inequality. The present article reviews the critical literature on the subject and proposes a chronology consonant with this literature. We focus on the themes that perhaps would have guided Rousseau, from the writing of the initial version of the text to its definitive version. Originally part of the musical polemics between Rousseau and Rameau, the Essay was gradually enriched, eventually covering in a unified way the author’s reflections on societies, languages, and musical systems. (shrink)