Since Truth and Method, Gadamer’s account of language or linguisticality as the medium of hermeneutic experience has prompted an ever-recurring reflection and critical engagement with the interpretive implications of this claim. For Gadamer, there is no subject matter that comes to the fore without linguisticality, that is, without the possibility of the subject matter to come into language in the first place. However, in later essays, he briefly discusses what he calls ‘prelinguistic’ in hermeneutic expe­rience. In this essay, I offer (...) an account of the prelinguistic in Gadamer’s works that still maintains the primacy of language in his hermeneutic project. The prelinguistic marks not only a kind of precondition of linguisticality itself, but it also marks the fundamentally disclosive and demanding character of hermeneutic experience as such. As a precondition, the prelinguistic is not something beyond or outside of language, but is the very impulse or drive towards linguistic expression. (shrink)

This article examines the meaningful intervention that Gert-Jan Van der Heiden’s recent book, The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony, makes in the developing field of the philosophy of testimony. I argue that this intervention is accomplished through a phenomenological investigation into the nature of the testimonial object and of the demand that it makes upon one who bears witness. In taking such an approach, I argue, Van der Heiden initiates an ontological turn in the field of testimonial (...) theory, shifting the conversation away from a debate about the conditions in which belief in testimony is justified – a debate that has in many ways defined the field for philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition. I suggest that Van der Heiden’s account is helpful in demonstrating that, in many cases, doing justice to a testimonial object requires an epistemic-ethical attitude other than belief. The article concludes by developing a few questions for Van der Heiden based on my interpretation of his project, including to what extent his phenomenology of testimony can account for how often our receptivity to testimony depends on the default trust that we have in others by virtue of our fundamental immersion in social life. (shrink)

Aristotle writes the Art of Rhetoric rhetorically. His actions sometimes speak louder than his words. At first, he presents rhetoric as concerned with a species of logos, but gradually makes clear that all logos is somehow rhetorical. To understand human beings, the animals with logos, one must first understand logos, thinking through its dyadic structure as at once communication and articulation—a structure that guarantees its failure fully to articulate and fully to communicate. Now, persuasion proceeds “by speaking either examples or (...) enthymemes, and besides these nothing.” To understand the enthymeme proves to require an understanding of topos—topic. But topos becomes clear only by way of a long series of examples. Finally, then, it is owing to the example, its strange mixture of the universal and particular, that we understand what Aristotle is doing. The example, itself exemplary of the power logos is the key to understanding human nature. (shrink)

Heidegger’s discussion of the concept and the phenomenology of ‘world’ is defined by its dual meaning, referring to both the unity of a single, encompassing whole and a number of different meaning contexts, i.e., ‘worlds’ in the plural. Heidegger’s emphasis on the verbal meaning of world (‘worlding’) and the discussion of problems such as the ‘world entry’ of an entity articulate the tension and dynamic between these two meanings. This contribution develops Heidegger’s account by (i) elucidating Heidegger’s early and late (...) discussion of ‘worlding’; (ii) connecting ‘worlding’ to the discussion of ontological pluralism in recent work by Kris McDaniel; and (iii) delineating a specific notion of a metaphysically neutral ‘phenomenological realism’ compatible with Heidegger’s version of ontological pluralism. (shrink)

Plato’s Protagoras is famous for Protagoras’s defense of the public practice of sophistry and his great myth, which contains his account of the origins of political life, as well as for Hippias’s rejection of the tyranny of nomos in the name of the natural kinship of the wise. What is perplexing is that Socrates makes no explicit response to these arguments. This essay argues that Socrates’s indirect response is actually contained in his otherwise unmotivated interpretation of the poem of Simonides, (...) where his description of “laconic philosophy” is in fact an indirect description of his own philosophical practice. While the sophists reject nomos without recognizing their own dependence on its stabilizing force, Socrates argues that genuine philosophers, recognizing at once the necessity as well as the defectiveness of nomos, must “unwillingly praise” convention and only present their criticisms indirectly. Socrates’s interpretation of Simonides, then, points the way to his own understanding of the tension between, but also the interdependence of, nomos and physis. (shrink)

Commenting upon van der Heiden’s The Voice of Misery, this paper addresses the peculiar task of witnessing and testimony that reaches beyond the ordinary sense of being a witness that is defined by the sphere of juridical concerns. Here the concern is with testimony that reaches to the point of “bare life”, the point at which a life is stripped down to a point at which the very idea of speech and bonds with others is shed. Understood in this sense, (...) the task of testimony begins a the limits of what we call “the human”. Following from Heidegger, Plato, and Celan the effort is made both to speak about the character of such testimony as well as about the “ethos” of such a relation to life itself. (shrink)

What philosophical reasons are there that could ground Kant’s Declaration in 1799 against Fichte’s Doctrine of Science? To answer this question, the present paper reconstructs what Kant could have said but did not. The first section traces the possible peer influences on Kant’s stance toward Fichte expressed in the Declaration and derives from it what Kant conceived to be the problems with the Doctrine of Science. The second section establishes three formation conditions for transcendental paralogisms. The third section proposes a (...) Fichtean variant of paralogism and shows how in Fichte’s case the three formation conditions obtain. (shrink)

In this essay, the author takes up the responses of Dennis J. Schmidt and Carolyn Culbertson to his monograph The Voice of Misery: A Continental Philosophy of Testimony. It first observes that both respondents have a shared interest in the ethical dimension of the question of testimony, which has much to do with the exceptional subject matter, namely that of bare life, that The Voice of Misery takes as its point of departure to analyze what testimony is. In the first (...) section, the author engages with Schmidt’s account of the importance of Heidegger, Plato’s myth of Er and Celan’s poetry for thinking testimony and shows how exactly these references allow us to think the ethos and the ethics of textimony. In the second section, he discusses the three questions Culbertson raised concerning the practical, more everyday stakes of testimony in relation to the epistemology of testimony and the question of epistemic justice. (shrink)

The article explores the proximity between Simondon’s philosophical project and phenomenology through his relation to Merleau-Ponty. Three concepts that link the two philosophers are examined: genesis, relation, and Simondon’s preindividual, which are shown to constitute an attempt to answer questions Merleau-Ponty was addressing in his later work. The article shows how Simondon’s argument for ontogenesis rather than ontology is related to Merleau-Ponty’s ontological project, which in turn originates in the latter’s reading of Husserl, particularly the interest in genetic phenomenology expressed (...) as early as the Phenomenology of Perception. It then shows that the radical notion of relation employed by Simondon responds to problems Merleau-Ponty had encountered in thinking the corps propre and the chiasm. The paper then discusses the link between Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of the flesh and Simondon’s concept of preindividual. By confronting these two bodies of work, the article suggests that phenomenology is an important starting point for Simondon. (shrink)