Preview: /Review: Satoshi Higuchi, Somaesthetics and the Philosophy of Culture: Projects in Japan (New York, NY; Oxford, England: Routledge, 2021), 138 pages./ Satoshi Higuchi’s Somaesthetics and the Philosophy of Culture is a succinct and innovative work in aesthetics and philosophy of education, despite what the title may otherwise imply. Indeed, the title may be the only shortcoming in this work, for it does not convey the scope of the concepts covered. It may be better titled Somaesthetics and the Philosophy of (...) Education, but even this does not express the important and fascinating discussions on the aesthetics of sports contained herein; and “education” is perhaps too narrow to encompass the range of application of the ideas (especially in the final part of the book). However, when the reader looks past the title, they will find a nicely organized work introducing readers to the topic of the aesthetics of sport, its application for improving pedagogy, and several avenues for further development in these areas. Higuchi’s previous work is a tireless series of granting legitimacy to the study of sports. Somaesthetics and the Philosophy of Culture is another important step in this project. Readers need not be familiar with Richard Shusterman’s multidisciplinary project of somaesthetics for, when it is necessary, Higuchi provides the relevant details. Readers who are familiar with somaesthetics will very quickly see how the ideas here complement it well. (shrink)

Preview: /Review: Justo Serrano Zamora, Democratization and Struggles Against Injustice (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), 232 pages./ “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” In amongst a plethora of memorable metaphors and other impressive rhetorical devices, we find in Martin Luther King Jr’s most iconic speech (delivered at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln (...) Memorial – commonly known as the “I have a Dream” speech): this biblical expression of the fluid quality of the pursuit of justice. Quoting the Jewish prophet Amos, who was outraged by wealth disparities in the ancient Northern kingdom of Israel, King taps into a common imagery of the forward march of justice as a matter of a watery bursting forwards, aiming ultimately for a calmer, more settled state of affairs. This kind of imagery is widespread in popular culture. For example, people can be said to “flood” or “pour into” the streets at moments of mass mobilization; in response, the police often seek to “contain the flow” of crowds at protests; and a successful revolution is often thought of as a “turning of the tide.” This lexical field of water in motion evokes both a chaotic sense of the unexpected and the emergence of an underlying order seeking to overcome the existing political order. It also suggests that the justice-oriented masses are moved, at best, in a semi-conscious way by events that typically start outside of themselves – like a growing ripple caused by the proverbial pavé dans la mare. The strategic benefit of this kind of talk is that it presents the struggle for justice as natural and, in some sense, inevitable; while injustice is presented as merely artificial and temporary, for nature eventually reclaims its rights. To put it simply: φύσις meets νόμος, φύσις defeats νόμος. This way of speaking is both dramatically and rhetorically powerful. (shrink)

The goal of the text is to reconstruct the concept of cultural normativity found in the phenomenological philosophy of law. The starting point of the text is the distinction between cultural normativity and normativity in culture. This distinction is based on reference to an extra-cultural, but not non-human instance – transcendent to the creations of humanity and its world, but in relations with the human equipment, with the characteristics of a specific human being and its existence. The specific relations between (...) cultural and legal normativity can be found in phenomenological concepts of law, which draw on the Husserlian transcendentalism and essentialism. The phenomenology of law attempts to answer the question of the sources, and the ontological and epistemological status of normativity as such. Normativity as a written and unwritten set of norms is characterized by phenomenologists with reference to value and axiology. The values are assumed by them as certain fixed reference points (“horizon of values” given to be recognized), because norms make it possible to establish rules for various individual and collective practices within a particular community and culture on the basis of values. (shrink)

In response to recent controversies about racial transitioning, I provide an argument that deceptions about ancestry may sometimes constitute fraud. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I criticize the arguments from analogy made famous by Rebecca Tuvel and Christine Overall. My claim is that we should not think of racial transitioning as similar to gender transitioning, because different identity groups possess different kinds of obstacles to entry. I then provide historical surveys of American racial categories and the various types (...) of passing common in American history, in order to distinguish the potentially fraudulent from the relatively innocent styles of passing. (shrink)

In response to recent controversies about racial transitioning, I provide an argument that deceptions about ancestry may sometimes constitute fraud. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I criticize the arguments from analogy made famous by Rebecca Tuvel and Christine Overall. My claim is that we should not think of racial transitioning as similar to gender transitioning, because different identity groups possess different kinds of obstacles to entry. I then provide historical surveys of American racial categories and the various types (...) of passing common in American history, in order to distinguish the potentially fraudulent from the relatively innocent styles of passing. (shrink)

This article confronts the problems of establishing normative restrictive claims for delegitimizing conduct and attitudes of cultural appropriation. Using C. Thi Nguyen’s and Matthew Strhol’s intimacy account (IA) as a background, I offer an alternative of cultural adoption relying upon Alain Locke’s value theory and philosophical pluralism. The phenomenon of cultural adoption I propose develops some insights from Nguyen’s and Strohl’s IA, while critiquing their framework’s perceived limitations. By adding loyalty and intensity to the prerogatives of intimacy, the hope is (...) that a more nuanced approach to the ethical concerns of cultural adoption will be achieved. My contention is that Locke’s notions of a racial sense or kinship feeling provides stronger grounds for establishing an ethics of the passerby or what I will call non-intimate encounters. Next, I will argue that the interpersonal relations of groups cannot be interpreted as simple, but only as complex wholes. Instead of monoliths and exclusive binaries, we have to recognize variation within groups and learn to think in what Albert Murray calls “mulatto,” or a culture of novel hybrids. In the final section, I argue that Locke’s philosophy, broadly construed, operates as a contraceptive knowledge against the growing imperial apathy of populists and absolutists. We should work to abandon forms of political and epistemological violence by rejecting these forms of cultural abuse. It is my grand contention that human groups express in their differences a uniqueness that makes us distrust or admire and like each other. (shrink)

Preview: No shortage of bigotry and prejudice can be found around the world. But why race to the bottom and compete for a monopoly on tragedy in human mistreatment? The philosophy of race is an intricate piece to the study of language, art, history, and culture and wants to learn about elsewhere and distant others. How we go about understanding the issues of identity politics and what solidifies a community’s sense of purpose and mythic consciousness hinges upon our attitudes toward (...) cultures and ethno-racial relations. When it comes to the migrant crises, socio-economic conditions aggravating inequalities, or geo-political conflicts, for example, people’s premonitions about race largely inform how they respond to the demands for social justice. Tracing the trajectory from chattel slavery, the trail of tears, Jim Crow laws and lynchings, the civil rights movements, police brutality and profiling, to Black Lives Matter should we be believers or skeptics of racial progress? Our global ethnoscape and diasporic makeup is vast and complex. Due to this, studying race is emerging from the backwaters of academia and becoming an essential mode of inquiry, especially in African American philosophy and philosophy of culture. Similar to the “linguistic turn,” philosophy is undergoing a “racial turn” of sorts. Philosophy’s transdisciplinary nature is well-suited to examine this ethno-racial complexity, but has not lived up to its potential by failing to take more seriously the social disadvantages endured by underrepresented groups. In many ways, philosophy contributed to the dark history of grounding antiblack racism in biology, anthropology, the social sciences, and speculative metaphysics. Hence, it is vital that all practioners in our profession, especially philosophers of culture, work on behalf of reconciliation and atonement for such sins. Furthermore, confronting questions about racism and social justice will “improve philosophy” as Naomi Zack and others have argued. (shrink)

This paper examines the polemical nature of anti-racist education and discourse in America today. On one side of this issue are those who think of the efforts toward inclusion, diversity, and the pursuit of social justice in academia as serving positive ends. On the other side are those who oppose and vilify such efforts as evidence of the destructive ethos of liberal education. This has led to a situation where universities and schools across the country have seen professors and teachers, (...) including philosophers, experience backlash for speaking seriously and courageously about confronting the problem of racism in society. One recent example of this anomaly is the kind of faux outrage or moral panic that drives the hysteria against Critical Race Theory, an inquiry that examines the intersection of race and law in the United States, as well as unearthing the reality of structural racism in America, often disguised in the mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. This faux moral panic has been used by legislatures across the country, as the raison d’être, to pass bans and enforce policies or rules that restricts how professors (including philosophers), and teachers can talk about race, systemic racism, structural oppression, or the problem of racial injustice in the classroom. In this paper, I explore how this polemical situation creates significant challenges and unique possibilities for the discourse of philosophy, especially for those who are interested in becoming antiracist philosophers, in the context of such legal rules and restrictions. This is not for the faint of heart. (shrink)

Black women do not want to become white women because they know that this is impossible. Yet, some black women straighten and curl their naturally kinky hair, or wear hair extensions, weaves and wigs that resemble Caucasian hair. Still, they recognize that hair is only one attribute of their Being and that even if they choose to wear non-African hairstyles, they can concurrently embrace other aspects of their black identity. So, is this a matter of cultural assimilation or integration, or (...) is there a deeper ontological problematic underlying these cross-racial hair styling choices? I interrogate three arguments that black women usually advance for their hairstyling choices – the survival strategy argument, the protective styling argument, and the options-choice argument. I use Mabogo Percy More’s interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concepts of “the Look,” “facticity,” and “bad faith” to analyze Black women’s hair consciousness through the lens of his “Politics of Being” concept. (shrink)

This paper takes up Hadot’s call for more comparative work on Buddhism and Philosophy as a Way of Life by comparing Zen Master Hakuin Ekaku’s artwork Pilgrims with the graffiti artist Banksy’s The Street is in Play. Beyond the striking similarities in form and apparent tongue-in-cheek criticism of graffiti, this paper explains the context of Hakuin’s artwork and the text of his painting before exploring the importance of graffiti in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. I argue that by (...) taking up Hadot’s call for more comparative work we find that Hakuin’s Zen bears fruitful points of comparison with Hadot’s account of philosophy as a way of life. Furthermore, a comparison of the two artworks of Banksy and Hakuin helps us better understand both figures via thematic elements of humor and socially disruptive writings. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between cinema and philosophy through the lens of interest shown by some filmmakers in the lives and works of philosophers. It begins by delving into contemporary perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and cinema. In order to assess how the constitutive dissimilarity of the two terms and the ways in which they can be brought together are at the origin of speculative short circuits and experiences of wonder, it brings together the works of thinkers – (...) Cavell, Benjamin, and Kracauer; and filmmakers Rossellini, Montaldo, Keaton, and Jarman. Reflecting on the aesthetic and cultural impact of cinema is all the more important given the current omnipresence of images and prosthetic technologies that, with their incessant solicitations, threaten the processes of apprehension, learning, and conveying of knowledge. Thinking and perceiving differently thus becomes an essential function of cinema, one keenly performed in Safaa Fathy’s Derrida’s Elsewhere, analyzed in the last two sections. (shrink)

Preview: /Review: Brian S. Dixon, Dewey and Design: A Pragmatist Perspective for Design Research, 200 pages./ Brian S. Dixon’s book Dewey and Design provides, as the book’s subtitle declaims, a pragmatist perspective for design research. Design research is an academic field that specifically deals with the design process. Its domain-specific knowledge led to the establishment of design as an independent discipline of study in the second half of the last century. According to Dixon’s description, design research consists of three major (...) areas of investigation: the design process, the artifacts that result from this process, and the relation of these artifacts with the end-user. Dixon exposes the fruitlessness of drawing a clear dividing line, and argues that design research would be better off as a continuous, not necessarily linear, process involving “practically” all three. Concurrently, the author emphasizes the practical aspect of this continuity; on the one hand as a stark contrast to the idea of ​​purely theoretical research, on the other, from a pragmatist viewpoint, intending the knowledge of the world as full of the practical consequences of acting within it. Specifically, the pragmatist slant of Dixon’s proposal is that of John Dewey, centered on the ideas of “an experience,” “inquiry,” and “imagination”; notions aiming at providing “a robust epistemological narrative” for design research. The choice of this perspective necessarily leads Dixon to deal with problems such as the ontology of the specifically creative act of designers, distinct from the artistic one, the communicative potential of industrial artifacts, and their ethical import. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s critique of Edmund Husserl in Voice and Phenomenon targets several ways in which Husserl’s theory of signs is said to remain dependent on a model of presence, and therefore to be a form of onto-theology. In a sense this simply extends Martin Heidegger’s own critique of Husserl as failing to account for what remains obscure behind any presentation to the mind. Yet Derrida’s critique is ultimately more radical than Heidegger’s, though the radicality is in this case unjustified. Namely, (...) Derrida goes beyond Heidegger’s critique of presence to mount an additional critique of “self-presence,” which is more often known as “identity.” Derrida’s insufficiently motivated critique of identity leads to additional problems for his philosophy. (shrink)

Michel Foucault defined parrhesia as “the free courage by which one binds oneself in the act of telling the truth.” Could telling objective untruth also be a parrhesiastic act, insofar as it requires courage and initiates subjectivation? Climate deniers, anti-vaccinationists and other groups that delegitimize the authority of science present themselves as courageously standing up against the dominant discourse, as rebellious subjects who speak the inconvenient and unaccepted truths. It is not difficult to prove that their truths are untruths, but (...) it remains problematic to distinguish true courage from its simulacra. This article argues that Foucault’s investigations of truth, subjectivity, and power become of great use in the face of today’s confusion. The phenomenon of post-truth cannot be explained simply as the product of postmodern relativism. The will-to-truth, along with the will to constitute oneself as a truth-telling subject, persists, requiring critical analysis more than ever. What may prove politically efficient is to engage in the kind of critique that would account for actual power relations and unmask false courage rather than debunk specific concepts or ideas. (shrink)

The paper is an attempt at a systematic review and a tentative synthesis of the philosophically most relevant theories of voice that are to be found within the psychoanalytic tradition. Beginning with some reflections borrowed from Thomas Ogden, the author proceeds to examine two lines of thinking about voice: the ‘paternal’ line which discusses voice mostly in relation to the superego and the orientation of the self and the ‘maternal’ line which discusses voice in relation to the processes of subjective (...) constitution. Having analyzed selected insights of such authors as Freud, Reik, Isakower and Lacan within the paternal line and Lacan, Anzieu, Rosolato, Vasse, and Abraham&Török within the maternal one, the author attempts to show the common features of many of these diverse takes, focusing especially on the processes of internalization of external voices and on the strange status of voice as both most intimate and alien to us. The closing discussion of Mladen Dolar’s theory opens the way to a synthetic view of voice as the paradoxical kernel of human subjectivity. (shrink)

Preview: Ernst Cassirer rightly observed that culture, in all its manifold forms, requires expression and, accordingly, is always mediated by some means of communication. These means are extremely diverse – from simple gestures and face expressions or drawings on the stone walls to sounds combined in sophisticated ways into musical compositions, subtle languages of literature, carefully arranged moves of dancers and actors, mathematical formulas, and – more recently – whole worlds created in the digital, virtual realm. There is, however, one (...) medium that seems to be a more primordial and originary conveyor of culture than the others, namely the human voice. Compared to – for example – writing, voice turns out to be a much more complicated phenomenon. First of all, mostly everything that could be written, can also be spoken. Secondly, and more importantly, voice allows for modalities that are unattainable for writing. Speaking in an articulated, regular manner and thus conveying a semantic content is just one way of using our voice. But voice does not necessarily need to be semantic. Sometimes we also shout, roar, howl, scream, or cry. In such cases, voice activates our most primeval forms of expression, linking us to the animal kingdom. But, on the other hand, voice – both in its semantic and asemantic mode – is a medium of music. As such, it sets us apart from the realm of animality, and allows for participation in the purely human realm of aesthetic experiences. (shrink)

Preview: Shusterman, as a philosopher who draws from the work of John Dewey, has pragmatic expectations for art. For Dewey, communing with art was an intensification of experience, that is to say being in the world. For art is full of meaning, and it is in human nature to rush to search for meanings. Experience is only satisfactory if it enriches what is lived in it. Dewey’s message was one of the first voices to warn of the alienation of art. (...) According to it, its consumption should give people a chance for emotional and spiritual compassion. Richard Shusterman’s attitude toward art is similar: “As experience, art is obviously part of our lives, a particularly vivid form of our experienced reality, rather than a mere fictional imitation of it.” -/- Shusterman has developed his own concept of aesthetics, which he has called “somaesthetics” – the aesthetics of the soma. The Greek word soma here means a feeling, animated, purposeful body. Also, the term “aesthetics” is understood in a different way than its usual wider usage, according to which aesthetics is a theory of art and beauty. Shusterman refers to the old, original Greek word aisthetikos meaning sensory perception. The somaesthetic project’s goal is to combine theory with practice and consider the body in two ways: on the one hand, as a medium enabling cognition through perception, and on the other, as an external form of representation. That is why somaesthetics is interested in activities that expand and explore body awareness, such as meditation, yoga, and treatments that shape the appearance, including cosmetics and fashion. One of the main tasks of somaesthetics is to eliminate the dominant attitude toward the body in Western philosophy, which sees it as an obstacle to cognition. (shrink)

Music, as sung and listened to, has been described in many a tale as powerful and transformative. Yet, the important question is not so much if that claim is true or whether it may be verified, but what kind of power and transformation are alluded to in those mythical and literary sources? Taking these symbolic claims and elaborating on their possible meaning, alongside thinkers such as Carolyne Abbate or Roland Barthes, proceeds to find ways in which these claims may suggest (...) different roles that music and singing play in human lives. As much as current musicological and anthropological academic narratives point to the power and its negotiation in society, there is more to singing voices’ charms than this. The author points to an important transformation that happens when the human existential qualities found in the voice’s imperfections (its materiality) are matched with the music’s aesthetic qualities (its beauty, sublimity, its symmetry, its impression) to transform the listener and make her listen. (shrink)

Preview: /Review: Poul Andersen, The Paradox of Being: Truth, Identity, and Images in Daoism, 362 pages./ Philosophy tends to approach Daoism in degrees. One may be introduced to the Dao de Jing of Laozi and appreciate the poetic structure and appreciate the virtues of non-coercive action. When one next encounters the writings of Zhuangzi, one is struck by the difference in style, the humor, and often the difficulty in penetrating the meaning of many passages. This is frequently contrasted with Confucian (...) philosophy. The vocabulary, upon first examination appears similar but upon further reading one discovers that not only do these traditions use shared terminology in different way but that their views of reality is stark. This is much more so with the French existentialists and yet Poul Andersen finds sympathetic understanding between Daoism and “philosophies of existence” with regards to the concept of being. Those familiar with the Dao de Jing can probably cite passages that Andersen will address as it is unmistakable in Daoism that being is said to come from and depend on non-being. The existentialist tradition has meditated on questions of being and so Andersen’s aim is to undertake an exploration of being in Daoism informed by existentialist methodology. This review seeks to emphasize the case studies Andersen utilizes in his research. While his methodological approach is informed by existentialist philosophers, his decades of research in Chinese religions provides much of the substance throughout. (shrink)

Humility is enjoying an upsurge of interest among contemporary virtue theorists. Unfortunately, many of these discussions have cast humility as inconsistent with social activism. Humility is assumed to consist of quiet and unobtrusive traits which seem inconsistent with the assertiveness and outspokenness required for social activism. Paul Bloomfield argues that this aspect of humility – being inconsistent with social activism – prevents it from counting as a virtue at all as a virtue must be the kind of thing that is (...) always appropriate to possess and display. Here I attempt to present an account of humility that is not inconsistent with social activism and that can, and should, be considered a virtue where virtue is loosely understood to mean a generally desirable trait of character. (shrink)

This essay is a theologico-philosophical meditation on Bruno Schulz, focusing on his “love for the marginal”: a special attention paid to tandeta, in other words all things trashy, located on the eponymous edges of the world, far away from the center. Contrary to the assumed mode of interpretation, which reads Schulz’s fascination with the “dark forces of life” in terms of the depth subversive toward the surface, I propose a different scheme: an opposition of center and edges/margins, deriving from the (...) Kabbalistic metaphysics of Isaac Luria, which constituted the primary matrix of the Hasidic Kabbalah, known to Schulz as the member of the pre-war Drohobycz Jewry. I then juxtapose Schulz’s intuition of a life thriving on the cosmological margins with Freud’s early theory of the drives, especially his concept of perversion as a “libido on the edge.” In both writers we find a similar echo of the spatial Kabbalistic imagining of the relation between the emptied center and the rich diaspora of life, dispersing and multiplying on the fringes of the “cosmic exile.”. (shrink)

Preview: Culture, one can say, is the process of projecting, creating, and setting limitations. It begins with such acts as much as it lives and sustains itself through them. The limitations concern its inward reality as much as the demarcation between itself and an outward sphere – the realm which is considered as not belonging to it, a dark zone of what was excluded. Culture not only sets its outward, external limits, but it is itself permeated by a whole series (...) of internal limitations. What is at stake is in-forming an original chaos of disorganized, fragmented, inconceivable, and raw “reality.” That is, turning it into identifiable, coherent, ontologically grounded and secured world in which we can dwell. To set cultural limitations means, then, to project particular symbolic, imaginative, social, political, religious, economic, hygienic, medical, and so forth, orders. And at the same time to exclude everything falling short of the standards provided by such orders. This act creates intelligible frameworks within which all culturally mediated human experiences, from the most private and intimate through the public and common to the most sublime ones, can become meaningful. This act gives them contours, actuality, and facticity. It does not mean a simple acceptance of these limitations. Rather it simply indicates that all our experiences involve encountering limitations of different kinds. And as such they [experiences] are essentially nothing else than taking a stance, position, attitude – being it active or passive, positive or negative – toward them. In other words, limits, boundaries, borders, and along with them also margins, are all-pervasive, constitutive elements of culture and of our understanding of ourselves and of reality. (shrink)

Preview:/Review: Marcin Kilanowski, The Rorty-Habermas Debate: Toward Freedom as Responsibility,, 304 pages./ The American philosopher Richard Rorty and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas engaged in a lengthy discussion over the years on a range of issues, particularly as these issues involved the nature of liberal, democratic society following the horrors of Auschwitz. The two thinkers came from different philosophical traditions with Rorty associated with analytical philosophy and pragmatism and Habermas with Continental philosophy, the Frankfurt School, and critical theory. Both philosophers (...) saw themselves as “postmetaphysical,” rejecting traditional philosophical questions about the nature of reality and knowledge. Marcin Kilanowski, Professor of Law at Nicholas Copernicus University in Poland, offers a detailed discussion of the Rorty-Habermas debate. His book is intended for a broad audience beyond academic philosophers. He presents an exposition of both Rorty’s and Habermas’ thought, together with a comparison with those of John Dewey, who influenced them both. Kilanowski then compares and contrasts the thought of Rorty and Habermas with the goal of showing large areas of agreement, even though they philosophized in seemingly different ways. Kilanowski also suggests lessons that may be learned from the Rorty-Habermas debate about the nature of politics and democracy. He does so through the concept of freedom and through the development of a view he calls “freedom as responsibility.” The review examines Kilanowski’s study of the Rorty-Habermas debate and concludes that Kilanowski succeeds in his aim of showing the convergence between the two thinkers. The review also suggests that Kilanowski’s work may have a broader application in that it suggests how dialogue between different philosophical traditions may be developed and understood. As in Kilanowski’s book, the review also questions the “postmetaphysical” stance adopted by both Rorty and Habermas. (shrink)

This paper attempts to illustrate a process of analysis that will hopefully open a path to more complete and useful definitions of sign and symbol. It applies a form-content analysis to the metaphysical properties of these two concepts. The objective is to locate criteria necessary and sufficient to derive formal definitions for these terms. Wittgenstein’s concept of “forms of representation” is analyzed and applied to the topic. Criteria are outlined that determine the appropriateness of the sign and symbol to be (...) applied as labels. Criteria of definition are then developed using gesture, metaphor, and several other example types to illustrate the use of the criteria in distinguishing between sign and symbol. The structural organization of these two concepts proved to be especially complex and led to what some readers may find somewhat obscure. It is not our intention to be purposefully obscure. (shrink)

It is common to accuse Christian supersessionism of responsibility for the Holocaust. This article qualifies this claim by arguing that the theological ideology that directly preceded and aided the Holocaust was unequivocally hostile to this traditional Christian doctrine. It is German neo-Marcionism – which deliberately fought against replacement theology – that provides a direct religious context for the Nazi solution to the Jewish question. Kant appears in this picture as the first modern German Christian who consistently pursued an anti-supersessionist agenda (...) of “purifying” Christianity by radically severing it from its Jewish roots. (shrink)

This article attempts to demonstrate that the failure to recognize real conflicts and bring them to representation is the chief yet highly inconspicuous reason behind the regression of ways in which we understand and describe today’s reality. Crucially, this shortcoming has helped to elevate the language of economics to the rank of the basic idiom for the development of mutual representations. As my analyses show, the language of economy has become the principal medium of representation for communities separated by great (...) distances and unable to recognize each other’s existence as rooted in their respective realities, despite the fact that they are deeply interconnected. For this reason, although global dependence and conflict, including exploitation and exclusion, remain faceless, they do find some expression in symbolic indices of anonymous capital flows, represented and made legible in streams of numbers. (shrink)

Preview:/Review: James G. Hart, Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Ontological Phenomenology, ed. Rodney K.B Parker, 284 pages./ James Hart is an important phenomenological scholar and thinker who is the author of several books and many articles on Husserl, Husserl’s Utopian Poetics, and the phenomenological movement. This book is Hart’s dissertation written at the University of Chicago between 1969 and 1972. The book has an appendix of the opening sections of Conrad-Martius’s Metaphysics of the Earthly translated by Rodney Parker, who encouraged Hart to publish (...) this dissertation almost 50 years after he had defended it at the University of Chicago. Hart first encountered Conrad-Martius through his mentor at Catholic University, Thomas Prufer, who was a friend of Hedwig Conrad-Martius. The Prufers spent summers in Munich where Conrad-Martius taught and Prufer attended her lectures as a student. Hart’s major professor at Chicago was Mircea Eliade and his interest in myth coincided with Conrad-Martius’s work. But Hart’s dissertation was directed by Langdon Gilkey. Hart went to study in Munich in 1967, unfortunately, Conrad-Martius had died in 1966. Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Ontological Phenomenology is the only monograph in English on the Munich phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius. She is usually considered a “marginal thinker” in the phenomenological movement and one of the Munich circle of phenomenology. The book is part of Springer’s series on “Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences.” The discussion of women in the history of philosophy could give a broader picture of whether Conrad-Martius is a marginal figure or whether her thought should have a broader audience. Historical accident certainly has something to do with her relative obscurity. Being a woman, she had a difficult time getting to her habilitation. This situation only became worse in the Third Reich. (shrink)

In this essay I analyze the phenomenon of boundary and the mode of human experiencing of it. I claim that it is essential, or even foundational, to culture. Humans encounter boundaries positively or negatively virtually everywhere, in all forms of experience of reality and of themselves. To experience a boundary is, obviously, not identical with a simple acceptance of our limitations, but is equally constituted by a pursuit to transgress it. There is no boundary without at least possible transgression, and (...) there is no transgression without a boundary. In this sense one cannot be understood without the other. This paradoxical relation is constitutive – as we know from the great narratives of our culture – for culture and humankind in their essential entanglement. But this picture is to be supplemented by a moment of resistance – even if we were able to transgress all boundaries, does that mean we should? It is this question which draws our attention to creative and normative aspects of our experience of boundaries. It is this question which constitutes a challenge to our thinking and acting whenever we encounter a boundary. In my analyses I pay some special attention to boundaries in contemporary art. (shrink)

This paper discusses gardening as a practice that may be useful in reconsidering how landscape boundaries can be experienced. The assumption is that one should think of landscapes as “entities” which are material, but at the same time may be said to exist only insofar as they are experienced by humans. As such, they are always bounded. In order to show how gardening may be helpful in shaping the boundaries of landscapes two approaches to gardening are discussed: one treats gardening (...) as a model of creating order and eliminating all that which is seen as alien to it (Zygmunt Bauman), the other – claims that gardening requires respecting nature (Gilles Clément). (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to look at the existential phenomenon of being addicted from the perspective of speculative philosophy. The starting point is the description of Walter Benjamin’s narcotic experiences. Further in my considerations I am guided by the Kantian categories of the dialectics of pure reason, with particular emphasis on transcendental ideas. However, only the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel along with the concepts of desire and habit allows us to comprehend addiction as a wild and unbridled (...) desire for life, taken over by a dead scheme, by a mechanism, automatism. It is in this behavior, and only in it, that we constantly become aware of ourselves, lose ourselves to the specified objectification, obtain finite satisfaction, and repeat that deadness – this what addiction precisely is according to the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Hegel links it with an attitude of “stubborn subjectivity” that clings to the limits of its solipsistic finiteness, to the “bad infinity” and seeks satisfaction within its borders. In this way, the German philosopher links addictive behavior with the structure of dialectics itself. (shrink)