In Nietzsche's Psychology of Ressentiment, Guy Elgat develops an interpretation of some of the central themes of Nietzsche's GM, which is one of his most systematic works and a pivotal part of his critique of the modern moral outlook that grew out of Christianity. Elgat's original approach is framed by two fundamental ideas: first, Nietzsche takes the concept of "moral justice" to be central to the morality he sets out to criticize; second, Nietzsche's suspicion toward moral justice is rooted in (...) its association with the affect of ressentiment. Thus, Elgat notes that ressentiment is frequently supposed either to express a sense of justice, or to... (shrink)

This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxicity of the technical milieu and post-truth calling for a radical bifurcation, they need to be reframed (...) and re-imagined in terms of the process of exosomatization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causality and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene. (shrink)

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted in December 2002 at France Culture with Elie During, is the best introduction to Stiegler's Time and Technics series. This collection includes a new interview conducted specially for this volume and an interview with Artpress from 2001. In Philosophising By Accident, Stiegler introduces some of the key arguments about the technical constitution of the human and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. He reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his (...) controversial thesis about the three types of memory and speaks about concepts central to his later works, such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object. (shrink)

This essay asks why Aristotle, certainly no friend to unlimited democracy, seems so much more comfortable with unconstrained rhetoric in political deliberation than current defenders of deliberative democracy. It answers this question by reconstructing and defending a distinctly Aristotelian understanding of political deliberation, one that can be pieced together out of a series of separate arguments made in the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Abstract The idea of a purely civic nationalism has attracted Western scholars, most of whom rightly disdain the myths that sustain ethnonationalist theories of political community. Civic nationalism is particularly attractive to many Americans, whose peculiar national heritage encourages the delusion that their mutual association is based solely on consciously chosen principles. But this idea misrepresents political reality as surely as the ethnonationalist myths it is designed to combat. And propagating a new political myth is an especially inappropriate way of (...) defending the legacy of Enlightenment liberalism from the dangers posed by the growth of nationalist political passions. (shrink)

Tractatus, 5.62 famously says: ‘… what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language mean the limits of my world.’ The later part of this repeats what was said in summary at 5.6: ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. And the key to the problem ‘how much truth there is in solipsism’ has (...) been provided by the reflections of TLP, 5.61. (shrink)

In his recent address to the Aristotelian Society, Aurel Kolnai suggests that games exhibit what he calls a “genuine paradoxy.” I do not believe that he has shown this to be the case, even on the most permissive interpretation of what it means to be a paradox. Kolnai has, however, called attention to an aspect of games which invites further investigation, and I should like to advance the following considerations not so much as a criticism of Kolnai as an attempt (...) to take the investigation along a path which Kolnai has indicated, but which he has not himself, in my opinion, followed. It is not that Kolnai does not say many interesting, indeed penetrating, things about games, for he does. That Kolnai's inquiry is an important contribution to the philosophy of games is not in question. What is questionable is whether paradox has very much to do with that contribution. (shrink)

Bernard Berofsky addresses that metaphysical picture directly.Nature's Challenge to Free Willoffers an original defense of Humean Compatibilism.

ABSTRACT This paper reconsiders the arguments of my book, The Longing for Total Revolution, in response to the thoughtful analyses collected in this symposium. It restates the book’s main genealogical and critical arguments about the philosophical sources of uniquely modern forms of social discontent, while distinguishing those arguments from recent attempts to uncover the deeper, theological sources of discontent. It focuses, in particular, on the role played in modern social discontent by the group of thinkers I describe as the “Kantian (...) left”: a long line of social critics who sought to “realize” Kant’s understanding of human autonomy in society, thereby gaining what Marx called “control and conscious mastery” over our social world, not just over our wills. (shrink)

Philosophy should not try to assimilate itself to the aims of the sciences. Scientism stems from the false assumption that a representation of the world minimally based on local perspectives is what best serves self-understanding. Philosophy must concern itself with the history of our conceptions, and we must overcome the need to think that this history should ideally be vindicatory. There is no basic conflict between arguing within the framework of our ideas, reflectively making better sense of them, and understanding (...) their highly contingent history. The third of these activities is an inescapable part of the second. (shrink)

The paper argues that in our usage of moral language we relate three concepts: guilt, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This assumes that we can distinguish between external actions and internal executions, because guilt as well as forgiveness and reconciliation are realities that first affect our inner humanity. When a relationship has been damaged by culpable actions (sometimes even by both sides), forgiveness is the precondition of reconciliation. As long as people accuse each other, there can be no talk of true reconciliation. (...) Although these are attitudes, that is, inner engagements, reconciliation also becomes outwardly recognizable as peace. However, these relationships can only be explained well in the connections of individual persons to each other. When political communities confront each other, our moral sense becomes fuzzy, because it is not so easy to say how such collectives (e.g., peoples) are to be determined in their inside and outside. Who can and may forgive, if other persons have become victims of culpable actions, but cannot forgive themselves? Here, then, the difficulty of individuality and collectivity is added. The essay pleads for maintaining the conceptual conjunction between individual and collective forgiveness. However, this should not be done at the price of a complete socio-ontological dissolution of collectives. Therefore, one must also be cautious about rash universalistic appropriation of the Other or the other group, because this is usually accompanied by a failure to recognize and endure the selfhood of the Other. Before it comes to a “false” reconciliation in this way, it is better to at least recognize each other – also in diversity. This should also be reflected in the rules of conflict, which must above all be oriented toward ensuring that conflicts are not carried out in such a way that the manner in which the conflict is carried out makes reconciliation impossible. But in both collective and individual reconciliation, the person does not have the outcome of the process entirely in his or her own hands. Reconciliation is not a technique, but a relational event that is carried out in an “open space.”. (shrink)

The scholastic philosopher is interested in definition for a different reason than the lexicographer and linguist. The philosopher is trying to learn things. Fe defines, after investigating reality, in an attempt to describe reality clearly and to sum up some aspect of his understanding of reality. Hence, we find our scholastic philosophers adopting as a main feature of their method this insistence on defining, on precise and detailed explanation of their definitions, and on proving that their definitions da correctly express (...) what a nature or activity is. A dictionary of the language of scholastic philosophy fitted to the needs of beginners and of undergraduate students of the subject is not available in English. (shrink)

In addition to this much-needed clarification of the uses and abuses of the term "modernity," Yack here provides a fresh look at familiar modern ideas and practices such as nationalism, constitutionalism, and liberal democratic politics. Our world, the author suggests, offers us far stranger and more unexpected combinations that are dreamt of in modernist and postmodernist philosophies. His critique of the tendency to treat modernity as an integrated and coherent whole will expand the reader's vision to take in the broader (...) landscape of surprising and inconsistent features in the social and political world that surrounds us. The Fetishism of Modernities will be of interest to social, political and cultural theorists, intellectual historians and philosophers, as well as anyone with a stake in current debates about modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

In this article, I examine Nietzsche's famous claim that moralities are a “sign-language” or “symptomatology” of the affective states of moral agents. I sketch out the sentimentalist interpretation of this claim, which has become prevalent in the scholarly literature, and argue that it cannot be correct. The relation it posits between values and the affects that explain them displays certain distinctive characteristics—noncontingency, expressive transparency, and specificity—which the relation between affects and values Nietzsche envisages in the examples that illustrate his claim (...) ostensibly lacks. I argue that the relation between affects and values is better understood as functional, rather than expressive: he explains moral judgments by showing how they serve certain emotional needs of the agent. Thus, Nietzsche's claim is better understood as articulating a kind of sentimental pragmatism. I conclude with some brief thoughts on the relation between this pragmatism and sentimentalism. (shrink)

Ours is an age of general automation. The factory that produced proletarians now extends to the biosphere; consequently, disautomatization is needed, which is the real meaning of autonomy. Autonomy and automatism must be reconceived as a composition rather than an opposition. Knowledge depends on hypomnesic automatisms that open up the possibility of what Socrates called “thinking for oneself”; digitalization thus requires a new epistemology that entails questions of political and libidinal economy. Today, automatization serves the autonomization of technics more than (...) noetic autonomy, but reconceiving the latter necessarily involves reconsidering the meaning and character of desire. Greta Thunberg’s diagnosis of the irresponsibility of the generation before hers exposes the fact that the knowledge necessary to combat the consequences of contemporary technological development has been destroyed. The only possible counter to this irresponsibility lies in the reconstitution of knowledge, understood as the means by which humans struggle against entropy and anthropy. (shrink)