Through the examination of anti-psychiatric theory and literary texts, this timely and thought-provoking volume explores the possibilities of liberating our habitual patterns of perception and consciousness beyond the confines of a capitalist era. In Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry, Skott-Myhre asks the question, how might we be different if we didn't live in a capitalist society? By drawing on Marxist and post-Marxist theory, and conducting nuanced analysis of the professional writings of anti-psychiatrists including Basaglia and Laing, and (...) the work of fiction writers Kafka and Garcia Marquez, the text identifies alternative conceptualizations of the self. Focusing in particular on portrayals of institutions and the family, Skott-Myhre proposes that these social systems offer new modes of reading the world and ourselves which will transform social organization and free subjectivity from dominant capitalist structures. This transdisciplinary text responds to a revitalized interest in alternatives to traditional psychology, an interest in life beyond capitalism, and the crisis in the traditional family. Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry will offer timely reading for graduate students, researchers, and scholars in the fields of cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, family studies, and interdisciplinary studies. (shrink)

Rising concerns among scholars about the intellectual and cultural foundations of democracy have led to a revival of interest in the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism. In this book, Hans Joas shows how pragmatism can link divergent intellectual efforts to understand the social contexts of human knowledge, individual freedom, and democratic culture. Along with pragmatism's impact on American sociology and social research from 1895 to the 1940s, Joas traces its reception by French and German traditions during this century. He (...) explores the influences of pragmatism—often misunderstood—on Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge, and on German thought, with particularly enlightening references to its appropriation by Nazism and its rejection by neo-Marxism. He also explores new currents of social theory in the work of Habermas, Castoriadis, Giddens, and Alexander, fashioning a bridge between Continental thought, American philosophy, and contemporary sociology; he shows how the misapprehension and neglect of pragmatism has led to systematic deficiencies in contemporary social theory. From this skillful historical and theoretical analysis, Joas creates a powerful case for the enduring legacy of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead for social theorists today. (shrink)

The metaphor of parasites or parasitism has dominated literary critical discourse since the 1970s, prominent examples being Michel Serres in France and J. Hillis Miller in America. In their writings the relationship between text and paratext, literature and criticism, is often likened to that between host and parasite, and can be therefore deconstructed. Their writings, along with those by Derrida, Barthes, and Thom, seem to be suggesting the possibility of a semiotics of parasitism. Unfortunately, none of these writers has drawn (...) enough on the biological foundation of parasitism. Curiously, even in biology, parasitism is already a metaphor through which the signified of an ecological phenomenon involving two organisms is expressed by the signifier of “[eating] food at another’s [side] table”. This paper will make some preliminary remarks on semiotics of parasitism, based on the notions of Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) and structural coupling (Maturana and Varela). It will look into the phenomenon of co-evolutionary process in community ecology. With reference to empirical history, the project will briefly surveythe literary and medical praxis of the 17th century England where large number of creative writings referred to the phenomenon of parasitism, which was deeply embedded in religious practice (e.g., the Eucharist) and political life (e.g., the courtier ecology in monarchy) of the times. Finally, it will touch upon the possible ‘parasitic’ relationship between language and biology. (shrink)

The article draws a conceptual distinction the (French) structuralism of the 50’s–60’s and the post-structuralism of the 70’s, which are discussed as overlapping in their intellectual paths; their mutual dynamics is defined as a reaction of the intelligence to the pressure of depersonalized unified schemes within the logic of structuralism against free improvisation and loose interpretation instead of total explanations in the post-structuralism interpretation. The article establishes a conceptual identity of the paradoxical nature between post-structuralism (and deconstructionism, which is homogeneous (...) and identical thereto in a number of aspects), on the one hand, and constructionism with its specific process of language dismantling – social/ideological languages, social group dialects, on the other hand, which naturally leads the authors to the analysis of the paradoxicality principles, defined by post-structuralism (five principles of paradoxicality of Gilles Deleuze – paradox of regress, paradox of sterile reiteration, paradox of neutrality, paradox of absurd, paradox of Levi-Strauss); poststructuralists’ paralogisms are examined through paradoxical denotation; the late Roland Barthes’ phenomenon of paradoxicality, becoming a plot-forming principle of narration, is analyzed. Poststructuralism is conceptualized in the article as the first decisive step of post-modernism; the affinity of post-structuralist and postmodernist commitment to parody, game and irony is stated; the theory of language games in post-modern interpretation is explored; one of those games – a game of carnival – is explored within the diachronic retrospective; the affinity of parody and carnival tradition of post-structuralism and post-modernism to the romantic irony of the XIXth century and its inconsistency with the popular culture of laugh is established. The genesis of poststructuralism and post-modernism is connected with the ideological restart of the Western society before the “very end” of the Resistance ideas and the disappointment of the left European intellectuals in the “great legends” and illusions of Marxism. The blurred concepts of relativism are connected with the mutual disproportion of different layers of historical experience. (shrink)

These two volumes form a full portrait of Hans Reichenbach, from the school boy and university student to the maturing and creative scholar, who was as well an immensely devoted teacher and a gifted popular writer and speaker on science and philosophy. We selected the articles for several reasons. Many of them have not pre viously been available in English; many are out of print, either in English or in German; some, especially the early ones, have been (...) little known, and deal with subject-matters other than philosophy of science. The genesis and evolu tion of Reichenbach's ideas appeared to be of deep interest, and so we in cluded papers from four decades, despite occasional redundancy. We were, for example, pleased to include his extensive review article from the encyclo pedic Handbuch der Physik of 1929 on 'The Aims and Methods of Physical Knowledge', written at a time of creative collaboration between Reichenbach's Berlin group and the Vienna Circle of Schlick and Carnap. Reichenbach was a pioneer, opening new pathways to the solution of age-old problems in many fields: space, time, causality, induction and probability - philosophical analysis and interpretation of classical physics, relativity and quantum physics - logic, language, ethics, scientific explanation and methodology, critical appreciation and reconstruction of past metaphysical thinkers and scientists from Plato to Leibniz and Kant. Indeed, his own philosophical journey was initiated by his passage from Kant to anti-Kant. (shrink)

It is well known that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right initiated, when it first appeared, a dispute about his philosophy in general that has not abated to the present day. The initial grounds for this dispute included: Hegel’s often virulent attacks, in the Philosophy of Right, on contemporaries such as Fries, Hugo, and von Haller; the question of his political stance within Prussia, which was then rapidly developing into a reactionary, authoritarian state; in other words, the question of (...) Hegel’s political accommodation, the question of his attitude to natural law, and so on. For a long time, therefore, the philosophical dispute was shaped by the political interests of the day. The struggle against Hegel’s philosophical system as a whole even resorted to personal defamation of the philosopher, so that, by revealing personal weakness, his system and the influential school of followers he had attracted could be discredited. Likewise, the diverse attempts at an adequate assessment of the historical influence of Hegel’s philosophy have come to a head. The two main questions, also deriving their inspiration from differing interpretations of the Philosophy of Right, are: How legitimate are the various Marxist references to Hegel as either the forerunner of Marxism or its principal opponent? How legitimate is the accusation that Hegel, by developing a totalitarian theory of the state, prepared the ground for twentieth century fascism, especially National Socialism? As previous research has pointed out, an adequate assessment of such relations will have to deal very carefully with Hegel’s position in his own day. For example, apart from his attitude to the situation in Prussia, his attitude to the most important event of the age, the French Revolution, must be examined. Furthermore, comparative perspectives must be established, so that the distinctive shape of Hegel’s philosophy of right can be seen clearly, against the background of the European constitutional debates of the day. In the last analysis, however, the essence of the disagreement still stems from the problem of the proper political classification of Hegel’s philosophy of right. (shrink)

Well-developed educational system leads to a strong country. The Chinese government has emphasized and clarified the priority of developing the Chinese educational system, and it has accelerated efforts to modernize it to position China as one of the world leaders in education. This essay discusses the priority of developing the Chinese educational system, and it outlines the main factors for the construction of a modern theoretical system of education with Chinese characteristics. It argues that this construction should be based on (...) the actual practice of education in China in the new era, it should be deeply rooted in the methods and wisdom of traditional Chinese education, it should incorporate the educational ideology and concepts nurtured by the modern Chinese revolutionary culture, it should draw on the latest scientific advancements and achievements throughout the world and keep pace with the development of the times, and, finally, it should be informed by the study of the nature and development of human beings with special attention to the theoretical issues embedded in educational activities themselves, which relate to the deepest levels of a philosophical worldview. (shrink)

The central theme of this work is on the one hand the "disintegration of unity" and on the other hand the "unfolding of multiplicity". Cultural modernity wanted to legitimize all human knowledge with the help of 'grand narratives' and combine it into a unit. To this end, she has produced three meta-narratives. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, artists, writers, and philosophers began to doubt and dispute the 'unity of knowledge'. Ultimately, their assessments have meant that today we (...) can no longer seriously believe in the relevance of terms such as 'totality'. So today we are trying to bring unity and multiplicity into a relationship of cultural mediation. (shrink)

"Every philosophy is a philosophy of its own time" , wrote Hegel, thus underscoring an essential aspect of the cognitive function of philosophy. "The issue of peace is a burning, painful one of our time." Lenin made this statement on the day following the overthrow of the provisional government in Russia, putting into words one of the principal issues of the socialist revolution. Since that time, the issue of peace has remained at the center of Marxist (...) thought. (shrink)

A series of dialogues with the most exciting and controversial German philosopher writing today. Peter Sloterdijk first became known in this country for his late 1980s Critique of Cynical Reason, which confronted headlong the “enlightened false consciousness” of Habermasian critical theory. Two decades later, after spending seven years in India studying Eastern philosophy, he is now attracting renewed interest for his writings on politics and globalization and for his magnum opus Spheres, a three-volume archaeology of the human attempt to (...) dwell within spaces, from womb to globe: Bubbles, 1998; Globes, 1999; Foam, 2004, all forthcoming from Semiotext. In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk answers questions posed by German writer Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs, commenting on such issues as technological mutation, development media, communication technologies, and his own intellectual itinerary. Iconoclastic and provocative, alternatively sparkling and bombastic, a child of '68 and a libertarian, Sloterdijk is the most exciting and controversial German philosopher to appear on the world scene since Nietzsche and Heidegger. Like Nietzsche, Sloterdijk remains convinced that contemporary philosophers have to think dangerously and let themselves be “kidnapped” by contemporary “hypercomplexities”; they must forsake our present humanist and nationalist world for a wider horizon at once ecological and global. Neither Sun nor Death is the best introduction available to Sloterdijk's philosophical theory of globalization. It reveals a philosophe extraordinaire, encyclopedic and provocative, as much at ease with current French Theory as with Heidegger and Indian mystic Osho Rajneesh. (shrink)

Marquard wrote this book in 1963 as a Habilitation Thesis with Hegel scholar Joachim Ritter under the title “On depotentiation [Depotentialisierung] of transcendental philosophy—some philosophical motives of a recent pyschologism in philosophy.” He elaborates the thesis that one aspect of the attractiveness of Freud’s psychoanalysis is its relationship with the transcendental natural philosophy of German Idealism: both classical philosophy of nature in German Idealism and Freud’s psychoanalysis, de-potentiate transcendental philosophy. As the philosophy of nature (...) in Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is not widely known, Freud’s psychoanalysis makes the transcendental arguments against transcendentalism indirectly present, according to Marquard. In publishing the Habilitation project of 1963 in 1987, 24 years after its original concept was drafted, the thesis does not address the fashion fads of Freudianism in the Federal Republic of Germany during the last 20 years in the form of Freudian Marxism directly, rather it allows a critical and fresh look at the left-Hegelian Freud reception during those years indirectly, presenting the old thesis of 1963 in a 1987 perspective. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

Émile Durkheim remains one of the most controversial, and deeply misunderstood, classics of social theory. His work differs from the dominant version of sociology that has essentially accepted the modernist self-description of contemporary societies; and it contradicts the individualism that has come to dominate the social sciences. For everybody who is interested in constructing theoretical alternatives to this individualism, Durkheim's sociology can be a useful inspiration - not only because of the solutions it suggests, but already because of the questions (...) it asks. Making use of the theoretical possibilities offered by the Durkheimian tradition, however, requires going beyond the familiar appropriations. The Oxford Handbook of Émile Durkheim takes stock of the different recent debates on Durkheimian sociology, and makes them accessible to a wide audience spanning various disciplines; this includes crucial debates that, due to language barriers, are not easily accessible for an English-reading public. The handbook's chapters elucidate the controversial key concepts of Durkheimian sociology; situate them within the contemporary political and theoretical debates they were originally responding to; offer surveys of empirical research that uses Durkheimian concepts (on topics that were already central for Durkheim's own work as well as on topics that Durkheim hardly touched upon), thus demonstrating the possibilities of a Durkheimian sociology; bring out the divergent, and competing, ways in which Durkheim's ideas have been appropriated and reformulated within more recent theoretical developments in the social sciences. In doing so, this volume is an important resource for all scholars and students looking to understand Durkheimian sociology. (shrink)

The pressures that led to the evolution of episodic memory have recently seen much discussion, but a fully satisfactory account of them is still lacking. We seek to make progress in this debate by taking a step backward, identifying four possible ways that episodic memory could evolve in relation to simulationist future planning—a similar and seemingly related ability. After distinguishing each of these possibilities, the paper critically discusses existing accounts of the evolution of episodic memory. It then presents a novel (...) argument in favor of the view that episodic memory is a by-product of the evolution of simulationist future planning. The paper ends by showing that this position allows for the maintenance of the traditional view that episodic memory operates on stored memory traces, as well as explaining a number of key features of episodic memory: its being subject to frequent and systematic errors, its neural co-location with the capacity for simulationist future planning, and the potential existence of non-human episodic memory. (shrink)

This essay argues that Pufendorf conceived the principles of natural law against the rationalism and innatism of the 17th century, and that Condillac similarly formulated a conception of the human origin of language, both of them thus securing open and human foundations for the two primal institutions of law and language, and also making all citizens free agents in the ordering of communal living.

In 1890 C. S. Peirce wrote a review of A. C. Fraser’s recent book on Locke, published to coincide with the bicentennial of Locke’s Essay. Peirce remarked that “Locke’s grand work was substantially this: Men must think for themselves, and genuine thought is an act of perception…. We cannot fail to acknowledge a superior element of truth in the practicality of Locke’s thought, which on the whole should place him nearly upon a level with Descartes.” This estimate of Locke was (...) not the common opinion in England during the nineteenth century. This opinion was reflected in Fraser’s book which, Peirce remarked, could not “be said to be a sympathetic account of [Locke]. The biographer seems to see no charm in his hero, and is perpetually speaking of his want of imagination; which only means he was not given to unpractical dreaming.” Locke had his knowledgeable critics and defenders—for instance Dugald Stewart and John Stuart Mill—but the common opinion ranged from extreme hostility and contempt to condescending criticism of isolated minor points. His style was deplored, his philosophy was called unoriginal and a mere unacknowledged plagiarism of Gassendi and Hobbes; he was said to have so thoroughly misunderstood Descartes that he had merely repeated him with new errors; he was said to owe his philosophical reputation entirely to his advocacy of the popular argument for political freedom or merely to the intellectual circumstances of his time; he was held accountable for Condillac’s rejection of reflection and reason; he was knocked down with a few bare sentences loosely drawn from Leibniz; he was said to have made the mind a puny, passive, mechanical thing. He was called a sensualist, a materialist, a sceptic, an atheist, and a utilitarian though at the same time—and not without contradiction—he was generally, especially by his critics, styled a “great lover of truth,” a plain and simple, well-meaning and religious man. To the nineteenth century Locke meant the Essay, and the history of the Essay was in large measure the history of modern thought, of the eighteenth century. Precisely for this reason there was something nearly sinister about him, in spite of his good personal character. “Locke, himself a clear, humble-minded, patient, reverent, nay, religious man,” said Carlyle, “had paved the way for banishing religion from the world.”. (shrink)

This book presents an innovative reading of Daoist philosophy that highlights the critical and therapeutic functions of satire and humor. Moeller and D'Ambrosio show how the Zhuangzi expounds the Daoist art of "genuine pretending" the paradoxical skill of enacting social roles without submitting to them or letting them define one's identity.

Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books (...) from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Introduces contemporary American philosophy of technology through six of its leading figures. The six American philosophers of technology whose work is profiled in this clear and concise introduction to the field—Albert Borgmann, Hubert Dreyfus, Andrew Feenberg, Donna Haraway, Don Ihde, and Langdon Winner—represent a new, empirical direction in the philosophical study of technology that has developed mainly in North America. In place of the grand philosophical schemes of the classical generation of European philosophers of technology, the contemporary American generation (...) addresses concrete technological practices and the co-evolution of technology and society in modern culture. Six Dutch philosophers associated with Twente University survey and critique the full scope and development of their American colleagues’ work, often illustrating shifts from earlier to more recent interests. Individual chapters focus on Borgmann’s engagement with technology and everyday life; Dreyfus’s work on the limits of artificial intelligence; Feenberg’s perspectives on the cultural and social possibilities opened by technologies; Haraway’s conception of the cyborg and its attendant blurring of boundaries; Ihde’s explorations of the place of technology in the lifeworld; and Winner’s fascination with the moral and political implications of modern technologies. American Philosophy of Technology offers an insightful and readable introduction to this new and distinctly American philosophical turn. Contributors are Hans Achterhuis, Philip Brey, René Munnik, Martijntje Smits, Pieter Tijmes, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. (shrink)

Hans Reichenbach, a philosopher of science who was one of five students in Einstein's first seminar on the general theory of relativity, became Einstein's bulldog, defending the theory against criticism from philosophers, physicists, and popular commentators. This book chronicles the development of Reichenbach's reconstruction of Einstein's theory in a way that clearly sets out all of its philosophical commitments and its physical predictions as well as the battles that Reichenbach fought on its behalf, in both the academic and popular (...) press. The essays include reviews and responses to philosophical colleagues, such as Moritz Schlick and Hugo Dingler; polemical discussions with physicists Max Born and D. C. Miller; as well as popular articles meant to clarify aspects of Einstein's theories and set out their philosophical ramifications for the layperson. At a time when physics and philosophy were both undergoing revolutionary changes in content and method, this book is a window into the development of scientific philosophy and the role of the philosopher. (shrink)

Cimpian et al. observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gs are f’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still treat it inferentially in a much stronger way: all Gs are f. This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’, ‘contingency’ and ‘relative difference’ from psychology to provide a uniform semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. (...) The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie’s cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics will be grounded on a strengthening of Cohen’s relative readings of generic sentences. In contrast to Leslie and Cohen, we propose a uniform semantic analysis of generics. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f’ is true because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G. We will make use of Kahneman and Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases approach, according to which people tend to confuse questions about probability with questions about representativeness, to explain pragmatically why people treat many generic statements inferentially in a much stronger way. (shrink)

The world of Chinese philosophy witnessed an ideological storm that raged for almost four decades in the second half of the twentieth century, and Ren Jiyu was a leading figure in it. The Marxist interpretation of traditional Chinese thought in terms of five scientifically determined historical stages, an economic substructure with its ideological superstructure, and a continuous struggle between materialism and idealism, was like a whirlwind that came and went in Chinese academia. This interpretive framework for the study (...) of Chinese philosophy dominated the field between the 1950s and the 1980s, when it was rapidly marginalized. Now that the winds have subsided and the Marxist straitjacket has become much looser, scholars of Chinese thought and historians interested in the twentieth century have something to reflect upon: the nature, the impact, and the value of Marxist intellectuals. How were differences of opinion expressed and treated within the boundaries of what was ideologically acceptable? How did views emerge, evolve, and loosen within this period? This selection of six influential articles written by Ren Jiyu give an insight into these questions coming from one particular voice. (shrink)

단국대 학생들의 교책과목으로 집필된 책.단국대학교의 역사와 한민족의 가치관,미래부터 교육과 인간화까지 전체 15장에 엮었다.

Since the late 1980s, the neglect of experiment by philosophers and historians of science has been replaced by a keen interest in the subject. In this volume, a number of prominent philosophers of experiment directly address basic theoretical questions, develop existing philosophical accounts, and offer novel perspectives on the subject, rather than rely exclusively on historical cases of experimental practice. Each essay examines one or more of six interconnected themes that run throughout the collection: the philosophical implications of actively and (...) intentionally interfering with the material world while conducting experiments; issues of interpretation regarding causality; the link between science and technology; the role of theory in experimentation involving material and causal intervention; the impact of modeling and computer simulation on experimentation; and the philosophical implications of the design, operation, and use of scientific instruments. (shrink)

Quine challenged traditional views of the a priori by appealing to two key premises: that any statement may be held true “come what may” and that no statement is immune to revision in light of new experience. Chalmers has recently developed a seemingly compelling response to each of these claims. The critique is particularly threatening because it seems to rest on the Bayesian premise that upon acquiring evidence E, a rational agent will update her credence in any statement S to (...) equal her prior conditional credence in S given E. We argue that Chalmers’s criticisms misfire. When properly understood, Quine’s two theses are largely consistent with Bayesianism. (shrink)

although mostly known to specialists nowadays, Kenelm Digby was a remarkable figure on the intellectual scene of the early seventeenth century. He has been described as “one of the most influential natural philosophers” of his time,1 and corresponded with many of the great scholars of his days, including Descartes, and the French pioneer of atomism, Pierre Gassendi. In the later years of his life, Digby, alongside men like Robert Boyle, became one of the founding members of the Royal Society.2Digby authored (...) one major work of philosophy: the Two Treatises of 1644. This work consisted of a long First Treatise on bodies, and a shorter, Second Treatise on the human soul. In the First Treatise, Digby argued... (shrink)

Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

This paper looks at the critical reception of two central claims of Peter Auriol’s theory of cognition: the claim that the objects of cognition have an apparent or objective being that resists reduction to the real being of objects, and the claim that there may be natural intuitive cognitions of nonexistent objects. These claims earned Auriol the criticism of his fellow Franciscans, Walter Chatton and Adam Wodeham. According to them, the theory of apparent being was what had led Auriol to (...) allow for intuitive cognitions of nonexistents, but the intuitive cognition of nonexistents, at its turn, led to scepticism. Modern commentators have offered similar readings of Auriol, but this paper argues, first, that the apparent being provides no special reason to think there could be intuitions of nonexistent objects, and second, that despite his idiosyncratic account of intuition, Auriol was no more vulnerable to scepticism than his critics. (shrink)

History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or (...) his studies of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated. (shrink)

This volume pays tribute to the remarkable scholarship of Hans Dieter Betz, which has combined amazing range with consistency of vision. Defying the traditional boundaries of the academy, Hans Dieter Betz, Shailer Mathews Professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has made significant contributions in the fields of New Testament, classics, church history, theology, and history of religions. This Festschrift brings together the work of major scholars of ancient religion and philosophy who are part of (...) Betz's international circle of conversation. The volume also contains a complete bibliography of Hans Dieter Betz's publications from 1959 to 2000. (shrink)

The work of Thomas White represents a systematic attempt to combine the best of the new science of the seventeenth century with the best of Aristotelian tradition. This attempt earned him the criticism of Hobbes and the praise of Leibniz, but today, most of his attempts to navigate between traditions remain to be explored in detail. This paper does so for his ontology of accidents. It argues that his criticism of accidents in the category of location as entities over and (...) above substances was likely aimed at Francisco Suárez, and shows how White’s worries about the analysis of location were linked with his broader cosmological views. White rejects real qualities, but holds that the quantity of a substance is somehow distinct from its bearer. This reveals a common ground with some of his scholastic interlocutors, but lays bare a deep disagreement with thinkers like Descartes on the nature of matter. (shrink)

The student of philosophy usually is not irritated by obscure formulations. On the contrary, reading the quoted passage he would presumably be convinced ...

Aristotle defines growing as a process in which an individual living being persists as it accumulates new matter. This definition raises the question of what enables an individual to persist as its material composition continuously changes over time. This paper provides a systematic account of Pietro Pomponazzi’s answer to this question. In his De nutritione et augmentatione, Pomponazzi argues that individuals persist in virtue of their forms. Forms are individuated in part by their material, causal, and temporal origins, which commits (...) Pomponazzi to the view that individuals necessarily have the material, causal, and temporal origins they do. I provide an account of why Pomponazzi held this view. While his opponents remain unnamed, I argue that his arguments for this view are best read as addressing, among others, Paul of Venice and Gregory of Rimini. (shrink)

In this volume philosophers from throughout the Asia-Pacific region discuss a wide range of topics related to the development of democratic values and ways of life. The papers explore ideas, values and practices related to democracy from the different perspectives of the great religious and philosophical traditions of Asia, as well as considering both philosophical issues and the place of philosophy in a democratic society. While the contributors represent different philosophical traditions, they are connected through a common concern with (...) humanity, a belief in the value of philosophical inquiry and scholarship and by a commitment to the value of philosophy education in building and sustaining democracy. (shrink)

In the late 1830s and early 1840s Hans. L. Martensen helped to introduce the thought of G.W.F. Hegel to the intellectual world of Copenhagen. Between Hegel and Kierkegaard offers the first English translations of three important early writings of Martensen in the philsophy of religion. These treatises evidence an original and critical interpretation of Hegel's thought from a speculative theological point of view. The heart of Martensen's philosophy of religion is the idea of freedom or personality grounded in (...) its relation to the divine. These writings exercised an important and formative influence on the young Kierkegaard, Martensen's student, even though Kierkegaard later became a formidable opponent and critic of Martensen. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper studies Antoine Le Grand's account of organic identity over time in human bodies. In response to Aristotelian critics who argued that the Cartesian rejection of the Aristotelian ontology of matter and form had put in jeopardy the diachronic identity of material substances in general and of living bodies in particular, Le Grand argued that the identity over time of the human body could be accounted for without the traditional notions of matter and form. The paper shows how he (...) drew on both the Cartesian metaphysics of mind and body and contemporary views on human anatomy and organic generation to develop a unique account of bodily identity over time in human animals. (shrink)

In scholarship on the history of philosophy, it is widely assumed that Charles Fourier was a utopian socialist who could not have exerted a significant influence on the development of Karl Marx's thought. Indeed, both Marx and Engels seem to have advanced this view. In contrast, I argue that in 1844 when Marx was developing his anthropology and social critique, he relied upon Fourier's thought to supply a key assumption. After establishing this connection, I explain why Marx's tacit reliance (...) on Fourier creates a problematic undercurrent in his thought. (shrink)