Socializing Metaphysics supplies diverse answers to the basic questions of social metaphysics, from a broad array of voices. It will interest all philosophers and social scientists concerned with mind, action, or the foundations of social theory.

This is the first in-depth critical appraisal in English of the political, legal, and cultural writings of Carl Schmitt, perhaps this century's most brilliant critic of liberalism. It offers an assessment of this most sophisticated of fascist theorists without attempting either to apologise for or demonise him. Schmitt's Weimar writings confront the role of technology as it finds expression through the principles and practices of liberalism. Contemporary political conditions such as disaffection with liberalism and the rise of extremist (...) political organizations have rendered Schmitt's work both relevant and insightful. John McCormick examines why technology becomes a rallying cry for both right- and left-wing intellectuals at times when liberalism appears anachronistic, and shows the continuities between Weimar's ideological debates and those of our own age. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

This perceptive study of John Case, teacher of philosophy at Oxford from the mid-1560s until his death in 1600 and author of expositions of Aristotle which became standard textbooks of the time, focuses on his intellectual and cultural milieu and reveals.

This is the first in-depth critical appraisal in English of the political, legal, and cultural writings of Carl Schmitt, perhaps this century's most brilliant critic of liberalism. It offers an assessment of this most sophisticated of fascist theorists without attempting either to apologise for or demonise him. Schmitt's Weimar writings confront the role of technology as it finds expression through the principles and practices of liberalism. Contemporary political conditions such as disaffection with liberalism and the rise of extremist (...) political organizations have rendered Schmitt's work both relevant and insightful. John McCormick examines why technology becomes a rallying cry for both right- and left-wing intellectuals at times when liberalism appears anachronistic, and shows the continuities between Weimar's ideological debates and those of our own age. (shrink)

John Case , the most important English Aristotelian of the Renaissance period, has not yet received the attention he deserves. In his Lapis philosophicus , an exposition of Aristotle's Physics, is found a discussion of the relation of nature to art which parallels in many ways that formulated a few years later in the writings of Francis Bacon. Case argues, in a way more reminiscent of the works of Giambattista della Porta than of those of Aristotle, that the natural (...) philosopher can legitimately apply the productive arts in helping nature to fulfill her function. Moreover, while rejecting the excessive claims of the Paracelsians, Case does accept the transmutational claims of the alchemists. In the final analysis, his ‘Aristotelianism’ has been tempered by the tradition of Renaissance natural magic. Like many other Peripatetic thinkers of the period, Case shows himself to be an eclectic, drawing materials from a wide variety of sources and open to many of the new scientific tendencies then developing. (shrink)

IntroductionThis essay is divided into two distinct parts.In the first I shall explore the complex way in which Carl Schmitt’s thought was split three ways: between a Catholic universalism that extends the “law of humanity” to the whole of the globe; a modern defense of the normativity of the absolutely sovereign nation-state; and finally a stress upon the primacy of a more limited civilizational landmass, smaller than that of the whole planet but larger than that of the state. In (...) this third case, it is actually “empire“ that is covertly to the fore and supremely the Western land-based empire that had once been Christendom. (shrink)

In this comment, we will focus on Greco’s brief for agent reliabilism in preference to simple reliabilism. Agent reliabilism differs from simple reliabilism primarily in requiring, not merely belief that results from a reliable process, but belief grounded in stable dispositions that make up the subject’s character.

Title: Political Theology Publisher: The MIT Press ISBN: 0262192446 Author: Carl Schmitt Title: The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy Publisher: The MIT Press ISBN: 0262691264 Author: Carl Schmitt.

Looks at the scientific basis for theories of drama, and explains how Cage's ideas have affected modern theater.

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external (...) constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such. (shrink)

This paper replies to various concerns raised in a symposium on Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry.

From the time of John Locke’s critique of Descartes’ ideae innatae, empiricism and rationalism have been seen as diametrically opposed to each other and have, therefore, been placed on opposite ends of the Western philosophical spectrum. Since that time, many have also seen in the irreconcilability of these positions the gap that separates the Anglo-American and the continental philosophical traditions. Plato, often held to be the main representative of a particularly uncompromising rationalism, is considered by many to be the (...) founder of most forms of rationalism. The general idea behind this interpretation is that Plato believed human thought to have its true foundation in a transcendent world of purely intelligible entities. On this view, Plato, the rationalist, seeks knowledge in a domain that transcends all experience and can only be comprehended through intellectual intuition. While Aristotle, the empiricist, limits himself to the objects accessible to his senses and recognizes only that which is able to be verified or falsified through observation or reduced to such a verification or falsification. (shrink)

Everyday our vision travels across time and space. We see images in the media about atrocities, disruptions, crises, famine, and wars. And in each case our sense of injustice is awakened. We feel outrage and indignation based upon our ideals and value systems which were formed through our traditions and religions. But in this age where the power of media and information is so powerful, what we see is often manufactured to appeal to our values. While these values circulate among (...) the images we see in cyberspace, these manipulations are rooted in certain realities: geography, natural resources, and power relationships. Our values are managed to serve the control of resources and territory. They serve the deeper reality of geography and geopolitics. How then are these ideals and values created, manipulated, and opposed across various pivots or boundaries, between East and West, between the individual and the collective? Through English geographer Sir Halford Mackinder’s concepts of “pivot” and “heartland”; German philosopher Carl Schmitt’s importance of “nomos”; and French writer Victor Segalen’s reflections on the loss of cultural diversity, we outline this priority of geography. By examining these writers, we can begin to ask if our ideals and values have any real moral or theological significance, or if they are merely effects of the competition between powers. Can ideals and values lead to real change and development, or are they merely leashes to guide us based on the aims of power? (shrink)

The twenty-first century so far has seen the global rise of authoritarian populism, systematic racism, and dogmatic metaphysics. Even though these events demonstrate the growth of an age of 'unreason', in this original and compelling book John Roberts resists the assumption that such thinking displays an unthinking irrationality or loss of reason; instead he asserts that an important feature of modern reactionary politics is that it offers a supposedly convincing integration of the particular and the universal. This move is (...) defined by what Roberts calls the 'reasoning of unreason' and has deep roots in the history of Western thought and politics. Tracing the dark history of enlightenment-disenlightenment, John Roberts explores 'the reasoning of unreason' across centuries from Aquinas, William of Ockham, the most important treatise on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarum, Locke, Kant, and Count Arthur de Gobineau, to Social Darwinism, Nazism, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Friedrich von Hayek. Roberts provides a new set of philosophical-political tools to understand the formation and denigration of the rational subject and the current reinvestment in various forms of political unreason globally. The Reasoning of Unreason is the first book to draw on the philosophy of reason, political philosophy, political theory and political history, in order to produce a dialectical account of the 'making of reason' internal to the forces of unreason and the limits of reason. (shrink)

In this comment, we will focus on Greco’s brief for agent reliabilism in preference to simple reliabilism. Agent reliabilism differs from simple reliabilism primarily in requiring, not merely belief that results from a reliable process, but belief grounded in stable dispositions that make up the subject’s character.

Over the last decade there has been a veritable explosion of Anglo-American interest in the works of Weimar constitutional and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. There has been concurrently a revival in the treatment of technology as a subject worthy of social-philosophical inquiry. Yet the two scholarly movements have surprisingly passed each other by. Surprisingly because as I demonstrate the German critique of technology is crucial for understanding the works of Schmitt, especially his criticisms of liberalism, and vice versa, (...) theoretical confrontations with technology, often dismissed as excessively abstract, could benefit greatly by observing the way in which Schmitt incorporated theoretical engagements with technology into practical-political treatises. The conjuncture of the critiques of liberalism and technology in Schmitt's writings may shed fresh light on the perennial problem of "technocracy" in liberal democracies and the potential for authoritarianism latent within it. The context in which fascism first emerged in Europe was characterized by a structural transformation--a fusion--of the economy, society and politics as welfare state conditions eclipsed the nineteenth century's--supposedly separate--state/society configuration. As the perceived agent of this transformation technology consequently aroused exhilaration, awe and fear irrespective of whether it was perceived as beneficial or detrimental. The analyses on the part of the intellectuals who engaged technology in this context were sometimes hysterical but also sometimes quite perspicacious. Soviet Communism, fascism and liberal technocracy were all posed as solutions to this situation. Since the 1970s industrial societies have undergone another structural transformation as a Fordist welfare state configuration gives way to a globalized one. This process has brought down Soviet Communism, but fascism has reemerged and liberal technocracy transmutes itself in not necessarily progressive ways. The considerations on these political alternatives in the wake of this century's first technological transformation by fascism's most brilliant promoter and liberalism's most relentless critic may not provide facile answers in the midst of this century's second transformation. But we must properly understand the past to accurately assess the present and insure that the disastrous outcome that befell a fragile liberal democracy such as Weimar's does not occur again. (shrink)

MEDIEVAL LOGICS LAMBERT MARIE DE RIJK (ed.), Die mittelalterlichen Traktate De mod0 opponendiet respondendi, Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlagigen Texte. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge Band 17.) Miinster: Aschendorff, 1980. 379 pp. No price stated. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MARTA FATTORI, Lessico del Novum Organum di Francesco Bacone. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1980. Two volumes, il + 543, 520 pp. Lire 65.000. VIVIAN SALMON, The study of language in 17th century England. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory (...) and History of Linguistic Science, Series 111: Studies in theHistory of Linguistics, Volume 17.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1979.x + 218 pp. Dfl. 65. Theoria cum Praxi. Zum Verhaltnis von Theorie und Praxis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. (Akten des 111. Internationalen Leibnizkongress, Hannover, 12. bis 17.November 1977, Band 111: Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Wissenschaftstheorie, Metaphysik, Theologie.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980. vii + 269 pp. DM 48. CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL LOGICS MICHAEL CLARK, The place of syllogistic in logical theory. Nottingham: University of Nottingham Press, 1980. ix + 151 pp. £3.00. A.F. PARKER-RHODES, The theory of indistinguishables. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. xvii + 216 pp. Dfl.90.00/$39.50. NICHOLAS RESCHER and ROBERT BRANDOM, The logic of inconsistency. Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1980. x + 174 pp. f 11.50. MISCELLANEOUS J. ZELENY, The logic of Marx. Translated from the German by T. Carver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. xcii + 247 pp. £12.50. FELIX KAUFMANN, The infinite in mathematics. Edited by Brian McGuinness. Introduction by E. Nagel. Translation from the German by Paul Foulkes. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978. xvii + 235 pp. Dfl 85/$39.50 (cloth); Dfl 45/$19.95 (paper). PAMELA MCCORDUCK, Machines who think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1979. xiv + 275 pp. $14.95. J. MITTELSTRASS (ed.), Enzyklopadie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie Bd. 1 : A-G. Mannheim, Wien, Ziirich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1980. 835 pp. DM 128. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst by Mark SchmittJohn StoreyMark Schmitt. Spectres of Pessimism: A Cultural Logic of the Worst. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 147 pp., hardcover, $44.99. ISBN 9783031253508.[End Page 256]What I have called radical utopianism was an important concept for two of the founding figures of British cultural studies, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.1 In 1976, in the revised edition of (...) William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Thompson introduced into English Miguel Abensour's concept of the "education of desire."2 This has had a profound impact on what has become known as utopian studies but has had hardly any influence on cultural studies. Ruth Levitas together with Thompson (from whom she borrowed the concept) have probably done more than most to make Abensour's formulation popular in critical work on utopianism.3Abensour, however, was almost certainly drawing on part of a point made by William Morris in a letter written in 1884. Morris writes of the teaching of desire and political organization as the two main components necessary to bring about radical change: "The means whereby this is brought about is first, educating people into desiring it, next organising them into claiming it."4 But he also writes of another form of education, what he called "the education of discontent."5 In "Art Under Plutocracy," a lecture given in Oxford in 1883, he explained, "It is my business here to-night and everywhere to foster your discontent … [and] to help in educating that discontent into hope, that is into the demand for the new birth of society."6 He made a similar point in a lecture given in Manchester earlier in 1883:My business herein is to spread discontent. I do not think that this is an unimportant office; for, as discontent spreads, the yearning for bettering the state of things spreads with it, and the longing of many people, when it has grown deep and strong, melts away resistance to change in a sure, steady, unaccountable manner.7The role of the education of discontent is to undermine our sense of the inevitability of the here and now, to make change conceivable and to believe that it is possible, promoting what Raymond Williams calls an "active wanting"—"Possibility, seriously considered, is … not what with luck might happen. It is what we can believe in enough to want, and then, by active wanting, make possible."8 For Morris, the production of utopian desire, as a result of the interrogation of the here and now from the perspective of an alternative social space, would, according to Thompson, "help people to find out their wants, to encourage them to want more, to challenge them to want differently, and to envisage a society of the future in which people, freed at last of necessity, might choose between different wants."9 [End Page 257]Radical utopianism allows us to dare to dream that the way things are is not inevitable—that is, a world arranged in the interest of the powerful few. It broadens our vision of the world and opens up new ways of seeing. As the familiar is defamiliarized, what we have learned to think of as immutable suddenly looks changeable and the capitalist dogma There Is No Alternative can begin to give way to the enabling slogan Another World Is Possible. It allows us to anticipate the possibility of a world in which the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, to slightly misquote them, have a revolutionary insistence: "We are many, they are few."Radical utopianism seeks to free imagination from the limits placed on it by a society run in the interests of the powerful few and to know that these limits are historical. While we seem able to see the past as historical and the future as history waiting to happen, the present seems outside history: in a word, "natural." Radical utopianism makes the present historical. Understood in this way, it is not an attempt to produce blueprints of the perfect society. Given the historical variability of human nature, it is impossible to predict what a perfect society might be like. Instead, radical utopianism is... (shrink)

ExcerptGather three readers of Telos together in a room to speak about a controversial issue, and you’re likely to hear six opinions, each one forcefully expressed. After all, the journal has made a point of addressing the social and political challenges of modernity by cultivating the intellectual resources of discrete, often overlooked communities and traditions. This has placed the clash of divergent viewpoints, or “intellectual diversity,” at the core of its identity. Want to hear an anarchist argue with a liberal (...) about a Catholic conservative’s reading of the implications of Carl Schmitt for the neo-Confucian view of culture, nationhood, and globalization? A Telos conference is the place for you. Welcome—sit for a while and have some coffee (it’s Italian). (shrink)

It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of [the] abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century [Thomas Hobbes] became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and a natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature.... [J]uristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his (...) scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1922)In the light of Hobbes's natural science, man and his works become a mere phantasmagoria. Through Hobbes's natural science, “the native hue” of his political science “is sicklied o'er with the pale cast” of something which is reminiscent of death but utterly lacks the majesty of death—of something which foreshadows the positivism of our day. It seems then that if we want to do justice to the life which vibrates in Hobbes's political teaching, we must understand that teaching by itself, and not in the light of his natural science. Can this be done?² Leo Strauss, “On the Basis ofHobbes's Political Philosophy” (1959). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 419-420 [Access article in PDF] Martin Mulsow. Moderne aus dem Untergrund: Radikale Frühaufklärung in Deutschland, 1680-1720. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2002. Pp. x + 514. Paper, € 58.00.This is a marvelous, detailed, textured study of a large number of minor works and minor figures that developed and transmitted many of the elements of modern philosophy in early modern Germany. Many of (...) the texts were written in Latin, and only some were published. One should not teach the philosophy of the Enlightenment from Hazard or Cassirer without attention to these figures, whom they did not know. Now we know where our heroes like Lessing, Hume, and Kant got many of their fundamental ideas.Martin Mulsow ends this book with ten theses. The first holds that most of the authors discussed were radicalized in a multi-layered process, not simply from the reading of Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle, or Toland. For example, one could take the role of an opponent in an academic disputation, and bit by bit begin to believe one's unorthodox role. Or one could be provoked by ultra-orthodox opponents to explore the opposite of what they believed. Some authors evolved into and out of radical positions over the course of their lives.Further theses contend that small, trusted circles of friends were often the enabling condition in which unorthodox views were first expressed and then hammered out. Irony, satire, humor, paradox, and ambivalence played key roles. It is often difficult to tell whether some of these texts were serious or intended as jokes, and perhaps the authors did not always know themselves. Some radical ideas were spread simply by curious erudites who assembled collections and bibliographies of radical manuscripts and texts without believing them.Mulsow shows how people wrote on controversial topics in coded scholarly language. Spinozism was discussed under the rubrics of Platonism and Stoicism; the sovereignty of the people was considered in terms of the lex regia; and Biblical criticism became code for the physicians' rejection of the materiality of the soul. Thus philosophical discourse can be found where one might least expect it in legal, philological, historical, and scientific debates. The numerous case studies that the author assembles amount to philosophical microhistory.Substantial chapters deal with various aspects of the intellectual stew that emerged from the bubbling pot of Jews and Socinians and other Christian sects that were semi-tolerated in the Netherlands. Unlike any construction of moderate and radical positions as opposed and at odds, Mulsow shows how they were often intertwined. The destruction of Christian Platonism, the paradoxical development of Enlightenment ideas out of anti-humanism, and the uses of so-called eclecticism in philosophy made possible the assembly of modern philosophical positions.In yet another paradox, many of these writers belong to what has been called the "conservative Enlightenment," intending only to temporize and draw the teeth of the political and philosophical radicals, and yet their writings systematized and transmitted the ideas of the radicals, opening the way to further radicality. It is a perennial weakness of the skeptics and proto-liberals like Gundling that they defended freedom of thought and libertas philosophandi even where it would undermine the ideas and institutions in which they believed.Most of the philosophically radical positions began as critiques of theological positions, and this is one reason why it is ever more apparent that one cannot understand the rise of modern philosophy without a close acquaintance with early modern theology. None of the early modern philosophers we are trying to understand was ignorant of the many levels of theological debate. There are numerous connections to later times: for example, a seventeenth-century debate over political theology anticipated Carl Schmitt's twentieth-century rediscovery of this topos.Mulsow places the Enlightened ideas of Locke and Newton in the context of their basis in the theology of anti-Trinitarian Socinians and Arians such as Samuel Crell. This was as important to many who radicalized it as the Spinozism credited with spawning the radical... (shrink)

This volume cannot but call to mind The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy published twenty years ago under the editorship of Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner. The Cambridge Companion fares well in the comparison. The Cambridge History contained some weak or irrelevant articles, as well as articles that flatly contradicted each other, but its largest flaw was its artificial division of Renaissance philosophy, in almost cookie-cutter fashion, into synthetic themes that tended to obscure rather than illuminate historical developments (...) and connections. Far more successful was what has, up to now, been unquestionably the best survey of Renaissance philosophy available, Schmitt’s and Brian Copenhaver’s Renaissance Philosophy that appeared in 1992, where the chapters are organized by schools of thought , and thinkers are presented in diachronic succession within each chapter. The Cambridge Companion combines many of the virtues of both volumes and, of course, brings the reader up to speed on the literature that has appeared in the last two decades. (shrink)

Schmittova strategija kritike parlamentarizma je zasnovana na poskusu histo-riziranja parlamentarnega diskurza, na tem, da ga opazuje kot produkt liberalnih poskusov depolitiziranja modernega sveta. Na tej podlagi skuša Schmitt, metafizik, razgaliti pojave, ki so vezani na parlament, in s tem razkriti in razložiti njegovo bistvo. Fenomen parlamenta hoče demaskirati z vprašanjem po njegovih temeljnih načelih. Schmittov opis parlamenta temelji na poenostavljenih konceptualnih abstrakcijah in zaradi tega selektivno, to je — enostransko, preučuje in poudarja le nekatere od značilnosti in zagat parlamenta. (...) Ta enostranskost Schmittove interpretacije se kaže na več načinov: prvič v njegovem očitnem neupoštevanju predliberalne zgodovine parlamenta; drugič v tem, da mu ni uspelo dojeti globokega prepada med liberalnimi načeli parlamentov devetnajstega stoletja; in končno v njegovem slepem zavračanju možnosti, da bi se demokratično reformiralo parlament in okrepilo njegove moči v nasprotju s »totalno državo«. (shrink)

The contributors to _The Anomie of the Earth_ explore the convergences and resonances between Autonomist Marxism and decolonial thinking. In discussing and rejecting Carl Schmitt's formulation of the nomos—a conceptualization of world order based on the Western tenets of law and property—the authors question the assumption of universal political subjects and look towards politics of the commons divorced from European notions of sovereignty. They contrast European Autonomism with North and South American decolonial and indigenous conceptions of autonomy, discuss the (...) legacies of each, and examine social movements in the Americas and Europe. Beyond orthodox Marxism, their transatlantic exchanges point to the emerging categories disclosed by the collapse of the colonial and capitalist frameworks of Western modernity. Contributors. Joost de Bloois, Jodi A. Byrd, Gustavo Esteva, Silvia Federici, Wilson Kaiser, Mara Kaufman, Frans-Willem Korsten, Federico Luisetti, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Benjamin Noys, John Pickles, Alvaro Reyes, Catherine Walsh, Gareth Williams, Zac Zimmer. (shrink)