Classic, influential study of Greek tragedy.

This collection of more than two hundred of Nietzsche's letters offers a representative body of correspondence on subjects of main concern to him--philosophy, history, morals, music and literature. Also included are letters of biographical interest which, in Middleton's words, mark the stresses and turnings of his life. Among the addressees are Richard Wagner, Erwin Rohde, Jacob Burkhardt, Lou Salome, his mother, and his sister Elisabeth. The annihilating split in Nietzsche's personality that has been associated with his collapse on a street (...) in Turin in 1889 is described in a moving letter from Franz Overbeck which forms the Epilogue. Index. (shrink)

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

In this highly original book, Donald Levy considers the most important and persuasive of these philosophical criticisms, as articulated by four figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Adolf Grunbaum.

The Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), according to which we are responsible for what we did only if we could have done otherwise, is relied upon in the argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Compatibilists, like Harry Frankfurt, attack PAP with stories that they devise as counter-examples; why are their stories, and the stories devised by defenders of PAP, so bad? Answers that suggest themselves are that these philosophers do not try to imagine how things actually unfolded; (...) what it would be like for a real person in the situation; and actual talk of someone being responsible or being able to do otherwise. That they do not imagine these things also can be explained by their unwarranted assumption that when they talk, for example, about someone not being able to do otherwise, they are talking not about talk of it (in a story), but of the thing itself, not-being-able-to-do-otherwise. (shrink)

Neste texto, o nosso objetivo é indicar, seguindo o horizonte proposto por Primo Levi em Os afogados e os sobreviventes [1986], que é possível comunicar ou diminuir a distância entre o expressar e o compreender. Como hipótese, argumentaremos que embora não nos seja permitido sentir no lugar do outro, é-nos possível compreender a sua expressão; essa compreensão se daria a partir de uma conversão do olhar, fundamentada em uma vontade de comunicar. Para isso, utilizaremos – no horizonte da problemática de (...) Levi – alguns elementos da filosofia de Simone de Beauvoir, em especial a sua noção de situação, e de Ludwig Wittgenstein, com ênfase em sua noção de apresentação panorâmica. Ambas as noções mencionadas sugerem, a nosso ver, atitudes metódicas, das quais Levi se aproximou. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Let Us Be Human:Primo Levi and Ludwig WittgensteinDavide SpartiThe demolition of a man is difficult, almost as much as creating one.— Primo Levi1The modest but also remarkable ambition of Primo Levi's most important book Se questo è un uomo is "to provide material for a quiet [pacato] study of certain aspects of the human soul [animo umano]."2 More precisely, its ethical core (and its title) concerns itself with (...) the loss of our humanity, with the inexorable destruction of what is human.3 The book describes such patterns of dehumanizing through a number of mechanisms operating in the concentration camps of Auschwitz–Birkenau, where Levi was deported. By showing how the Nazis viewed the camp inmates as completely disconnected from their own lives, Levi bears witness to the Nazis' restricted willingness to grant humanity, to their denial of the internal relation which ties them to the inmates. Since the book offers insights for those who ask themselves "what is it to be human?" (and what remains of the human in extreme situations?), its main philosophical issue is whether or not something admits being seen as human.4Wittgenstein describes the attitudes we adopt in reacting to other creatures by analyzing the grammar of "seeing something as something:" only of a living human being, he famously adds, can we say: he [End Page 444] or she has a soul (see also PI, § 281).5 That the human body stands as one of the criteria for the ascription of psychological predicates—that human beings are endowed with an expressive power that neither statues nor animals possess; that human beings around us exert by their very presence a power which belongs uniquely to them—is suggested by the fact that even when we fantasize about living chairs or tables, for example in cartoons, we tend to lend human features to such animated furniture. So, according to Wittgenstein there is a conceptual connection between psychological predicates and certain kinds of human expression. But, one must add, this connection is achieved only through use, and is given only within the context of a form of life. The context of a shared form of life is needed because without it those forms of expressive behavior would not be intelligible: only if I am prepared to regard the object before me as a human being will I smile back and even talk to it. A living body is hence not enough: what is needed is a role through which such expressions are performed and have a point.In a similar vein, Levi shows the extent to which our experience of something as human depends on our relation to it—on the quality of our stance towards it. If it makes sense to speak of seeing somebody as a human being, it is because we can imagine individuals who lack or lose such a capacity or willingness. And it is precisely within the context of the concentration camp that what admits being seen as human changes drastically.In this essay I will draw lines of connection between Levi and Wittgenstein by relying on Stanley Cavell's crucial notions of avoidance and acknowledgment. After showing how such notions play a role in Wittgenstein's remarks on the so called "other mind" problem, I will turn to Levi and show how his remarks on the denial of the human in the concentration camp supplement Wittgenstein's grammatical remarks and can also be fruitfully read using the categories of avoidance and acknowledgment.6Although Wittgenstein does offer some remarks on Nazism, was personally engaged in protecting his family after the annexation of Austria, and mentions the Russian gulags in conversation with Rhees, he was never concerned with any empirical analysis of specific, let alone extreme, human situations. In light of this, it is clear that life in the concentration camp cannot be grasped and explained by simply relying on a few Wittgensteinian categories. However, the points Levi raises, as I will show in the conclusion, reveal an analogy with some of the [End Page 445] questions that worried Wittgenstein. This will also lead me to discuss a stylistic element that links the Austrian philosopher to the... (shrink)

Book Review of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics, edited with commentary by Edoardo Zamuner, Ermelina Valentina Di Lascio and D. K. Levy. Wiley Blackwell: Chichester, 2014, vii + 141 pp.

Ludwig Wittgenstein/ Karl R. Popper/ Claude Levi-Strauss/ Martin Heidegger/ Karl Jaspers/ Hannah Arendt/ Ernst Bloch/ Max Horkheimer/ Theodor W. Adorno.

We are constantly called upon to evaluate the evidential weight of testimony, and to balance its deliverances against our own independent thinking. ‘Intellectual autonomy’ is the virtue that is supposed to be displayed by those who engage in cognition in this domain well. I argue that this is at best a misleading label for the virtue, because virtuous cognition in this domain consists in thinking with others, and intelligently responding to testimony. I argue that the existing label supports an excessively (...) individualistic conception of good thinking, both within and outside philosophy. I propose replacing ‘intellectual autonomy’ with ‘intellectual interdependence’, which properly emphasises the depth of our reliance on one another, without suggesting we ought ever to be epistemically servile. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's work remains, undeniably, now, that off one of those few philosophers who will be read by all future generations.

Peter Finch's translation of Wittgenstein's remarks on culture and value presents all entries chronologically, with the German text alongside the English and a subject index for reference. "It was Wittgenstein's habit to record his thoughts in sequences of more or less closely related 'remarks' which he kept in notebooks throughout his life. The editor of this collection has gone through these notebooks in order to select those 'remarks' which deal with Wittgenstein's views abou the less technical issues in his philosophy. (...) So here we have Wittgenstein's thoughts about religion, music, architecture, the nature of philosophy, the spirit of our times, genius, being Jewish, and so on. The work is a masterpiece by a mastermind."—Leonard Linsky. (shrink)

What methodology should philosophers follow? Should they rely on methods that can be conducted from the armchair? Or should they leave the armchair and turn to the methods of the natural sciences, such as experiments in the laboratory? Or is this opposition itself a false one? Arguments about philosophical methodology are raging in the wake of a number of often conflicting currents, such as the growth of experimental philosophy, the resurgence of interest in metaphysical questions, and the use of formal (...) methods. This outstanding collection of specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers discusses these questions and many more. It provides a comprehensive survey of philosophical methodology in the most important philosophical subjects: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, philosophy of science, ethics, and aesthetics. A key feature of the collection is that philosophers discuss and evaluate contrasting approaches in each subject, offering a superb overview of the variety of methodological approaches - both naturalistic and non-naturalistic - in each of these areas. They examine important topics at the heart of methodological argument, including the role of intuitions and conceptual analysis, thought experiments, introspection, and the place that results from the natural sciences should have in philosophical theorizing. The collection begins with a fascinating exchange about philosophical naturalism between Timothy Williamson and Alexander Rosenberg, and also includes contributions from the following philosophers: Lynne Rudder Baker, Matt Bedke, Greg Currie, Michael Devitt, Matthew C. Haug, Jenann Ismael, Hilary Kornblith, Neil Levy, E.J. Lowe, Kirk Ludwig, Marie McGinn, David Papineau, Matthew Ratcliffe, Georges Rey, Jeffrey W. Roland, Barry C. Smith, Amie L. Thomasson, Valerie Tiberius, Jessica Wilson, and David W. Smith. (shrink)

The so-called "Big Typescript" is Wittgenstein's first attempt to publish in a book his collected thoughts since his return to Cambridge and to philosophical writing, thus correcting the "serious errors" (Wittgenstein) of his early work. Among the texts in Wittgenstein's estate, the "Big Typescript" is the one that, next to the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" (the "Tractatus") of 1918, appears to be the most "finished", with a table of contents structured in chapters and sections. It is, however, a fragment, without either title, (...) motto or conclusion. To Wittgenstein, it was important "that the thoughts in [the book] should progress from one subject to another in well-ordered consecutiveness." It is precisely this structure of the "Big Typescript", though ultimately rejected by Wittgenstein, which constitutes the immeasurable value of the text for the study of and as an introduction to Wittgenstein's thinking. (shrink)

Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book.

The Greek poets and philosophers, united in a belief that men and women perceive the world around them very poorly, for this reason describe much of human behavior as fumbling for happiness in the dark. By contrast, perception failure is anathema to the modern tradition, as even the most innocent sort plays havoc with modern preference axioms.

O objetivo desse trabalho é relacionar os três princípios, ou prazeres, estéticos de um videogame, isto é, imersão, agência, transformação, com o summum bonum e as categorias fenomenológicas de Charles S. Peirce. O summum bonum pode ser entendido como uma mistura entre sentimento, ação e razão. Os sentimentos, ações e pensamentos do jogador são responsáveis pela concretização e ampliação desse horizonte estético. A imersão é um princípio estético de primeiridade. Podemos entender o ato de imergir como um prazer de primeiridade (...) – pois o jogador, metaforicamente e literalmente, vai para outro lugar, estando sem relação com o que está fora da imersão. O princípio estético da agência é regido pela secundidade. Obtém-se prazer em forçar-se contra o mundo do jogo, controlando-o mecanicamente, agindo e reagindo. Todos os jogos possuem secundidade, mas os jogos de competição, lutas, corridas, e mesmo alguns RPGs online, possuem características marcantes de força mecânica, embate, ação e reação. O terceiro e último princípio estético é a transformação. A transformação é um processo. Jogos que permitem diferentes abordagens costumam ser jogos em que há um processo de crescimento, tanto na questão do gameplay quanto da própria narrativa do jogo. O mundo do jogo e o personagem vão se transformando em algo diferente no decorrer do tempo – há uma evolução, e essa evolução é caracterizada como um fenômeno de terceiridade. Concluiu-se que, embora todos os videogames tenham esses três princípios estéticos, cada jogo individual privilegia um ou dois desses princípios. É justamente esses princípios estéticos que direcionarão a escolha do que vai ser jogado, muito mais do que a temática ou o gênero desse jogo. (shrink)

It is frequently noted that a “crisis in language” accompanied the profound changes in human consciousness everywhere evident near the turn of the century. As the nature of reality itself became problematic—or at least suspect, distrusted for its imposition of limits upon individual imagination—so, necessarily, did the relationship of language to reality. Thus in the later nineteenth century, the adequacy of an essentially standardized form of “classical” writing was increasingly questioned as an effective vehicle for artistic expression: even though often (...) in “elevated” form, such writing bore too close a connection to ordinary discourse. Indeed, it was precisely the mutually shared, conventional aspects of language that came to be most deeply distrusted for their failure to mirror the more subjective, obscure, and improbable manifestations of a transcendent reality or, rather, realities—the plural reflecting an insistence upon the optional and provisional nature of human experience. Language in its normal manifestations—with its conventionalized vocabulary and standardized rules for syntactical combination—proved inadequate for an artistic sensibility demanding, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, “a world of abnormally drawn perspectives.”This dissatisfaction with “normal” language received its classic statement through Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos. Writing in 1902, Hofmannsthal conveys through the figure of the aristocratic Chandos the loss of an encompassing framework within which the various objects of external reality are connected with one another and integrated with the internal reality of human feelings. Chandos’ world has become one of disparate, disconnected fragments, resistant to the abstractions of ordinary language. It is a world characterized by “a sort of feverish thought, but thought in a material that is more immediate, more fluid, and more intense than that of language.” Chandos longs for a new language in which not a single word is known to me, a language in which mute objects speak to me and in which perhaps one day, in the grave, I will give account of myself before an unknown judge.”2 The content and forms of art thus shifted away from exterior reality, which no longer provided a stable, “given” material, toward language itself—to “pure” language in a sense closely related to the symbolists’ “pure” poetry. “No artist tolerates reality,” Nietzsche proclaimed.3 And Gustave Flaubert’s farsighted advice to himself was that he should write “a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style.”4 2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ein Brief,” Gesammelte Werke, ed. Bernd Schoeller with Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols. , 7:471-72; my translation. All further translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.3. Friedrich Nitzsche, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols. , vol. 15, The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, p. 74.4. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller , p. 154. Other passages in this letter are equally remarkable for their “modernist” tone. Flaubert argues that from the standpoint of l’Art pur, “one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things” . Further:The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the future of Art lies in this direction. I see it, as it has developed from its beginnings, growing progressively more ethereal …. Form, in becoming more skillful, becomes attenuated, it leaves behind all liturgy, rule, measure; the epic is discarded in favor of the novel, verse in favor of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its creator. This progressive shedding of the burden of tradition can be observed everywhere: governments have gone through similar evolution, from oriental despotisms to the socialisms of the future. [P. 154] Robert P. Morgan, professor of music at the University of Chicago, is currently writing a history of twentieth-century music and working on a study of form in nineteenth-century music. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “On the Analysis of Recent Music” and “Musical Time/Musical Space”. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: European Positivism Latin American Positivism Martí Rodó Vaz Ferreira Ingenieros References Further Reading.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Allegory and the Spaces of LoveOscar Martín (bio)Writing about Spanish sentimental fiction from 1450 to 1550 is not an easy task, as we are discussing a genre with a difficult theoretical configuration. The investigation of sentimental fiction, however, has been sorting out the classifications that applied to a hodgepodge of works previously labeled as “sentimental novel” (“novela sentimental”). This label, once attached uncritically to a bunch of heterogeneous texts (...) that shared such intangibles as “loving focus” or “prevalence of psychological description over narratives,” has been applied more consistently nowaday, thanks in part to the scholarly efforts started in the 1980s like those of Martínez Jiménez and Muñoz Marquina (1982), and Martínez Latre (1989).1 Using some of these research efforts, Alan Deyermond has codified the genre accurately:Brevity; focus on psychological interest over external action; a tragic vision of love; autobiography (first-person narration or a narrator as a character) and the insertion of letters or poems (or, often, both) into the narration.[77]2Within this scholarly categorization, Regula Rohland de Langbehn has been pivotal in offering—first in 1986, and more recently in 1999—a threefold scheme in the development of the genre she labels as “sentimental novel”: a first group chronologically of the genre would be represented by Siervo libre de amor and Sátira de felice e infelice vida, both works marked by the influence of cancionero poetry—specially in the allegorical structuring and in the characterization of love, and by other subjects being limited to an abstract and general analysis of emotions. Both works also present a debate over the moral value of love. A second group would gravitate around Triste deleytacion and the works of Diego de San Pedro and Juan de Flores, works that show a wider range of topics and the impact of a broader generic textuality like cancionero poetry and such chivalric novels as Tirant. Finally, she distinguishes a third group whose main characteristic is the imprint of Celestina’s influence on both the narrative surface and its thematic approach. In the same vein, Vicenta Blay Manzanera has taken up this threefold scheme, dividing the genre into “the creation of the paradigm” (“la creación del paradigma”) the climactic stage, and the downfall and disarticulation of the narrative sentimental system” (“la fase climática” and “el tercero la fase de declive o desintegración del paradigma”) [“La conciencia genérica” 221]. [End Page 132]Just as Rohland de Langbehn’s works had at least settled down the arguments about the existence of a sentimental novelistic genre, however, medieval Hispanic scholarship has been shaken by an entrenched debate over not only the identification of this genre (novel or fiction) but whether the genre even existed at all. It was Antonio Cortijo Ocaña who, while editing a critical cluster in La Corónica on sentimental fiction, opened the door to some scholars such as Weissberger who voiced their skepticism over the generic nature of sentimental prose, a skepticism already present in an innovative volume published by Gwara and Gerli in 1997. This skeptical position was also supported by Cortijo Ocaña himself, who in 2001 published a monumental work in which, although using the generic term as a departure point, he ended up suggesting the difficulty of defining it, therefore jettisoning it. This position in turn was contested by Rohland de Langbehn, who in 2002 defended the validity of both the existence of a genre and its name novela sentimental, a position that has sparked a new round of replies in a La Corónica forum in 2003.In this debate, I would join today’s minority position on the existence of a sentimental genre, because, as I explained in my 2001 review of Rohland de Langbehn’s book and as I find convincingly argued in her 2002 contribution, there are internal traits within sentimental fictional texts that do not appear together in other sentimental generic texts [139]. In addition, once we take into account the obvious intertextuality of those sentimental texts, as Blay Manzanera has shown [“La conciencia genérica”], and the overutilization of central motifs in the configuration of love’s debate, we... (shrink)

This book, translated for the first time into English, presents the major statement of the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Here, in his most systematic work, Feuerbach’s thought on religion and on the philosophy of nature achieves its full maturity. Central to the thought of Feuerbach is the concept that man not God is the creator, that divinities are representations of man’s innermost feelings and ideas. Philosophy should turn from theology and speculative rationalism to sound factual anthropology. “My aim in (...) these Lectures,” writes Feuerbach, “is to transform friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers, worshippers into workers, candidates for the other world into students of this world, Christians, who on their own confession are half-animal and half-angel, into men––whole men.”. (shrink)

Includes 70 entries on the theme of recognition, dealing with the concept, the main authors, the history of the theme, its applications, and its presence in various disciplines. The paper version to appear in late 2020. Entries available online first.

Dynamic systems theory (DS) provides tools for exploring how simpler elements can interact to produce complex psychological configurations. It may, as Lewis demonstrates, provide means for explicating relationships between two reductionist approaches to overlapping sets of phenomena. The result is a description of psychological phenomena at a level that begins to achieve the richness we would hope to achieve in examining psychological life as it is experienced and explored in psychoanalysis.