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Displaying: 1-10 of 10 documents


1. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Matthew Berry

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Scholars have advanced many different interpretations of Aristotle’s discussion of “the naturally just” in the Nicomachean Ethics. Most of these interpretations, however, pay insufficient attention to the context into which Aristotle introduces the concept, and in particular to Aristotle’s discussion of political justice, of which “the naturally just” is only a part. This paper seeks to recover that context and to offer a new interpretation of “the naturally just” as the part of political justice that is derived from the nature of republican politics, rather than from the agreement of fellow citizens.

2. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Magnus Ferguson

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I propose that Hannah Arendt’s hermeneutical philosophy can make important contributions to ongoing debates in the study of epistemic injustice. Building on Kristie Dotson’s concern that Miranda Fricker’s formulation of hermeneutical injustice is needlessly restrictive, I argue that Arendt’s concept of ‘thinking’ challenges us to imagine a form of hermeneutical virtue that is rigorously self-critical. The self-destructive tendency of Arendtian thinking may help to guard against the specific danger that Dotson identifies - namely, that an overly rigid approach to hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical virtue can itself generate situations of epistemic injustice. Despite important differences that emerge, it is productive to bring together Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical virtue and Arendt’s concept of self-undermining thinking in order to reveal the ways in which these two corrective strategies might enrich and pose important challenges for the other.

3. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Christopher Iacovetti

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This article attempts to draw out and to clarify a tension at the core of Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift (1809). This tension can be put as follows. On the one hand, Schelling insists quite strongly throughout this text upon the inherent goodness of creaturely selfhood—not simply in the negative sense that selfhood is not intrinsically evil, but in the positive sense that each created self is loved by God and destined to play a singular part in God’s self-revelation. On the other hand, Schelling depicts selfhood in terms that seem to link it inextricably—perhaps constitutively—to sin and evil. It is my contention in this article that this tension arises as a result of Schelling’s attempt, in the Freiheitsschrift, to embed an essentially Kantian account of radical evil within the broadly Neoplatonic framework he had sketched five years earlier in his Philosophy and Religion (1804).

4. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Simon Lambek

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This article presents a reading of Nietzsche’s use of rhetoric as inseparable from his philosophical project. I provide an exegesis of Nietzsche’s own reflections on rhetoric and consider its actual deployment, arguing that Nietzsche’s rhetoric is often deliberately dissonant and oriented toward facilitating receptive effects. The aim, I suggest, is to shift politics of possibility—to alter what can and cannot be done and said politically. Dissonant rhetoric, rhetoric that marries aesthetic attunement with affective turbulence, helps to accomplish this end by shaping the way that rhetoric is received by audiences. I conclude by suggesting that Nietzsche’s rhetoric has implications for contemporary theory, shifting how we might view critical political engagement in the public sphere. Understood in this way, Nietzsche’s rhetoric provides a perhaps surprising model for a critically robust form of rhetoric.

5. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Pascal Massie

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This essay addresses the following questions: How does the meta-sensory function of koine aisthesis (sensing-that-I-sense) relate to its other functions? How can a meta-level arise from the immanence of sensation? Can we give an account of meta-sensation that doesn’t assume a transcendental plane? My contention is that (a) the representationalist model doesn’t apply to Aristotle and that (b) Aristotle offers an alternative that is worth exploring. I propose to interpret the meta-sensory power of the koine aisthesis in terms of the sensing of the limits of perception. The sensing of the limit of sensation is the sensing of sensation itself qua potentiality as exemplified by Aristotle’s observations on the experience of seeing darkness or hearing silence. If it is so, sensing-that-I-sense doesn’t require an appeal to a transcendent faculty and arises from the immanent experience of sensation itself.

6. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Lucio Angelo Privitello

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This paper is Part II of my study entitled “Approaching the Parmenidean Sublime: A New Translation and Resequencing of the Fragments of Parmenides.” What I seek to accomplish here is to elaborate on my resequencing/translation decisions, and take up the more thorny philosophical/juridical aspects of my position previously mentioned, yet condensed, in “Notes to Translator’s Introduction,” and “Notes on the Fragments.” I believe that this continued engagement with the fragments of Parmenides makes up the “dutiful apprenticeship” intrinsically represented in the poem’s teacher-student exchange, and in the request to convey the story. The request to convey the story is still alive and well in Parmenidean studies. This passing along of a teaching, its history, and its style, makes up the essence of an apprenticeship, whether artistic, philosophical, or as a social ontology. To streamline my references to the poem, I will use only my translated and resequenced fragment and line numbers found in my article, “Approaching the Parmenidean Sublime: A New Translation and Resequencing of the Fragments of Parmenides,” from Volume 23, Number 1, pages 1–18, Fall 2018, of this journal.

7. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Jeffrey Reid

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Greek tragedy, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, represents the performative realization of binary political difference, for example, “private versus public,” “man versus woman” or “nation versus state.” On the other hand, Roman comedy and French Revolutionary Terror, in Hegel, can be taken as radical expressions of political in-difference, defined as a state where all mediating structures of association and governance have collapsed into a world of “bread and circuses.” In examining the dialectical interplay between binary, tragic difference and comedic, terrible in-difference, the paper arrives at hypothetical conclusions regarding how these political forms may be observed today.

8. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Mark Sentesy

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The Protagoras examines how community can occur between people who have nothing in common. Community, Protagoras holds, has no natural basis. Seeking the good is therefore not a theoretical project, but a matter of agreement. This position follows from his claim that “man is the measure of all things.” For Socrates community is based on a natural good, which is sought through theoretical inquiry. They disagree about what community is, and what its bases and goals are. But Plato illustrates the seriousness of Protagoras’s position through the repeated breakdown of their conversation. The dialogue leads us to question both speakers’ assumptions about community. Socrates must face the problem that not everything can be brought to language. Protagoras must recognize that there is a basis of community even in what cannot be shared. Community is grounded in an event that is both natural and not up to us, and cultural and articulate.

9. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Beau Shaw

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Paul Celan’s “Tenebrae” is a scandalous poem: it describes how “unity with the dying Jesus” (in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s words) is achieved by means of the Jewish experience of the concentration camps. In this paper, I provide a new interpretation of “Tenebrae” that breaks from the two traditional ways in which the poem has been viewed—on the one hand, as a Christian poem that suggests that Jesus, insofar as he suffers just like Jewish concentration camp victims do, can provide “hope and redemption for the faithful” (Gadamer), and, on the other hand, as an ironic criticism of this Christian idea. Rather, I suggest that “Tenebrae” is a modification of Christianity: preserving Christian belief about Jesus’s death, it destroys that belief, and does so for the sake of the defense against Christian persecution. Finally, I suggest that this view reveals the peculiar poetic form of “Tenebrae”—what I call “political form.”

10. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 25 > Issue: 1
Peter Westmoreland

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Tensions between sentiments and reason are a well-known feature of Rousseau’s moral theory. To explain these tensions, this paper appeals to Rousseau’s moral foundationalism. In this foundationalism, I argue, feeling and reason operate jointly to establish the content and normativity of moral law. This joint operation is not always smooth, and additionally there is much leeway in this theory, which explains the theory’s ability to accommodate various interpretations and emphases as well as its struggle to delimit specific moral laws, choices, and actions. The most important element of this foundationalism is conscience, which does the work of voicing moral laws with content and normativity grounded in moral sentiments.