International Philosophical Quarterly

Martin Buber wrote his 1904 dissertation on Nicholas of Cusa, but the relationship between the two has been little studied. This article focuses on four ways in which Buber appropriated Cusa’s ideas. (1) Cusa’s theory of participation argues for the absolute worth of the individual, foreshadowing Buber’s ethics of actualization. (2) Buber takes Cusa’s model of how one may know God as other through “learned ignorance” and applies it to how one may know and adequately respond to beings as others in his distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” relations. (3) Buber employs Cusa’s term “coincidence of opposites” to describe what happens in dialogue. Seeing the coincidence of opposites moves subjects to adopt intersubjective perspectives and give up unhealthy relations of conflict. (4) Buber’s 1938 criticism of Cusa for maintaining that selves evolve in isolation illuminates Buber’s creation of his own dialogic philosophy.

I offer a critique of Melissa Zinkin’s reading of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment. She argues that in judgments of taste the imagination is freed from its determinate relation with the understanding because the form of intuition in which beauty is apprehended is different from the form of intuition employed in determinate judgment. By distinguishing between an extensive and intensive form of intuition, this interpretation is able to explain why the apprehension of beauty cannot be subsumed under a concept. But I contest Zinkin’s identification of the sensus communis with this intensive form of intuition. I then substantiate two interrelated claims: (1) that we can account for the genesis of the sensus communis by distinguishing between an intensive and an extensive form of time, and (2) that we can avoid making the sensus communis atemporal by showing that it resides within an intensive form of time as a condition for its possibility, thereby structuring Kant’s account of the sensus communis securely within the critical framework.

Philosophical investigation of human nature has a long, distinguished, and multifaceted history. In the East some of the most heated philosophical disputes pertaining to issues concerning moral self-cultivation centered on disagreements about human nature. Within the Neo-Confucian tradition that developed out of Korea, issues concerning human nature took center stage in a dispute now known as the “Horak Debate” that began in the eighteenth century. In this paper I seek to introduce the Horak Debate to contemporary philosophers by (a) historically situating the debate within the tradition of Korean Neo-Confucianism, (b) providing an outline of the Horak Debate and identifying its central points of contention, and (c) demonstrating the debate’s philosophical significance by revealing how some of its key issues are rooted in disagreements that continue to concern contemporary philosophers.

Metropolitan John Zizioulas has recently written a probing assessment of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love. Zizioulas has thereby opened a dialogue between his own theological personalism and von Hildebrand’s phenomenological personalism. In this paper, I am at continuing this dialogue. I formulate three objections that I see Zizioulas raising to von Hildebrand’s claim that love exists as a value-response. In considering them, I try to eliminate misunderstandings, to identify areas of agreement and disagreement, and to show where each of these thinkers has something to gain from the encounter with the other. Most of all, I aim at working towards an understanding of love that incorporates the insights of both von Hildebrand and Zizioulas.

I suggest two valid and sound arguments refuting physicalism, whether it is reductive or supervenience physicalism. The first argument is a self-referential one that is not involved with any self-referential inconsistency. The second argument demonstrates that physicalism is inescapably involved with self-referential inconsistency. Both arguments show that arguments and propositions (to be distinguished from sentences) are not physical existents. They are rather mental existents that are not reducible to any physical existent and do not supervene on anything physical. From these two arguments it clearly follows that any physicalist argument or proposition, as a mental existent, is self-refuting.

The theory of infinite modes is not only one of the most controversial points in the philosophy of Spinoza, but also a kind of crossroads concept on whose clarification or interpretation the definition of his philosophy’s overall meaning depends. This article aims to examine Spinoza’s theory of infinite modes, mediate and immediate, in relation to other elements of Spinoza’s theory. Through an analysis of Spinoza’s writings, it proposes an inner reconstruction of the theory in order to ensure the consistency of the difficulties pointed out by several critics and to provide a solution. Spinoza’s identification of immediate infinite in motion, rest, and infinite intellect involves the questions of “what” they really are and what their role is within his system. About mediate infinite modes, Spinoza talks very little and only in terms of facies totius universi. This “silence” is closely linked to the “false” problem of the deduction/mediation of the finite from the infinite, a problem for which Spinoza himself was partly responsible by his statements on motion and the need to analyze the topic in more depth.

Heidegger’s position regarding the independent existence of entities has been a matter of considerable controversy. On the one hand he appears to defend something resembling transcendental or Kantian idealism without the notion of a thing in itself. On the other he upholds the independent existence of entities in their ontic dimension. The resultant interpretive controversy primarily pertains to how one can make the Dasein-dependence of being cohere with the Dasein-independence of entities. In this paper I argue that this philosophical difficulty arises from a textual ambiguity in the notion of Vorhandensein, which is used to designate two different senses of objectivity: one of the innerworldly existence of objectified entities and another regarding their bare existence independent of their worldliness. After tracing the historical context for this ambiguity, I argue that Heidegger believes that entities unlike Dasein are inherently bare of meaning or nonsensical in themselves.