Symposium

A quick look into the index of Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint reveals that all references to “abstract terms” occur only in the appendix (taken from Brentano’s “Nachlass” essays). What should we make of this? Was it the case that the inquiry into abstract, as well as non-existent, objects came as an afterthought to Brentano? Or was he all too aware of the consequences of such investigations? Furthermore, was it largely the absence of such inquirythat prompted Husserl and his early students in Göttingen, such as Daubert and Reinach, to develop a deep ontological commitment to entities he refers to as “abstract” or “ideal”?

What is a society? What is political power? John Searle claims that previous political philosophers not only neglected these fundamental questions but also lacked the means to effectively address them. Good answers, he thinks, depend on theories of speech acts, intentionality, and constitutive rules first developed by analytic philosophers. But Searle is mistaken. Early phenomenologists had already developed the requisite theories. Reinach’s philosophy of law includes a theory of speech acts. This theory is based on Husserl’s account of intentionality. Edith Stein extended that account by offering a detailed description of collective intentionality. And it was Stein who brought these strands of early phenomenological research together to address the very questions of political philosophy Searle regards as both fundamental and neglected. In this paper, I recount Stein’s answers to these questions and argue that they compare favourably withthose of Searle.

Scheler subjects Husserl’s categorial intuition to a critique, which calls into question the very methodological procedure of phenomenology. Scheler’s divergence from Husserl with respect to whether sensory or categorial contents furnish the foundation of the act of intuition leads into a more significant divergence with respect to whether phenomenology should, primarily, be considered a form of science to which a specific methodology applies. Philosophical methods, according to Scheler, must presuppose, and not distract from, important preconditions of knowledge that pertain more to the philosopher than to logical procedure. Accordingly, the phenomenological attitude serves as a foundation for, and is not the result of, the phenomenological method.

Gilbert Ryle never pursued research under Edmund Husserl. However, Ryle was indeed Husserl’s student in a broader sense, as much of his own work was deeply influenced by his studies of Husserl’s pre-World War I writings. While Ryle is the thinker whose name typically comes to mind in connection with the concern over category mistakes I argue that (1) Husserl deserves to be known for precisely this concern as well, and (2) the similarity between them is no accident. Developing this reading of Ryle’s Husserlian pedigree forces a broader reevaluation of each of their roles in twentieth-century thought.

L'objectif de cet article est de montrer, contre toute attente peut-être, que le thème du nouveau est au centre du projet proustien d'une « recherche du temps perdu », autrement dit de sa conception de l'art comme une réminiscence. Compris dans un sens anti-platonicien, le nouveau correspond ultimement chez Proust à notre besoin d'être.

I argue that Sartre's understanding of needs is not inconsistent with his conception of the human condition. I will demonstrate that his use of the term "needs" signals a change of focus, not a rejection of his earlier views. Sartre's Iater "dialectical" account of human needs should he read, in light of his phenomenological account in Being and Nothingness, as aspects of our facticity and situation. Satisfying needs is compatible with a range of choices about how to satisfy those needs and what they mean for us. I contend that Sartre remains true to the phenomenological roots of his work and avoids a commitment to a human nature or essence. Finally, I will address some of the questions that arise from Sartre's focus on needs in his dialectical ethics. I will begin by examining Sartre's early account of the human condition, and then consider his focus on needs in relation to this account.

Une vulgate interprétative a repéré chez Bergson deux intentions majeures : d'une part, celle de montrer que le temps d'Einstein est compatible avec la conception de la durée ; d'autre part, celle de subordonner le temps einsteinien au temps vécu. Les pages qui suivent seront l'occasion pour nous d'ébranler le second volet de cette interprétation. Sans le refuter de point en point, nous voudrions en effet montrer que de nombreux passages de l'œvre bergsonienne permettent d'atténuer I'idée que Bergson ait inféodé le temps d'Einstein au sien propre. L'intérêt principal de cette tâche sera de faire contrepoidsà une conception bien ancrée, mais excessive, et de montrer que le temps de la relativité restreinte a pleine valeur non seulement dans le cadre des sciences physiques en général, mais aussi dans celui du bergsonisme en particulier.

In this essay, I offer thoughts on the constitution of images in art, especially as they are constituted in painting and in photography. Utilizing ideas from Gadamer, Derrida and Adorno, I shall argue that representation should be conceived as a performative concept and as an act of formation; i.e., as a process rather thanas something "fixed." My reflections will be carried out in connection with a careful analysis of Gerhard Richter's painting Reader (1994), which is a painting of a photograph that depicts a female who is reading. I demonstrate how a close analysis of this fascinating painting leads us deeper into the problem of painted images, insofar as it enacts what it is about, namely, the constitution of itself as an innige by means of a complex and enigmatic relationship between seeing, reading, memory, inner, outer, gaze and blindness.

The essay explores the development of sociobiology, its basic tenets, and its contributions to the study of human nature as well as ethics. It insists that Darwinism is more than a biological theory and presents a possibility of interpreting sociobiology as manifesting not the triumph of the selfish gene but, on the contrary, the only way in which the expansion of altruism was possible.

Tont au long de sa carrière philosophique, Heidegger s'est livré à une constante explication avec Hegel, qu'il considérait comme son plus vif antagoniste. Dans le cadre de cet article, nous entendons nous rapporter aux origines de leur différend et prendre la mesure des griefs du Jeune Heidegger à l'endroit de la dialectique hégélienne. Nous tenterons en un second lieu de démontrer que son opposition frontale camoufle en fait une secrète appropriation, puisque Heidegger aurait préalablement fait sienne l'idée d'un usage productif de la négation en philosophie.

I will argue that 'Continental Philosophy' is an Anglo-American invention. It is 'Pseudo-Continentalism,' no more than a highly selective rendering of Western European Philosophy. Borne out of opposition to the dominance of analytical philosophy in our universities, Pseudo-Continentalism in fact converges with analysis in remarkable ways. Both are advertised as revolutions in thought and both stand over against the tradition of speculative philosophy: both repeat eachother's historical shibboleths about traditional speculative philosophy in respect of the completeness of reason and of reality, the priority of identity and totality, the predetermined fixity of teleology. What this amounts to is a common rejection of a chimera, which in Pseudo-Continental Philosophy is usually called onto-theology or the metaphysics of presence and in the analytic tradition is sometimes called speculative philosophy. Here, indeed, the analytic tradition is moreradical: as I will show, it characteristically rejects any notion of a special kind of activity of actualisation as a feature of the real, whether this is understood as Being, mind, will, the élan vital. Difference, or the impotential. These are the vestiges of the tradition of speculative philosophy that are retained under the rubric of Continental Philosophy.