Displaying: 1-20 of 2778 documents

0.153 sec

1. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
Samuel Talcott The Education of Philosophy: From Canguilhem and The Teaching of Philosophy to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
This paper questions the widespread assumption that education can and should mold students to socially desirable ends. It proceeds by sketching an important part of the intellectual history informing Foucault’s genealogy of this assumption’s emergence in a disciplinary society. This history involves Georges Canguilhem, Foucault’s elective master. And in the relation between the writings of master and student, we find a different exemplification of education, namely, as a thoroughly dialogical and philosophical activity undertaken for the sake of freedom. Examining this historical relation also: 1) establishes Canguilhem’s international importance as a philosopher because of his role in the 1953 UNESCO report on The Teaching of Philosophy; 2) helps clarify Foucault’s understanding of philosophical activity as problematization and his understanding of normativity; 3) helps think about education and the history of philosophy without looking for master theorists, but rather philosophical schools.
2. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
Tom Sparrow Some Ways to Speculative Aesthetics
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Continental philosophy is witnessing a global renaissance of speculative philosophy. And while some corners of this movement are gaining traction in art- and architecture-theoretical circles, its application to philosophical aesthetics has been forestalled in favor of metaphysical and, secondarily, epistemological inquiry. This essay tracks some of the ways that speculative aesthetics is emerging, and opening new pathways, within the renaissance. It accomplishes three primary tasks. First, it enumerates several of the ways that the name “speculative aesthetics” has been mobilized in contemporary speculative philosophy. Second, it presents and develops one approach to speculative aesthetics, namely Graham Harman’s, and highlights its indebtedness to Levinas. Third, it briefly endorses a particular way forward for speculative aesthetics, one that is object-oriented (like Harman’s) and articulated in a recent essay by N. Katherine Hayles, the work of Steven Shaviro, and my book Plastic Bodies.
3. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
John Harfouch Does Leibniz Have Any Place in a History of Racism?
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
I claim that a genealogy of the philological racism known as ‘orientalism’ should include Leibniz as a founding figure. This argument is framed and motivated by recent publications that seek to exclude Leibniz from the history of race and racism by arguing that he insists on a linguistic, rather than ‘racial,’ schematic of human diversity. A survey of nineteenth-century race theory reveals that this distinction is not only specious, but these recent defenses only further implicate Leibniz in the linguistic tradition that is orientalist racism.
4. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
Matthew Sharpe Camus and the Virtues (with and beyond Sherman)
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Albert Camus can be meaningfully read as an agent-focussed virtue ethicist, as David Sherman has suggested. Yet moving far beyond Sherman’s version of this claim, we show here how Camus accepts what are four definitive parameters of the classical authors’ conception of the virtues—the last of which takes him beyond today’s recognised “virtue ethicists.” Firstly, he understands the virtues as lasting, beneficent dispositions to think, feel, and act in certain ways. Secondly, he conceives the virtues as mastering the untethered passions: the sources of epistemic partiality and behavioural excess (démesure). Thirdly Camus conceives of the virtues (led by his versions of the four cardinals: courage, mesure, justice and a directive “lucidity”) as necessary accomplishments if people are to live fulfilled lives. Finally—and here bidding farewell to a solely theoretical approach—Camus appreciates that such self-mastery can only be achieved through education and habituation (an “ascesis” or “a difficult science of living”), and through the imitation of the kind of exemplars he holds up before us in his literary fiction.
5. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
Timo Helenius Understandings and Standings Under: Hermeneutics, the New Realisms, and Our (Baconian) Idols
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Scholars—philosophers and scientists alike—have recently reintroduced the New Realism movement, which has its roots in the soil of early twentieth-century philosophy, as a challenge to continental philosophy. This essay will propose a “BLT correction” (Bacon, lecture, theatre) in order to criticize, instead of support, the current tendency to underestimate the insightfulness of phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. The paper will discuss a hermeneutic of Idols proposed by Francis Bacon, and will conclude by proposing Paul Ricoeur’s correlating inclusion of objectifying explanation (expliquer/comprendre) as a necessary phase in interpretative action.
6. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
Emmanuel Alloa, Judith Michalet Differences in Becoming: Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze on Individuation
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
For a long time, Gilbert Simondon’s work was known only as either a philosophy restricted to the problem of technology or as an inspirational source for Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference. As Simondon’s thinking is now finally in the process of being recognized in its own right as one of the most original philosophies of the twentieth century, this also entails that some critical work needs to be done to disentangle it from an all too hasty identification with (or even subsumption under) Deleuzian categories. While both Simondon and Deleuze have made crucial contributions towards a theory of differential individuation that significantly diverges from other authors associated with French poststructuralism insofar as they insist on the dynamic and vital dimension of difference, they also differ on crucial points. Whereas Simondon sees the process of becoming as transductive amplification, Deleuze theorizes it as intensifying involution, leading to two notably distinct concepts of difference.
7. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
Michele Cardani, Marco Tamborini Italian New Realism and Transcendental Philosophy: A Critical Account
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
By recognizing Immanuel Kant as the founder of the so-called being-knowing fallacy, the Italian new realism proposed and defended by Maurizio Ferraris argues for the autonomy of ontology from epistemology. The dependence of reality on our conceptual framework would in fact transform our world in a system of beliefs that loses its connection with the “hardness” of the given data. This paper discusses Ferraris’s claims by maintaining that they are based upon an insufficient reading of history of philosophy, particularly, upon a misinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy. Firstly, we shortly analyze the relationship between transcendental philosophy and post-modernism through a comparison with Friedrich Nietzsche: we criticize their conflation. Secondly, we take into consideration Kant’s arguments about science and answer a particular objection of Ferraris by investigating how we can legitimately acquire knowledge in the deep past without contradicting Kantianism. In this sense, we believe that the new realism presents inconsistent arguments.
8. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 3
Dominik Finkelde Logics of Scission: The Subject as "Limit of the World" in Badiou and Wittgenstein
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Badiou and Wittgenstein focus in their works on potentialities of innovation in the realm of thought as well as in the realm of politics. These innovations manifest themselves especially when two seemingly contrasting jurisdictions of thought—present in politics and logic—meet and merge. For Badiou a set-theoretical process of enforcement may change pre-established templates of a political doxa. For Wittgenstein it is the spontaneity of concept-formations that crisscross referential relations within the “space of reasons” and through performative enactments make visible unexpected places of unprompted innovation. For both Wittgenstein and Badiou, the subject is of vital importance in this union of politics and logic. It is both a “limit of the world” as well as a “supernumerary agency.” Characterized as such, it can provoke new worlds to appear with the aid of what I will call self-proclaimed logics of scission.
9. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Werner Hamacher, Julia Ng The One Right No One Ever Has
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
The right to have rights was never a right to be had. Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation of the most elementary right of all, the right to participate in the definition of rights, is not a description of a given right that belongs to one or the other form of law, but an indictment of a deficit in the construction of legality on the basis of the right to withdraw legal protection from members of a community, and therefore to refuse rights. The one and only human right thus turns out to be ungrounded in anything but the idea of its being had: a “property right” that traces back to the legal, philosophical and linguistic definitions of “one’s own” since antiquity. Only the gift of the incalculable and of that which cannot possibly be legitimated can ground the autarchic self-relation of having: ungrounded in the rationally organized nature of any given, possessing the right to membership in a political community turns out to be permission to freely transfer this possession to another, without expectation of a return.
10. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Peg Birmingham, Ian Alexander Moore, Orcid-ID Vilde Aavitsland Editors' Introduction: Étienne Balibar and Remembering Werner Hamacher
11. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Amy Allen Rationality, Normativity, and Critique: Response to Sheth and Zambrana
12. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Amy E. Wendling Turn Up the Heat: A Look at Shannon Winnubst’s Way Too Cool
13. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Richard A. Lee, Jr. I May Not Be Cool, but I Am Classy: A Response to Way Too Cool
14. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Shannon Winnubst Selling T-shirts at SPEP: The Unexamined Ego of Continental Philosophy; Response to Wendling and Lee
15. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Dimitris Vardoulakis What Comes Before the Citizen?: Violence and the Limits of the Political in Balibar
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Vardoulakis traces the function of violence in Balibar’s theory of the subject/citizen. Doing so, Vardoulakis brings together areas of Balibar’s philosophy that are usually discussed separately, such as his work on Spinoza, his anthropology and his lectures on violence. Finally, Vardoulakis uses the presentation of the way violence figures in all these fields to offer a critique of Balibar’s conceptions of democracy and power.
16. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Hasana Sharp Spinoza’s Commonwealth and the Anthropomorphic Illusion
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Balibar presents Spinoza as a profound critic of “the anthropomorphic illusion.” Spinoza famously derides the tendency of humans to project their own imagined traits and tendencies onto the rest of nature. The anthropomorphic illusion yields a gross overestimation our own agency. I argue in this essay that the flip side of this illusion is our refusal to extend certain properties we reserve exclusively to ourselves. The result is that we disregard the power of social and political institutions because they do not resemble us. The anthropomorphic illusion therefore causes us both to overestimate our power as singular individuals and to underestimate the power of social and political institutions. If we understand ourselves and institutions as “transindividuals” rather than on the illusory model of substantial individuality, it is unproblematic to attribute individuality to collective powers, like the commonwealth.
17. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Cinzia Arruzza Capitalism and the Conflict over Universality: A Feminist Perspective
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
In this paper I adopt Étienne Balibar’s distinction between three forms of universality—“universality as reality,” “fictive universality,” and “ideal universality”—in order to retrieve universalism for feminist politics. The paper articulates a proposal for the feminist adoption of a specific notion of universality, which I call political insurgent universality. This notion is not based on a definition of human essence or of women's nature. It is rather rooted in the “real universality” historically created by capitalism, that is, in the fact that capitalism has generated a world in which people are interdependent and in which capitalist accumulation poses objective universal constraints on social reproduction.
18. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Mark G. E. Kelly Whither Balibar's Europeanism?
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
This article is a critique of Étienne Balibar's philosophical orientation towards Europe, construed as both an ideal and an institutional reality, in light of recent European crises. I argue that Balibar's commitment to Europe follows from his longstanding political-philosophical preference for a compromise position between political utopianism and political realism, but that this compromise is ultimately incoherent, combining the ungroundedness of utopianism with the undue self-limitation of realism.
19. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Angelica Nuzzo "Living in the Interregnum": Hegelian Reflections on the "Dynamic Universal"
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
The essay uses the second moment of Hegel’s “absolute method,” namely, the moment of the advancing action, in order to shed light on the constitution of the dynamic universal in society, politics, and history through the moment of stasis or crisis. In the action that advances or in the middle moment of the method lies the “crisis” of the unfolding process. Dialectically, action advances by stalling and imploding but also by emerging from this frozen state, moving on from it. I indicate the moment of crisis-stasis as the predicament of “living in the interregnum” and examine it by appealing to Thucydides, Gramsci, and Gordimer.
20. Philosophy Today: Volume > 61 > Issue: 4
Martin McQuillan Saint Étienne: Balibar, Grexit, and Universalism
abstract | view |  rights & permissions
Étienne Balibar has provided a sustained commentary on the politics of Greece and its relation to the European Union. This writing is a practical mobiliza­tion of Balibar’s theoretical work on universalism and European identities. This essay questions some of the assumptions that provide a seeming confidence in Balibar’s decision-making with respect to Greece that are not found elsewhere in his work. It goes on to explore the questions of balance and calculation in Balibar and in writing on politics more generally.