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221. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
Michael Wiitala Non-Being and the Structure of Privative Forms in Plato’s Sophist
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In Plato’s Statesman, the Eleatic Stranger explains that the division of all human beings into Greek and barbarian is mistaken in that it fails to divide reality into genuine classes or forms (eide). The division fails because “barbarian” names a privative form, that is, a form properly indicated via negation: non-Greek. This paper examines how the Stranger characterizes privative forms in the Sophist. I argue that although the Stranger is careful to define privative forms as fully determinate, he nevertheless characterizes them as having a structure unlike that of their non-privative counterparts. A privative form, in contrast to a non-privative form, is indifferent to the specificity of its members.
222. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
Eve Rabinoff Rational and Non-rational Perception in Aristotle's De Anima
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The bulk of the account of perception that Aristotle offers in De Anima focuses on analyzing the operation of the five senses and the reception of their respective objects. On Aristotle’s own terms, this analysis is an incomplete account of perception, for it does not explain how perception operates in the life of an animal, with the aim of supporting a certain kind of life. This paper aims to supplement the account of the five senses by considering perception in the context of human life. I argue that human perception, i.e., rational perception, differs from non-rational perception insofar as the latter is perspectival—that is, the non-rational animal perceives objects only in light of its needs and desires—whereas the former is non-perspectival—that is, a person perceives objects as independent of and exceeding her desires.
223. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
Jean De Groot Why Epistemology Is Not Ancient: From Device and Drama into Philosophy
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This paper traces the significance of first principles (archai) in Greek philosophy to cognitive developments in colonial Greek Italy in the late fifth century BC. Conviction concerning principles comes from the power to make something true by action. Pairing and opposition, the forerunners of metonymy, are shown to structure disparate cultural phenomena—the making of figured numbers, the sundial, and the production, with the aid of device, of fear or panic in the spectators of Greek tragedy. From these starting points, the function of the gnômôn in knowledge is explored.
224. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
G. R. F. Ferrari Plato the Writer
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In this talk I consider a body of my more recent work in order to isolate the shared approach that it takes to reading Platonic dialogue, an approach which had been absent from my writing on Plato up to that point and is largely absent from any of the traditions that influence how most of us read Plato. Its key feature is a refusal to treat the character Socrates as operating as if he were Plato’s secret agent within the dialogue—as if one should attribute to Socrates all of the cunning and the control with which one might credit instead the author who scripted Socrates’s habitual triumphs. The focus of this new approach is rather on Plato’s “writerly” philosophizing: on how Plato exploits the distinction between what he and his character Socrates are up to as philosophers in order to guide our sense of his own activity and aims as a philosophic writer.
225. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
Sarah Jansen Audience Psychology and Censorship in Plato’s Republic: The Problem of the Irrational Part
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In Republic X, the “problem of the irrational part” is this: Greek tragedy interacts with non-reasoning elements of the soul, affecting audiences in ways that undermine their reasoned views about virtue and value. I suggest that the common construal of Socrates’s critique of Greek tragedy is inadequate, in that it belies key elements of Plato’s audience psychology; specifically, (1) the crucial role of the spirited part and (2) the audience’s cognitive contribution to spectatorship. I argue that Socrates’s emphasis on the audience’s cognitive contribution to spectatorship allows him to anticipate a non-authoritarian solution to the problem of the irrational part.
226. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
Francisco J. Gonzalez "I Have to Live in Eros": Heidegger's 1932 Seminar on Plato's Phaedrus
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Heidegger’s recently published 1932 seminar on Plato’s Phaedrus arguably represents his most successful dialogue with Plato, where such dialogue is characterized by both the deepest affinity and the most incisive opposition. The central thesis of Heidegger’s interpretation is that the Phaedrus is not simply a logos about eros, but rather an attempt to show that eros is the very essence of logos and that logos is thereby in its very essence dia-logue. Heidegger is thus here more attuned than ever before to the erotic and dialogical character of philosophy while at the same time concerned with how this conception of philosophy can lead to the eclipse of being and truth.
227. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
Theodore George Letter from the Edtior
228. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 19 > Issue: 2
Robert D. Metcalf The Situation of Epistemology in Plato’s Theaetetus
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While it may be controversial to categorize Plato’s Theatetetus as “epistemological,” given what is implied by this term, the dialogue does offer a discourse on knowledge, at least in the minimal sense of questioning knowledge. But more than that, the dialogue “situates” its questioning, and its critical examination of attempted definitions of knowledge, in two ways that are particularly illuminating: first, its dramatization of Socrates coming-to-know Theaetetus through philosophical dialogue; second, its taking for granted a whole array of epistemic practices and keeping them in view, peripherally, throughout the discussion. The most interesting example of the latter is found in the famous Digression of the Theaetetus, where the difference between philosophy and rhetoric is understood in terms of the knowledge/lack-of-knowledge belonging to each.
229. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Ben Vedder Schleiermacher’s Idea of Hermeneutics and the Feeling of Absolute Dependence
230. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
John Protevi Violence and Authority in Kant
231. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Rudi Visker Un-European Desires: Toward a Provincialism without Romanticism
232. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
John Sallis Of the Χώρα
233. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 1
Fabio Ciaramelli The Loss of Origin and Heidegger’s Question of Unheimlichkeit
234. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Philippe Van Haute Michel Foucault: Psychoanalysis and the Problem of the Law
235. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Jean-Luc Marion The End of the End of Metaphysics
236. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 2 > Issue: 2
Paul J. M. Van Tongeren Nietzsche’s Transfiguration of History: Historicality as Transfiguration
237. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 1
Daniel L. Tate Renewing the Question of Beauty: Gadamer on Plato’s Idea of the Beautiful
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Posing the question of beauty anew, Gadamer pursues a hermeneutic remembrance of the original relation of beauty and truth forgotten by modern aesthetics. For Gadamer, the essential relation of kalos and aletheia is preserved, above all, in Plato. This essay elaborates his retrieval of Plato, re-thinking the splendor of beauty and the illumination of truth from being as an event of coming-to-presence. After discussing his engagement with Heidegger the essay reconstructs Gadamer’s interpretative argument, showing how he interprets the transcendence, radiance, and measure that characterize Plato’s idea of the beautiful as structural features of being as an event of truth.
238. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 1
Tanja Staehler The Refuge of the Good in the Beautiful
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In the Platonic dialogues, the enigmatic concept of the good tends to retreat at those very moments when it is supposed to show itself. This paper examines the relation between the beautiful and the good as the good takes refuge in the beautiful. Hans-Georg Gadamer holds a particular interest in these retreats since they show that there is actually an emphasis on appearances and the human good in Plato. In contrast, Emmanuel Levinas is critical of the primacy of vision and the beautiful from an ethical perspective. The relevant passages in the dialogues will be interpreted with respect to this divergence.
239. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 1
Susanna Lindberg Lost in the World of Technology with and after Heidegger
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Is Heidegger’s theory of the era of technology a sufficent hermeneutics of contemporary globalization? It remains invaluable because it understands technology in terms of transcendence, and transcencence in terms of being-in-the-world. But should it nevertheless be revised in the context of contemporary social and technological environment? This article shows firstly how Heidegger’s general idea of being-in-the-world is specified in his theory of technology, and how technology reduces man and nature into “natural resources” and being into elemental techno-nature. Secondly, the article presents two types of critique to Heidegger’s idea: on the one hand, Ihde, Latour and Stiegler question Heidegger’s understanding of technology as a total system; on the other hand, Foucault and Eldred question Heidegger’s understanding of technology independently of social and economical structures. The article suggests that re-interpreted through these critiques, the theory of technology gives a good basis for an ontology of contemporary “uprooted” existence.
240. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 20 > Issue: 1
Gordon Hull Building Better Citizens: Hobbes Against the Ontological Illusion
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Hobbes rejects the Aristotelian political animal, a move that enables a malleable psychology in which we are driven by our passions and responses to external objects. Our psychology is accordingly overdetermined by our socio-cultural environment, and managing that environment becomes a central task of the state. A particular problem is what I call the “ontological illusion,” the constitutive human tendency to ontologize products of the imagination. I argue that Hobbes’s strategies for managing the ontological illusion govern part four of Leviathan. Those chapters are intended to convince elites that crediting ontological illusions in policy is disastrous, as his discussion of demonology and its thinly veiled references to witchcraft persecutions readily illustrates.