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A Time For The Humanities: Futurity And The Limits Of Autonomy, James J. Bono, Tim Dean, Ewa P. Ziarek

Education

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?

The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, …

Die Naturgeschichte Der Griechischen Bronze, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

I take up Pliny’s account that 3000 life-sized, bronze statues were to be found in Rhodes, Athens, Olympia, etc. Far from the plaster image of 18th century aestheticism and apart from the modern conception of ‘desire’, the agonistic tradition of competitive contest (not conflict as Nietzsche reminds us), suggests that the Greek found himself against and in tension with such statues. A hermeneutic phenomenological reflection raises the question of the ‘look’ of such bronzes in the context both of art history and aesthetics and I refer to contemporary empirical analogies and research suggesting that ancient statues were modeled from life. …

Ad Jacob Taubes, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Will As Commitment And Resolve: An Existential Account Of Creativity, Love, Virtue, And Happiness, John Davenport

Philosophy & Theory

In contemporary philosophy, the will is often regarded as a sheer philosophical fiction. In Will as Commitment and Resolve, Davenport argues not only that the will is the central power of human agency that makes decisions and forms intentions but also that it includes the capacity to generate new motivation different in structure from prepurposive desires.

The concept of "projective motivation" is the central innovation in Davenport's existential account of the everyday notion of striving will. Beginning with the contrast between "eastern" and "western" attitudes toward assertive willing, Davenport traces the lineage of the idea of projective motivation from …

The Philosophical Approach To God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Edition, W. Norris Clarke, S.J.

Philosophy & Theory

This book is a revised and expanded edition of three lectures delivered by the author at Wake Forest University in 1979. Long out of print, in its new edition it should be a valuable resource for scholars and teachers of the philosophy of religion.

The first two lectures, after a critique of the incompleteness of St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous Five Ways of arguing for the existence of God, explore lesser-known resources of Aquinas’s philosophical ascent of the mind to God: the unrestricted dynamism of the human spirit as it reaches toward the fullness of being, and the strictly metaphysical ascent …

Reflections On Greek Bronze And 'The Statue Of Humanity'. Heidegger's Aesthetic Phenomenology And Nietzsche's Agonistic Politics, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

"Heidegger’S Will To Power," Journal Of The British Society For Phenomenology, Vol. 38, No. 1 (January 2007): 37-60, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

I argue that Heidegger deliberately composed the Beiträge zur Philosophie in order to keep it as an unpublished work throughout his life. In 1935, Heidegger was named to the board of directors for the National Socialist edition of Nietzsche’s collected works. This experience brought Heidegger into contact with the editorial forces that control an author’s legacy, even an author of Nietzsche’s formidable stylistic powers. And as is typical enough, the parallel Heidegger drew was a personal one. In response, Heidegger composed what might stand as his own “Nachlaß” material. The Beiträge would then work to limit Heidegger’s vulnerability to editorial …

“The Problem Of Science” In Nietzsche And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Research Resources

Nietzsche and Heidegger pose important philosophical questions to science and its technological projects. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and I argue that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. More than a thoughtful reflection on science, however, the heart of philosophy is also at stake in …

Teilhard And The Future Of Humanity, Thierry Meynard, S.J.

Religion

Fifty years after his death, the thought of the French scientist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) continues to inspire new ways of understanding humanity’s future. Trained as a paleontologist and philosopher, Teilhard was an innovative synthesizer of science and religion, developing an idea of evolution as an unfolding of material and mental worlds into an integrated, holistic universe at what he called the Omega Point. His books, such as the bestselling The Phenomenon of Man, have influenced generations of ecologists, environmentalists, planners, and others concerned with the fate of the earth.

This book brings together original essays …

Who Is Zarathustra’S Nietzsche?, David B. Allison

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

With the appearance of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the work immediately following that — particularly, in Book Five of The Gay Science and in the 1886 Prefaces to the Second Edition of his works, there emerges a remarkably transformed sense of Nietzsche’s own self-awareness, a turn, based on his own autocritique, that basically works as a form of self-therapy — enabling him to grasp the really binding purchase the social symbolic has on the individual. In submitting himself to this autocritique, he first raises the question as to its possiblity, and then proceeds to effectuate it in a rather …

Words In Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy And Poetry, Music And Eros In Hölderlin, Nietzsche, And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche’S “Gay” Science, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Offers a reading of the allusion to the 'Provencal' in Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, including the troubadour’s art (or 'technic') of poetic song, an art at once secret, anonymous and thus nonsubjective, but also including logical disputation, for which it is the model, and comprising, perhaps above all, the important ideal of action (and pathos) at a distance: l’amour lointain. But beyond the Provençal character and atmosphere of the troubadour, Nietzsche’s conception of a joyful science, Nietzsche's 'gay' science also adumbrates a critique of science understood as the collective ideal of scholarship, and including classical philology as much as logic, …

Heideggers "Beiträge Zur Philosophie" Als Ethik. Phronesis Und Die Frage Nach Der Technik Im Naturwissenschaftlichen Zeitalter., Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Ecstatic Morality And Sexual Politics: A Catholic And Antitotalitarian Theory Of The Body, Graham James Mcaleer

Religion

This first book-length treatment of Thomas Aquinas’s theory of the body presents a Catholic understanding of the body and its implications for social and political philosophy. Making a fundamental contribution to antitotalitarian theory, McAleer argues that a sexual politics reliant upon Aquinas’s theory of the body is better (because less violent) than other commonly available theories. He contrasts this theory with those of four other groups of thinkers: the continental tradition represented by Kant, Schopenhauer, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Levinas, and Deleuze; feminism, in the work of Donna Haraway; an alternative Catholic theory to be found in Karl Rahner; and the “Radical …

Mousike Techne: The Philosophical Practice Of Music In Plato, Nietzsche, And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

After retracing the breadth of the definition of music in antiquity to the end of justifying the sense in which one may speak of 'the music of philosophy' as Plato's Socrates does, this essay re-reads the Platonic distinction between philosophy as the highest kind of music and performative, as heard or played sung music as a lower form. It then turns to an exploration of Nietzsche's writing style conceived on a muscial model precisely qua aphoristic and concludes with a review of Heidegger's thought as musically composed or adumbrated.

Continental Philosophy In Britain And America, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Continental, or as it is sometimes called, contemporary European philosophy represents a range of approaches to academic philosophy distinguished from the analytic modality dominating professional or institutional philosophy in the United Kingdom and in the United States, as in Australia, Canada, and Ireland. Where the analytic tradition itself may be said to trace its own roots to Europe, e.g., positivism may be traced to France and its originator August Comte, and logical empiricism to Germany and to Austria and the writings of Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein and the members of the Vienna Circle, continental philosophy expresses an ideological tradition …

Continental Philosophy In Britain And America, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

list of chapter sections en lieu of an abstract

“Introduction” 22-28; “Phenomenology” 28- 34; “Hermeneutic Phenomenology” 34-40; “Existentialism: Toward an Ethics of Responsibility & a Feminist Erotic Ethic” 40-44; Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur; Continental Aesthetics: Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception” 51-56; “Continental Philosophy of Science” 56-58; “The Hermeneutics of the Other: The Dominion of the Ethical” 58-64; “The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory” 64-67; “From Structuralism to Deconstruction” 67-82.

Divine Illusions, Alphonso Lingis

Research Resources

David Allison says to his readers that Nietzsche writes for you — you and him and me. In his book he tells of what of Nietzsche’s thoughts he has, with long years of research and penetrating and generous reflection, made his own. The lucidity of this book enables us to see if these thoughts can also become ours. Nietzsche’s thoughts are not only extremely complex but hard thoughts which we cannot make our own without a struggle. The finest virtue of a philosophical book on Nietzsche is that it provokes this struggle. Here I am only going to recount a …

Between Dancing And Writing: The Practice Of Religious Studies, Kimerer L. Lamothe

Philosophy & Theory

This book provides philosophical grounds for an emerging area of scholarship: the study of religion and dance.

In the first part, LaMothe investigates why scholars in religious studies have tended to overlook dance, or rhythmic bodily movement, in favor of textual expressions of religious life. In close readings of Descartes, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, LaMothe traces this attitude to formative moments of the field in which philosophers relied upon the practice of writing to mediate between the study of “religion,” on the one hand, and “theology,” on the other.

In the second part, LaMothe revives the work of theologian, …

Beyond Violence: Religious Sources Of Social Transformation In Judaism, Christianity, And Islam, James L. Heft, S.M.

Religion

In an age of terrorism and other forms of violence committed in the name of religion, how can religion become a vehicle for peace, justice, and reconciliation? And in a world of bitter conflicts-many rooted in religious difference-how can communities of faith understand one another?

The essays in this important book take bold steps forward to answering these questions. The fruit of a historic conference of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scholars and community leaders, the essays address a fundamental question: how the three monotheistic traditions can provide the resources needed in the work of justice and reconciliation.

Two distinguished scholars …

From Fleck’S Denkstil To Kuhn’S Paradigm: Conceptual Schemes And Incommensurability, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This article argues that the limited influence of Ludwik Fleck’s ideas on philosophy of science is due not only to their indirect dissemination by way of Thomas Kuhn, but also to an incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework of history and philosophy of science and Fleck’s own more integratedly historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to understanding the evolution of scientific discovery. What Kuhn named “paradigm” offers a periphrastic rendering or oblique translation of Fleck’s Denkstil/Denkkollektiv, a derivation that may also account for the lability of the term “paradigm”. This was due not to Kuhn’s unwillingness to credit Fleck but rather to …

Continental Philosophy Of Science: Mach, Duhem, And Bachelard, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

As representatives of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empiricism and positivism, the particular names Ernst Mach (1838–1916), Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) and Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) have of course and as already noted much more than a merely historical significance. In analytic philosophy of science, an ongoing tradition of reinterpretations of their work continues to influence the current linguistic or theoretical crisis in analytic philosophy and semiotics - semantics of scientific theory (Duhem not only as represented by W.V.O.Quine but also Stanley Jaki) as well as, on the other hand, the current emphasis on experiment representing the counter-absolutist turn to the history (and …

On The Analytic-Continental Divide In Philosophy: Nietzsche's Lying Truth, Heidegger's Speaking Language, And Philosophy, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This article explores the question of the nature of the differences between analytic and continental styles of philosophizing, raising the political stakes of the professional differentiation between, and especially: the denial of the difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. Discusses the question of the annexation of the philosophical themes of continental philosophy on the part of analytic philosophy, annexation because it is not dialogical or hermeneutical, appropriation or cooption simply by refusing the distinction between styles altogether.

Heidegger: Through Phenomenology To Thought, William J. Richardson

Research Resources

No abstract provided.

Kuhn's Paradigm As A Parable For The Cold War: Incommensurability And Its Discontents From Fuller's Tale Of Harvard To Fleck's Unsung Lvov, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

In a journal issue dedicated to a discussion of Steve Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, I argue that Kuhn’s limited acknowledgment of Fleck’s influence on his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was due to a foundational incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework for philosophical studies of science and Fleck’s historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to scientific progress. The incommensurability in question constituted an insurmountable tension between the kind of language and thinking manifest in Fleck’s study and the conceptual language evident in Kuhn and characteristic of one might still call the received view’ in philosophy of science. …

Getting At The Rapture Of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly And Visual Experience, Leo J. O'Donovan Sj

Research Resources

Leo J. O'Donovan offers an art-critical account of the American artist Ellsworth Kelly including a comprehensive overview of his career and his attention to color and to vision. O'Donovan explores context and situation to raise questions of painterly color and atmosphere:

Citation:

Leo J. Donovan, "Getting at the Rapture of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly and Visual Experience." In: Babette Babich, ed., Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Hermeneutic Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 295—300.

In-Between Science And Religion, Dominic Balestra

Research Resources

This paper traces the demise of the demarcation between science and non-science by falsifiability in early Popper through sophisticated revisions which results in transforming Popperian falsifiability into a historical situated criticizability, and one which retains a Duhemian requirement of subjectivity. This transformation opens a revised Popperian standpoint to the disciplinary rationality of theology, with important implications for reconsidering the relation between science and religion. It is then concluded that a significant, intellectual relationship of either dialogue or convergence between science and theology requires something like Patrick Heelan's hermeneutical philosophy of science for the standpoint in-between science and religion.

A Priestly View Of Bible Arithmetic: Deity's Regulative Aesthetic Activity Within Davidic Musicology, Ernest G. Mcclain

Research Resources

Reading arithmetic proportion in the bible via musical hermeneutics, this essay emphasizes the important role of music in predominantly aural cultures. Applying Patrick Heelan's non-distributive lattice logic to examples extracted from the bible, McClain applies the notion of regulative aesthetic activity to the Davidic musicology embedded in Bible mathology. Includes several illustrative diagrams.

Was Heisst Das -- Die Bewandtnis? Retranslating The Categories Of Heideggers Hermeneutics Of The Technical, Theodore Kisiel

Research Resources

No abstract provided.

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

Research Resources

In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …