Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Philosophies Of Science: Mach Duhem Bachelard, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

approaches reflect the philosophical reflections on science expressed from the tradition of continental thought. In this context, the philosophical reflections on science to be found in Mach, Duhem and Bachelard may be mined for what should prove to be a productive historical foundation between these two traditions addressed to a common focus. Mach, Duhem and Bachelard among other thinkers have argued that science itself is more critical, indeed more inherently ‘hermeneutic’, than philosophy. But this point is problematic, and not only because of its counter-intuitive content -- whereby science ends up with the virtue of being more hermeneutic than hermeneutics …

Sloterdijk’S Cynicism: Diogenes In The Marketplace, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

Nietzsche And Lou, Eros And Art : On Lou’S Triangles And The « Exquisite Dream » Of Sacro Monte, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

Le Zarathoustra De Nietzsche Et Le Style Parodique. A Propos De L’Hyperanthropos De Lucien Et Du Surhomme De Nietzsche, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

Abstract Nietzsche’s Übermensch is derived from Lucian of Samosata’s term hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances in the context of that terminological origination in Lucian’s Kataplous — literally: sailing into port — referring to the journey of the soul into the afterlife, as escorted by Hermes and ferried by Charon along with myriads of others facing the same fate. The Kataplous he tyrannos, a title usually rendered as the Downward Journey (or The Tyrant), is a Menippean satire telling the tale of the “overman” supposed superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly life …

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

Babette Babich

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 …

Sokal’S Hermeneutic Hoax: Physics And The New Inquisition, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

“The Hermeneutics of a Hoax: Physics and the New Inquisition” offers a rhetorical analysis and hermeneutics reading of the parodic character of Sokal's "hoax." From the perspective of a philosopher of science, it is argued that it is important to attend both to the rhetorical level of philosophy and science. In addition it is important to consider the culture of status (Bourdieu) as well as the self-reflective weaknesses of the culture of physics including those of (traditionally) physics-dominated philosophy of science. Echoing some of the criticisms and highlighting the points of social advocacy of the late Paul Feyerabend underscores the …

Nietzsche And Eros Between The Devil And God’S Deep Blue Sea: The Problem Of The Artist As Actor–Jew–Woman, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

In just one aphorism in The Gay Science, Nietzsche arrays “The Problem of the Artist” in a complex, highly reticulated constellation. Addressing every member of the excluded grouping of disenfranchised “others,” Nietzsche turns to the destitution of a god of love keyed to the self- or inward-turning absorption of the human heart. His ultimate and irrecusably tragic project to restore the innocence of becoming requires the affirmation of the problem of suffering as the task of learning how to love. Nietzsche sees the eros of art as what can teach us how to make things beautiful, desirable, lovable in the …

Zu Nietzsches Stil, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

Das Thema von Nietzsches Stil ist hier sowohl von Bedeutung als Frage nach dem Wesen jenes Stils wie auch als Frage danach, was er in philosophischer, nicht einfach in asthetischer oder literarischer Hinsicht erreicht hat. Hier wird nachgelegt, dass die Kunst des Lesens, die technische Kunst des hörens als eine Art des Hörens in einer philosophischen Seinsweise zu verstehen sei. Damit setzt sie nicht allein eine diskursive Kunst musikalischen Gespürs seitens des schreibenden, sondern eigentlich auch seitens des Lesenden voraus. Untersucht wird vor allem, Nietzsches Aphorismos im Rahmen des Antisemitismus. Diese außerordentlich komplexe innere Ausrichtung von Nietzsches Stil ist die …

The Birth Of Kd Lang’S Hallelujah Out Of The ‘Spirit Of Music’: Performing Desire And ‘Recording Consciousness’ On Facebook And Youtube, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

The Hallelujah Effect on the Internet The initial focus of this essay, apart from important preliminary references to Leonard Cohen is on kd lang, not as composer (although she is one) but musical performer and not as guitarist (although she is one) but as a singer and although her live performances have to make all the difference, very specifically, for the sake of any analysis, specifically as her singing is available in video format on YouTube. Of course there are many readings of kd lang and popular music, and of course most of them focus on the way she dresses, …

Great Men, Little Black Dresses, & The Virtues Of Keeping One’S Feet On The Ground, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

One can use phenomenology, along with the usual tools of scholarship and analysis, to make the point that the promises of the 1960’s and 1970’s especially those of the women’s movement, have yet to bear significant fruit in the academy. Hence, for everybody’s non-thingly phenomenology of non-practice, a handy-dandy wiki-check on the net yields the claim that “U.S. Department of Education reports indicate that philosophy is one of the least proportionate, and possibly the least proportionate, fields in the humanities with respect to gender,” with a rather dismal addendum reporting that in “2004, the percentage of Ph.D.s in philosophy going …

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

Babette Babich

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 …

Adorno On Science And Nihilism, Animals, And Jews, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No less than Heidegger or Nietzsche, Adorno had his own critical notions of truth/untruth. But Adorno’s readers are unsettled by the barest hint of anything that might be taken to be anti-science. Thus it is argued that Adorno opposes not science but scientism. But, and here not unlike Arendt, Adorno argued that so-called “scientistic” tendencies are the very conditions of society and of scientific thought.” I ask how we are to read Adorno by exploring his thought on animals and nihilism.

Towards A Critical Philosophy Of Science: Continental Beginnings And Bugbears, Whigs, And Waterbears, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not – excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a …

The Ister: Between The Documentary And Heidegger’S Lecture Course Politics, Geographies, And Rivers, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

The Ister, the 2004 documentary by the Australian scholars and videographers, David Barison, a political theorist, and Daniel Ross, a philosopher, appeals to Martin Heidegger’s 1942 lecture course, Hölderlins Hymne «Der Ister»and the video takes us «backward» as the river flows: beginning from the Danube’s delta where it ends in the sea and «journeying» with it to its source in the Alps. the value of the Barison/Ross documentary for both political theory and philosophy is its illustration of the technological incursions or assaults on the river itself, that is to say: its representation of the ‘uses’ and hence of the …

Greek Bronze: Holding A Mirror To Life, Expanded Reprint From The Irish Philosophical Yearbook 2006: In Memoriam John J. Cleary 1949-2009, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

To explore the ethical and political role of life-sized bronzes in ancient Greece, as Pliny and others report between 3,000 and 73,000 such statues in a city like Rhodes, this article asks what these bronzes looked like. Using the resources of hermeneutic phenomenological reflection, as well as a review of the nature of bronze and casting techniques, it is argued that the ancient Greeks encountered such statues as images of themselves in agonistic tension in dynamic and political fashion. The Greek saw, and at the same time felt himself regarded by, the statue not as he believed the statue divine …

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

Babette Babich

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.

Nietzsches Wissenschaftsphilosophie - Vorrede, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

Wo Kant als Begründer der modernen philosophischen Kritik die Absicht hatte, die Grundlagen der Möglichkeit einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik aufzuzeigen, die als Wissenschaft würde auftreten können, artikuliert Nietzsches Kritik die Grundlegung für jede Wissenschaftstheorie, die als Philosophie auftreten und Philosophie bleiben kann. Eine kritische, reflektierte Wissenschaftstheorie zu etablieren, ist nur als Philosophie möglich,

während das, was man Philosophy of Science – also deutsch: Wissenschaftstheorie – im traditionell analytischen Sinn genannt hat, tatsächlich keine Philosophie ist.

In diesem Buch wird die Wissenschaftsphilosophie Nietzsches aus der Perspektive einer Befragung des Wesens der Wissenschaft unter der Optik der Kunst betrachtet. Dies schließt die …

On The Order Of The Real: Nietzsche And Lacan, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

Ex Aliquo Nihil: Nietzsche On Science And Modern Nihilism. Acpq, 84-2 (Spring 2010): 231-256., Babette Babich

Babette Babich

This essay explores the nihilistic coincidence of the ascetic ideal and Nietzsche’s localization of science in the conceptual world of anarchic socialism as Nietzsche indicts the uncritical convictions of modern science by way of a critique of the causa sui, questioning both religion and the enlightenment as well as both free and unfree will and condemning the “poor philology” enshrined in the language of the “laws” of nature. Reviewing the history of philosophical nihilism in the context of Nietzsche’s “tragic knowledge” along with political readings of nihilism, willing nothing rather than not willing at all, today’s this-worldly and very planetary …

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

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

"An Impoverishment Of Philosophy", Babette Babich

Babette Babich

Interview on philosophy journals and editing, academic publishing, digital content, the analytic continental divide in philosophy, its persistence along with the reasons for its denial, philosophy curricula.

Early Continental Philosophy Of Science, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

Ad Jacob Taubes, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

Continental Philosophy In Britain And America, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

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 …

Nietzsche’S Post-Human Imperative: On The “All-Too-Human” Dream Of Transhumanism, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

No abstract provided.

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

Babette Babich

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 …