Continental Philosophy Commons^™

Introduction To The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism And The Politics Of Popular Culture, Roland K. Végső

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The first half of The Naked Communist is devoted to the theoretical and historical foundations of my reading of anti-Communist fictions. After the theoretical introduction, I examine anti-Communist aesthetic ideology by first analyzing its political and then its aesthetic components.

In the second half, I examine the way the culture of anti-Communism defined the “world” as the ultimate horizon of political imagination. Included is a brief overview of some of the most popular texts of the given genre.

Finally, I conclude these chapters with a reading of particular authors.

Staffan Müller-Wille And Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History Of Heredity, Charles H. Pence

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Higher Than The Original Stands The Translation: Translating Heidegger Into Filipino, Remmon E. Barbaza

Philosophy Department Faculty Publications

This paper is a reflection on the author’s experience of translating Martin Heidegger into Filipino. It first addresses the questions of principles underlying the act of translation, such as those of fidelity (to both source and target languages, original author and translator), as well as the role of the translator as an intermediary between the original author and the readers. Then it demonstrates examples of his experience of translating selected key terms and passages in Heidegger—such as sein, stellen, Ereignis, and their cognates—indicating the difficulties as well as the challenges that arise in the work of translation. A notable problem …

The Desert Of The Ethical, Jules Simon

Departmental Papers (Philosophy)

 As far as I can tell, the concept of “desert” in Levinas’s thought seems to retain itsfamiliar associations, namely, as an environment that can be empirically characterizedas inhospitable, barren, and destitute of the kinds of material resources necessary forthe growth of the autonomous and autochthonous subjective self. It also seems plausiblethat a relevant extension of desert conditions to human community in Levinas’stopography would be the “cities” of concentration camps of the Holocaust. In otherwords, there is a correlative interior type of desert that, with Levinas, can be intuitedas what I am calling a desert of the ethical . In what …

To Live, By Grace, William Robert

Religion - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Kierkegaard, Paraphrase, And The Unity Of Form And Content, Antony Aumann

Journal Articles

On one standard view, paraphrasing Kierkegaard requires no special literary talent. It demands no particular flair for the poetic. However, Kierkegaard himself rejects this view. He says we cannot paraphrase in a straightforward fashion some of the ideas he expresses in a literary format. To use the words of Johannes Climacus, these ideas defy direct communication. In this paper, I piece together and defend the justification Kierkegaard offers for this position. I trace its origins to concerns raised by Lessing and Mendelssohn about the relationship between form and content in works of art. I maintain that Kierkegaard follows early German …

Reconciling Positivism And Realism: Kelsen And Habermas On Democracy And Human Rights, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

It is well known that Hans Kelsen and Jürgen Habermas invoke realist arguments drawn from social science in defending an international, democratic human rights regime against Carl Schmitt’s attack on the rule of law. However, despite embracing the realist spirit of Kelsen’s legal positivism, Habermas criticizes Kelsen for neglecting to connect the rule of law with a concept of procedural justice (Part I). I argue, to the contrary (Part II), that Kelsen does connect these terms, albeit in a manner that may be best described as functional, rather than conceptual. Indeed, whereas Habermas tends to emphasize a conceptual connection between …

Philosophische Figuren, Frauen Und Liebe: Zu Nietzsche Und Lou, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

On Nietzsche’S Judgment Of Style And Hume’S Quixotic Taste: On The Science Of Aesthetics And ‘Playing’ The Satyr, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay reviews Nietzsche’s discussion of scholarly judgments of style beginning with his own inaugural lecture at Basel together with David Hume’s stylistic reflections in Hume's “On the Standard of Taste.” This casts light both on the context and the substance of Nietzsche’s own scholarly concern with the question of style and taste in terms of what Nietzsche called the “science of aesthetics” and consequently of scholarly judgment in both classics (or classical philology, here including archaeology and historiography) and philosophy. I also include a brief discussion of Nietzsche’s phenomenological performance practice of dance or playing the “satyr.”

On Nietzsche’S Judgment Of Style And Hume’S Quixotic Taste: On The Science Of Aesthetics And ‘Playing’ The Satyr, Babette Babich

Working Papers

No abstract provided.

The Convergent Conceptions Of Being In Mainstream Analytic And Postmodern Continental Philosophy, Jeremy Barris

Humanities Faculty Research

There is ultimately a very close convergence between the conceptions of being in widely recurrent elements of both mainstream Anglo-American philosophy and mainstream postmodern Continental philosophy. One characteristic idea often drawn upon in Anglo-American or analytic philosophy is that we establish what has meaning (at all or as such) and so what we can say about what is, by making evident the limits of sense or what simply cannot be meant. A characteristic idea in Continental philosophy of being is that being emerges through contrast and interplay with what it is not, with what has no being at all and …

There’S No Place Like Home: From Oz To Antichrist, J. Sage Elwell

Journal of Religion & Film

This article explores the dialectic of the uncanny in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Flemming, 1939) and Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), treating the latter as a sequel to the former such that we encounter Dorothy first as a young girl and then as a grown woman. I observe that the uncanny entails a repressive and expressive moment that is cinematically rendered in these two films, and drawing on Freud and Žižek, I argue that in Dorothy’s evolution from Oz to Antichrist we see that the witches and wizards and gods and devils of our own minds are known to …

Scapegoats And Redemption On Shutter Island, Cari Myers

Journal of Religion & Film

The themes of redemptive violence, scapegoating, and ritual in the films of Martin Scorsese have provided much grist for critical scholarship. While it is going too far to claim that Scorsese is intentionally interpreting Girardian themes (which are themselves borrowed from a rich mythological tradition), the comparisons between the theorist and the director are compelling. My goal here is to establish the primary themes of scapegoating, mimesis, the cycle of violence, and feuding identities that occur in both Girard’s works and Scorsese’s films and pull them forward into a more recent work of Scorsese, Shutter Island.

In The Shadow Of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought In America. By Robert Gooding- Williams. (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2009)., Ronald Sundstrom

Philosophy

Robert Gooding-Williams’s In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro Modern Political Thought In America offers several contributions to political theory and African American philosophy and politics.1 His conception of “Afro-Modern Politics” sharpens our understanding of the history and tradition of African American political thought, and his analyses of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Blacks Folks and Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom adds to and challenges various debates about their politics and legacies.2 Gooding-Williams applies the insights from his comparative analysis of Du Bois and Douglass to distinguish a conception of politics as rule from a conception of …

Genius Loci. Zu Nietzsche, Lou Und Dem Sacro Monte, Bzw. Den Sacri Monti, Babette Babich

Research Resources

No abstract provided.

The Self, Its Ideal, And God: The Implications Of Non-Objective Self-Experience, Jeremy H. Smith

English Faculty Scholarship

This article explicates the unified argument of James G. Hart's 1200 page work Who One Is. Hart begins with an exploration of the non-objective self as propertyless ipseity; then relates that sheer ipseity to the concrete development a self; and then, that self to the ideal self which guides its development; and finally, the ideal self to God as its origin. Hart also shows the relevance of Jaspers' notion of Existenz at each of these stages. The uniqueness and “mineness” of any “I” cannot be a matter of properties. Each “I” is a unique “haecceity” for which multiple instantiation …

Politics And Heidegger: Aristotle, Superman, And Žižek, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

This essay discusses Heidegger's thinking on the political and technology in the context of metaphysics in an age that is increasingly directed to both technology and the imaginary or the virtual. The context of Aristotelian phronesis is traced back to Aristotle's youth in Macedonia and the circumstance of war and world conquest, to the allure of a comic book character (that would be the Action Comic's figure of Superman) and the cinematic seduction of a pair of eyeglasses to conclude with a review of Latour's network actants and Žižek on Marxism (and Occupy Wall Street).

Martin Heidegger On Günther Anders And Technology: On Ray Kurzweil, Fritz Lang, And Transhumanism, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

La Fin De La Pensée? Philosophie Analytique Contre Philosophie Continentale, Babette Babich

Research Resources

No abstract provided.

Covenant Nation: The Politics Of Grace In Early American Literature, Justin M. Scott-Coe

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The argument of this dissertation is that a critical reading of the concept of "covenant" in early American writings is instrumental to understanding the paradoxes in the American political concepts of freedom and equality. Following Slavoj Zizek's theoretical approach to theology, I trace the covenant concept in early American literature from the theological expressions and disputes in Puritan Massachusetts through Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of Will and the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, showing how the covenant theology of colonial New England dispersed into more "secular" forms of what may be called an American political theology. The first chapter provides an …