Philosophy Commons^™

Meaning And Development, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This book is a learned yet passionate critique of alternative theories of development as addressed to traditional societies. It offers a forceful argument for sacrifice to be made in the name of moral faith. The metaphysical grounds and the scientific verification for such a faith are explored. An eloquent and original case for pursuing economic development in accordance with democracy and human dignity.

The Unique Role Of Logic In The Development Of Heidegger's Dialogue With Kant, Frank Schalow

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Self-Overcoming In Foucault's Discipline And Punish, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Prisons are veritable universities of crime. Within them young offenders learn both the values and the techniques of hardened criminals. In addition to these lessons in professional ethics and theory, aspiring criminals also get hands-on experience within prison walls, for prisons are also centers of criminal activity: drug and arms trafficking, rape, gang warfare, and murder. And, like all good universities, prisons help their proteges make the contacts they need to further their budding careers.

Debts Due And Overdue: Beginnings Of Philosophy In Nietzsche, Heidegger, And Anaximander, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What sort of text is On the Genealogy of Morals, this work that Nietzsche called the "uncanniest" of all books? Is it only a book about morals, as the title might indicate? Even the superficial reader will see that much more is at stake, since questions concerning politics and aesthetics are prominent. But could we also read more attentively and with an ear to hearing a certain diagnosis of the metaphysical condition and its tradition that are necessarily implicated in the genealogy of morals? Certainly Nietzsche begins to suggest ideas of this sort quite early in the text, as in …

Jean-Luc Nancy And The Corpus Of Philosophy, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

How to touch, tactfully, the corpus of Jean-Luc Nancy? How can this corpus be shared and divided (partagé}? How can these words or thoughts be weighed? This text seems to set itself vigilantly and rigorously in opposition to the mystery of the incarnation and urges us to demystify the discourses of the body. The very translatability of the paper--to whatever degree translation is possible--and its presentation--in whatever way presence is possible--are modalities closely linked to the question of what body and corpus are and can be. The text "Corpus" is exscripted, to speak with Nancy, written out, that …

L'Abîme De La Vision, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Revenant a l'œuvre monumentale de Mikel Dufrenne sur la Phénomenologie de l'experience esthétique pour la considérer sous l'angle de l'évolution de notre compréhension de la phénoménologie depuis 1953, force est de constaterque Dufrenne se distançait déjà quelque peu d'une phénoménologie et d'une esthétique de la présence. Forts de la lecture des derniers essais de Heidegger et de notre confrontation à la poursuite par Derrida de cette interrogation sur l'onto-théologie, peut-être avons-nous de notre côté trop facilement présumé que la tradition phénoménologique opérait presque impulsivement sous le signe de la présence, ce qui a fait de nous des experts peut-être …

Work, Inc.: A Philosophical Inquiry By E. F. Byrne, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Workers need a voice. Not that the poor and the powerless of our society altogether lack advocacy. But you require a special and politically correct grievance to capture the media and gain a hearing.

Review Of Heidegger's Confrontation With Modernity: Technology, Politics, And Art By Michael E. Zimmerman, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Michael Zimmerman has composed this book in two voices. One is the clear and generous voice that we have heard for two decades and that has made Zimmerman the foremost expositor of Heidegger in the English language....The second voice is bitterly critical of Heidegger and responds to the recent discussion of Heidegger's entanglements in reactionary and fascist politics.

Development, Ethics And The Ethics Of Nationalism, Messay Kebede

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In a world which exhibits so much power and yet does so little to drive back underdevelopment, it is not to be wondered if the thinking endeavour is shrouded with the impression of being confronted with the greatest enigma, with the most disconcerting sphinx of all times. However, concerning this most pressing and controversial issue of underdevelopment, of all the disciplines which study man, philosophy is the one which until now said the least. Is this due to simple insensitiveness, or to pure neglect, or to the feeling of not being directly concerned? Whatever the reasons may be, the simple …

Asceticism/Askēsis: Foucault's Thinking Historical Subjectivity, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure Foucault calls his work an askēsis, "an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought." The "living substance of philosophy," Foucault writes, is the essay, "which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication." Foucault's work, then, does not simply report to us his conclusions or theories. Foucault is not primarily interested in imparting information. What he offers instead is a kind of exercise book.

Guilt As Management Technology: A Call To Heideggerian Reflection, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Messkirch, Germany, a small town in the Black Forest. He died in 1976. As these dates indicate, Heidegger lived through a time when Western civilization was undergoing a series of upheavals probably now only dimly imaginable to those of us who are the products of them. His life spanned a technological revolution that changed even the most basic patterns of human (and certainly not only human) life in the industrialized world.

Deaths Of Art: David Carrier's Metahistory Of Artwriting, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This essay is a critical examination of David Carrier's Artwriting (1987), which offered a philosophical account of the implicit strategies of narrative and presentation deployed by a wide range of art historians and critics. Here, this author raises some questions concerning Carrier's attempt to describe or define a genre of 'art-writing' distinct from philosophical aesthetics; he also discusses Carrier's views in the context of those writers whom Carrier examines in Artwriting.

Nietzsche And The Future Of The University, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche's first generation of readers tended to see him as a thinker, philosopher or prophet of the future; he was the teacher of the superman, the transvaluator of all values, the founder of a new philosophy of the will to power. In the many discourses of the early twentieth century that are devoted in various ways to 'Nietzsche and the Future' there are obvious signs of the nineteenth century cult of progress, although interpreted divergently by social Darwinism, socialism or anarchism. Now we are more sophisticated. Those first readers saw Nietzsche as radicalizing and rewriting the modernist metanarrative (substituting the …

Paradigms And Paraphernalia: On The Relationship Of Theory And Technology In Science, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What is the connection between theory and technology in science? What is the relationship between the various activities of "doing" science and the instruments that enable these activities? My interest here is to explore these questions in a very broad and elementary way, occasionally citing examples plucked from the history of science. [excerpt]

Subversion Of System / Systems Of Subversions, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What might it mean to think outside or beyond the Hegelian system of philosophy? Already in Hegel's own time this was a question that came to occupy those who labored under the weight of his speculative and comprehensive system of thought. The easiest and most immediately appealing strategy was to seize upon some category that seemed to be relatively neglected within the system, something that seemed to have been too easily aufgehoben into the totality. Kierkegaard is sometimes represented as centering his challenges to the Hegelian system around the valorization of the unhappy consciousness; that is, the consciousness aware of …

Translating, Repeating, Naming: Foucault, Derrida And The Genealogy Of Morals, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Two cautions or warnings (at least) must be heeded in the attempt to do justice to Nietzsche's project of a genealogy of morals in the text that bears that name. While the Genealogy is often regarded as the most straightforward and continuous of Nietzsche's books, he tells us in Ecce Homo that its three essays are "perhaps uncannier than anything else written so far in regard to expression, intention, and the art of surprise.” If we should think ourselves successful in penetrating to these uncanny secrets and saying what Nietzsche's text means, once and for all, we would then have …

Foucault's Move Beyond The Theoretical, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Theory plays an important role in virtually every academic discipline currently vital. The specific functions of theory may differ from discipline to discipline, but it is difficult to think of any serious discipline that is able to dispense with it entirely; for theory, we usually assume, is quite simply the name of all instances of systematic speculation, all attempts at rational explication. Ordered mentation, most of us unwaveringly believe, is and must be theoretical. All that is not theoretical is either confused thinking – or, more positively, perhaps it is poetic – or it is not thinking at all, but …

High Art, Folk Art, And Other Social Distinctions, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Most discussions of the arts by critics and philosophers could be characterized in terms of a rather studied neglect of folk and popular art. This neglect is hardly absolute, however, for it is important in order to articulate a specific conception of aesthetic taste, beauty, or style to contrast the standard being used or praised with some other, less desirable, even degraded way of producing or appreciating something similar. It is perhaps more than a historical coincidence that the formation of the modern concept of taste and aesthetic judgment, in the eighteenth century, coincides roughly with the discovery and valorization …

To Philosophize Is To Learn To Die, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

As the quintessential man of letters, Roland Barthes had the genial gift of being able to sympathize with an endless variety of discourses, texts, myths, and semiotic systems. The profusion of apparent subjects-Japan, Brecht, Balzac, photography, "mythologies," classical writing, the theater-is perhaps calculated to provoke the purist who insists on the values of thoroughness and well-grounded inquiry. At the same time, one would have to be obtuse to fail to recognize the critical projects that animate the many books, essays, and studies; these are explorations that put into question the often closed and crabbed commitment of the scholar or critic …

Canons, Careers, And Campfollowers: Randall And The Historiography Of Philosophy, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

For some very good reasons John Herman Randall, Jr. saw himself as an innovator and a deviant within the discourse that is called the history of philosophy. In an early chapter of The Career of Philosophy he pronounces this characteristically salty judgment on the main tendency of such work:

The history of philosophy, in truth, since German professors captured it and made it the handmaiden of academic advancement, has been a rigid tradition. Philosophy began with Thales, it falls neatly into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, and it culminates in the men now writing for your favorite philosophical journal, God forgive …

An Ancient Quarrel In Hegel’S Phenomenology, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The Phenomenology of Spirit has been in rich and equal measures a source of both frustration and fascination to its readers. Coming to it from the more conventional texts of our tradition (even including Hegel's later writings) readers have been puzzled, first, by the structure of the Phenomenology. Despite his suggestions that he is following an actual historical development of some sort Hegel will pass from the Terror of 1793-94 to prehistoric religions of nature, or from Kantian universality in morality to the life of the Greek polis. In addition the Phenomenology contains a vast number of allusions to particular …

Gadamer, Habermas And The Death Of Art, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Since the appearance of Jurgen Habermas's critical review of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode], there has been talk of the ‘Gadamer-Habermas debate' among those who are interested in the nature of historical understanding and social rationality. More recently a number of philosophers have come to see that the issues involved are of wider scope, and that the opposition of the two can be seen as emblematic of two very general styles or approaches to philosophy, which are at the centre of contemporary discussion. As one might expect, differences at fundamental levels concerning truth and understanding …

British Hermeneutics And The Genesis Of Empiricism, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In an essay of 1961, "The History of Philosophy and Historicity," Paul Ricoeur has suggested that the narratives which we construct of the history of philosophy tend either toward excessive integration or disintegration. On the first alternative we tend to view the history of philosophy, or a segment of it, as a succession of systems understood from the perspective of that system closest to our own philosophical inclinations; on the second alternative we tend toward a dispersive attention toward specific problems, thinkers, and texts. Neither approach is satisfying, but Ricoeur maintains that in the history of philosophy, as contrasted to …

The Man Of Letters And The Author Of Nature: Hume On Philosophical Discourse, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Recent philosophy in the English language manifests a concern with the status and nature of the philosophical text which seems virtually unprecedented in Anglo-American thought. The very suggestion that the concept of the philosophical text ought to be taken seriously by philosophers (as opposed to publishers or literary historians) appears to be a recent addition to our world of discourse. For in the dominant tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, the philosophical enterprise has usually been construed as an open-ended inquiry, a posing and sharpening of questions, counter-questions, objections, and refutations in which the important thing is doing philosophy. So far this …

From The Sublime To The Political: Some Historical Notes, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Let me document my suggestion that modernist poetics tends to give a privileged position to what has traditionally been known as the sublime by adducing two examples from rather disparate traditions. Martin Heidegger's ontological poetics can reasonably be viewed as a renewal of the aesthetics of the sublime -- although Heidegger never uses the term sublime, so far as I know -- and is explicitly hostile to the limitations of aesthetics, conceived as an autonomous study of a certain kind of experience. Harold Bloom does recur to the Romantic terminology of sublimity in his attempt to construct a poetics which …

Nietzschean Aphorism As Art And Act, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche is commonly said to be an aphoristic writer, perhaps the master of the aphorism. Yet it is not clear what is entailed by this stylistic designation or how far it takes us in understanding Nietzsche's thought and writing. It is a mistake to see Nietzsche's writings as exclusively aphoristic, if this is meant to imply that his writings lack philosophical and literary structure. Certainly sections of those books (conveniently numbered and titled) can be regarded as independent aphorisms (if aphorisms are ever independent, a question which must be assessed). In fact the long third essay of The Genealogy of …

Peirce And Derrida On First And Last Things, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The movement of philosophical ideas across national and linguistic borders, especially in these days of international conferences, is notoriously slower than the physical movements of philosophers themselves. When rumblings of new names or new ideas come from afar, there is a rather predictable but unphilosophical tendency to claim that the putative new thoughts are either old hat, trivial or absurd; this trichotomy is not much of an improvement on the older positivistic dichotomy of tautologically trivial or merely empirical. Jacques Derrida is a philosopher of some eminence in France who has generally been subjected to such treatment by English-speaking philosophers, …

Virtue And The Need For Heroes, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Ronald Zigler has intended to take us on an educational adventure, a descent into the moral underworld of human biology, in search of "a theory of virtue and how it can be taught." With the shade of John Dewey as guide, intoning the admonition that "all virtues and vibes are habits," Zigler tracks the sources of aggression through the epigenetic land and, lo, approaches even unto the hypothalamus itself. He returns blinking into the daylight of moral education, clutching the truth that training in meditation is a key to the development of virtue, because it can "promote the functional integration …

Nietzsche On Envy, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

A recent newspaper story suggests a significant change in the attitude of some baseball fans. While the phenomenon of harassment of players from the stands is not new, there seems to be a new spirit behind the hurling of bottles and other dangerous debris. Whereas such attacks were once motivated by scorn for poor performance or by a violent enthusiasm for the opposing team, spectators are now also apparently moved by envy. They are, according to a number of sportswriters, jealous and resentful of the high salaries and prestige of professional ballplayers. No doubt envy is an ancient phenomenon, but …

Some Genres Of Post-Hegelian Philosophy, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

There are a number of important texts, sometimes treated as philosophical and sometimes as literary works, which do not usually find an appropriate audience. Paradigms of what I have in mind are: Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings, almost all of Nietzsche, Marx's narratives of capital and class-struggle, Sartre's complex series of fictions, plays, treatises, critical performances and autobiography, and Heidegger's hypnotic meditations and textual exegeses. Responses by philosophers, especially Anglo-American ones, seldom take account of the specific literary forms of these works or of their authors’ very self-conscious concern with the problems and strategies of writing. It is true that the texts …