History of Philosophy Commons^™

Kant And Feminism, Kurt Mosser

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The juxtaposition of Kant's name with "feminism" seems almost designed to invite scorn and indignation. As we will soon see, throughout his career Kant made a variety of noxious and distasteful comments about women. As we will also see, Kant has been regarded, with Descartes, as the philosopher chiefly responsible for providing modern Western philosophy with a picture of reason that has been employed in a variety of ways oppressive to women. Yet the reader of Kant's works in practical philosophy, specifically the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason, could very well harbor a …

Gestalt Shifts In Moral Perception, Peggy Desautels

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Moral philosophers often assume that there are clear and unambiguous single descriptions of particular moral situations, and thus they view their primary task as that of determining the most moral action to take when in these situations. But surely there is less chance of there being a single and final way to describe a given moral situation than there is of there being a single and final way to organize and describe a visual display. Although we perceive many of our day-to-day moral experiences in an unreflective and even reflexive manner, it is also possible for us to (and we …

Übersehen: Nietzsche And Tragic Vision, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Toward the end of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche sketches the possibility of a rebirth of tragedy and tragic culture. At this point Nietzsche's seductive language reaches a kind of crescendo; all along he has been inviting the reader to share his sense of what ancient tragedy was, and he does this in part by implying that the question of one's tastes and sensitivities here are crucial in determining whether one is hopelessly caught in the anemic Alexandrian world of modernity (sometimes called "the culture of the opera," later to be called nihilism) or whether one is a candidate for …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Nietzsche Contra Renan, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

I mean by the title of this essay to allude to Nietzsche Contra Wagner and thereby to suggest the use which Nietzsche made of Renan in formulating some of his most distinctive thoughts. More specifically I suggest that Nietzsche's later view of history, especially as expressed in The Genealogy of Morals and The Antichrist, is a critique and parody of Renan's History of the Origins of Christianity. (I speak deliberately of Nietzsche's "view of history" rather than his "philosophy of history" because the latter phrase contains too many associations which Nietzsche's view rejects.) What is at issue is not a …

Peirce's Critique Of Hegel's Phenomenology And Dialectic, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Although Peirce clearly and repeatedly stated his intention to construct a philosophical system, each of his attempts in that direction is at best fragmentary and some are ultimately incoherent. The ambiguities of Peirce's cosmology, his theory of meaning and his conception of truth cannot be avoided by anyone who carefully considers his own "guess at the riddle." Rather than cataloguing these puzzles, I hope to give at least a partial account of why they remain in the work of a philosopher who was avowedly systematic, possessed great analytic and synthetic powers, and had an acute sense of the physiognomy of …

Nietzsche's Graffito: A Reading Of The Antichrist, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Even those writers who have good things to say about Nietzsche usually do not have good things to say abut his penultimate book, The Antichrist. Like Ecce Homo it is often described as at least prefiguring Nietzsche's madness if not (as is sometimes the case) said to be part of that desperate glide itself. Those inclined to reject the book may be encouraged in this view by Nietzsche's statement to Brandes, in November 1888, that The Antichrist is the whole of The Transvaluation of All Values (originally announced as a series of four books) and that Ecce Homo is its …

Styling Nietzsche: A Review Essay Of Jacques Derrida Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Any examination of a text by Derrida challenges us to begin with an inquiry into its style. ''The Question of Style" was in fact the originally announced title of this essay which Derrida has since changed to Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Èperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche). Style is often regarded as a somewhat extraneous aspect of the philosophical enterprise; it is thought to be a variable form or container which may obstruct our comprehension of the matter or spirit of philosophical communication. Now it is well known that Derrida's whole enterprise involves a challenge to the "logocentric" tradition of philosophy according …

Notes On The Animal Kingdom Of The Spirit, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

One of the more neglected chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology, which contains neither the obvious drama of the master and slave dialectic nor the deep enigmas of the final pages on absolute knowledge, carries the somewhat puzzling title Das geistige Tierrefrh und der Bertrug oder die Sache selbst. Of the major commentators on Hegel only Lukács has suggested its central place in the design of the whole: Kojéve and Lowenberg (following Royce) have suggested vivid readings of it as an analysis of the conflicts and jealousies of intellectual, artistic, and professional work. What follows is a series of remarks and variations …

Choice And Universality In Sartre's Ethics, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Does Sartre have a coherent ethical position? At the end of Being and Nothingness he raises questions about the ethical implications of his ontology but refers them to a promised future work. For the student of existentialism it is an interesting question whether any of Sartre's later works offer this anticipated and definitive statement. Yet in the controversy over whether Saint-Genet or the Critique of Dialectical Reason fills the gap in Sartre's thought, the one concise presentation of his ethics in Existentialism Is a Humanism has been generally neglected. This neglect has not been groundless, for the essay, originally delivered …

Habit And Meaning In Peirce's Pragmatism, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The pragmatic movement has often been misunderstood; the most frequent misconceptions, which assimilated the philosophies of Peirce and James in particular to forms of positivism, reductionism, or crude voluntarism seem to be on the wane. Peirce's scholastic realism, his doctrine of signs, and his conception of truth as the unique and destined goal of inquiry now tend to receive the attention that was formerly reserved for his empiricism and pragmatism. A similar change in the estimation of James seems to be taking place insofar as his theory of truth is seen as much less simplistic than was formerly supposed; and …