Philosophy of Language Commons^™

The End Of The World And Other Times In The Future, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In an interview with his biographer Sylvie Simmons, Leonard Cohen identifies the main interests in his work as "women, song, religion". These are not merely personal concerns for Cohen, they are dimensions of the world that he tries to understand as a poet, singer, and thinker.

Now it's something of a cliché to see the modern romantic or post-romantic singer or poet in terms of personal struggles, failures, triumphs, and reversals. Poets sometimes respond by adopting elusive, ironic, enigmatic, or parodic voices: think, in their different ways, of Bob Dylan and Anne Carson. Yet Cohen has always worn his heart …

Speaking A Word For Nature: Thoreau's Philosophical Saunter, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Thoreau's extraordinary essay "Walking" is obviously an encomium on what the author calls "the art of Walking" and an exhortation to readers to understand and practice that art. Yes, but we must realize that he speaks of the art of walking in no "pedestrian" sense (if this expression may be excused). Thoreau not only wants us to think the unthought in ordinary walking but to participate in the essay's performance of an allegory or analogue of the practice that he calls sauntering to the Holy Land; it becomes an itinerary through the fields of language that reveals unsuspected sights and …

Aesthetics And The Philosophy Of Art, 1840-1900, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The question can be raised whether the category or discipline of philosophical aesthetics existed before the eighteenth century. Unlike "logic:' "ethics:' and "physics:' a traditional Stoic division of philosophy with great staying power, "aesthetics" is clearly a product of modernity. As Paul O. Kristeller demonstrated in "The Modern System of the Arts:' it was in the eighteenth century that the idea of the aesthetic as a distinctive human capacity and the parallel consolidation of the notion of the fine arts crystallized in the writings of (mostly) French, German, and English philosophers and critics. The modern concepts of art and aesthetics …

Assassins And Crusaders: Nietzsche After 9/11, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Nietzsche describes his four Unzeitgemiisse Betrachtungen as Attentate, assassination attempts. The first of these, his self-described "duel" with David Friedrich Strauss, published in 1873, begins with the question of war and time. It is untimely or out of season insofar as it challenges the smugness of the cultural philistines who take Germany's victory in the Franco-Prussian War to be a testament to the superiority of German culture. As those in the United States might have learned after the end of the Cold War and after the first Gulf War, "a great victory is a great danger," and we might …

"Give Me A Break!" Emerson On Fruit And Flowers, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

"Give me a break!" This expression appears to be an imperative or a request. In colloquial English, it can be either, or it can be uttered with various degrees of irony as a complaint, an objection, or a reproof. I want to begin by considering it in a relatively serious way, by asking what it means to ask someone to give, and to give a break. According to some analyses in a certain discourse on the gift (for example, in Nietzsche, Bataille, Levinas, and Derrida), the gift is always a break of some sort. It is an interruption, an excess, …

The "Confessing Animal" On Stage: Authenticity, Asceticism, And The Constant "Inconstancie" Of Elizabethan Character, Peter Iver Kaufman

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

For persons persuaded by the rhetoric of sixteenth-century religious reformers, authenticity was a complex matter of access to the reality of divinity. George Levin's paper on empiricist "habits of mind" seems a strange place to start elaborating on that observation, for such "habits" look to be worlds apart from what I study, the sixteenth-century Calvinist adaptations of patristic and medieval ascetic spirituality. Yet Levin maintains that he has identified empiricism's near-ascetic techniques. "To know nature," he claims, "one must make it alien ... and deny one's own desire." If he is correct about "the programmatically self-alienating" character of "the positivist …

Go Figure! Refiguring Disfiguring, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In his extraordinary book, Disfiguring, Mark Taylor bursts into the marketplace of the contemporary artworld by bringing together the idea of the death of God with that of the death of art. In the artworld prices of Van Goghs, Monets, and Warhols go up and down; the glossy journals like Art in America chronicle these values discreetly and contain prospectuses for investments, whether in the form of actual advertising or in the pieces pushing the latest artist or style, or looking for hidden value in an old one. In this marketplace the death of God is also, it seems, …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Reading And Writing In The Text Of Hobbes's Leviathan, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Critics have often suggested that Hobbes is a paradigm case of a philosopher whose own style of writing violates the norms he sets down for rational discourse. Philosophy, he says, "professedly rejects not only the paint and false colors of language, but even the very ornaments and graces of the same." More specifically he says that metaphors must be "utterly excluded" from "the rigorous search of truth ... seeing they openly professe deceit, to admit them into counsel, or reasoning, were manifested folly.” Nevertheless, attention focuses on his flair for the dramatic or metaphorical, as in the great mise en …

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 …

The Owl Of Minerva And The Colors Of The Night, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

What I wish to do, however, is to call attention to the manner in which Hegel speaks of Minerva's owl and to juxtapose both the manner and the substance of his thought about the twilight of philosophy and civilization with some of Hölderlin's dichterisch and Heidegger's denkerisch meditations on similar themes. For if Hegel has announced the coming of the night, Hölderlin and Heidegger have sought to make the night their very own territory and to comprehend it from within. If Hegel has rather gingerly allowed himself to lapse into that famous figurative discourse of the owl and the gray …

Hegel On The Meanings Of Poetry, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Since Socrates' attack on poetry, philosophers and critics have been faced with the problem of reconciling two convictions which seem equally pressing. While poetry (or imaginative literature) is and has been valued as a source of insight and knowledge, it also seems clear that poetic meaning is of a rather different sort than that found in science, ordinary language, or (to introduce the classical contrast) prose. Philosophical theories of poetry, then, take one of two forms: either they deny one of these two beliefs, implying perhaps that poetry has only nonsensical or literal meaning, or they provide a cognitive analysis …

Intention And Interpretation In Art: A Semiotic Analysis, Gary Shapiro

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Kant was perhaps the first philosopher to note the distinctive puzzle, verging on paradox, which marks our dealings with art. Works of art seem to place us under an obligation to interpret them and yet we are convinced that our interpretations will never be exhaustive. Kant attempts to account for this peculiar phenomenon by talking of "purposiveness without purpose" or of the aesthetic idea as "a representation of the imagination to which no concept is adequate." We are constrained to see some pattern or organization in a work of art and this is typically understood as a teleological or purposive …

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 …