Who is it that can tell me who I am?The often-complex interplay between self and others characterizes educational undertakings. Considerations of how we gain knowledge involve, at least implicitly, an understanding of the relationship between self, others, and the material environment in which learning occurs. The Academy-Award-winning 1987 film Babette’s Feast, based on the 1950 short story by Isak Dine-sen, while not formally a story of education, presents through its protagonist a pedagogy that highlights learning through encounter as complementary (...) and integral to enhanced and mature knowledge. In this article, I engage closely with the film version of Babette’s Feast to elucidate its educational... (shrink)

Using the guise of a simple supper of commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of a charismatic Protestant pastor, who had gathered around him a community of devoted disciples in a small village in Norway, Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen shows us a banquet in which, through the food prepared with the eye of an artist, the senses are awakened for the first time to a kind of experience where what is corporal and what is spiritual cease (...) to be at odds with each other. Thus, a reconciliation of a lost unity between the body and the soul, matter and spirit, is celebrated and achieved. From this first step, with which the fundamental internal fragmentation is overcome, the other levels of unity (unity with others, with the cosmos, and with God) occur in a chain sequence, so to speak. As in all religious situations, there occurs here the coming together of two orders that seem unreconciliable: the temporal and the eternal, the limited and the infinite, the profane and the sacred. The mediator between both orders is Babette, who takes on a genuine sacerdotal function. However, there is an unexpected inversion, and paradoxically what is profane and mundane comes to the rescue of what is spiritual and sacred. (shrink)

_Varieties of the Self_ discusses human perspectives of the Paraclete (founded in 1129) on sacrifice, intentionality, and views on body and soul. The anthropological approach connects different works written by Peter Abelard to views on the individual within this community.

Drawing on recent scholarship, with essays by a selection of international scholars, this volume throws new light on the literary persona of Peter Abelard, one of the most diversely gifted people of the Middle Ages.

This article explores and defends the idea that the etiquette conventions governing dinner parties, whether formal or informal, have moral significance. Their significance derives from the way that they foster and facilitate shared moral aims. I draw on literary and philosophical sources to make this claim, beginning with Isak Dineson's short story, Babette's Feast. I employ the concept of ritual from Confucius and Xunzi, as well as Immanuel Kant's detailed discussion of dinner parties in the Anthropology. Kant's account (...) in particular helps illuminate how properly conducted dinners can enhance our understanding and promote moral community among the people who attend. I conclude that dinner parties play an important role in the moral life, and that the etiquette conventions governing them derive their binding force from their contribution to that role. (shrink)

This is the second of two articles investigating the filmic representations of Jesus and the Christ-event. The first article investigated the theological and esthetic issues raised by the major works in the one hundred years' tradition of the Jesus film. The present study takes into consideration the films which approach the Jesus story and the Christ-event metaphorically, the so-called Christ-figure films. It begins with a discussion of the biblical-theological foundations for such a metaphorical representation, and then it analyses a series (...) of films which can be interpreted as adopting this approach. Jesus of Montreal is analysed as a transitional film which represents both literal and metaphorical images of Jesus, privileging, however, the metaphorical approach. The classical American western Shane is seen as shifting its content and themes away from the typical «mythical » western in order to better accommodate the Jesus and Christ themes. The filmic embodiment of the Jesus story and Christ-event in women Christ-figures is examined in two films, Babette's Feast and Bagdad Café . Then the longer original version of one of Kieslowski's Decalogue films, A Short Film about Love, is interpreted as an extended metaphor of the salvific encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Finally, Bresson's masterpiece, Au hasard Balthazar, is considered as creating in its protagonist, the donkey Balthazar, the most audacious and theologically profound Christ-figure i. (shrink)

Nietzsche's use of metaphor has been widely noted but rarely focused to explore specific images in great detail. A Nietzschean Bestiary gathers essays devoted to the most notorious and celebrated beasts in Nietzsche's work. The essays illustrate Nietzsche's ample use of animal imagery, and link it to the dual philosophical purposes of recovering and revivifying human animality, which plays a significant role in his call for de-deifying nature.

Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science, is the second volume of a collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, featuring essays addressing truth, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, with a substantial representation of analytically schooled Nietzsche scholars. This collection offers a dynamic articulation of the differing strengths of Anglo-American analytic and contemporary European approaches to philosophy, with translations from European specialists, notably Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Paul Valadier, and Walther Ch. Zimmerli. This broad collection also features a preface by Alasdair (...) MacIntyre. Contributions explore Nietzsche's contributions to the philosophy of language and epistemology, and include essays on the social history of truth and the historical and cultural analyses of Serres and Baudrillard, as well as new contributions to the philosophy of science, including theological and hermeneutical approaches, history of science, the philosophy of medicine, cognitive science, and technology. (shrink)

In this astonishingly rich volume, experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship on what is arguably Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edited by their authors, this collection showcases definitive works that have shaped Nietzsche studies alongside new works of interest to students and experts alike. A lengthy introduction, annotated (...) bibliography, and index make this an extremely useful guide for the classroom and advanced research. (shrink)

Adorno’s phenomenological study of radio offers a sociology of music in a political and cultural context. Situating that phenomenology in the context of Adorno’s philosophical background and the world political circumstances of Adorno’s collaboration with Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio Project, illuminates both Adorno’s Current of Music and the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer and the ‘Culture Industry’. Together with an analysis of popular music in social practice/culture, this article also explores Adorno’s spatial reflections on Paul Bekker’s notion (...) of the community-building power of the symphony, including his reflection on the radio face which he elaborated in terms of both time and the physiognomics of the time-space of sound, private and communal, and adds connections with today’s Internet and related media. (shrink)

In what follows I raise the question of Ariadne and Dionysus for Nietzsche, including the relative size of Ariadne’s ears, as Dionysus observes at the close of “Ariadne’s Lament” [Klage der Ariadne]. Nietzsche’s references to ears invoke not only Nietzsche’s “selective” concern with having the right ears but also the question of myth and genealogical context. Reading through myth is key not only in terms of the textual, lyric tradition but also painting and sculpture, including sarcophagi in antiquity. It makes (...) all the difference to ask, as Karl Kerényi cites Nietzsche as asking: Wer weiß …was Ariadne ist? And not less: who was she to Dionysus? To this extent, Nietzsche’s concern with ears, small and long, is less incidental or furry fetish than hermeneutic attunement. (shrink)

What I here call Merleau-Ponty’s crystal lamellae corresponds to a phenomenology of the crystal of the interstices of being: the between. Phenomenology’s crystal as I refer to this here is a layered in and through spatial tensions, shimmering, overlapping, intervals magnifying planes and surfaces in all dimensions. This is a crystallography in words to retrace the relations of lived space, tactically navigated, anticipated, recalled, as this experienced awareness of the world around, the places in which we live, especially public spaces, (...) layered in layers, including lattice arrays of space, seen and unseen, including a reflection on art, aesthetic production, especially but not only in Lascaux, and perception, on anger, and the political including the terrorism of capital. (shrink)

Günther Anders’s poem Du kleiner Fischerman is read here as a text contribution to the irruption that is violence and its enduring (omnipresent) aftermath. The essay includes a discussion of transmedial expression, including dramatization, or television and social media, text and subtext, as well as the inspiration of Anders’s poem as a work of art continuing in our times: the ongoing exclusion(s) of certain names and certain thinkers as of certain musical modes, including electronic musical works, as of voices and (...) of collective memory, or oblivion. Reading Raymond Williams along with Anders and Adorno on television updated in today’s era of screen-being, this essay reads the challenges of on-line music magazines, Leonard Cohen and k.d.lang, between modes of memorialization, including a reading of Anders’s poetic memorial on the violence of Walter Benjamin’s death to conclude with Ivan Illich on the ongoing expropriation of death (and health) today. (shrink)

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 the cold war political circumstances surrounding the writing of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . Following a discussion of Fleck's anatomical allusions, I include a brief discussion of Aristotle (on menstruation and darkened mirrors) and conclude with a reference to the productivity of error in Mach and Nietzsche. (shrink)

in Charles Scott and Arleen Dallery, eds., Ethics and Danger: Currents in Continental Thought. Albany. State University of New York Press. 1992. Pp. 83-106.

Beginning with Jürgen Habermas's 1968 reflection on Nietzsche's criticisms of knowledge and science, the essays in this volume engage Nietzsche's challenge to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory as well as other social and political theories of modernity and postmodernity. Juxtaposing Habermas and Nietzsche for the sake of the "future" of critical theory, the essays in this collection draw variously on Marx and Weber as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and others. The distinguished authors in this book (...) argue that critical theory is best served by responding to challenges such as those associated with identity politics and globalization and including an authentic engagement with Nietzsche. This important volume features contributions by Babette E. Babich, Karin Bauer, Howard Caygill, Rebecca Comay, Fred Dallmayr, Josef Früchtl, Jürgen Habermas, Dominique Janicaud, Alexander Nehamas, David Owen, Max Pensky, Holger Schmid, Tracy B. Strong, James Swindal, and Bernhard Taureck. (shrink)

One of the outcomes of the publication of the Black Notebooks has been to invite scholars to rethink their understanding of Heidegger’s thinking, including his “world-historical anti-Semitism,” his...

This chapter contains sections titled: Science and Leidenschaft The Music of the Gay Science and the Meaning of Wissenschaft Gay Science: Passion, Vocation, Music.

This essay seeks to make the case for reading hermeneutic philosophy of science with Feyerabend. In addition, there is the question of science, as Nietzsche raises this question along with Feyerabend’s programmatic recommendations for traditional philosophy of science. Including a discussion of method in history as in theology and philology, including Nietzsche’s hermeneutics, this essay reviews Feyerabend’s exchanges with Lakatos along with the resistance of mainstream philosophy of science to hermeneutics as such. A discussion of Feyerabend’s ‘gods’ engages what he (...) invokes as ontological abundance as well as his criticism of the limitations of Popper’s critique of Parmenides requiring both historical/historiographical context, an understanding of science in practice, via a contextualization of Schrodinger, and via Plato’s epistemology along with Duhem on experiment and Riegl on style, crucial for Feyerabend on the notion of ‘progress,’ key for Lakatos and others, in art and science. (shrink)

This collection dedicated to and including David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste," offers a much needed resource for students and scholars of philosophical aesthetics, political reflection, value and judgments, economics, and art. The authors include experts in the philosophy of art, aesthetics, history of philosophy as well as the history of science. Contributors include Babette Babich, Howard Caygill, Timothy M.Costelloe, Andrej Démuth / Slávka Démuthová, Bernard Freydberg, Peter Kivy, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Christopher MacLachlan, Emilio Mazza, Roger Schiner, Roger Scruton, and (...) Dabney Townsend, . (shrink)

A discussion of Nietzsche's philology as the prelude to his philosophy of science.

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and conclude by (...) taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation. (shrink)

At the extreme limit of suffering [ Leiden: pathos] nothing indeed remains but the conditions of time or space. At this moment, the man forgets himself because he is entirely within the moment; the God forgets himself because he is nothing but time; and both are unfaithful. Time because at such a moment it undergoes a categoric change and beginning and end simply no longer rhyme within it; man because, at this moment, he has to follow the categorical..

What is the nineteenth century? If some historians of the "long" nineteenth century date its beginning back to 1750, does it end in 1900 or, as is said, in 1914 or, as one German historian reflects on the ongoing influence of the so-called "historical century," is it still ongoing? In continental philosophy, the nineteenth century seems to have a certain durability, to take the case of Slavoj Žižek and other Hegelians like Robert Pippin. Is Nietzsche representative of his own times? (...) Or is he, as he himself says, "posthumous"? Robert C. Holub's book introduces Nietzsche as "The Timely Meditator", the better to contradict what Holub describes as Nietzsche's "conscious effort to present himself as an 'untimely'... (shrink)

radicalization of Kant 's critical project inverts or opposes traditional readings of Kant 's critical program. Nietzsche aligns both Kant and Schopenhauer with what he named the effectively, efficiently pathological optimism of the rationalist drive to knowledge, patterned on the Cyclopean eye of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy. For the rest of Nietzsche's writerly life, the name of Socrates would serve both as a signifier for the historical personage marking the end of the "tragic age" of the Greeks as (...) well as a signifier for the philosophical tradition of the idealization of reason, knowledge, and truth: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer. (shrink)

Resumen: En La actualidad de lo bello, Gadamer hace una referencia reveladora a la improvisación musical y a la importancia de la escucha musical, además de poner en primer plano la necesidad de justificación del arte. Situando este debate a través de Goethe y Platón, junto con las Lecciones de Estética de Adorno de finales de la década de 1950 y una discusión sobre Nietzsche y la Antigüedad, es posible establecer que lo que está en juego es la afinación, así (...) como una tensión que invita a un debate ulterior tanto sobre la detención del amante en Carson como el demorarse en Heidegger. Al revisar la hermenéutica gadameriana de la programación y la interpretación musical, incluida la improvisación y el desafío de la nueva música, las reflexiones de Gadamer sobre la cultura musical en el contexto de la cultura social y su reflexión no solo pueden ser leídas a través de Platón y Goethe, sino también a partir de las concepciones de "lo bello" en Hölderlin y Rilke. Se trata de una "conversación" cultural en la que la contribución del público puede estar en tensión con la programación musical progresiva, además de la dinámica de respuesta que surge en la energeia de la improvisación tanto para el intérprete como para el oyente.// Abstract: Gadamer’s On the Relevance of the Beautiful makes telling reference to musi-cal improvisation and the importance of musical listening in addition to fore-grounding the need for justification. Situating this discussion via Goethe and Plato along with Adorno’s late 1950s lectures on Aesthetics together with a discussion of Nietzsche and antiquity, what is at stake is attunement and a tension which invites a discussion of Carson on the lover’s arrest and Heidegger on tarrying. By reviewing Gadamer’s hermeneutic of musical pro-gramming and performance, including improvisation and the challenge of new music, Gadamer may be read on music culture in the context of social culture and his reflection not only via Plato and Goethe but Hölderlin and Rilke on ‘the beautiful.’ At work is a cultural ‘conversation’ where audience input can be in tension with progressive musical programing along with the dynamic of response emergent in the energeia of improvisation for performer and listener. (shrink)

"Homer and Classical Philology," Nietzsche's 1869 inaugural lecture at the University of Basel, addresses not only the history of the Homer question as a problem but also raises the question of the discipline of classical philology as science . Thematically, Nietzsche's first lecture as a professor of classical philology focuses on the significance of style as such. In this meta-scholarly context, the issue of scholarly discernment is explored in terms of aesthetic judgment, as a judgment of taste, a focus Nietzsche (...) subsequently resumes in the second of his Untimely Meditations, "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life."1 To be . (shrink)

Nietzsche's importance for the development of twentieth‐century hermeneutics can be traced through Martin Heidegger, Hans‐Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur's nomination of Nietzsche, alongside Marx and Freud, as a “master of suspicion”, precisely posed in the context of Nietzsche's unmasking of the text and its truths. For Nietzsche himself, hermeneutics frames his formation as a classical philologist, an archetypically hermeneutic discipline Nietzsche shared with Gadamer. Declaring that “nature's conformity to law” is no fact, Nietzsche challenges nothing less than the very dogmatic (...) possibility of scientific progress. Nietzsche's importance for the explicitly philosophical traditions of hermeneutics is well attested at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it turns out to include explicitly phenomenological elements. Studies of Nietzsche and metaphor and rhetoric, and Nietzsche's discussion of the same art, have the Diltheyan point of connection: Nietzsche's philosophical hermeneutics of history precisely conceived, as the philologist Nietzsche always conceived history, as a science. (shrink)