This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. With one exception, the fifteen essays, which reflect the wide range of the author’s interests, appear in English for the first time. The essays consider figures in the history of philosophy and twentieth-century thought. They also examine several general topics that have always been of central concern to Agamben: the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and (...) Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics. Despite the diversity of the texts collected here, they show a consistent concern for a set of overriding philosophical themes concerning language, history, and potentiality. In the first part of the book, Agamben brings philosophical texts of Plato and Benjamin, the literary criticism of Max Kommerell, and the linguistic studies of J.-C. Milner to bear upon a question that exposes each discipline to a limit at which the possibility of language itself is at stake. The essays in the second part concern a body of texts that deal with the structure of history and historical reflection, including the idea of the end of history in Jewish and Christian messianism, as well as in Hegel, Benjamin, and Aby Warburg. In the third part, the issues confronted in the first and second parts are shown to be best grasped as issues of potentiality. Agamben argues that language and history are structures of potentiality and can be most fully understood on the basis of the Aristotelian theory of _dynamis_ and its medieval elaborations. The fourth part is an extensive essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”. (shrink)

Mathematical tools of category theory are employed to study the syntax-semantics problem in the philosophy of mathematics. Every category has its internal logic, and if this logic is sufficiently rich, a given category provides semantics for a certain formal theory and, vice versa, for each formal theory one can construct a category, providing a semantics for it. There exists a pair of adjoint functors, Lang and Syn, between a category and a category of theories. These functors describe, in a formal (...) way, mutual dependencies between the syntactical structure of a formal theory and the internal logic of its semantics. Bell’s program to regard the world of topoi as the univers de discoursof mathematics and as a tool of its local interpretation, is extended to a collection of categories and all functors between them, called “categorical field”. This informal idea serves to study the interaction between syntax and semantics of mathematical theories, in an analogy to functors Lang and Syn. With the help of these concepts, the role of Gödel-like limitations in the categorical field is briefly discussed. Some suggestions are made concerning the syntax-semantics interaction as far as physical theories are concerned. (shrink)

The Michael Heller’s article entitled “How is philosophy in science possible?” was originally published in Polish in 1986 and then translated into English by Bartosz Brożek and Aeddan Shaw and published in 2011 in the collection of essays entitled Philosophy in Science. Methods and Applications. This seminal paper has founded further growth of the ‘philosophy in science’ and become the reference point in the methodological discussions, especially in Poland. On the 40th anniversary of Philosophical Problems in Science we (...) wanted to make this paper freely available to the international public by reprinting its English version. In this issue it is followed by two additional articles-commentaries. (shrink)

This book is a collection of recent lectures by Agnes Heller, delivered all over the world. These essays are edited and introduced by the author of the most significant intellectual biography of her work, John Grumley. In these lectures, Heller engages one of her greatest strengths: to discover philosophy within the very flux of contemporary events. These bring together such timely topics as refugees, human rights, truth in politics and the contemporary university as well as perennial issues (...) like the possibility of artistic representation of the Holocaust, the question whether revolutions are always betrayed, and the possibility of universality in the contemporary multicultural world. (shrink)

The essays in this collection, written by prominent scholars, offer a new approach to their work.

This book is the first attempt to think philosophically about the comic phenomenon in literature, art, and life. Working across a substantial collection of comic works author Agnes Heller makes seminal observations on the comic in the work of both classical and contemporary figures. Whether she's discussing Shakespeare, Kafka, Rabelais, or the paintings of Brueghel and Daumier Heller's Immortal Comedy makes a characteristic contribution to modern thought across the humanities.

"This volume is concerned with how we ought to evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend - discussed here as the "problem of contingent future persons." For it seems that those future persons who are brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by them in any conventional sense. This is a relatively novel problem in ethics and as yet there is simply no consensus on how (...) we ought to evaluate such actions or, indeed, on whether we can. However, the pursuit of a solution to the problem has been interestingly employed by moral philosophers to press the limits of ethics and to urge a reconsideration of the nature and source of value at its most fundamental level. Intended for professional ethicists, policy researchers, and graduate students, this volume explores the theological implications of the problem and advances the investigation of it both philosophical and in theological terms." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to Lawrence Ferrara’s Chapter Four in R. Phelps, R. Sadoff, E. Warburton, and L. Ferrara, A Guide to Research in Music Education, 5th Edition (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2005)Jack HellerIt is curious that Lawrence Ferrara disagrees with Jack Heller and Edward. J. P. O'Connor's view1 that "philosophy" is not "research," yet in the chapter headings in the book A Guide to Research in Music Education, (...) 5th Edition, Chapter 4 is labeled "Philosophical Inquiry," while other chapters are labeled "Qualitative Research," "Nonexperimental Research," "Quantitative Research," and "Historical Research" (italics added). Why not "Philosophical Research?" Maybe he, too, believes that philosophy is not research.In our Handbook Chapter2 we pointed out that research should be systematic and based on "empirical observation." To make things worse we said that research should try to provide "unbiased evidence." Ferrara ascribes to us a positivistic view that we did not make nor believe. That view, according to Ferrara is that the "key reason for their [our] dismissal of philosophical inquiry (notice inquiry not research) as a bona fide research design is the invariable criterion that they [we] assign to all research if it is indeed research: to present 'unbiased evidence.'" [End Page 89] We still believe that research should try to be as objective as possible while realizing that all observations are researcher dependent and have error. Research should strive to reduce error as much as possible.My reading of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions does not conflict with what was written in our Chapter. We did not claim that data are unbiased but rather that research should try to limit bias and try to interpret observations that can be supported by specific behavior.Philosophy, or more properly model building, should lead research. Assumptions that appear in a model are just that. They are assumptions. Not fact; not unbiased opinion. But these assumptions or philosophical conclusions should not be called research in music education because they do not provide any behavioral evidence as support. The deductive process used in philosophy (syllogistic reasoning, for example) should help to develop hypotheses that can be investigated by an inductive process (data collection). Philosophy is a time honored scholarly activity. We certainly do not mean to diminish its importance. All research should have a philosophical underpinning that should produce a theoretical model. This model then should be tested by research. Our Handbook Chapter takes this position. Philosophy is philosophy, not research.Ferrara paraphrases Rom Harre3 by stating thatthere are at least three realms of scientific research and theory: the first realm is marked by ordinary perception in which what is known is based on observable and empirically verifiable facts; in the second realm, perception may catch up with conception–there is a promise of technological development... through which researchers will eventually be able to 'observe' and empirically verify what they only conceived (as in philosophical inquiry) as the probable explanation; and in the third realm there are genuine theoretical acts of imagination... that will never be directly (italics added) perceived, for example, empirically observed or verified.Ferrara points out that this "positivist dictum [the Harre quote above]... is unrealistic in relation to actual (italics added) scientific research and practice."4 It is not clear to which "actual scientific research and practice" Ferrara refers. This entire view is misguided. Ferrara does not believe "the methodology of the natural sciences can appropriately be utilized in the human sciences and arts research, retaining the level of objectivity (italics added) achieved in the natural sciences." Who does Ferrara believes carries out natural science research? Are they not humans, constrained by the same problems of observation that all humans encounter? Are their observations more "objective" as Ferrara seems to believe? The natural scientist, like all other researchers, faces the issue of error in observing phenomena that all researchers face. (See the many examples of [End Page 90] this view in Jacques Barzun and Henry Graff.5 ) Neither philosophical inquiry, nor logical positivism, nor the "new realism" approach that Ferrara proposes for research is free from observational error. The role of all research is to minimize error.A quick romp through some... (shrink)

This study examines interactions in which students help each other with their learning during classroom instruction, forming groups in the process. From a conversation analytic perspective, helping is assumed to be a sequentially organized activity jointly accomplished by the participants. As an activity that proceeds alongside other ongoing classroom activities, helping can be conceived as part of a multiactivity that poses students with multi-faceted interactional and moral challenges. While previous research on helping in educational contexts has primarily focused on the (...) influence of helping on learning outcomes and social dynamics in helping interactions, the present study investigates how students cope with the intricacies of moral commitments inherent in helping as a concurrent activity. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, we aim to elaborate on how students’ dual involvements – i.e., their involvement in classroom activities while simultaneously providing help – manifest in the ways in which groups are constituted, maintained, and dissolved. The analyses reveal that both the compatibility of helping with the activity already in progress as well as the students’ problem definition are consequential for the sequential and bodily-spatial unfolding of the help interaction, inducing different arrangements that constitute a continuum, at each end of which there is a dominant orientation toward the shared space of helping or toward the individual/collective space. Furthermore, from a methodological perspective, our study aims to demonstrate the extent to which multimodal interaction analysis is applicable when examining naturally occurring groups, in this case, in interactive processes of helping. The study is based on a data corpus that comprises video recordings of mathematics and German lessons from two fifth-grade classrooms. (shrink)

For the winter semester of 1942-1943, Heidegger announced a lecture course at the University of Freiburg on Parmenides and Heraclitus. In Heidegger’s collected works, volume 54, the lecture course was published under the title Parmenides, since Heidegger never actually discussed Heraclitus in the course. I may add that he barely discussed Parmenides either. The lecture course proceeds in circles. The lecturer seems to introduce new themes again and again, quickly digressing from each, only to return to some, but not all, (...) of them. Allow me to list the main themes in order of their appearance in the lecture notes: originary thinking, aletheia, goddess, translation, conflict, the Greek word pseudos and its translations, how the Romans mistranslated the Greeks, the Greek word methodos and its misunderstanding, lethe, the translation of zoon logon ekhon, the word, pragma, techne, physis and how it is not natura, unconcealing and concealing, the history of being, the polis, the daimon, the essence of the Greek gods, politeia, adike, what philosophy is, to think on something or about something, metaphysics, the subject/object relation, I-ness, egoism, metaphysics as the essence of technology, to think being, the essence of truth, the fate of the Occident, to rethink originary thinking, the foundation/less and so on. As one can see from this brief, and by no means full enumeration, Heidegger’s lecture course on Parmenides contains a small encyclopedia of the so called “basic words” of his philosophical turn. There is nothing in his famous Letter on Humanism that was not already present during the Parmenides course in the winter semester of 1942-1943. (shrink)

Collected in the course of research on the religious development of the young, these letters were written by children ranging in age from six to twelve and from a variety of religious backgrounds.

This ground-breaking collection of essays tackles the philosophical issues at play in cosmology, physics, mathematics, and neuroscience. The book considers topics such as the presence of ontology in cosmological theory and physics. It also weighs the philosophical issues connected with mathematical method, the neuroscience of emotions, and evolutionary anthropology. The contributions look at structuralism in the Platonic philosophy of science and the issue of knowledge and faith. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the philosophy of (...) science and the increasingly blurred borders between the two. (shrink)

Written by philosophers, cosmologists, and physicists, this collection of essays deals with causality, which is a core issue for both science and philosophy. Readers will learn about different types of causality in complex systems and about new perspectives on this issue based on physical and cosmological considerations. In addition, the book includes essays pertaining to the problem of causality in ancient Greek philosophy, and to the problem of God's relation to the causal structures of nature viewed in the light (...) of contemporary physics and cosmology. [Subject: Philosophy, Cosmology, Physics, Religious Studies]. (shrink)

The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In _Homo Sacer,_ Agamben aims to connect the problem of (...) pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty, a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals. (shrink)

Feminist Time Against Nation Time offers a series of essays that explore the complex and oftentimes contradictory relationship between feminism and nationalism through a problematization of contemporality. The collection pursues the following questions: how do the specific temporalities of nationalism and war limit and delimit public spaces in which dissent might happen; and how might we account for the often contradictory and ambiguous relationship of "feminism" and "nationalism" through an exploration of the problem of time?

In this book, one of the most distinguished scholars of German culture collects his essays on a figure who has long been one of his chief preoccupations.

Job crafting has been established as a bottom-up work design instrument for promoting health and well-being in the workplace. In recent years, the concepts of job crafting have been applied to the university student context, proving to be positively related to student well-being. Building on person-centered analyses from the employment context, we assessed approach study crafting strategy combinations and the relationships to students’ exhaustion, study engagement, and general well-being. Data from 2,882 German university students were examined, collected online during the (...) summer term in 2020. Using latent profile analysis, we found five distinct crafting groups, which showed discriminate validity with regard to emotional exhaustion, engagement, and well-being. The results underscore the positive role of study crafting for students’ health and well-being. They further indicate a less important role of increasing social resources for emotional exhaustion when combined with a moderate increase in structural resources and a moderate increase in challenging demands. Our findings imply that interventions to promote study crafting should be considered to promote student health and well-being. (shrink)

This collection examines the life and thought of Agnes Heller, who rose to international acclaim as a Marxist dissident in Eastern Europe.

Dear Professor Heller . . . Your paper had started out superbly. It was a great aesthetic and cognitive pleasure to follow you as you guided us through the intellectual history of the main idea of Kleist's essay, from Plato through the biblical Fall of Man, to Schiller, and Kierkegaard, and Kafka. Indeed the perceptive listener's experience was so satisfying that his disappointment was doubled when he came to realize that all this erudition and beauty had been displayed only (...) in order to serve as a contrast-providing background for the sharp delineation of a reductionistic explanation which you consider to be characteristic of psychoanalysis: the interpretation of the disturbance of man's naive, unselfconscious pre-Fall state as nothing more than a portrayal of sexual impotence—the reduction of a deep existential preoccupation to a case of phimosis. I am certain that the relief I felt when you then took up Freud's demonological-neurosis paper was not an idiosyncratic response on my part but an experience shared by many open-minded listeners in your psychoanalytic audience. Let us, therefore, disregard the "text" of your sermon and consider the substantial questions that you raised after you turned to Freud; these are to my mind the most central ones that you undertook to examine in your—despite its disappointing aspects—splendid address to us. Put into my own words, your most important question was this: What is the purpose of the psychoanalyst's efforts outside the clinical setting, in particular when his contributions take the form of a pathography? That is, To what end do analysts study the psychopathology of the creators of great works? I, too, have asked myself this question, and since you read my old essay "Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule" , you know some of my answers. But important basic questions are hardly ever answered once and for all; and I will, therefore, under the impact of your lecture, respond as if I had heard the question for the first time. Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and a teacher and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His works include The Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders—which has appeared in German, French, and Italian translations—, The Restoration of the Self and collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science. His "A Reply to Margret Schaefer"" was published in the Spring 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1. (shrink)

Aesthetics and Modernity brings together Agnes Heller's most recent essays on aesthetic genres such as painting, music, literature and comedy, aesthetic reception and embodiment in the context of the continuing pitfalls of modernity. The essays also throw light on Heller's theories of values, emotions and feelings, embodiment, and modernity. Those with an interest in philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, and social theory will find this collection illuminating, and an essential addition to any philosophy bookshelf.

This collection of lectures by world-renowned philosopher Agnes Heller, edited and introduced by John Grumley, covers a range of political and cultural issues, from the highly topical to modern classics.

he article is a review of Kamil Trombik’s book, in which he presents particular concepts of the philosophy of nature at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Kraków in the years 1978 to 1993. It was the first and decisive period in the formation of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Academy. The goal of the monograph was to demonstrate the factors that contributed to philosophy of nature becoming one of the most prominent and representative trends in this academic center, (...) as well as to attempt to answer the question of why “philosophy in science,” developed initially by Michał Heller and Józef Życiski, became the main style of doing philosophy of nature there. In the reporting part of the review main problems that the author raises are presented. They are collected in three chapters of his work, which corresponds to three initial phases of the formation of the philosophical department at the Pontifical Academy of Theology. Then, in the critical part, some aspects of Trombik’s work are assessed. First of all, the attention is paid to the part concerning the determination of the sources of “philosophy in science” which—although it seems to be the most interesting—is also the least original part of the work. Next, the contribution of Karol Wojtyła and many other lesser-known scientists and philosophers to the formation of an interdisciplinary atmosphere and the promotion of “philosophy in science” in the structures of The Pontifical Academy of Theology and the Krakow intellectual milieu is also appreciated. Many hypotheses and research perspectives in Trombik’s book are highlighted in the review, demonstrating the importance of this Krakow research center for the history of Polish science and philosophy. (shrink)

The article is a discussion of the statement of Michał Heller, who in a few paragraphs of the book titled Filozofia i wszechświat made a comparison between mathematical and musical structures and stated clear parallelism between them. A number of inaccuracies have resulted from a too cursory treatment of that compelling problem. The level of the statement made by Heller, i.e. "mathematical structures in physical models or theories are to the structure of the world like a musical score (...) to a piece of music" is inaccurate; if the score is to correspond with physical models, and it is composed of sound structures itself, the structures in that statement can correspond to structures only and the structure of the music has a mathematical structure already in its basis. In the further course of his argument Heller imprecisely uses the term of "notes", one time as the score, the other time as characters written in it or as sounding elements of a piece of music. Another contentious issue concerns the organization of the material of the mathematical and musical structures. In classical music an orderly collection of sounds of a certain piece of music is always a purely arbitrary and limited selection of sounds, ordered according to the pitch of sounds; it is not driven by any other rules. In comparison to the mathematical structure it presents itself rather as a system which is similar to numbers that are scattered according to rules which are not mathematical at all. The score itself does not constitute any type of musical structure and a specific musical structure appears only in an interpretation. A significant difference occurs also at the level of characters. The content of a numeric character is stable even when it is isolated from the whole mathematical system. It always means one and the same thing, i.e. a specific quantity. A note, by contrast, becomes completely meaningless when detached from the stave. The numerical character of the sound structures is not self-contained. It exists only when it serves music. Meanwhile, mathematical structures, although they support the world according to Heller, are fully self-sufficient in their own field, which is mathematics. They can exist for themselves there. Thus, mathematics would have a double existence: one for itself as art and the other one for the world as a basis. By contrast, music has a single existence only; it exists for the aims of art. With its entire splendor it does not have enough power to exist for itself. While creating sound structures, a composer considers neither the numerical basis of sound nor its acoustic sense, or any other sense connected with music. Finally, mathematical systems probably often relate to the mysteries of existence in a way which shakes all our knowledge and vision of reality. How dissimilar are musical structures here, though? There is only one certain thing there: both mathematical and musical structures can deeply move a human spirit. That is where, perhaps, their greatest similarity lies. (shrink)

This book offers a collection of essays in contemporary political philosophy from a wide range of Continental viewpoints. The authors include some of the most prominent European and European-oriented philosophers and political thinkers of our day. Two sections out of four focus on the debate between prescriptive and descriptive types of political thinking. On the prescriptive or normative side, Karl-Otto Apel, Robert Paul Wolff, Robert Spaemann, Hans Jonas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard discuss current forms of legitimating political life via some (...) ultimate grounding. On the descriptive or phenomenological side, Bernhard Waldenfels, Michel Henry, William J. Richardson, Jürgen Link, and Vincent Descombes argue that an understanding of praxis is always implied as one reaches insights into the life-world; there is no need to either construe or set normative standards for action. The remaining two sections deal with transcendental and institutional types of political philosophy, respectively. Manfred Riedel, Stanley Rosen, Thomas Seebohm, and Ludwig Siep develop Kant’s search for “a priori” conditions in the public realm; explicitly or implicitly, they confront the ancient Greek with the modern Enlightenment conceptions of life in public. Lastly, Agnes Heller, Alain Touraine, Reinhart Koselleck, and Bertram Schefold put to work many ways of looking at the life of our institutions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 3-24 [Access article in PDF] Agamben's Potential Leland Deladurantaye Giorgio Agamben. Potentialities: Collected Essays In Philosophy. Ed., trans., and intro. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. [P] It is only after a long and arduous frequenting of names, definitions, and facts that the spark is lit in the soul which, in enflaming it, marks the passage from passion to accomplishment.--Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of (...) ProseIn a preface written for the French translation of his Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben states that"every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks." 1 This remark, which describes every work of art as a preface, does not simply refer to the impossibility of translating the all of life into a single work. Nor does it simply refer to those purely empirical obstacles which stand in the way of creation, preventing the work of art from attaining the plenitude it might have hoped for had not greedy wine-merchants, harrying tailors, and eloquent panderers distracted the Great Minds from their tasks. Instead, in returning every work of art to its originary hesitation, in evoking the oscillation between work and draft, effort and accomplishment, Agamben invokes a much richer and darker potentiality lying at the heart of the work. It is this richer and darker potentiality that constitutes the central concern of Agamben's thought and that gives its name to this collection. Yet what is named in this potentiality? What is the nature of the potentiality of which Agamben speaks? What is this potentiality the potential for?Before advancing in the investigation of this question, let us look briefly at what is gathered together under its name. In this collection of essays by a thinker of unquestionable brilliance one finds a number of axes. The first of these is that of chronology: the essays presented in this volume stretch from 1975 to 1996 and thus cover the period during which works such as Stanzas, Infancy and History, The Idea of Prose, and The Coming Community were prepared and published. The second axis--the one that dictates the ordering of the texts found in this volume and which is the choice of the editor and not the author--is a thematic one: the book is divided into four sections entitled respectively, "Language," "History," "Potentiality," and "Contingency." 2 One notes the presence of other, more fugitive axes such as those which can be found in connections between different essays in the collection (as in the case of the remark from a late Byzantine lexicon cited in the closing paragraphs of the first essay, which receives a magisterial, thirty-page gloss in the last, richest essay in the collection) and between the essays gathered together in this volume and Agamben's other written works (the question [End Page 3] of the genealogy of the sacred, which lies at the heart of Agamben's most recent works, is evoked here in the closing lines of the eighth essay in this collection; the question of a philosophy of life as the coming philosophy in the chronologically final essay in this volume [chapter 14] thus announces Agamben's more recent studies on the politico-philosophical concept of life). These last two axes confront the reader with all the more urgency, as no major thinker since Walter Benjamin has occupied himself with such a tensely, densely interconnected constellation of concerns at the heart of such seeming diversity of subject. At the hub of these axes, which accelerate and blur in the reading of the work, lies the animating, abiding concern of Agamben's thought: potentiality. The Potentiality of Language, or Matter 1.1 This preface with which we began, and which finds itself near the chronological midpoint of the essays gathered together in this volume, contains a singular profession de foi. After suggesting that, "if for every author there exists a... (shrink)

I will return to the second point in a different context later; at this moment I will discuss only the issue raised by my pointing up the fact that the essay in question was written by someone in Professor Heller's field. What motivated me to make the statement was not my belief that the use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of art should be restricted to certified psychoanalysts—indeed, I have always been a staunch advocate of the opposite view. My (...) motive for this, I assumed harmless, and not, of course, irrelevant, indiscretion was that I wanted to show that Professor Heller's critique of psychoanalysis was not broadly based, that his representative example was a piece that happened to have crossed his way, that he was not using the work of an established writer in the field that he was condemning. My statement that your essay is an unacceptable text in a sermon preaching against applied analysis is unrelated to the value of your article. Even if in the future it should turn out that your essay—as far as I know your first contribution to applied psychoanalysis—was the forerunner of a significant oeuvre that would put you into the class of the great contributors of psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, it is at this point not an acceptable text for a sermon against our field. Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, teacher and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and author of many influential works on the psychology of the self. His works include The Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders - which has appeared in German, French, and Italian translations - and a collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science. His "Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Literature: A Correspondence with Erich Heller" was published in the Spring 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Are a statue and the lump of clay that constitutes it one object or two? Many philosophers have answered ‘two’ because the lump seems to have properties, such as the property of being able to survive flattening, that the statue lacks. This answer faces a serious problem : it seems that nothing grounds the difference in properties between colocated objects. The statue and lump are in the same environment and inherit properties from the same composing parts. But it seems that (...) differences in properties should be grounded. For this reason, philosophers including Mark Heller, Dean Zimmerman, Theodore Sider, Trenton Merricks, and Eric Olson have rejected the answer ‘two’. -/- I offer a solution to the grounding problem, in order to revive the traditional account. I argue that extrinsic relations contribute to the supervenience base of many kinds or sorts, and these extrinsic relations ground differences between colocated objects, such as statues and lumps of clay, human beings and lumps of tissue, and planets and masses of matter. The same collection of parts can stand in more than one extrinsic relation, with each relation grounding the composition of a distinct kind of object. In cases in which this happens, the properties of each object differ from the properties of other objects that share the same parts. (shrink)

Theodor W.Adorno was one of the towering intellectuals of the twentieth century. His contributions cover such a myriad of fields, including the sociology of culture, social theory, the philosophy of music, ethics, art and aesthetics, film, ideology, the critique of modernity and musical composition, that it is difficult to assimilate the sheer range and profundity of his achievement. His celebrated friendship with Walter Benjamin has produced some of the most moving and insightful correspondence on the origins and objects of the (...) Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. This unprecedented collection, devised and assembled by one of Europe's rising social theorists, distills the best from published assessments and responses to Adorno's oeuvre. The collection is divided into 4 volumes: Volume 1: Philosophy, Ethics and Critical Theory Part 1: Negative Dialectics Included here are contributions on the concept of totality in the writings of Adorno and Lukacs; Adorno and Bourgeois Philosophy; the relationship between Adorno and Kierkegaard; Adorno's Critique of Idealism; Adorno and Linguistics; Adono and Habermas. Part 2: Ethics and Redemption This is comprised of contributions on Adorno and Truth; Adorno's Inverse Theology; and Adorno and the Ineffable Part 3: Critical Theory, Ideology Critique and Social Science Included here are contributions on Adorno's relation to the Positivist Dispute; the Popper-Adorno Controversy; Adorno and Empirical Research; and Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Volume 2: Aesthetic Theory Part 1: Art and Politics in 'Aesthetic Theory' This includes material on the De-Aestheticization of Art; Adorno, Utopia and Mimesis; Adorno and autonomous art; Adorno and Dialectics; Adorno, Marxism and Art; Art and Criticism in Adorno's Aesthetics; Adorno's concept of the Avant-Garde. Part 2: Philosophy of Music This includes contributions on Adorno's music and social criticism; Adorno and nostalgia; Adorno, Heidegger and the meaning of music; Adorno and Wagner. Part 3: On Jazz The material included here addresses questions of Adorno and Popular Music; Adorno's encounter with jazz; Adorno, Jazz and Society; and the reasons for Adorno's apparent hatred of jazz. Volume 3: Social Theory & The Critique of Modernity Part 1: On 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' Included here are chapters on the dialectic of enlightenment and post-functionalist thought; dialectic of enlightenment as genealogy critique; the relationship between the dialectic of enlightenment, modernity and postmodernity; Adorno's critique of progress; Adorno and theories of subjectivity; and the dialectic of enlightenment and rationality. Part 2: Anti-Semitism This consists of material on Adorno and Horkheimer; and Adorno and Public Sphere Part 3: Popular Culture and Capitalism Included here are contributions on Adorno and Sport; Adorno's alleged left-wing elitism; Adorno's critique of astrology and the Occult; Benjamin and Adorno on Disney; Adorno, Totalitarianism and the Welfare State; and Adorno and Mass Society. Volume 4: Cultural Theory and the Postmodern Challenge Part 1: 'Damaged Life': Exile in America This section includes Leo Lowenthal's insightful recollections of Adorno; Adorno and the primal history of subjectivity; Adorno and Los Angeles; Adorno's relation to American culture; and Adorno's exile in England. Part 2: Film Theory This section includes chapters on Adorno and the Culture Industry; Benjamin, Adorno and Contemporary Film Theory; Adorno, Aesthetics and the Social. Part 3: Wellmer and Adorno Included here are papers on Aesthetic, Psychic and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer; and New German Aesthetic Theory after Adorno. Part 4: Jameson on Adorno Included here are papers on Jameson, Adorno and the persistence of the Utopian; and a Marxism for Postmodernism Part 5: Modernism and Postmodernism This section contains papers on Adorno, Foucault and the Modern Intellectual; Adorno, Foucault and Two forms of the Critique of Modernity; Adorno and the Habermas-Lyotard Debate; Adorno, Postmodernism and Edward Said; Adorno, Heidegger and Postmodernism; Adorno and the Decline of the Modern Age; The literary process of modernism; Adorno, Tradition and the Postmodern Part 5: The Feminist Response Included here are contributions on Adorno and Judith Butler; Adorno, Art Theory and Feminist Practice; and Gender in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. The collection comes with a superb Introduction to Adorno by Gerard Delanty which elucidates the main contributions of this penetrating and enduring thinker. Comprehensive and consistently illuminating, the collection includes the thought on Adorno from some of the most distinguished commentators on social theory. Included here are selections from the writings of Susan Buck-Morss, Martin Jay, Agnes Heller; David Frisby; Johann Arnason; Richard Wolin; Andrew Bowie; Robert Hulnot-Kentor; Leo Lowenthal; Richard Rorty Axel Honneth; Albrecht Wellmer; and Jurgen Habermas. The result is a peerless research resource allowing readers to delve into all aspects of Adorno's extraordinary accomplishments in social thought, philosophy and cultural criticism. It will be required reading for students of the Frankfurt School, Marxism, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics and Social Theory. (shrink)

In Marxism's uneasy relationship with ethics a small number of theorists considered it imperative to develop the moral principles implicit in Marx's social theory. They created a humanistic Marxism in stark contrast to the crude approach of Stalinism. This collection brings together analyses by leading scholars on those thinkers who made signifiant contributions to ethical thinking within the Marxist tradition—Kautsky, Bloch, Fromm, Marcuse, Lefebvre, Macpherson, and Heller.

As a whole these essays take their cue from the later Wittgenstein in an effort to get beyond the verifiability/falsifiability cul-de-sac and to "get clear" on some religious concepts by exploring religious language at work. The opening two essays, by E. Heller and P. Holmer, are the only two that deal directly with Wittgenstein. Heller shows some interesting parallels between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, but largely these essays are for introductory purposes. Although Wittgenstein's presence is felt in the remaining (...) essays, his name is seldom mentioned. Ian Ramsey has two contributions, one on paradox and one on religion and science. He is up to his usual method of making plausible suggestions by means of careful distinctions, always with a careful eye on the phenomenology of the religious universe of discourse. F. Ferré explores the notion of "models" as it works in science and sees how this concept can work in the examination of religious language. T. McPherson uses a distinction between literal, semiotic, and symbolic meaning to explore religious assertions and analogy. R. C. Coburn suggests that a neglected use of theological statements is to answer the limiting questions of religion in a manner that is logically complete. B. Mitchell talks about justifying religious belief in answer to MacIntyre's charge that such a project reveals a basic misunderstanding of religious discourse. There are two intriguing essays by Wm. Poteat, one of which draws an analogy between birth and suicide to build a doctrine of creation. C. B. Daly writes on metaphysics and the limits of language. Although there is same familiar wrangling over tired issues, the book does manage to collect some refreshing although not strikingly original essays.--S. O. H. (shrink)

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court is anticipated to finally decide whether the Second Amendment is an individual or a collective right. This article is not about the textual and historical arguments on the basis of which the Court is likely to make its decision. My topic is more fundamental. Assuming that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, what purpose does it serve? What are the possible reasons that private arms possession is sufficiently valuable to (...) deserve constitutional protection? Because it was insufficiently sensitive to the variety of justifications available, the majority in Parker v. District of Columbia (the D.C. Circuit case appealed in Heller) failed to identify the purposes of the Second Amendment. The passing comments it made were compatible with a large number of very different justifications. Second Amendment advocates have also been surprisingly muddled on the issue. This confusion has gone unnoticed because no one has, until now, offered a philosophically rigorous account of the justifications available and the important distinctions between them. Clarity about the value of private arms possession is essential for determining the scope of the Second Amendment under an individual right interpretation - a project that lower courts will be forced to undertake if Parker is affirmed. Courts commonly interpret the scope of a constitutional right in light of the interests the right protects. For this reason, they need a clear conception of why individuals have an interest in private arms possession. I offer this article as a first, but crucial, step toward answering this question. (shrink)

Revisionary ontologists are making a comeback. Quasi-nihilists, like Peter van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks, insist that the only composite objects that exist are living things. Unrestriced universalists, like W.V.O. Quine, David Lewis, Mark Heller, and Hud Hudson, insist that any collection of objects composes something, no matter how scattered over time and space they may be. And there are more besides. The result, says Eli Hirsch, is that many commonsense judgments about the existence or identity of highly visible (...) physical objects are a priori necessarily false. In a “last ditch effort” to bring revisionary ontologists back to their senses, Hirsch marshalls what he calls the Argument from Charity. We can be sure that there are tables and chairs and that there are no fusions of Plato’s nose and the Eiffel Tower, says Hirsch, because these commonsense platitudes are a logical consequence of the well-known principle of interpretive charity applied to natural languages, like English. In what follows, I assess the Argument from Charity. My conclusion is that if this is the best we can do to save revisionary ontologists, they are surely lost forever. (shrink)

New Mutualisms. Politics, Needs and Emancipation. According to the research hypothesis that forms the backdrop of this contribution, the most diverse forms of mutualism represent variants of political action born of, among, and for subjects in need. In contrast to the hypothesis of an uncritical valorization of these experiences, however, it is not necessarily the case that these collective actions of solidarity reciprocity also express the same need for renewal of institutional politics. The reconstruction of the different stages of the (...) modern history of mutualism will allow to question the alleged mutually exclusive relationship between politics and needs theorized by a long and authoritative philosophical tradition and, paradoxically, reaffirmed precisely by its fiercest critics such as Hannah Arendt. Following this operation of historical and conceptual contextualization it will become possible to identify the main differences between mutualism and other forms of civic engagement of the charitable or assistentialist kind, and then to draw an idealtypical classification of the different degrees of politicalness openly claimed or, in fact, expressed, by its contemporary manifestations. (shrink)

Introduction THOMAS C. HELLER AND DAVID E. WELLBERY A he essays that follow originated in a conference entitled "Reconstructing Individualism," held at ...

The debate about the nature of modernity and postmodernity has become central to intellectual culture today. In this work, two distinguished social theorists make a distinctive contribution to this continuing discussion.

In 1962 Hilary Putnam forced us to face the possibility of robot cats. More than twenty years later Daniel Dennett found himself doing battle with mad scientists and other “bogeymen.” Though these two examples are employed in different philosophical arena, there is an important connection between them that has not been emphasized. Separating the concept associated with a kind term from the extension of that term, as Putnam and others have urged, raises the possibility of accepting counterexamples to compatibilistic analyses (...) without rejecting compatibilism. Even if no compatibilist analysis of our concept of free action is acceptable, a compatibilist account of the essential nature of free action may be. (shrink)

Written by one of the most influential figures in post-World-War-II social thought, _A Theory of Modernity_ is a comprehensive analysis of the main dynamics of modernity, which discusses the technological, social and political elements of modernism.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

General Ontological Language (GOL) is a formal framework for representing and building ontologies. The purpose of GOL is to provide a system of top-level ontologies which can be used as a basis for building domain-specific ontologies. The present paper gives an overview about the basic categories of the GOL-ontology. GOL is part of the work of the research group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) at the University of Leipzig which is based on the collaborative work of the Institute of Medical Informatics (...) (IMISE) and the Institute for Computer Science (IfI). It represents work in progress toward a proposal for an integrated family of top-level ontologies and will be applied to several fields of medicine, in particular to the field of Clinical Trials. (shrink)

This provocative book attempts to resolve traditional problems of identity over time. It seeks to answer such questions as 'How is it that an object can survive change?' and 'How much change can an object undergo without being destroyed'? To answer these questions Professor Heller presents a theory about the nature of physical objects and about the relationship between our language and the physical world. According to his theory, the only actually existing physical entities are what the author calls (...) 'hunks', four-dimensional objects extending across time and space. This is a major contribution to ontological debate and will be essential reading for all philosophers concerned with metaphysics. (shrink)