This essay stages a dialectical confrontation between Adorno–Horkheimer on one hand and Benjamin–Badiou on the other against the background of the former's reductive portrait of Ulysses in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, which depicts him as a proto-bourgeois archetype of profit-seeking and acquisitive ethos. In sharp contrast, Walter Benjamin's allegorical materialism foregrounds, by dialectical illumination, hieroglyphic traces of Homeric virtues. These, I argue, are sustained and further amplified by Alain Badiou's topological ethics and loop-politics.

Materialism is considered to be an anathema to Indian philosophy. Despite this, Indian tradition boasts of a strong materialist trend predating the Vedas. This paper traces the proto-materialist ideas as found in the ancient Tantra and pre-classical or original Sāṃkhya. Representing the naturalistic trend in Indian philosophy, ancient Tantra identified the brain as the seat of human consciousness. The pre-classical Sāṃkhya considered matter as the primal non-intelligent or non-sentient first cause from which the universe was to evolve. It (...) considers the material cause to be self-sufficient for the purpose of producing the world; the principle of consciousness is potentially contained in the primeval matter. This paper aims to provide an overview of the Indian materialist viewpoint for multidisciplinary scholars. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that Berkeley is proto-phenomenologist. The term phenomenology will chiefly be understood in terms of the approach of Edmund Husserl. Berkeley is attentive to the correct use of significations in philosophical exposition, the subjective character of experience, the motility of the perceiver and the transcendence of things. Like the phenomenologists he rejects materialism, naturalism and scepticism. He seeks to preserve the evidences of ordinary perception, setting out an account of scientific theory that can cohere (...) with them. In the first part of this essay I go through some of the more clear-cut ways in which Berkeley anticipates Husserl and some of the latter’s successors. In the second part I lay out their criticisms of Berkeley, also indicating what they hold in common. In the third and final part I consider some of the ways in which Berkeley can meet these criticisms, either readily or through certain qualifications, and I bring out his most significant contributions as a proto-phenomenologist. My aim is to show there are more than traces of the phenomenological attitude in Berkeley. In his efforts to save the appearances, he goes back to that world in which we live and breathe, if not quite have our being. (shrink)

The aims of this paper are twofold: (1) to critique Graham Harman’s avowedly nonrelational object-oriented ontology from the shared relational vantage of ethics, social philosophy, and feminist new materialism; and (2) to articulate the metaphysical basis for a materialist ontology that serves at once as a posthumanist metaethic, or, as I call it, proto-ethic. The nascent movements of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology suggest some fruitful strategies for challenging the anthropocentrism of the post-Kantian philosophical landscape. They do so, (...) however, by simultaneously foreclosing the possibility of thinking with these strategies to address moral and political problems, insofar as they characterize the real as fundamentally nonrelational. I argue that Harman’s adopted noumenalism is ultimately self-undermining, and offer as an alternative a materialist account of reality as intrinsically phenomenal, where phenomenality is unpacked as the excessive, ongoing source of proto-ethical norms to which every human ethical system implicitly appeals. (shrink)

Jābāli, one of the priest-cum-counsellors of king Daśaratha, has long been recognized as an odd character, preaching materialism in order to persuade Rāma to go back to Ayodhyā after the death of his father. The critical edition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa reveals several stanzas interpolated in the vulgate so as to denigrate Jābāli and brand him as a rank opportunist. In spite of that, whatever remains of Jābāli’s speech addressed to Rāma evinces one of the basic tenets of materialist (...) ontology, i.e., denial of the existence of any other-world, and hence the futility of performing rites for the ancestors. However, nothing is said about the epistemology,, ethics, and metaphysics of materialism as it existed at the time when the Rāmāyaṇa was redacted. Considering all this it is better to call Jābāli a proto-materialist who speaks of a philosophy akin to the teachings of Ajita Kesakambala, a senior contemporary of the Buddha, whose doctrine has been dubbed as that of annihilation in the Tipiṭaka. Both of them belong to the pre-Cārvāka materialist tradition in India. (shrink)

The controversy over teleology raged in the early modern period with particular intensity. In this paper, I will show that Guillaume Lamy represents a current of antifinalism, devoid of weakness, and far from compromise with his adversaries. This antifinalism makes of Lamy not so much a sincere supporter of the unknowability of God in other words, a proto but rather a radical Lucretian materialist, whose aim is to openly distance himself equally from the partial Cartesian rejection of final causes (...) and from the sugar–coated Epicureanism of the Gassendists. (shrink)

ABSTRACT 'The Duologue of King/Governor Pāyāsi' has long been recognised as a source for the proto-materialism current at the time of the Buddha. What needs to be stressed is the significance of the text as a pointer to the development of Logic in India. Perception, which is an accepted method of experimental enquiry, and reasoning from analogy, which can lead at best to a probable conclusion - these two are the only means employed to settle the dispute concerning (...) the existence of the other-world. The Jain version of the same duologue-cum-parable, though varying in minor details regarding the name and identity of the monk refuting the king/governor, contains the same contrast, namely, perception versus analogical reasoning. There can be little doubt that the original parable was conceived with a view to asserting the existence of the other-world. In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, an earlier Brahmanical text, however, instead of argument by analogy, verbal testimony was invoked to settle the same point. Naciketas is assailed by doubt about the existence of a person after his or her death. The authority of Yama, the Pluto of Indian mythology, is invoked to convince him that the other-world does exist. Thus, the three parables taken together exhibit three means of knowledge in operation: verbal testimony and argument by analogy pitted against perception. RESUMO 'O duólogo do rei/governador Pāyāsi' há muito tempo é reconhecido como uma fonte da corrente protomaterialista da época do Buda. O que é necessário ressaltar é o significado desse texto como um indicador do desenvolvimento da lógica na Índia. Percepção, aceita como método de investigação experimental, e raciocínio por analogia, que no máximo pode conduzir a uma conclusão provável - apenas esses dois são os meios utilizados para dirimir a disputa que diz respeito à existência do outro-mundo. A versão jaina do mesmo duólogo-cum-parábola, mesmo com variações que concernem ao nome e à identidade do monge que se opõe ao rei/governador, contém o mesmo contraste, a dizer, percepção contra raciocínio por analogia. Não há muita dúvida de que a parábola original foi concebida com o intuito de afirmar a existência do outro-mundo. Entretanto, na Kaṭha Upaniṣad, um texto bramânico mais antigo, em vez do argumento por analogia, o testemunho verbal foi invocado para resolver o mesmo ponto. Naciketas é tomado pela dúvida sobre a existência da pessoa depois da sua morte. A autoridade de Yama, o Plutão da mitologia indiana, é invocada para convencê-lo que o outro-mundo existe. Portanto, as três parábolas juntas exibem três meios de conhecimento em função: testemunho verbal e argumento por analogia opostos à percepção. (shrink)

Richard Rorty would have read these passages strategically as so much meta‐physical mumbo jumbo, yet they can "usefully" apply here. Derrida famously argued that differance was neither a word nor a concept. Rorty's dismissiveness here is typical of his transvaluative stylistics, presenting itself, as always, in commonsensical rather than counterintuitive attire. Yet Badiou's reworking of Derrida's non/concept can help us situate Rorty's philosophy in the nonplace between transvaluative legibility and illegibility, where it reads to this day. The eschewal of every (...) "conditions of possibility" rhetoric had consequences for Rorty's Critical reception – consequences that were already implicit in Consequences of Pragmatism, but which Rorty may not have foreseen. Rorty's peculiar tragedy is that he was not a proto‐cultural materialist, any more than he was a "conditions of possibility" antifoundationalist or a by now mythological logical positivist. Neither Rorty nor speculative realists are speculative, of course, in the sense that Hegel's philosophy is called "speculative.". (shrink)

Ciò che qui chiamo Materialismo indiano non deve intendersi come scuola filosofica unica ed univocamente impostata, bensì come insieme di correnti di pensiero, propugnanti differenti punti di vista, ma tutte collocate entro l’orizzonte concettuale che nega ciò che in Occidente si usa chiamare Trascendente. Inoltre, com’è ovvio, bisogna distinguere tra un Materialismo filosofico – che prenderò in considerazione qui – ed un Materialismo, per così dire, popolare – al quale mi riferirò solo se necessario. Due sono le impostazioni materialiste che (...) intendo trattare: l’una riguarda i sostenitori dell’esistenza di cinque elementi materiali (bhūtapañcakavādin) che chiamerò, seguendo Ramkrishna Bhattacharya, proto-Materialisti, l’altra concerne i sostenitori dell’esistenza di quattro elementi materiali (bhūtacatuṣṭayavādin), tra cui i Cārvāka. (shrink)

The triumph of scientific materialism in the Seventeenth Century not only bifurcated nature into matter and mind and primary and secondary qualities, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out in Science and the Modern World. It divided science and the humanities. The core of science is the effort to comprehend the cosmos through mathematics. The core of the humanities is the effort to comprehend history and human nature through narratives. The life sciences can be seen as the zone in which (...) the conflict between these two very different ways of comprehending the world collide. Evolutionary theory as defended by Schelling developed out of natural history, but efforts have been made to formulate neo-Darwinism through mathematical models. However, it is impossible to eliminate stories from biology. As Stuart Kauffman argued, mathematical models attempt to pre-state all possibilities, but in evolution there can be adjacent possibles that can be embraced by organisms but cannot be pre-stated. To account for such actions it is necessary to tell stories. Mathematics provides analytic precision allowing long chains of deductions, but tends to deny temporal becoming and cannot do justice to the openness of the future, while narratives focus on processes and events, but lack exactitude that would provide precise deductions and predictions. In advancing mathematics adequate to life, Robert Rosen argued that living beings as anticipatory systems must have models of themselves, and strove to develop a form of mathematics able to model life itself. It has been convincingly argued that narratives are central to human self-creation and they are lived out before being explicitly told. Their models of themselves are first and foremost, stories or narratives. If this is the case, might not living beings as biological entities be characterized by proto-stories or narratives in their models of themselves? Biosemiotics, largely inspired by C.S. Peirce, provides a bridge between mathematical and narrative comprehension, conceiving them as different forms of semiosis. The study of life through biosemiotics could reveal how mathematics and narratives can be understood in relation to each other. This could have implications for how we understand science and the humanities and their relationship to each other. In this paper I will examine work in theoretical biology that might advance these efforts. (shrink)

Though most contemporary philosophers and scientists accept a physicalist view of mind, the recent surge of interest in the problem of consciousness has put the mind/body problem back into play. The physicalists' lack of success in dispelling the air of residual mystery that surrounds the question of how consciousness might be physically explained has led to a proliferation of options. Some offer alternative formulations of physicalism, but others forgo physicalism in favour of views that are more dualistic or that bring (...) in mentalistic features at the ground- floor level of reality as in pan-proto-psychism. My aim here is to give an overview of the recent philosophic discussion to serve as a map in locating issues and options. I will not offer a comprehensive survey of the debate or mark every important variant to be found in the recent literature. I will mark the principal features of the philosophic landscape that one might use as general orientation points in navigating the terrain. I will focus in particular on three central and interrelated ideas: those of emergence, reduction, and nonreductive physicalism. The third of these, which has emerged as more or less the majority view among current philosophers of mind, combines a pluralist view about the diversity of what needs to be explained by science with an underlying metaphysical commitment to the physical as the ultimate basis of all that is real. The view has been challenged from both left and right, on one side from dualists and on the other from hard core reductive materialists. Despite their differences, those critics agree in finding nonreductive physicalism an unacceptable and perhaps even incoherent position. They agree as well in treating reducibility as the essential criterion for physicality; they differ only about whether the criterion can be met. Reductive physicalists argue that it can, and dualists deny it. (shrink)

In this dissertation I uncover a logic of the development of atomism in early Greek philosophy that has not been previously recognized in the philosophical literature. This logic results from the nature of subjectivity and the attempt by reflective subjects to understand the world in which they live. Thus because of the nature of illusions built in to perception and reflection, reflective subjects who attempt to understand their world will develop more or less accurate accounts according to their ability to (...) see through these illusions. ;Physicalism, as it is understood by Professor Phillip Scribner of The American University and explained in currently unpublished manuscripts, provides the interpretative key that reveals the underlying logic in the development of early Greek philosophy. It is therefore necessary to explain this particular form of physicalism in some detail in order to understand the terminology and categories to be used in the historical analysis. To this end I explain the physicalist ontology and philosophy of science, the genesis of the problem of mind in Modern and Contemporary philosophy, the physicalist solution to the problem of mind, and the nature of the physicalist critique of the history of philosophy. ;In the historical sections the themes of materialism, reductionism, and realism are used to compare the views of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, and Democritus and to show how their various positions on the themes follow from their assumptions about the nature of subjectivity. I argue that the predecessors of atomism were all naive realists and that this assumption about the nature of mind generates the problems of early Greek philosophy. The resolution of these problems follows from the development of critical realism by Leucippus and a form of proto-physicalism by Democritus. ;The main sources used are English translations of Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker by H. Diels, edited by W. Kranz, and a variety of secondary sources which provide the consensus of modern authorities. (shrink)

Marx admirait grandement Aristote. En aurait-il pour autant accepté l'étrange réactualisation de l'ontologie, cette proto-science de "l'être en tant qu'être"? Toute son oeuvre atteste au contraire qu'elle relevait à ses yeux de "l'ancienne philosophie", conçue à une époque où se confondaient encore toutes les branches du savoir et dont il fallait "sortir d'un bond". L'élaboration par lui et ses continuateurs de cette logique supérieure qu'est la dialectique matérialiste offrait désormais la clé d'une connaissance positive d'un monde s'expliquant par lui-même, (...) sans adjonction d'aucune sorte. On peut s'étonner qu'au soir de sa vie, Georges Lukacs (1885-1971), une des figures les plus marquantes du marxisme contemporain, se soit lancé dans l'impossible tentative de réanimer cette antiquité philosophique. Riche en développements sur le travail et l'aliénation, sa monumentale Ontologie de l'être social n'en révèle pas moins un significatif écartèlement entre le penseur marxiste et l'homme de la Mitteleuropa qu'il ne dépouilla sans doute jamais complètement en lui. (shrink)

Though most contemporary philosophers and scientists accept a physicalist view of mind, the recent surge of interest in the problem of consciousness has put the mind /body problem back into play. The physicalists' lack of success in dispelling the air of residual mystery that surrounds the question of how consciousness might be physically explained has led to a proliferation of options. Some offer alternative formulations of physicalism, but others forgo physicalism in favour of views that are more dualistic or that (...) bring in mentalistic features at the ground- floor level of reality as in pan-proto-psychism. My aim here is to give an overview of the recent philosophic discussion to serve as a map in locating issues and options. I will not offer a comprehensive survey of the debate or mark every important variant to be found in the recent literature. I will mark the principal features of the philosophic landscape that one might use as general orientation points in navigating the terrain. I will focus in particular on three central and interrelated ideas: those of emergence, reduction, and nonreductive physicalism. The third of these, which has emerged as more or less the majority view among current philosophers of mind, combines a pluralist view about the diversity of what needs to be explained by science with an underlying metaphysical commitment to the physical as the ultimate basis of all that is real. The view has been challenged from both left and right, on one side from dualists and on the other from hard core reductive materialists. Despite their differences, those critics agree in finding nonreductive physicalism an unacceptable and perhaps even incoherent position. They agree as well in treating reducibility as the essential criterion for physicality; they differ only about whether the criterion can be met. Reductive physicalists argue that it can, and dualists deny it. (shrink)

This book introduces concepts in philosophy of mind and neurophilosophy. Inside, three scholars offer approaches to the problems of identity, consciousness, and the mind. In the process, they open new vistas for thought and raise fresh controversies to some of the oldest problems in philosophy. The first chapter focuses on the identity problem. The author employs an explanatory model he christened sense-phenomenalism to defend the thesis that personal identity is something or a phenomenon that pertains to the observable/perceptible aspect of (...) the human person. The next chapter explores the problem of consciousness. It deploys the new concept equiphenomenalism as a model to show that mental properties are not by-products but necessary products of consciousness. Herein, the notion of qualia is a fundamental and necessary product that must be experienced simultaneously with neural activities for consciousness to be possible. The last chapter addresses the mind/body problem. It adopts the new concept proto-phenomenalism as an alternative explanatory model. This model eliminates the idea of a mind. As such, it approaches the mind-body problem from a materialistic point of view with many implications such as, the meaning of our existence, the possibility of thought engineering as well as religious implications. (shrink)

While Hume has often been held to have been an agnostic or atheist, several contemporary scholars have argued that Hume was a theist. These interpretations depend chiefly on several passages in which Hume allegedly confesses to theism. In this paper, I argue against this position by giving a threshold characterization of theism and using it to show that Hume does not confess. His most important confession does not cross this threshold and the ones that do are often expressive rather than (...) assertive. I then argue that Hume is best interpreted as an atheist. Instead of interpreting Hume as a proto-logical positivist and arguing on the basis of Hume’s theories of meaning and method, I show that textually he appears to align himself with atheism, that his arguments in the Dialogues on Natural Religion support atheism, and that this position is most consistent with Hume’s naturalism. But, I hold that his atheism is soft and therefore distinct from that of his peers like Baron d’Holbach—while Hume really does reject theism, he neither embraces a dogmatically materialist position nor takes up a purely polemical stance towards theism. I conclude by suggesting several ways in which Hume’s atheistic philosophy of religion is relevant to contemporary discussions. (shrink)

In this article, Brzozowski’s much discussed connections with fascism are reconsidered in the context of interpretations of fascism by Sternhell and Gentile. At the end of his life, Brzozowski tried to reconcile socialism and nationalism. He criticized orthodox Marxism and liberal democracy, underlined the political and cultural importance of the nation, praised irrationalism, strength, imperialism, heroism, asceticism, the labourer and the soldier as ideal attitudes with regard to the world. He wanted to turn Poland into a modern nation, but feared (...) some consequences of modernity. Brzozowski’s ambivalent attitude towards modernity precludes finding an adequate description for them, in particular in the Polish and Central European context, although his concepts were similar to those of some of his contemporaries from France or Italy, such as Georges Sorel or the “La Voce” group, as well as “antimoderns” as described by Antoine Compagnon. At present labels such as “fascism” or even “proto-fascism” seem to be too ambiguous to grasp the originality of Brzozowski’s thinking. The Polish thinker’s case suggests a reconsideration of Sternhell’s thesis that Eastern-European Marxism remained loyal to the Heglian, rationalist, and materialist essence of Marxism. (shrink)

Based on the hypothesis that the selfhood is the last outpost of sociality within a person, consciousness and the self are considered as complex spiritual and material phenomena, they include at least three main components: neurobiological activity, intimate personal environment and social context. The author analyzes an internal materialistic perspective, which infers the reduction of self and consciousness to ordinary neural processes of the brain. With this perspective, the main thing for neural activity is to maintain homeostasis, first, within the (...) brain itself, and then within the organism as a whole. Based on the latest achievements of neuroscience and the constructions of neurophilosophy, the impossibility of a significant accentuation of the production of the self against the background of the default activity of brain activity is demonstrated. The concept of protoconsciousness is introduced. In its context, it is shown that even the simplest ones can use complex algorithms for processing information, correcting behavioral errors to ensure effective existence in the life world intended for them. As a result – there is an integrative behavior, when one or another of its elements is not just a single reaction to a stimulus but formed as a result of the execution of a certain algorithm (of yet not clear structure and origin), data and commands for which come from several sources. Attention is drawn to the fact that even for a quite simple behavior there is need for some built-in spatio-temporal matrix which will be typologically similar to Kant’s forms of perception. From the standpoint of a materialistic perspective, it is proposed to consider rationality and the self, which is associated with it, as a kind of superstructure over the outconscious interaction with reality that our biological predecessors developed. However, both rationality and the self inevitably presuppose a return to sociality, without which neither the first nor the second can be conceived. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Where's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field by S. Scott GrahamJoshua HananWhere's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. By S. Scott Graham. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 194 pp. Paperback $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5771-5.The proliferation of materialist perspectives in rhetorical studies has generated feelings of disciplinary crisis and fragmentation. Early materialist formulations of rhetoric, such as those put forward by Michael Calvin McGee and Raymie McKerrow, conceptualized materiality (...) discursively and, thus, maintained continuity with more traditional accounts of rhetoric as a practice of "symbolic action." However, beginning with texts such as Ronald Walter Greene's "Another Materialist Rhetoric" and Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley's edited collection Rhetorical Bodies, scholars began emphasizing the ontological and embodied rhetoricity of physical contexts and environments over discursive and ideological conceptions of materiality. This turn toward the ontological and embodied has rapidly expanded over the past twenty years, with numerous scholars now offering new materialist, postcritical, ecological, computational, and digital perspectives on rhetoric that privilege concepts such as affect, circulation, and assemblage over more traditional rhetorical terminology.It is in response to this tension between standard rhetorical perspectives and materialist rhetorical approaches that we can appreciate the interventions of S. Scott Graham's recent book, Where's the Rhetoric? Imagining a Unified Field. Rejecting the view that the materialist turns in rhetorical studies (particularly rhetorical new materialisms [hereafter referred to as RNM] and computational rhetoric) have left the discipline more fragmented and less capable of defending a unified perspective on rhetoric, Graham believes it is possible to generate a new unified theory that can affirm the lines of scholarly influence that have given rise to RNM (what Graham calls modern rhetoric's "right branch") as well as the more [End Page 218] traditional lines of scholarly influence that have led to a formulation of rhetoric as "symbolic action" (what Graham calls modern rhetoric's "left branch"). To accomplish this task, Graham argues that we should avoid the tendency to view RNM as "other" to traditional narratives about rhetoric and, instead, consider how these latter perspectives are compatible with the former. Much like unified field theories in physics that seek to bridge older perspectives on general relativity with newer perspectives on quantum mechanics (e.g., string theory and quantum loop gravity), Graham believes it is possible to achieve similar results in rhetorical studies by approaching standard rhetorical perspectives from the ontological viewpoints enabled by RNM.What makes Graham's angle on this claim particularly unique is his premise that a proto-new materialist perspective has underpinned some of the most influential left branch approaches to rhetoric all along. While most rhetoricians start from the present when introducing concepts associated with RNM, Graham, following historically informed thinkers such as Scot Barnett, Debra Hawhee, and Thomas Rickert, demonstrates that there is a line of thinking about "symbolic action" as "situated action" that goes back to the relational approach to metaphysics put forward by philosopher Henri Bergson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, as Graham argues, if we begin with Bergson's relational ontology, rather than the postmodernist and social constructivist philosophies that (explicitly and implicitly) shaped interpretations of rhetoric's left branch during the second half of the twentieth century, we do not "need to re-engineer rhetoric" to fit the latest trends of RNM (41). From Graham's perspective, many standard rhetorical perspectives have been hospitable toward new materialism from the outset. To appreciate this fact, we simply need to recuperate the Bergsonian legacy that informs this tradition.To make a case for this Bergsonian approach to rhetoric, the first main chapter of Graham's book (chapter 2) engages in detail with the work of Kenneth Burke. As a crucial founder of the symbolic action paradigm, Graham believes that if he can show the influence of Bergson on Burke's thought, he can, in turn, demonstrate how scholarship informed by Burke is also influenced by Bergson. To trace the influence of Bergson on Burke's thinking, Graham focuses on Burke's early work, especially Permanence and Change. In contrast to Burke's later writings (e.g., A Grammar of Motives, A... (shrink)

In contrast to the conventional view of Ludwig Feuerbach as a left-wing Young Hegelian, this article argues that his primary contribution to philosophy is to be found in his later ethics, the basis of which may be discerned in his earlier writings. Over and above recent work on Feuerbach's aesthetics, his relation to Herder, and the relationship between aesthetics and ‘theological politics’ in his thought, Feuerbach's philosophy can re-evaluated, in relation to Epicurus and the French libertin tradition, as articulating an (...) ethics of hedonism. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), the Nachlass fragment ‘Elementary Aesthetics’ (1843), and his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) Feuerbach moves towards the vitalist materialist position that culminates in his (proto-Nietzschean) insight in ‘Against the Dualism of Body and Soul, Flesh and Spirit’ (1846) into the world as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, thus laying the foundations for his recognition of the centrality of sensuous pleasure to the ethical life. (shrink)

Aristotle’s account of natural slavery as presented in his Politics is often treated by historians of philosophy as an account that can be analyzed purely internally in terms of its argumentative structure without referring to social factors. Against this view, Aristotle’s account of natural slavery is seen to be ideological according to at least one variant of the Marxist concept of ideology, and cannot be understood without reference to Aristotle’s socioeconomic context. The ideological nature of Aristotle’s account of natural slavery (...) is especially evident in his “proto-racialization” of the category of the “natural slave.” The Marxist concept of ideology is demonstrably useful in the historical study of philosophy, as compared with internalist historians of philosophy who claim that referring to nonphilosophical factors such as class interests inevitably obscures the philosophical content of the texts that are the objects of analysis. (shrink)

Cílem příspěvku je představit a zhodnotit filosofickou pozici A. N. Whiteheada, podle které je dualismus fatálním omylem v jádru moderní vědecké kosmologie, a proto je možné pokládat jej za jednu z příčin moderních ekologických a socioekonomických krizí. Nejprve je shrnuta Whiteheadova kritika mechanistického materialismu, z něhož vychází dualistický rys západního myšlení, který Whitehead nazývá bifurkací přírody. Je ukázáno, jak oddělování lidské mysli a kosmu neponechává žádný prostor svébytnému vědomí a životu a jak atribut nezávislosti ducha ústí v soukromé světy (...) zkušenosti a morálky. Dále je argumentováno, že centrální motivací Whiteheadovy kosmologické koncepce je vybudování systému, v němž si estetické, náboženské a morální zájmy podají ruku s koncepty světa, které mají své kořeny v přírodních vědách. Whiteheadova kosmologie je interpretována jako posun od materialismu k organicismu a zároveň jako přechod od statického k dynamickému pojetí kosmu. (shrink)

From 1919 to 1929, the great Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Communist Party, immersed not simply in theorising but also in significant practical-political work. Along with labour leader Jenö Landler, he led a faction opposing an ultra-left sectarian orientation represented by Béla Kun. If seen in connection with this factional struggle, key works of Lukács in this period – History and Class Consciousness, Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought, Tailism (...) and the Dialectic and ‘The Blum Theses’ – can be seen as forming a consistent, coherent, sophisticated variant of Leninism. Influential readings of these works interpret them as being ultra-leftist or proto-Stalinist. Such readings distort the reality. Lukács’s orientation and outlook of 1923–9 are, rather, more consistent with the orientation advanced by Lenin and Trotsky in the Third and Fourth Congresses of the Communist International. After his decisive political defeat, Lukács concluded that it was necessary to renounce his distinctive political orientation, and completely abandon the terrain of practical revolutionary politics, if he hoped to remain inside the Communist movement. This he did, adapting to Stalinism and shifting his efforts to literary criticism and philosophy. But the theorisations connected to his revolutionary politics of the 1920s continue to have relevance for revolutionary activists of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Hill and Montag’s The Other Adam Smith confirms many of the Left’s established positions on Adam Smith, but does so by framing the philosopher as a standard-bearer of the Scottish Enlightenment, and not just as an arch-capitalist and proto-Hayekian. The book makes a strong case, but also strong-arms its readers into choosing between the Scottish Enlighteners and the Spinozism that its authors prefer.

Prof. R. W. Sellars' article "Three Levels of Materialism," published in the present number of our journal, marks an important stage in the philosophical development of the noted American philosopher. In it he gives something in the nature of a summation of his views on one of the most important problems in the theory of knowledge—that of perception—to which Sellars has devoted many years of work and quite a number of articles.