The Quarrel over Swammerdam’s Posthumous Works reconstructs the vicissitudes of Johannes Swammerdam’s Biblia naturae, a pivotal collection of writings in the history of science. Bequeathed to the polymath Melchisédech Thévenot, the manuscripts and drawings of the treatises constituting this collection were instead kept by the editor Hermann Wingendorp after Swammerdam’s death (1680), triggering a quarrel over their publication. By analysing Swammerdam’s scientific legacy and by offering an edition of the correspondence testifying to the efforts towards such publication, this book sheds (...) light on the editorial history and intellectual context of Swammerdam’s Biblia. This reveals not only an intricate plot of authorized and unauthorized attempts to publish it, but also an exchange of scientific texts and instruments in the late seventeenth century. (shrink)

The intellectual history of Humanity is part of a vast genealogy that stems from disputes between those advocating the excellence of ancient times and those arguing the superiority of the present. Thus, since antiquity we find the persistent recurrence of a Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, virulence that stresses the human and social experience, either praised, either rebuked in its development process. This paper discusses the process of development of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns as (...) a matrix from which it is possible to perceive, in sparse and seemingly random historical positions, a way that guide us to the path, full of crossings and intersections, of modern experience. Its aim is to define some cardinal points of the Quarrel’s own development that help us to better understand how the idea of “modernity” has evolved. (shrink)

Now available in paperback, ____The Quarrel Between Philosophy__ ____and Poetry__ focuses on the theoretical and practical suppositions of the long-standing conflict between philosophy and poetry. Stanley Rosen--one of the leading Plato scholars of our day--examines philosophical activity, questioning whether technical philosophy is a species of poetry, a political program, an interpretation of human existence according to the ideas of 19th and 20th-century thinkers, or a contemplation of beings and Being.

This essay starts from the theory of disputes and progresses towards a theory of ‘interpellation’, which it aims to outline. The starting point is given by Lyotard's differend, which provides a first contrast between dispute and quarrel. Dispute can be seen as the more irenic pole of a system where quarrel would be identified as clearly agonistic. The essay first revisits the differend in the light of Habermas's theory, which posits that discussions take place against the background of a lifeworld. (...) This enables ways of conceptualizing both dispute, as emerging from the possibilities offered by language games, and quarrel, which belongs to the world of incomprehension. This first model is subjected to the test of Lewis Carroll's ‘Alice in Wonderland’ books, where dissensus is transformed into consensus, where a quarrel may end up in a dispute which respects conventions. But the crucial point of the essay is to provide a philosophy of language which enables the conceptualization of quarrels. The essay revisits the conceptions put forward in The Violence of Language and A Marxist Philosophy of Language but then carries the analysis into new territory. Finding inspiration in Althusser's theory of interpellation and in Judith Butler's reading of Althusser, the essay shows that quarrels enact both interpellation and counter-interpellation, and views further quarrels as one of the characteristics of human language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 456-458 [Access article in PDF] Quarrel & Quandary, by Cynthia Ozick; xiii & 247 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, $25.00. Ask Cynthia Ozick to define a Jewish book and she launches into an extended defense of the integrity of the body of traditional Jewish writing: Torah, Talmud, liturgy, ethics, and philosophy. Ozick takes her Judaism seriously; its literature, in the broad sense, (...) for her, is didactic and dedicated to the promotion of virtue attained through study. She takes literature seriously too and strenuously defends fiction as an act of the "free imagination," with an equal emphasis on both elements of that phrase although, Ozick rightly argues, the imagination by definition is free. Thus, a Jewish book and Jewish fiction are contradictory. To different degrees, emphasis, and purpose, both are freighted by moral purpose.So are the various Ozicks! A traditional Jew, a Jewish American writer, a novelist, an essayist, a classical feminist—all describe Ozick who obviously belies all simple categories save one: writer. Yet even as a writer, Ozick is complex and conflicted, lamenting that she hasn't written enough fiction but claiming that it simply could not have been different.While Ozick may not be as prolific as she would like, she is a commanding presence in American fiction and belles lettres. Her latest collection of non-fiction work, Quarrel & Quandary, demonstrates her clear thinking, breadth of expertise, seriousness, and intelligence. Ranging from the autobiographical to the political, each essay is informed by history and none is light nor nostalgic. "Dostoyevsky's Unabomber" is perceptive and regrettably prescient in its depiction of the philosopher-murderer. In "The Posthumous Sublime," Ozick walks us through the "grieving that has been made beautiful" in the four stories of Sebald's The Emigrants. "A Drug Store Eden" is a warm and familiar but never sentimental portrait of her hard-working parents and her Uncle Ruby. The humor of "Lovesickness" and "How I Got Fired from My Summer Job" resonate for middle-class, studious, awkward young girls. In another essay, awe-inspired respect for Kafka is balanced by reverent awe of God, which is tempered by an uncomfortable acceptance of Job's acquiescence. Where is Job's "impious impatience" in the face of his renewed prosperity and health?, she asks. Where is "the father's bitter grief over the loss" of his first family? In quintessential [End Page 456] Ozick, she acknowledges the staying power of the ancient sages who argued God's majesty at the same time reserving her right to "philosophic doubt," especially in light of the Shoah.Two essays in this volume are exceptional in their insight and influence. "Who Owns Anne Frank?" should put to rest the sentimentalization of Anne Frank and her diary. It should stop the shameless marketing of the Holocaust—the catastrophe that marked a century—as yet another genocide. Ozick's relentless focus on the reality of Nazi evil and its consequent waste of human lives and potential should abort further distortions about Anne's short life, but it probably won't. The diary has been "bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced... infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized, falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied." It has "nonsensically" been described as cheerful and optimistic, even in the face of the fact that Anne, along with other members of the attic community, were targeted for murder and that, one month before liberation, Anne and her sister Margot died as prisoners in the unimaginable horror of Bergen Belsen, a camp so lice-ridden and disease-infested that it was burned to ashes by the British rather than cleansed, disinfected, or rehabilitated.Ozick tracks the controversy centered on the transformation of Anne's diary into the Americanized, christianized, perky Junior Miss that American audiences would accept, including the fabrication of lines that rendered the targeting of the Jews as one victim among many: "We're not the only people that've had to suffer" instead of Anne's more thoughtful and complex—and potentially problematic—"In the eyes of the world, we're doomed.... Who knows, maybe our religion will teach... (shrink)

Anyone familiar with Nelson Goodman’s philosophical career knows that to have quarreled with him was a hazardous enterprise. For aside from his creative brilliance and analytical subtlety, he was also one of the foremost dialecticians of the age. Seeing through the flaws of rival views and rebutting putative counterarguments to his own came as easily to him as breathing. To recall his rejoinders to a long list of would-be rebuttals of his paper, “On Likeness of Meaning”, or the acute series (...) of counterexamples to received views of scientific law in his pioneering paper, “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals”, or his replies to criticisms of his nominalism in “A World of Individuals”, or again, his replies to confident attacks on his theory of projection is to find ample evidence of an intimidating intellectual presence. To take issue with him was in fact to take one’s philosophical life in one’s hands and many are those over the course of his career who rued the venture. (shrink)

At a time when professional art criticism is on the wane, the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy demands fresh answers. Professional art criticism provided a basis upon which to distinguish apt experiences of art from the idiosyncratic. However, currently the kind of narratives from which critics once drew are underplayed or discarded in contemporary exhibition design where the visual arts are concerned. This leaves open the possibility that art operates either as mere stimulant to private reverie or, in the (...) more contentful cases, as propaganda. The ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is that art influences surreptitiously while philosophy presents reasons that invite rational scrutiny. As such, in contrast to philosophy, art would undermine our agency. In July 2017, a group of philosophers gathered at the Art Gallery of NSW (AGNSW), in Sydney, Australia, in the presence of two AGNSW curators to explore the basis of their own experiences of selected artworks. Here, those commentaries are reproduced. Each reveal that objective grounds for an experience of art can be based in the community from which one draws one’s terms of reference. In our commentaries we see the expertise of the respective philosophical communities but other communities of culture or expertise might serve the same purpose and hence resolve the ancient quarrel. Before hearing these commentaries, I explain what is at stake when the ancient quarrel between art and philosophy is understood in contemporary terms. This Issue of the Curator also includes an article on the community-based art criticism that emerges from these commentaries followed by an exhibition review which reveals the incorrigible impulse (also demonstrated in the commentaries) to find the basis for the most apt experience of an artwork. A response by the AGNSW curators completes this issue. (shrink)

When I first starting hearing and reading about Jacques Rancière a number of years ago, I was deeply skeptical. Wasn’t this yet another European man becoming the new political theory “It Girl”? Wasn’t the claim that Rancière had a singular, fresh approach to dissent and protest overblown, when other people—especially critical race scholars, postcolonial theorists, feminists, queer theorists, and so on—had already addressed these topics thoroughly but were rarely acknowledged in mainstream scholarship? Did we really need to deify and create (...) a cottage industry around yet one more white male Western theorist, especially one who so rarely deigns to cite his influences or the work of others? It took... (shrink)

After he was delivered from the necessity of making provision for the flesh in its concupiscence and after tendering his resignation as a professor of rhetoric, St. Augustine was, in the autumn of 386 a.d., eager to explore his newfound Christian faith and prepare for his reception into the Catholic Church. His conversion, momentous though it was, did not so much entail a repudiation of all that he had learned and studied as it did a transformation of what had brought (...) him to the threshold of religious belief. Chief among the spoils of Augustine’s early education was philosophy, which he understood primarily as an all-encompassing love of wisdom and only secondarily as a confederacy of.. (shrink)

This article discusses the current debate between populist and republican accounts of democracy. To talk about democracy is inevitably to talk about the idea of a people and its power. From the beginnings of the Western political tradition, ‘the people’ has referred to both a constituted part of society (populus) and to a part excluded from political society (plebs). The article examines the differences between populism and republicanism in light of the different ways in which these two parts relate to (...) each other, and the resulting conceptions of the power of the people. For populism, the people have power when the plebs achieves hegemony within the populus by wresting control of the state from the ‘wealthy’ elites. According to the alternative republican account developed in this article, instead, the people have power when the plebs inscribes within the state the possibility of abolishing relations of rule. The distinction between these two conceptions of popular power is pursued in terms of the opposing attitudes that populism and republicanism have in relation to the rule of law. The article also raises a hypothesis as to the historical reasons for these distinctions between populism and republicanism by examining three historical moments, which are crucial for the development of plebeian politics: the early Roman republic, the Augustinian foundation of a Christian republic and the crisis of guild republicanism in Machiavelli's age. (shrink)

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel brings together contributions from leading scholars to explore the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism in the work of J.M. Coetzee.

This paper discusses how Jewish quarreling was a reason that Antiochus IV entered Jerusalem in 168 BCE and violently acted against the anti-Seleucid Jews. Two primary sources, 1+2 Maccabees and Josephus, are used extensively to demonstrate that this was indeed the case.

The rise and spectacular fall of the friendship between the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century, barely six months after they first met, reverberated on both sides of the Channel. As the relationship between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume unraveled, a volley of rancorous letters was fired off, then quickly published and devoured by aristocrats, intellectuals, and common readers alike. Everyone took sides in this momentous dispute between the greatest of Enlightenment thinkers. In this lively and revealing book, Robert (...) Zaretsky and John T. Scott explore the unfolding rift between Rousseau and Hume. The authors are particularly fascinated by the connection between the thinkers’ lives and thought, especially the way that the failure of each to understand the other—and himself—illuminates the limits of human understanding. In addition, they situate the philosophers’ quarrel in the social, political, and intellectual milieu that informed their actions, as well as the actions of the other participants in the dispute, such as James Boswell, Adam Smith, and Voltaire. By examining the conflict through the prism of each philosopher’s contribution to Western thought, Zaretsky and Scott reveal the implications for the two men as individuals and philosophers as well as for the contemporary world. (shrink)

Rather than just offer background readings or a survey of views on a subject, as traditional anthologies do, this volume tries to engage the reader’s active participation in understanding how philosophy came to be split between analytic and continental approaches and in finding ways to reconcile the two. It does so by tracing the history of philosophy as a perennial contest between two opposing world views: one that relates change to an underlying structure of invariance, and another that sees change (...) itself as the basic condition of existence. The seven chapters cover the full range of major topics of philosophy, from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics, and present carefully selected readings from key thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hegel, and Peirce up to Heidegger, Husserl, Kuhn, Kripke, and Putnam, among others—juxtaposed and introduced by the editors so as to stimulate active thinking about how the debate between these competing visions plays out in each arena. A bibliography of additional sources ends each chapter. The result is a new and inspiring tool for teaching philosophy to both beginning and advanced students. Even seasoned professionals will have much to learn about the development of philosophy and its current predicament from accepting the challenge to rethink the tradition from the perspective presented here. (shrink)

The following article has its basis in the respective chapter of my book entitled Work, Death, and Life Itself . In the present article I intend to elaborate the working hypothesis that the attempt to increase and extend participation in contemporary work enterprises can be understood more than ever before as a collusive quarrel between managers and workers about immortality. The quarrel has its roots in the widespread experience of the discrepancy between the vigour with which participation in organisations is (...) demanded and offered on the one hand and the inadequacy and limitations of its actual realisation on the other. Attempts to increase participation in a work enterprise are often confronted at an early stage with insoluble difficulties which too often lead to termination of the participation project.Although participation in general, and in work enterprises in particular, is generally seen as a paradigm for integration, co operation and democratisation among more or less equal partners, I propose the hypothesis that any attempt to practice participation will most probably lead to a situation in which management and workers get entangled in a collusive quarrel concerning the preconditions, content and range of said participation. Sustained by the predominant myth that management means the management of people, workers tend to become infantilised. The deep contempt and mistrust that so often characterise relations between managers and workers and/or their respective representatives thus poisons any simultaneous desire for trust and cooperation.In an analogy with ancient Greek mythology and its inherent quarrel between the immortal gods and the mortal ephemerals, the collusion between management and workers in contemporary work enterprises can be understood as a quarrel about participating in immortality. Since immortality is a limited resource, it is only available to the happy few. The collusive quarrel and the underlying split between managers and workers can only be overcome if both parties recognise that as human beings they can neither escape mortality nor relieve the other of it. (shrink)

This essay proposes to analyse the mechanisms of quarrels from a theoretical perspective largely informed by linguistics, and more specifically, by pragmatics. It connects with some of Jean-Jacques Lecercle's argument in the current issue, but takes the analysis in different directions. Looking at a number of examples of quarrels, this paper purports to identify the different participants and parameters in the development of a quarrel. These include speakers, texts, institutions that adjudicate, an audience and rules, as well as material conditions (...) under which disputes develop. These parameters provide a framework, rather than a rigid construction, within which speakers may change positions. Special attention is given to the beginnings of a quarrel and to the ends of a quarrel. The essay concludes on the dynamic of quarrels, which precludes modellization. (shrink)

I argue that a careful consideration of the internal relation between the expression of an emotion, ‘I am angry’, and the description of the object of that emotion, ‘That was wrong’, illuminates the sense in which emotions are intentional, and perhaps also rational, as brought out in cognitive accounts of emotion. It also throws light on the moral and interpersonal aspects of our emotional life, which I instantiate through a discussion of the different perspectives on what has happened between the (...) parties in a quarrel and the kinds of failures of understanding that may take place in such cases. (shrink)

This paper develops the implications of Spinoza’s invocation in chapter 6 of the traditional analogy between the oikos and the polis. Careful attention to this analogy reveals a number of interesting features of Spinoza’s political theory. Spinoza challenges the perception that absolute monarchy offers greater respite from the intolerable anxiety of the state of nature than does democracy. He acknowledges that people associate monarchical rule with peace and stability, but asserts that it can too easily deform its subjects. Unchallenged monarchy (...) may be credited with a certain order, “but if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, there can be nothing more wretched for mankind than peace.” This is all familiar to friends of Spinoza, but what kind of democracy is the alternative to those monarchies that tend toward despotism? It is a form of association that, he suggests, resembles a bitterly quarrelsome but nevertheless virtuous family. Thus, he admits that democratic, or popular, rule is typically turbulent and disorderly, but urges his reader to view contentions and disputes as a kind of salutary discord that preserves rather than threatens virtue. (shrink)

An examination of how debates originating in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns informed a broader exploration of the relation between past and present in various realms of eighteenth-century thought.

This book explores the pervasiveness of poetry's impact on philosophy and, conversely, how philosophy has sometimes resisted or denied poetry's influence.

In An Ancient Quarrel Continued, Louis Mackey argues that the relationship of philosophy with the literary arts is more intimate, more problematic, and more interesting than its relationship with the sciences.

Stanley Rosen's latest book is a collection of essays, the first of which gives the collection its title. The essays are undated, presumably as a way of emphasizing their continuity, but are said to "have been written at various times during the past thirty years" ; some of them are published here for the first time. Although most are on Plato, two are on Aristotle, and two on contemporary continental philosophy. The collection displays Rosen's considerable skill at wide-ranging, scholarly, and (...) insightful philosophical interpretation and criticism, in the service of a fundamental concern about the nature and possibilities of philosophy. It is undoubtedly the best introduction to his work as a whole. The following summaries, necessarily inadequate, observe the order in which the essays appear in the book. (shrink)

In this study, Levin explores Plato's engagement with the Greek literary tradition in his treatment of key linguistic issues. This investigation, conjoined with a new interpretation of the Republic's familiar critique of poets, supports the view that Plato's work represents a valuable precedent for contemporary reflections on ways in which philosophy might benefit from appeals to literature.

This paper looks at intrinsic disputation within proposition, and specifically within propositions that offer a moderated version of the freedom of speech and expression. It begins from a consideration of what is at stake in Othello's ‘Rude am I in my speech’, a rhetorical gesture that frames an act of great eloquence, and in which the eloquence serves to formulate a quarrel by ostensibly resolving it. This example reveals that there is a conflict between empirical quarrel and articulated spoken resolution. (...) This leads the essay to explore the way in which diplomacy works, whereby we establish the pretence that there is peace between disputatious positions through the power of the logic of ‘but’, thus: ‘I agree with you, but …’. Finally, this is extended to a consideration of the limits of and/or on free speech: ‘I defend free speech, but …’, where the ‘but’ is a gesture in which the defence of free speech is modified to the point of being obliterated. (shrink)

This study presents a full-length interpretation of two Platonic dialogues, the Theaetetus and the Sophist. The reading pursues a dramatic motif which I believe runs through these dialogues, namely the confrontation of Socratic philosophy, as it is understood by Plato, with the practise of sophistry. I shall argue that a major point for Plato in these two dialogues is to examine and defend his own Socratic or dialectical understanding of philosophy against the sophistic claim that false opinions and statements are (...) impossible, a claim which undermines the point of Socratic conversation. As this claim in PlatoÕs view rests on a certain understanding of Heraclitus and Parmenides, the confrontation with the sophists implies a confrontation with these two Presocratics as well. This defence of dialectical philosophy takes place, dramatically, at the crucial time when Socrates is publically accused of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens, the Theaetetus right before he first faces the accusation, the Sophist on the following day. I shall argue that this fact is important in understanding the argument of the two dialogues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ancient Quarrel Revisited:Literary Theory and the Return to EthicsJoseph G. KronickThe modern quarrel between theory and practice, like the ancient one between philosophy and poetry, is at once a practical one—at its heart is the question how we should live—and a pedagogical one—who or what is the proper teacher of virtue? Today, the quarrel is between theory and literature rather than between philosophy and poetry, a change that (...) has not been beneficial. The modern complaint against the abstractions of theory reflects a diminution in the quality of the argument. For the ancient Greeks, to ask about the virtuous life was to inquire into what it is to be human, for aretê, which is typically translated as "virtue," but is understood to mean "excellence" or "goodness," meant acting in accordance with what it is to be fully human. 1 The notion that "real issues," as one prominent theorist argues, belong to the realm of action and epistemological and ontological questions to the abstract realm of theory is a simplification of the more serious question of the relation of particulars to universals. It reverses the Platonic and Aristotelian hierarchy that makes thinking the highest form of activity. But something else is going on in this call to action: in denigrating thinking as abstract, it elevates doxa, opinion, in its place. Under the regime of doxa, two things occur: philosophy and poetry are looked upon as useless because utility becomes the criteria for measuring value, and singularity is looked upon with disdain, if it is, indeed, acknowledged at all, because to the extent the world as it appears is common to us all, doxa is not distinct or individual but uniform or the same. Philosophy and poetry share not only the stigma of being deemed useless, but they are dismissed as odd, singular, not common.This essay is concerned with the status of the singular in philosophy [End Page 436] and poetry. The ancient quarrel has not been settled, which may indeed be a good thing because the quarrel keeps alive the question, who is to speak for that which cannot be spoken of, the singular? Silence may be the appropriate response, yet to preserve the experience of that which resists language is the task of philosophy and poetry, hence the quarrel. A long tradition has it that the philosopher seeks universals, while the poet offers particular images of virtue, but at the heart of this argument over ethics is the question of how to account for the singular or unique. To do so, I turn to Socrates, whose singularity remains unaccounted for to this day.Socrates may be said to embody the very problem of the relation between philosophy and literature, for he left us no writings and exists for us primarily through the writings of Plato. Yet there is widespread acceptance of Plato's portrait of him, particularly as to Socrates' method, the elenchus, and his principle of the priority of definitions. However, Socrates' insistence upon the priority of definition is not an example of the philosopher elevating theory over experience but a practical issue involving the care of the self. Furthermore, in ancient Greece, moral and philosophical questions concerning the soul were as much the provenance of poetry as they were of philosophy. The search for truth is a practical matter concerning the conduct of life, but the Platonic philosopher wishes to give a rational account, or logos, that would link conduct to knowledge, whereas the poet's examples are bound to their representations. Nevertheless, to presume that Socrates was seeking a definition of virtue on the grounds that possession of the definition would translate into a good life is an absurdity, for he could never have sought after the knowledge of virtue if his mode of life depended upon the definition rather than on his character. 2The error is to accuse Socrates of placing abstract knowledge before virtuous conduct. When Socrates asks for a definition of the beautiful, for instance, he does not reject the answer, "the beautiful is a beautiful woman," because it confuses a particular with a universal (when compared to the beauty of the gods, the woman is... (shrink)

In this article, the French philosopher Jérôme de Gramont evaluates the modes in which twentieth century philosophy and literature—from Heidegger and Derrida to Blanchot and Beckett—aim to think our being-in-the-world beyond the concept of “man” and without the genus of the human.