Das Buch stellt, inspiriert durch Theodor W. Adornos Minima Moralia, ein Werkvergleichsmodell vor, das Kierkegaards und Nietzsches Werk als Fragen nach dem gelingenden Leben perspektiviert, wobei der "Einzelne" Kierkegaards und der "Einsame" Nietzsches jenes Fragen utopisch erfullen. Die von beiden Denkern entworfenen Theorien der Ausnahme, die aus Einsamkeit ihre vitalen Konturen beziehen, lassen sich strukturell verschranken und ermoglichen den systematischen Vergleich. Es kristallisiert sich eine nihilistische Moralkritik heraus, welcher Sachverhalt zuletzt an der Kritik einer auf Mitleid basierenden Moralphilosophie durchexerziert wird.

We provide a finite basis for the class of Borel functions that are not in the first Baire class, as well as the class of Borel functions that are not $\sigma $ -continuous with closed witnesses.

Pretendemos dar uma breve contribuição para a compreensão do conceito de biopolítica na obra do filósofo italiano Giorgio Agamben, mais precisamente em seu trabalho de 1995, inaugurador da série Homo Sacer, cujo título leva o mesmo nome: Homo Sacer: O Poder Soberano e a Vida Nua. Valendo-se do pensamento de Michel Foucault e Hannah Arendt de um lado, e Walter Benjamin e Carl Schmitt de outro, Agamben faz recuar o conceito de biopolítica às fundações da política ocidental. Importa, para (...) o filósofo, mostrar como estrutura, lógica e topologia de funcionamento a biopolítica anima as relações políticas desde seu fundamento e que a modernidade foi capaz de revelar, transformando radicalmente os espaços políticos contemporâneos. (shrink)

The article explores the development of the concept of revolution in modernity. We start from the hypothesis, formulated by Lazzarato, who claims that the abandonment of the idea of revolution is the reason for the political and theoretical defeat of critical thinking after May 68. Next, we trace a brief genealogy of the concept of revolution, focusing on the legacy of the French Revolution. In this part we use the analyzes of the classic study by Koselleck, but also from the (...) Foucauldian reading of Kant. A third moment is dedicated to the critique between the conception of time and its relationship with history in the work of Giorgio Agamben. The Italian, supported by Walter Benjamin, argues that Marxism lacked a radical understanding of time as relevant as its conception of history. Finally, we explore the dichotomy of uprising and revolution in an attempt to open other argumentative hypotheses to critical thinking from the idea of suspension of historical time present in a study by another Italian, Furio Jesi. (shrink)

This article analyses a footnote to the third version of the ‘Work of Art’ essay in which Walter Benjamin presents an account of ‘a certain oscillation’ between ‘cult value’ and ‘exhibition value’ as typical of the reception of all works of art. Benjamin's example in that footnote is the Sistine Madonna, a painting by Raphael in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie that has played an important part in German aesthetics since Winckelmann. Benjamin's footnote on the Sistine Madonna, along (...) with his critique of Hegel's aesthetics in that context, demand to be understood in relation to his remarks on Dada elsewhere in the artwork essay, and to his claim that technological reproducibility leads to the ‘actualization’ of the original reproduced. In that connection, the article concludes with an analysis of Kurt Schwitters's 1921 montage picture Knave Child Madonna with Horse. (shrink)

Some proponents of mechanistic explanation downplay the significance of how-possibly explanations. We argue that developing accounts of mechanisms that could explain a phenomenon is an important aspect of scientific reasoning, one that involves imagination. Although appeals to imagination may seem to obscure the process of reasoning, we illustrate how, by examining diagrams we can gain insights into the construction of mechanistic explanations.

The article scrutinises the semantics of canonical property designators of the forms ‘the property of being F’ and ‘F-ness’. First it is argued that, as their form suggests, the former are definite definitions, albeit of a special sort. Secondly, the prima facie plausible classification of the latter as proper names (which is often met in philosophical writings) is rejected. The semantics of such terms is developed and it is shown how its proper understanding yields important consequences about the concepts expressed (...) by these terms. (shrink)

This special issue is about something most of us might find very hard to conceive: states of consciousness in which self-consciousness is radically disrupted or altogether missing.

Advances in molecular biological research in the latter half of the twentieth century have made the story of the gene vastly complicated: the more we learn about genes, the less sure we are of what a gene really is. Knowledge about the structure and functioning of genes abounds, but the gene has also become curiously intangible. This collection of essays renews the question: what are genes? Philosophers, historians and working scientists re-evaluate the question in this volume, treating the gene as (...) a focal point of interdisciplinary and international research. It will be of interest to professionals and students in the philosophy and history of science, genetics and molecular biology. (shrink)

Written for independent study and suitable for an introductory course in logic, this classic text combines a sound presentation of logic with effective pedagogy ...

Many friends of the category of particularised qualities subscribe to the view that particularised qualities have a unique bearer in which they inhere; no such quality then can inhere in two different entities. But it seems that this idea is flawed, for there are apparent counterexamples. An apple’s redness is identical with the redness of its skin, though the apple is distinct from its skin. So it seems that a principle of beareruniqueness has to be modified, maybe by excluding certain (...) unwanted cases. (shrink)

uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. ZUr Kritik der Gewalt. SChicksal und Charakter. GEschichtsphilosophische Thesen. THeologisch-politisches Fragment.

The polarization of the individual and the community that underlies much of the debate between individualists and communitarians is made possible in part by the literal vanishingof civil society—the domain whose middling terms mediate the stark opposition of state and private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that is both voluntary and public. Modern democratic ideology and the reality of our political practices sometimesseem to yield only a choice between elephantine and paternalistic government or a radically (...) solipsistic and nearly anarchic private market sector—overnment gargantuanism or private greed. Americans do not much like either one. President Clinton's callfor national service draws us out of our selfishness without kindling any affection for government. Private markets service our avarice without causing us to like ourselves. The question of how America's decentralized and multi-vocal public can secure a coherentvoice in debates over public policy under the conditions precipitated by so hollow and disjunctive a dichotomy is perhaps the most important issue facing both the political theory and social science of democracy and the practice of democratic politics in America today. Two recent stories out of Washington suggest just how grave the situation has become. Health-care reform failed in a paroxysm of mutual recrimination highlighted by the successful campaign of the private sector against a presidential program that seemed to be widely misunderstood. The public at large simply went missing in the debates. (shrink)

“Sophisticated” theories of welfare face two potentially devastating criticisms. They are based upon two claims: that theories of welfare should be tested for what they imply about newborn infants and that even if a theory of welfare is intended to apply only to adults, we might still have sufficient reason to reject it because it implies an implausible divergence between adult and neonatal welfare. It has been argued we ought reject sophisticated theories of welfare because they have significantly counterintuitive implications (...) about neonatal welfare and because they imply an implausible divergence between the welfare of adults and that of newborns. I argue against both claims. (shrink)

Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the founding members of the College Internationale de philosophie. Ha has taught at Vincennes, Saint Denis and is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. Several of his books have appeared in English, notable The Postmodern Condition, Just Gaming and The Dirrerend. The Lyotard Reader is a collection of Jean-Francois Lyotard's most important and significant papers to date. While they are all written from within philosophy, they seek to address subjects as (...) wide-ranging as film, painting, psychoanalysis, Judaism and politics. The originality of Lyotard's work means that it can not be readily situated within any one philosophical tradition. Instead he returns philosophy itself to debates across a range of areas and, in so doing, redefines the philosophical enterprise. A number of chapters in The Lyotard Reader appear for the first time in English. This is the most comprehensive collection available of Lyotard's work, work has profoundly influenced debates on the Enlightenment, on modernity, on postmodernity, on the transmission f information, on literary theory and on philosophy. (shrink)

Discussion of the need for moral guidelines in business; suggestions for communication in the workplace.

This text was conceived as a synthetic introduction to the present-day situation of metaphysics and of ontology, to their stakes and their practices in the world and in France, by way of a preamble to the activities of the Atelier de métaphysique et d’ontologie contemporaines [Workshop on Contemporary Metaphysics and Ontology] at the École normale supérieure. It certainly does not claim to replace the more informed and complete works on which it rests, and which are indicated in the bibliography. Nor (...) was it written with the intention of being polemical against whatever conception of metaphysics, even if it goes without saying that the question is approached in a necssarily partisan, though resolutely conciliatory, manner. (shrink)

Offers a sustained meditation on the role of interruption in modernity. This book departs from and elaborates an important but overlooked dimension of Walter Benjamin's discourse: the question of style as it bears upon temporality and spatiality. This work suggests that the time has come to revise existing paradigms.

This paper addresses the question of whether or not Epicurus was a psychological hedonist. Did he, that is, hold that all human action, as a matter of fact, has pleasure as its goal? Or was he just an ethical hedonist, asserting merely that pleasure ought to be the goal of human action? I discuss a recent forceful attempt by John Cooper to answer the latter question in the affirmative, and argue that he fails to make his case. There is considerable (...) evidence in favour of a psychological reading of Epicurean hedonism, evidence that includes some of the very texts that Cooper cites in support of the ethical reading. (shrink)

Coleridge tended to view objects in the natural world as if they were capable of articulating truths about his own poetic psyche. He also regarded such objects as if they were capable of illustrating and concretely embodying truths about a transcendent spiritual realm. After 1805, he posited a series of analogical 'likenesses' connecting the rational principles that inform human cognition with the rational principles that he believed informed the teleological structure of the natural world. Human reason and the principle of (...) rationality realised objectively in Nature were both regarded as finite effects of God's seminal Word. Although Coleridge intuitively felt that nature had been constructed as a 'mirror' of the human mind, and that both mind and nature were 'mirrors' of a transcendent spiritual realm, he never found an explanation of such experiences that was fully immune to his own sceptical doubts. Coleridge and Scepticism examines the nature of these sceptical doubts, as well as offering a new explanatory account of why Coleridge was unable to affirm his religious intuitions. Ben Brice situates his work within two important intellectual traditions. The first, a tradition of epistemological 'piety' or 'modesty', informs the work of key precursors such as Kant, Hume, Locke, Boyle, and Calvin, and relates to Protestant critiques of natural reason. The second, a tradition of theological voluntarism, emphasises the omnipotence and transcendence of God, as well as the arbitrary relationship subsisting between God and the created world. Brice argues that Coleridge's detailed familiarity with both of these interrelated intellectual traditions, ultimately served to undermine his confidence in his ability to read the symbolic language of God in nature. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage collectif explore différents niveaux de la relation entre art et origine, notamment comment la notion d'origine fonctionne dans le champ des arts de manière transdisciplinaire, à travers toutes les formes de pratiques artistiques contemporaines. Les auteurs explorent la notion d'origine et sa valeur individuelle permettant de reconfigurer le personnel pour l'inclure dans le social. Il s'agit aussi de voir comment la notion d'origine participe du jeu de la construction et de la perception de l'oeuvre et pose la question (...) transculturelle du local par rapport au global et vice versa. Cet ouvrage s'adresse à tous ceux qui s'intéressent à la problématique de l'origine dans les arts : artistes, chercheurs, enseignants, étudiants en arts, institutions académiques, ainsi qu'à celles et ceux qui voudraient en savoir plus sur la relation entre origines et arts dans la création."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

If logic binds all reality, it would appear that God must be bound by logic. Swinburne argues that logic binds only actual human sentences. His case rests on an argument against Platonism, and the assertion that contradictions are incoherent. I argue that logic binds any possible language and so places a significant limit on God’s actions, that one need not be a Platonist to hold this, and that contradictions are not incoherent. I conclude that if God is an agent, his (...) hands must be tied, and explain why I find this conclusion unwelcome. (shrink)

Deirdre McCloskey is rightly one of the most recognizable names in economics. She views economics as a language that uses all the rhetorical devices of everyday conversation and therefore it should be judged by aesthetic and literary standards and not the criteria of mathematical rigor that is espoused by the mainstream. This controversial standpoint has been hugely influential and this examination of the methodological and philosophical consequences of her work is overdue, and very welcome.

Relatively little attention has been paid to Socrates' argument against akrasia in Plato's "Protagoras" as an example of Socratic method. Yet seen from this perspective the argument has some rather unusual features: in particular, the presence of an impersonal interlocutor ("the many") and the absence of the crisp and explicit argumentation that is typical of Socratic elenchus. I want to suggest that these features are problematic, considerably more so than has sometimes been supposed, and to offer a reading of the (...) argument that accounts for them. My reading revolves around the connections between Socratic method, consistency and akrasia. I argue that Socrates' discussion of akrasia aims at exposing the interlocutor's inconsistency, and to this extent is typical of Socratic inquiry; but it is also untypical, insofar as Socrates' chief concern here is with the inconsistency between an interlocutor's statements and his actions (what I call "word-deed inconsistency") rather than, as more usually, inconsistency among an interlocutor's various statements ("word-word inconsistency"). I use this reading to show how the akrasia argument, despite its untypical features, is not just a variant, but in an important way a paradigm, of Socratic method. (shrink)

The Controversy over the Existence of the World (henceforth Controversy) is the magnum opus of Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. Despite the renewed interest for Ingarden’s pioneering ontological work whithin analytic philosophy, little attention has been dedicated to Controversy's main goal, clearly indicated by the very title of the book: finding a solution to the centuries-old philosophical controversy about the ontological status of the external world. -/- There are at least three reasons for this relative indifference. First, even at the time (...) when the book was published, the Controversy was no longer seen as a serious polemical topic, whether it was disqualified as an archaic metaphysical pseudo-problem, or taken to be the last remnant of an antiscientific approach to philosophy culminating in idealism and relativism. Second, Ingarden’s reasoning on the matter is highly complex, at times misleading, and even occasionally faulty. Finally, his analysis is not only incomplete – Controversy being unachieved – but also arguably aporetic. -/- One may wonder, then, why it is still worth excavating this mammoth treatise to study an issue apparently no longer relevant to contemporary philosophy. Aside from historical and exegetical purposes, which are of course very interesting in their own right, Ingarden’s treatment of the Controversy remains one of the most detailed and ambitious ontological undertakings of the twentieth century. Not only does it lay out an incredibly detailed map of possible solutions to the Controversy, but it also tries to show why the latter is a genuine and fundamental problem that owes its hasty disqualification to various oversimplifications over the course of the history of philosophy. -/- In this chapter, I first give an overview of Ingarden’s method, which relies mainly on a combinatorial analysis. Then, I summarize his examination of possible solutions to the Controversy, and determine which ones can be ruled out on ontological grounds. Finally, I explain why this ambitious project ultimately leads to a theoretical impasse, leaving Ingarden unable to come up with a definitive solution to the Controversy – regardless of the fact that the book is unachieved. I argue that his analysis of the problem yields a more modest but nonetheless valuable result. (shrink)