At the opening of her article, Acker writes, "I am using this essay to do two things. To read a short passage from Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade. To read one of his tales. The more that I write my own novels, the more it seems to me that to write is to read." The two main divisions in the text bear the following headings: "To write in order to lead the reader into a labyrinth from (...) which the reader cannot emerge without destroying the world" and "Reading a tale by de Sade: writing or reading whose only purpose is to destroy itself.". (shrink)

_Essays on Beauvoir’s influences, contemporary engagements, and legacy in the philosophical tradition._.

In this paper I attempt to answer the question: What is interdisciplinary communication? I attempt to answer this question, rather than what some might consider the ontologically prior question—what is interdisciplinarity (ID)?—for two reasons: (1) there is no generally agreed-upon definition of ID; and (2) one’s views regarding interdisciplinary communication have a normative relationship with one’s other views of ID, including one’s views of its very essence. I support these claims with reference to the growing literature on ID, which has (...) a marked tendency to favor the idea that interdisciplinary communication entails some kind of ‘integration’. The literature on ID does not yet include very many philosophers, but we have something valuable to offer in addressing the question of interdisciplinary communication. Playing somewhat fast-and-loose with traditional categories of the subdisciplines of philosophy, I group some philosophers—mostly from the philosophy of science, social–political philosophy, and moral theory—and some non-philosophers together to provide three different, but related, answers to the question of interdisciplinary communication. The groups are as follows: (1) Habermas–Klein, (2) Kuhn–MacIntyre, and (3) Bataille–Lyotard. These groups can also be thought of in terms of the types of answers they give to the question of interdisciplinary communication, especially in terms of the following key words (where the numbers correspond to the groups from the previous sentence): (1) consensus, (2) incommensurability, and (3) invention. (shrink)

This thesis pursues two closely related lines of argument. In the first half, I explore the Bataillean notion of man through his complex relationship with Hegel and Nietzsche. The Janus-like conception that will be dis-covered results from Bataille’s unwillingness to grant priority either to Hegel’s insights concerning the structure of consciousness or to Nietzsche’s claim, contra Hegel, that those putative insights ‘involve a vast and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization’ Bataille acknowledges the heuristic value of both thinkers’ work but (...) ultimately refuses to let either become the dominant force within his thought. In the end Bataille’s human being remains caught between the ‘ex-cess’ of Nietzschean Will and the ‘restriction’ of Hegelian consciousness. He sees human existence, much like Freud, as moving with a ‘vacillating rhythm’ between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ activity. This recognition leads him to conclude that there exists a fundamental ambiguity to human existence – the Impossible – which resists reduction or assimilation to any kind of formal discourse. The second half proceeds to explore this ambiguity in more detail by first teasing out the relationship be-tween the traumatic experiences at the heart of two of Bataille’s novels against the Freudian notion of Trauma and its relation to the creation of Identity. This ultimately proves insuffi-cient when it comes to interpreting the actions of Bataille’s fictional characters. However it opens a space within which other methodologies of interpretation, namely those of Lacan, Girard, and Derrida, can be in-vestigated as potential sources of insight into those characters’ psychological structures and motivation. Here they are explored in relation to each other and in order to describe and explain more adequately the ‘impossible’ ambiguity at the heart of Bataille’s novels and conception of the human. (shrink)

By dovetailing the classical concepts of virtue, beauty, harmony and happiness with the cardinal values of modern imagination, life and freedom, Agnes Heller galvanizes modernity's anthropological reflexivity and hints at the prospect of a classicism pertinent to the present. Beyond nostalgia for an ancient past or apology for a contemporary present, her moral anthropology is approached via a dialectical elucidation of aspects of epicurean theory attuned to modernity's complexity. Under the contemporary condition of waning postmodern challenges, escalating confusion and cynicism, (...) moral anthropology's task is as one of probing modernity's destiny for a non-predatory humanism that combines the existential wisdom of ancient theory with modern values. (shrink)