The Ethics of Sport: A Reader; Cycling: Philosophy for Everyone: A Philosophical Tour De Force.

Offers philosophical and psychological reflections on cruelty and tenderness. The Cudgel and the Caress explores the enduring significance of tenderness and cruelty in a range of works across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Divided into two parts, the book initially focuses on tenderness, with David Farrell Krell delivering original readings of Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’s Antigone, and writings by Hölderlin, Hegel, Freud, and Derrida that deal with the importance of tenderness and the tragic consequences of its absence. Part One concludes with an (...) extended reading of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, in which Krell analyzes the tender relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. In Part Two, Krell begins by examining Otto Rank’s Birth Trauma, which reflects on the tenderness of gestation in the womb and the cruel necessity of birth. He then turns to an examination of cruelty in general, focusing on Derrida’s challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, his opposition between Kant and Nietzsche, and his analysis (and indictment) of the death penalty. Groundbreaking and insightful, the book provides a rare philosophical treatment of subjects vital to the world we live in. David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies at Brown University. (shrink)

Having followed the literature on genocide since the beginning of 1990s I have been often struck that academic writing on genocide is very much like non-professional pursuits in youth sports: anything is considered 'a good try'. The French have a good phrase for what I mean here: n'importe quoi. Works exhibiting no sound methodology, replete with irrational claims without factual basis and beliefs about foreigners adopted on faith limited only by a 'the worse the better' criterion of plausibility dominate the (...) literature on genocide. My only consolation in confronting this literature has been that philosophers, for the most part, had not been the ones taking part in this orgy of nonsense. The book Genocide and Human Rights takes even that solace away as it purports to be 'a philosophical guide' to genocide. (shrink)

Three Chilean Thinkers, a companion piece to Three Argentine Thinkers, attempts to examine some of the outstanding characters of Chile's intellectual development by way of analyzing the contribution of three of her distinguished representatives. Each thinker or philosopher, whichever the case may be, is symbolic of a definite sociopolitical movement which left its unmistakable imprint upon the cultural scene. Moreover, each thinker, no doubt, was strongly influenced by European philosophical trends, but should in now way be considered a mere imitator. (...) It would be more accurate to say that they adapted these currents to their particular situation, utilizing the various component elements in order to explain or reform the Spanish American scene. Since each of the three represents a separate epoch, it was thought best to present them in chronological fashion in order to insure a measure of historical continuity. Thus, the first author treated is Francisco Bilbao, representative par excellence of the Romantic period. He is followed by Valentín Letelier, who can be said to have been one of the foremost exponents of what may well be considered as a reaction to Romanticism, namely, the Positivist era. Finally, Positivism, in turn, also produced a reaction in the form of the various idealistic tendencies which blossomed forth at the turn of the century--reaction to the dominant position exercised by evolutionism and scientism--represented in Chile by Enrique Molina. (shrink)

Josh Berson’s meat question is, “Should humans be eating meat, and if so who, and what kinds, and how much?”. Answers emerge in the Prologue and two Parts united by a Bridge, Part 1, “Did Meat...

I would like to thank Prof. Stephen Read ( 2011 ) and Prof. Andrew Benjamin ( 2011 ) for both giving inspiring and elaborate comments on my article “Dwelling in-between walls: the architectural surround”. As I will try to demonstrate below, their two different responses not only supplement my article very nicely, but also augment each other’s. In the beginning of Read’s comment, as he sets the stage for his observations, he unknowingly also points in the direction of Benjamin’s remarks: (...) “I propose not to de-construct therefore, or add a point of view from an orthogonal position, but to try in the spirit of multidisciplinarity to talk in languages not well practiced—to begin to build what Bowker and Star call ‘boundary objects’ between different starting positions; points we can gather around to think further together” (Read 2011 ). Whereas Read facilitates a multidisciplinary dialogue, Benjamin focuses on how the absence of an initial distinction might threaten the endeavour of my paper. In my reply to Read and Benjamin, I will discuss their suggestions and arguments, while at the same time hopefully clarifying the postphenomenological approach to architecture. (shrink)

Descartes’ Rules for the direction of the mind presents us with a theory of knowledge in which imagination, considered as an “aid” for the intellect, plays a key role. This function of schematization, which strongly resembles key features of Proclus’ philosophy of mathematics, is in full accordance with Descartes’ mathematical practice in later works such as La Géométrie from 1637. Although due to its reliance on a form of geometric intuition, it may sound obsolete, I would like to show that (...) this has strong echoes in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, in particular in the trend of the so called “philosophy of mathematical practice”. Indeed Ken Manders’ study on the Euclidean practice, along with Reviel Netz’s historical studies on ancient Greek Geometry, indicate that mathematical imagination can play a central role in mathematical knowledge as bearing specific forms of inference. Moreover, this role can be formalized into sound logical systems. One question of general epistemology is thus to understand this mysterious role of the imagination in reasoning and to assess its relevance for other mathematical practices. Drawing from Edwin Hutchins’ study of “material anchors” in human reasoning, I would like to show that Descartes’ epistemology of mathematics may prove to be a helpful resource in the analysis of mathematical knowledge. (shrink)

During the 1930s, Aleksandr Promptov—a student of the founder of Russian population genetics Sergei Chetverikov—developed an elaborate concept of speciation in birds. He conducted field investigations aimed at giving a naturalistic content to the theoretical formulations and laboratory models of evolutionary processes advanced within the framework of population genetics, placing particular emphasis on the evolutionary role of bird behavior. Yet, although highly synthetic in combining biogeographical, taxonomic, genetic, ecological, and behavioral studies, Promptov's speciation concept was ignored by the architects of (...) the 1930s and 1940s evolutionary synthesis, including Theodosius Dobzhnasky, Ernst Mayr, and Julian Huxley. In this article, I argue that the story of Promptov's concept and its reception by other evolutionists challenges the traditional presentation of the synthesis as a singular, international process of the unification of biology, which led to the creation of a universal synthetic theory of evolution. It suggests that during the same time period, within largely the same theoretical framework, there were multiple, intrinsically local, attempts at creating synthetic evolutionary concepts. These concepts were often quite particular—in their taxonomic applicability, in their explanations of various evolutionary factors, and in the range of disciplines unified in the synthesis. Apparently, these concepts ran contrary to the universal aspirations of the synthesis architects, and as a result, they were disregarded, first by the architects and later by historians of the evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre has recently had published two books of selected essays, a study of the phenomenologist Edith Stein, a third edition of After Virtue, and an extensive collection of his early Marxist writings. These are reviewed, along with two recently published commentaries upon his work. The recent reinterpretation and revival of interest in that work receives much support from most of these publications. Central to this reinterpretation is the concept of practices, which MacIntyre first elaborated in After Virtue. His recent (...) work indicates how that concept may be further developed in the direction of a politically radical moral realism. (shrink)

Health is a central concept in Nietzsche’s work. Yet in the most philosophically sophisticated secondary literature on Nietzsche, there has been fairly little sustained treatment of just what Nietzschean health consists in. In this paper, I aim to provide an account of some of the central marks of this health: resilience, discipline, vitality, a certain positive condition of the will to power, a certain tendency toward integration, and so on. This exposition and discussion will be the main task of the (...) paper. Then in the concluding section of the paper, I consider a line taken in some related secondary literature, which would suggest that health might ultimately be understood in formal or dynamic terms, relating to one’s will to power and/or the unity of one’s drives. I will present the beginnings of an argument against such an account of health. In focusing on the formal and dynamic side exclusively, it cannot get the full story. In particular, it seems to me to miss the substantive dimension that is essential if we are to understand health properly. As I shall suggest, the core concept of Nietzschean health is not fully explicable except by reference to normative terms. (shrink)

In the Infamous Opening Sections from Part IX of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche celebrates a strident kind of elitism and countenances, in however attenuated a form, the institution of slavery. “Every enhancement of the type ‘man,’” he writes, “has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and difference in worth [Werthverschiedenheit] between man and man, and that needs slavery (...) [Sklaverei] in some sense or other” (257). In the section that follows, Nietzsche describes a “good and healthy aristocracy” as “accept[ing] with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake [um ihretwillen] .. (shrink)

Sidney: Court Maxims. Edited and introduced by Hans Blom, Eco Haitsma‐Muller and Ronald Janse. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press: 1996). xxxix + 216 pp., £35.00 cloth, £12.95 paper.The Politics of Women's Work: The Paris Garment Trades, 1750–1915. By Judith G. Coffin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 289 pp., $35/£28.50 cloth.Rethinking the Political: Gender, Resistance, and the State. By Barbara Laslett, Johanna Brenner, and Yesim Arat, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 498 (...) pp., $39.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background. By Paul Avrich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 265 pp., $14.95.Changing the Rules: Psychology in the Netherlands 1900–1985. By Trudy Dehue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ix + 204 pp., £30.00/$49.95 cloth.The Love Affair as a Work of Art. By Dan Hofstadter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), xxii + 314 pp., $24.00.Music in the Castle: Troubadours, Books and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries. By F. Alberto Gallo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 147 pp., $45.00/£35.95 cloth, $19.95/£15.95 paper.Imperialism and Its Contradictions. By V. G. Kiernan, ed. by Harvey J. Kaye (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), xii + 218 pp., £11.99 paper.Cholera in Post‐Revolutionary Paris, A Cultural History. By Catherine J. Kudlick, Studies in the History of Society & Culture, 25 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), xiv + 293 pp., $40.00/£30.00 cloth.Legal Medicine in History. Edited by Michael Clarke and Catherine Crawford, Cambridge History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xi + 364 pp.,£40.00 cloth.The Reign of Henry VIII: Politics, Policy and Piety. Edited by Diarmaid MacCulloch (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pp. vii + 313 pp., $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945–1989. By Michael Bess (Chicago/London: Chicago University Press, 1993), xxviii + 322 pp., £15.95/$22.95 paper.Focus: Margarete Steffin, The Brecht Yearbook 19. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, vii + 387 pp., n.p.g. paper.After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair Maclntyre. Edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), x + 322 pp., £45.00 cloth, £12.95 paper.Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States and Citizenship. Edited by Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 308 pp., $16.95 paper.Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik. By Ira Katznelson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), xx + 192 pp., n.p.g.After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist. By Clifford Geertz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 198 pp., $22.95.French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti‐Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture. By David Carroll (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), ix+ 299 pp. £29.95.Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, Edited by Richard Schacht, Philosophical Traditions Series, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xxl + 479pp.Critical Heidegger. Edited by Christopher Macann (London/New York: Routledge, 1996), 284pp., £40.00/£12.99.The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity. By Emil L. Fackenheim, edited by John Burbidge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 252 pp., $75.00/£56.00 cloth.The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848. By Paul W. Schroeder (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), xxii + 894 pp., £45.00/$49.95.Dueling: The Cult of Honor in Fin‐de‐Siècle Germany. By Kevin McAleer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xiii + 268 pp., H.B., n.p.g.Hegel's Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation. By Michael O. Hardimon (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), vii + 278 pp., $18.95 paper.The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. By William Calin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), xvi + 508 pp., $29.95 paper.Extreme‐Occident: French Intellectuals and America. By Jean Philippe Mathy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 305 pp., U.K. and Eire, $13.50 paper/£39.50 cloth. All other countries except U.S.A., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, $19.50 paper/$56.25 cloth.The Combing of History. By David William Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xxv + 264 pp., £38.25/$55.25 cloth, £14.25/ $20.75 paper.Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. By Theodore M. Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), xiv + 310 pp., $24.95/£19.95 cloth.Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States. By Matthew Frye Jacobson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 321 pp., $45.00 cloth.The Confessions and Correspondence, including the Letters to Malesherbes. The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Volume 5. Edited by Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters and Peter G. Stillman, translated by Christopher Kelly (Hanover/London: University Press of New England, 1995), xxxvi + 700 pp., $60.00 cloth.Heidegger, Dilthey and the Crisis of Historicism. By Charles R. Bambach (Ithaca/London: Cornell University, 1995), xii + 297 pp., $46.75 cloth, $20.85 paper.Three Discourses: A Critical Modern Edition of Newly Identified Work of the Young Hobbes. Edited by Noel B. Reynolds and Arlene Saxonhouse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) pp. ix + 181 pp., $27.50/£21.95. cloth.Telemachus: Son of Ulysses. By Francois de Fenelon, edited and translated by Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 340 pp., £40.00/$59.95 cloth, £14.95/$19.95 paper.Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature. By Bernd Magnus, Jean‐Pierre Mileuv, Stanley Stewart (London: Routledge, 1994), xi + 284 pp., £12.99 paper.Maltese Political Development 1798–1864, A Documentary History. By Henry Fredo (Malta: Interprint, 1993) xv+ 921 pp., n.p.g.Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300. By Janet Burton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi + 354 pp., $69.95 cloth, $18.95/£12.95 paper.Louis VIII: Le Lion. By Gerard Silvery (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 473 pp., 150.00 FF, paper.The Music of the Heavens: Kepler's Harmonic Astronomy. By Bruce Stephenson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 260 pp.The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Edited by David Cesarani (London: Routledge, 1994) 318 pp., £35.00 cloth, ISBN 0415–09954–4.Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. By William H. McNeill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), viii + 198 pp., $22.00 cloth.Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. By Pierre Hadot, translated and edited by Arnold Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), viii + 309 pp., n.p.g.Appetites and Identities: An Introduction to the Social Anthropology of Western Europe. By Sara Delamont (London/New York: Routledge, 1995), 254 pp., $59.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England. Edited by Margot Todd (London: Routledge, 1995), xiii + 279 pp., £11.99 paperback.Novalis: Signs of Revolution. By William Arctander O'Brien (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995), viii + 376 pp., £47.95 cloth/£ 17.95 paper.Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History and Musical Genre. By Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 301 pp., $45.00.Holland and the Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century: the Politics of Particularism. By J. L. Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 312 pp., $52.00/£35.00 cloth.Aspects of British Political History, 1815–1914. By Stephen J. Lee (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), viii + 375 pp., n.p.g.Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820. By David L. Denby (Cambridge Studies in French, 47) (Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi + 281 pp., £37.50. ISBN 0 52143086 0Platonism and the English Imagination. Edited by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xv + 357 pp., £40.00/ $59.95 cloth. ISBN 0–521–40308–1.Art and Eloquence in Byzantium. By Henry Maguire 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 111 figs. + xxiii + 148 pp., $18.95 paper.Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe's Faust. By H.‐ C. Binswanger, with a postcript by Irving Fetscher, translated by I. E. Harrison. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 132 pp. $24.75 cloth.Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue. By Heinrich Meier, translated by J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago/ London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 156 pp., $19.95/£15.95 cloth, ISBN: 0–226–51889–2Men, Ideas and Tanks: British Military Thought and Armoured Forces, 1903–1939. By J. P. Harris (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), viii + 342 pp., £40.00 cloth, £14.99 paper.Une histoire du paradis, II: Mille ans de bonheur. By Jean Delumeau. (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 496 pp., 150.00 FF, paper.Narrative Ethics. By Adam Zachary Newton (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), xi + 335 pp., $39.95.War and Economy in the Third Reich. By R. J. Overy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 390 pp., n.p.g.Between Reformed Scholasticism and Pan‐Protestantism: Jean‐Alphonse Turretin (1671–1737) and Enlightened Orthodoxy at the Academy of Geneva. By Martin I. Klauber (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 244 pp., £29.95.The Writing of Melancholy. Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism. By Ross Chambers, translated by Mary Seidman Trouille (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), xiv + 239 pp., $29.95 cloth.Idle Hands: The Experience of Unemployment, 1790–1990. By John Burnett (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), ix + 368 pp., £14.99 paper.The American Radical. Edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Harvey J. Kaye (New York/London: Routledge, 1994), 380 pp., £14.99 paper. (shrink)

At one time or another, most Contemporary Continental philosophers of religion make reference to Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead.” However, their interpretation and treatment of that announcement owes nothing to Nietzsche. Instead, they see the death of God as Hegel did, as a moment in a transition to a new way of talking and thinking about God or the Absolute. Their faith in God or the Absolute is not in doubt in the end. We argue that if one hears (...) and thinks Nietzsche’s word “God is dead”—along with Heidegger’s critique of onto-theo-logy-then faith in the end is in doubt. Any affirmation or profession of faith is questionable; there is no promise that all conflicts will be resolved and that all will be saved and forgiven. Nietzsche’s saying that “God is dead” calls for thinking and questioning; it calls not for faith, but faith in doubt. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore general features of the “architecture” (relations of white space, diagram, and text on the page) of medieval manuscripts and early printed editions of Euclidean geometry. My focus is primarily on diagrams in the Arabic transmission, although I use some examples from both Byzantine Greek and medieval Latin manuscripts as a foil to throw light on distinctive features of the Arabic transmission. My investigations suggest that the “architecture” often takes shape against the backdrop of an educational (...) landscape. The constraints of the economic marketplace and cultural aesthetic ideals also appear to play a role in determining the “architecture” of both manuscripts and early printed editions. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

This dissertation looks at the details of Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the revaluation of all values. The dissertation will look at the idea in several ways to elucidate the depth and complexity of the idea. First, it will be looked at through its evolution, as it began as an idea early in Nietzsche's career and reached its full complexity at the end of his career with the planned publication of his Revaluation of All Values, just before the onset of his (...) madness. Several questions will be explored: What is the nature of the revaluator who is supposed to be instrumental in the process of revaluation? What will the values after the revaluation be like (a rebirth of ancient values or creation of entirely new values)? What will be the scope of the revaluation? And what is the relation of other major ideas of Nietzsche's (will to power, eternal return, overman, and amor fati) to the revaluation? Different answers to these questions will be explored. Ultimately, the conclusion is that the revaluation is meant to be an imminent or near-contemporary event instituted by an extraordinary but realistic revaluator, who will transform the values of the whole of society after revaluation personal values by returning to ancient values as well as creating new values and that Nietzsche meant for many of his key ideas to have a revaluative role. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough were first edited and published in 1967 by Rush Rhees as Wittgenstein’s Bemerkungen über Frazers ‘The Golden Bough’. However, there is another edition, called Ludwig Wittgenstein: Remarks on Frazer’s Anthropology, edited and translated by Kenneth Laine Ketner and James Leroy Eigsti. In this paper I outline at least part of the history of this edition. At the same time, I shall describe some of the characteristic features of the Ketner and Eigsti edition. This (...) presentation takes as its point of departure the correspondence contained in the box “Wittgenstein 143” at the von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives, consisting of twelve letters that passed between Ketner and Eigsti, G.E.M. Anscombe, Rhees, and G.H. von Wright in 1972 and 1973. The presentation will also indirectly throw light on a number of issues concerning the editorial principles applied in publishing Wittgenstein’s remarks. (shrink)

This thesis argues for the significance of G.W Leibniz’s concepts of ‘expression’, ‘force’ and ‘perspective’ to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze. By triangulating the philosophical projects of Benjamin, Deleuze and Leibniz, as has not yet been done, the thesis opens up new perspectives and provides new readings of all three. Designating a structure of relations in which every simple substance or monad serves as a ‘living mirror’ of the universe, Leibniz’s concept of ‘expression’ denotes virtual inclusion or (...) immanence. His concept of ‘force’ denotes the self-incurred drive that motivates the monad to action, while his ‘perspectivism’ defines the monads individuality through their infinite points of view on the world. Deleuze and Benjamin, I suggest, appropriate Leibniz’s concepts as part of their respective critiques of epistemology, which target Kant’s conception of experience as a hierarchic relation of representation, allowing them to redefine experience as non-hierarchal, de-centred and embodied. At the same time, for both, Leibniz’s philosophy serves to criticize historicist views of chronological time. Leibniz’s perspectivism is reformulated by Deleuze and Benjamin as part of their respective critical theories of the image, culminating in their later formulations of the ‘dialectical’ and ‘crystal’ image, respectively. The conclusion however, highlights the diverging paths formed by their returns to Leibniz. Benjamin develops a politically effective ‘historical perspectivism’ in which the discontinuity of history enables ‘true historical time’ to replace chronological time. Deleuze, on the other hand, opts for an ahistorical pure form of temporality, his ‘mannerist perspectivism’ describing a continuous, perpetually repeated ‘becoming’. (shrink)

In the summer of 1980, I was privileged to be on the teaching staff of the Summer Institute on Medieval Philosophy held at Cornell University under the direction of Norman Kretzmann and the auspices of the Council for Philosophical Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. While I was giving a series of lectures on supposition theory, I went to my office one morning, and there under the door some anonymous wag from the Institute had slid the pen and (...) ink drawing you see in the graphic. It represents "Supposition" as a dragon, making a rude face at the viewer. The tail of the dragon is divided — not entirely accurately, as it turns out — into the various branches and subbranches of supposition. If the details are not altogether correct, the spirit is certainly understandable. I have absolutely no idea who the inspired artist was, but I have the original framed on the wall in my office. (shrink)

This thesis examines the notion of experience in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. It focuses on the relationship between its constructive and disruptive features in four facets of Benjamin’s work, starting with the early writings dedicated to history and tradition and then moving towards different analyses of the reception of the work of art in modernity. Chapter I examines Benjamin’s early characterisation of experience on the basis of the transmissibility of tradition and suggests that the constructive character of experience manifests (...) in the historical development of knowledge and truth in language. Chapter II is dedicated to The Origin of the German Mourning-Play and the shift towards an examination of the development of language from the perspective of the moments of rupture, forgetting and those deviations inherent in the transmissibility of tradition. I argue that experience appears immanently in the momentary suspension or interruption of the transmissibility of tradition: origin and allegory serve to characterise the double movement of concentrating the totality of tradition and suspending its objectivity. The ‘shattering of tradition’ that Benjamin regards to be the hallmark of modernity in his later writings is located within this dynamics. This shattering undermines the conditions for understanding the conflict out of which the present emerges, thereby producing a historiographic crisis which unsettles experience. Chapter III examines modern epic narration and the resources it develops to contests the forgetting which informs late capitalism. I specifically discuss the method of montage and the fragmentary memory associated with it to suggest that Benjamin looks at history from the standpoint of memory rather than from the perspective of tradition. Chapter IV discuses the radicalisation of the forgetting informing modernity and the possibility of developing, though momentarily, an equilibrium or interplay between technology and sensibility by means of long-term practice formed according to technical reproducibility and the principle of montage. It is finally argued that despite Benjamin’s constant emphasis on its destructive character, experience necessarily entails a cumulative or constructive dimension which Benjamin reformulates throughout his authorship in terms of tradition, memory and practice. (shrink)