This paper explores the Nazi view of nature as violent but orderly, contrasted with what the Nazis took to be the chaos and confusion of human society. In imposing strict authoritarian controls, the Nazis strove to emulate what they viewed as the natural discipline of instinct. They saw this as embodied in wild animals, especially large predators such as wolves, while the opposite were domesticated mongrels whose instincts, like those of overly civilized peoples, had been ruined through careless breeding. Those (...) who anticipated this view included Nietzsche and Kipling. The author finds the Nazi perspective best articulated by Nobel-laureate Konrad Lorenz, a member of the Nazi party and its Office for Race Policy, who believed that traits indicating genetic decline crossed species lines. He advocated correcting the alleged damage done to animals and people by civilization through eugenic controls. (shrink)

Historizing Subjectivity in Childhood Studies.

Two models of human perfection proposed by Nietzsche and the Buddha are investigated. Both the overman and the arahant need practice and individual effort as key to their realization, and they share roughly the same conception of the self as a construction. However, there are also a number of salient differences. Though realizing it to be constructed, the overman does proclaim himself through his assertion of the will to power. The realization of the true nature of the self does not (...) lead the overman to seek the way to be released from saṃsara as does the arahant. On the contrary, he rejoices in the eternally recurring situation. The arahant, however, has totally relinquished any attachment to the self, constructed or otherwise. The arahant does not care about the Eternal Recurrence, as he only focuses on the present moment. Finally, they are both beyond good and evil, but in a substantively different way. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of the concept of recognition and its connection with identity and respect. This is related to the question of how women are or are not adequately recognised or respected for their achievements in sport and whether eliminating sex segregation in sport is a solution. This will require an analysis of the concept of excellence in sport, as well as the relationship between fairness and inclusion in an activity that is fundamentally about bodily movement. I argue (...) that attempts to address the problem of women’s recognition in sport need to do so in ways that neither eliminate sport as a fairness regulated system for developing individual excellence in bodily movement nor that prevent women’s achievement of sporting excellence, with the regard that belongs to them. Doing this requires us to decide whether sport is about champions or about individual excellence. (shrink)

What does it mean to be human? This question has plagued the thoughts of people over centuries and will continue to do so. Margaret Archer attempts to grapple with the nature of our humanity in Being Human, the third volume in her ambitious five volume series theorising agency, culture and structure within a realist framework. I choose to focus on this book because it lays the foundations of agency and what it means to be human, which allows Archer's subsequent empirical (...) and theoretical investigation of the ‘internal conversation’. This essay reviews her undertaking to theorise humanity and to re-establish human causal powers in social theory in the face of postmodernity's ‘death of the subject’. I critique the power of Archer's theory from an eclectically informed position, including gender studies, poststructuralism and embodiment theories. Archer's authoritative position is somewhat destabilised by making visible her lack of consideration of intersubjectivity, language and the complex nature of power in her endeavour to retain a human-istic subject. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Abhandlung versucht auf die Komplexität der Bezüge zwischen Friedrich Nietzsche und Martin Heidegger aufmerksam zu machen. Im Hintergrund dieser Bezüge steht das Phänomen der Stimmigkeit, das von beiden Denkern erörtert wird. Heidegger macht Nietzsche zwar dessen metaphysischen Nihilismus zum Vorwurf, der im Wille zur Macht im Sinne eines Willen zum Willen gegenwärtig sei. Dennoch verweist Heideggers Interpretation auf die Vielfältigkeit und Vielseitigkeit im ursprünglichen Denkansatz dieses hintergründigen Denkers, womit erstmals auf die Relevanz Nietzsches bezüglich der modernen Metaphysik verwiesen (...) wurde; diese Relevanz war zuvor, sämtlichen affirmativen oder negativen Äußerungen über den Urheber des Zarathustra zum Trotz, verworfen worden. Trotz alledem gibt es bei Nietzsche auch weiterhin Themen, die selbst Heidegger verkannt hatte, die jedoch auf vorzügliche und ertragreiche Weise zum Verständnis dessen, was man als Gemeinsamkeiten im Denken dieser beiden Philosophen betrachten darf, beitragen können. Das Tor, das sowohl in Nietzsches als auch in Heideggers Denkarena führt, ist das Thema ihrer thematisch neutralen, fundamentalen Stimmigkeit. Die Beurteilung dieses Sachverhalts erweist sich so als grundlegend für das Verständnis Nietzsches und Heideggers, aber auch für unsere heutige Situation. (shrink)

This article presents an argument for the return to the original meaning of the concept value. This is achieved by revisiting the genealogy of the concept and by placing in perspective and questioning the common parlance thereof in contemporary legal discourse. The approach is decidedly against the often casual way in which courts and commentators treat the concept, seemingly as concretisation, validation, exegesis or reinforcement of fundamental norms, but without paying attention to its original meaning and use. It is submitted (...) that we confine our talk of values to the products of valuation, that is, the taste, the will, the esteem and/or perspective of some individual or group. Yet, it is not suggested that we completely discard the use of values discourse in law, the goal is rather to restate the inherent relativity of values language in legal discourse. This will bring necessary order to the current conceptual disarray and will foster mutual understanding and alliance. (shrink)

Approximately at the turn of the nineteenth century, the visual encounter between humans and birds, which has been going on since both forms of life have existed, began to solidify into a hobby, into something that a middle-class citizen of American might spend a morning doing. Certain technologies—optics , field guides, and later, automobiles—helped to enable this pursuit. In the twentieth century, bird watching became an immense industry. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, one report claims that in America (...) "an estimated 70.4 million people now go out-of-doors to watch birds one or more times per year" . Much has been written on how and why bird watching has grown in popularity during the last 150 years or so. 2 This essay will look instead at the effects produced by the nearly infinite acts of looking inherent to a hobby that has been described as one of "Americans' most-favored [outdoor] activities". (shrink)

The title of the book was chosen due to inspiration from Nietzsche’s famous book ‘Beyond good and Evil’, which has marked an unprecedented turning point in the history of philosophy. Hence, the book titled ‘Beyond Civilization and History’ is intended to outline the politico-historical debate, since the dawn of the 20th century. The discussion in the book will cover pre-modern, modern and post-modern discourse of the history of civilizations. The debate mainly focuses on the modernist and post-modernist historical context especially (...) surrounding the writings of Oswald Spengler, Norman Angell, Arnold J. Toynbee, and Alexander Dugin. (shrink)

One of the most influential recent developments in supposedly radical philosophy is ‘posthumanism’. This can be seen as the successor to ‘deconstructive postmodernism’. In each case, the claim of its proponents has been that cultures are oppressive by virtue of their elitism, and this elitism, fostered by the humanities, is being challenged. In each case, however, these philosophical ideas have served ruling elites by crippling opposition to their efforts to impose markets, concentrate wealth and power and treat everyone and everything (...) as mere instruments in a way that is not only undermining democracy and threatening economic, social and political stability through growing inequality, but is crippling efforts to deal with the global ecological crisis. Philosophers, Nietzsche claimed, are physicians of culture. Why should people claiming to be philosophers, or at least aligned with philosophers, subvert their own calling? In this paper I will suggest that with the expansion of education and the rise of neoliberalism, those involved in education and research, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have been proletarianized, and most have accepted this proletarianization. They have been reduced to a fraction of the proletariat - wage-slaves without economic security and therefore dependent on the will of others on whom they are dependent. They are not ordinary wage-slaves, however, but wage-house-slaves, having salaries rather than wages. If, as Marx argued, social being determines consciousness, posthumanism can be understood as the expression of ressentiment of these house-slaves at their condition while simultaneously serving to affirm their superiority to field-slaves while serving their masters. Their work is supported because it provides ideological cover for their masters, the new transnational managerial class or corporatocracy as they expand their power through information technology, while absolving this corporatocracy from responsibility for the consequences of their growing power. In making this claim I will argue that the real target of deconstructionists and posthumanists, although this is now seldom appreciated, has been the humanism of the New Left, a revival of the Radical Enlightenment inspired by Renaissance civic humanism and the German Renaissance. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, (...) transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality. (shrink)

The ArgumentLike many controversies in science, the one between Freud and Jung is overloaded with ad hominem arguments despite the incompatibility of such arguments with the pretensions of both sides to attain scientific ad rem validity. Unlike natural scientists, Freud and Jung regarded their own ad hominem arguments as relevant to general and impersonal truths. They practically legitimized such a use claiming to have a clinical basis for the rejection of the opponent's objections by a de-validating analysis of the opponent's (...) personality as a whole. The argument of this paper is that the de-validating strategy was neither an inevitable psychological outcome of the intricate interpersonal relationships in analytic situations nor the logical consequence of any clinical or scientific psycho-analytical discovery. It followed from the epistemological invalid pretension to have a general theory of mind which could explain by mental analysis the existence of “unreasonable opinions,” and the application of the same principles to the opinion that the theory itself is unreasonable. Such a pretension, apparently specific to mystical traditions in theology and metaphysics, was deeply rooted in the modern epistemological tradition. The paper examines the impact of the different branches of that tradition on Freud and Jung's respective ideologies, theories, and practice, including the ad hominem malpractice. (shrink)

In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche celebrated the dueling forces of reason and emotion as personified by the ancient Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. A subtle Apollonian-Dionysian balance can be observed in TimeSlips, a group-based creative storytelling activity developed in the 1990s and increasingly used in dementia care settings worldwide. This article explains how the Apollonion-Dionysian aspects of TimeSlips are beneficial not only for persons with dementia, but also for their carers. Narrative data from medical students at Penn State (...) College of Medicine who participated in TimeSlips at a local retirement community are shared. (shrink)

Michael Marder in Dump Philosophy claims that that there has been so much dumping with modern civilization that we now live in a dump, with those parts of our environment not contaminated by dumping, now rare. The growth of the dump is portrayed as the triumph of nihilism, predicted by Nietzsche as the outcome of life denying Neoplatonist metaphysics. Marder’s proposed solution, characterized as “undumping”, is to accept the dump and to promote reinterpretations and informal communities within the dump. It (...) is argued here that Marder provides great insight into our current situation and its causes; however, his proposed solution is too weak. To respond to the situation described, it is argued, it is necessary to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy dumping, or more broadly, healthy and unhealthy participation in nature. To make this distinction, it is necessary see humans as ecosystems and components of ecosystems, including the global ecosystem, as these have been characterized by anti-reductionist ecologists. Ecosystems can be healthy or unhealthy. Dumping and dumps should be identified as problematic outputs when they damage the health of ecosystems. The products of human activity not destined to be consumed or used for further productive activity, can then be identified and judged according to whether they augment or damage ecosystems’ health. Dumping should be severely restricted. This should be associated with making a commitment to life and its value, and living to augment life, developing the social and economic forms and institutions that facilitate living in this way. (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)

Nietzche and Grant both challenge us to make a clear choice about what we believe the world and human beings to be, while describing clearly the consequences of such a choice. This thesis attempts to clarify the choice with which they confront us, by examining what they say about three key topics: modernity, history and morality. In doing so, its aim is to highlight what it is that differentiates them and why. The thesis draws two conclusions, one about the fundamental (...) difference between Grant and Nietzsche and the other about the possible bases for a choice between their world views. The fundamental difference between Grant and Nietzsche is that for Nietzsche the world is chaos, and being is becoming, while for Grant there is order and purpose in the world, and being is seen as unchanging goodness. It is these particular views of being that shape and influence what each says about modernity, history and morality. The thesis argues that the basis for choosing between the world views of Nietzsche and of Grant must be faith or belief, rather than knowledge, for whatever reasons or justification one can give for choosing between being as becoming and being as unchanging goodness presuppose a context of being that is assumed or taken as already given. Source: Masterss International, Volume: 37-01, page: 0078. Adviser: Robert Pinto. Thesis --University of Windsor, 1997. (shrink)

In thinking of my relationship to Peter McHugh as an intimate collaboration, I take some reactions elicited to a most recent unpublished writing of his on intimacy as an occasion for discussing both intimacy and collaboration as a notion in-itself and as applicable to us in particular, treating that space between the general and particular of intimacy as its zone of fundamental ambiguity. I try to being to view a story of the imaginary of community, its elemental stirrings, that Peter (...) might appreciate. In this, I reorient Arendt's notion of communicating with the dead to the problem of the intimate collaboration and of how each might be a practice that mirrors the other, intimate collaboration being one way of confirming the vow in communicating with the dead to witness, and reciprocally, such communication being a way of practicing intimate collaboration. This leads me to bring to view a range of unstated resonances of the discussion that have applicability to our shared history. First, is intimate collaboration possible in organizations such as the university and how does it coexist among adversarial exchanges, factitious coteries, alliances, and collégial networks? Second, is communicating with the dead another way of speaking of tradition and dissemination in any context as such and what could the manner and method of orienting to this desire say about the quality of life in commemoration per se? (shrink)

The paper continues the model I began in a previous issue of Sophia . It is argued that the predominance of purely ascending or ‘top down’ forms of spirituality which stemmed largely from the axial period and have been carried forward into modern, transpersonal theories of evolutionary spirituality is a mistake and that there exists a lost or largely ignored form of spirituality—which I name somatic—which was the predominant domain of early Neolithic and Palaeolithic experience. Aspects of what I call (...) somatic mystical experiences have certainly been acknowledged at times to a limited degree, though they have rarely been fully explored, and have usually been considered as basic to other kinds of mystical experience, rather than fully developed forms in their own right. This article offers a fuller exploration and places such states more accurately within a detailed developmental framework than has previously been the case. Other issues relating to the horizon model across the two papers are also expanded. (shrink)

This article examines the double account of the human in Friedrich Nietzsche's writings. Genealogically, Nietzsche insists that humanity is a tamed herd that attacks its own animality. Philologically, this human – through anthropomorphism – sunders itself from those aspects of language that are not representational. Read in relation to this double critique, the article argues that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an attempt to imagine an entirely different relation between politics and language, one that enables a thinking of a future without (...) dominion and responds to the crisis of human rights and the humanities today. (shrink)

'And ecstasy is the way out! Harmony! Perhaps, but heart-rending. The way out? It suffices that I look for it: I fall back again, inert, pitiful: the way out from project, from the will for a way out! For project is the prison from which I wish to escape : I formed the project to escape from project!' Georges Bataille Inner Experience, p. 59 The most notable feature of the last ten years of going to Milan to visit design companies, (...) studios, manufacturers and the Salone di Mobili, has been the lack of change in outlook on the part of the Milanese Design community. The focus of any discussion centred around what has made Milanese design so special and always seemed to be focussed on the past. We revisited the 1960s and 1980s mainly—the Pop and the Postmodern, the bright colours and sensual shapes attesting to the stereotype of Milanese Design as energetic and desirous. The 1990s revisiting of a Scandinavian Modernist æsthetic particularly in furniture and kitchen appliance design seemed only to reinforce such a stereotype: “we can engage with this styling,” they seemed to say, “but it will always have our signature elegance and sophistication, that demands display and passion rather than objective appreciation.” Only Studio Mendini seemed to have no truck with the vagaries of fashion. Asked in Spring 2002 whether the studio’s playful style—so reminiscient of Design’s Postmodern turn of the 1980s as well as Pop’s 1960s exuberance—was still relevant in a world experiencing suicide terrorist attacks in many of the world’s cities, our guide told us that Signore Mendini believed that now, as much as ever, was it necessary to have some joy in people’s lives. And that is all.1 This is design as frippery, as an escape from the everyday, from the dirtiness of culture, of society and of politics. This is design which ignores the everyday experiences and concerns of people. This is design which has turned in on itself. This is not good enough. (shrink)

Philosophers exploring the ethical implications of closeness, or ‘given intersubjectivity’, favor an essential human predicament over an essential sexual dualism to explain their positions on responsibility for and response to the Other. This article proposes a feminist ethical ontology that rejects an essentialist base, turning instead to semiotics as a tool for describing the condition of human agency in a context of oppression. The discussion attends to the problems of downplaying the importance of difference and of blurring the distinction between (...) necessary and accidental actions and occurrences. In challenging the contention that response to the Other is beyond the realm of choice and will, this article considers the ethical implications in how this givenness substantiates inequality and gendered embodiment. The effects of hierarchical ontological dualism should not be ignored or misconstrued in an effort to isolate the definitive nature of human response. (shrink)

In thinking of my relationship to Peter McHugh as an intimate collaboration, I take some reactions elicited to a most recent unpublished writing of his on intimacy as an occasion for discussing both intimacy and collaboration as a notion in-itself and as applicable to us in particular, treating that space between the general and particular of intimacy as its zone of fundamental ambiguity. I try to being to view a story of the imaginary of community, its elemental stirrings, that Peter (...) might appreciate. In this, I reorient Arendt’s notion of communicating with the dead to the problem of the intimate collaboration and of how each might be a practice that mirrors the other, intimate collaboration being one way of confirming the vow in communicating with the dead to witness, and reciprocally, such communication being a way of practicing intimate collaboration. This leads me to bring to view a range of unstated resonances of the discussion that have applicability to our shared history. First, is intimate collaboration possible in organizations such as the university and how does it coexist among adversarial exchanges, factitious coteries, alliances, and collegial networks? Second, is communicating with the dead another way of speaking of tradition and dissemination in any context as such and what could the manner and method of orienting to this desire say about the quality of life in commemoration per se? (shrink)

This paper gives a short description of basic features of the dominating mindset in the Western world between the 1970s and today, often called “post-modern”, through a re-reading of John Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” . In doing so, it applies the viewpoint of an interdisciplinary history of ideas. Since collective mindsets have become the most important contextual political factors, the implications are multiple.

We all know by now why a kid starts whistling in the middle of a territory unknown. Refrain builds up a milieu, deterritorialising all the forces of the unknown with the ear of an other. However, have we as yet considered how the ear gets into resonance with the transformation of the unknown into the known? In other words, are we capable of knowing the unknown as such? Are we capable of translating the rhythms of the unknown into the known? (...) And if yes, what are those issues that we put at risk in such a move? Without doubt, Heidegger and Agamben would be of great help for us to discover the aletheia of rhythm, as if it is possible to know what rhythm is. However, our intention here is to talk about ears, rhythms, deterritorialisation of the ears without falling into the trap of phenomenological circle. Dear rhuthmos, is all our knowledge of rhythm circumscribed by a division that cannot be maintained by an ear? (shrink)

This text has already been published in La Deleuziana – Online Journal of Philosophy – ISSN 2421-3098 N. 10 / 2019 – RHYTHM, CHAOS AND NONPULSED MAN.: We all know by now why a kid starts whistling in the middle of a territory unknown. Refrain builds up a milieu, deterritorialising all the forces of the unknown with the ear of an other. However, have we as yet considered how the ear gets into resonance with the transformation of the unknown into (...) the known? In other words, - Philosophie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

Mutual feedback between human-made environments and facets of thought throughout history has yielded two myths: the Garden and the Citadel. Both myths correspond to Jung’s feminine and masculine collective subconscious, as well as to Nietzsche’s premise of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. Nietzsche’s premise suggests, furthermore, that the feminine myth of the Garden is time-bound whereas the masculine myth of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, constitutes a spatial deportment. Throughout history the two myths have continually molded the built (...) environment and thought, but the myth of the Ideal City – from Plato to Descartes to modernity – came to dominate city-form and ensuing aspects of contemplation. This relationship seems to have shifted during the twentieth century. Intellectual dispositions have begun to be largely nurtured by an incongruous city-form emerging from the gap between the incessant promise for an automated, well-functioning city, on the one hand, and looming alienation, coupled with the factual, malfunctioning city, on the other hand. Urban decay, a persisting and time-bound urban event that is a byproduct of this configuration, suggests the ascent of the Garden myth in post-modern city-form. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of a central psychopathological concept, the notion of "poor reality-testing. "Using ideas from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, I consider the nature of delusions in schizophrenia, largely through examining Daniel Paul Schreber's famous Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Many schizophrenic individuals do not in fact mistake their fantasies for reality, as is traditionally assumed. Rather, I argue, they engage in a solipsistic mode of experience, a felt subjectivization of the lived world that is associated with a (...) stance of passivity and hyperconsciousness. I discuss the existential conditions and consequences of this stance and show that certain anomalous or paradoxical features of schizophrenic delusion are explicable on this phenomenological account. (shrink)

: This review offers a critical analysis of Shannon Sullivan's "feminist pragmatist standpoint theory" as a framework for thinking about issues of identity and truth. Sullivan claims that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on an anonymous or pre-personal quality to bodily experience commits him to a false universality and that his understanding of bodily intentionality traps him in a subjectivist philosophy that is incapable of doing justice to difference. She suggests that phenomenology in general is theoretically limited because of its alleged subjectivism (...) and universalism, and she turns to Dewey's pragmatism to develop a "transactional model" of identity and truth. In response, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of anonymity and intentionality do not entail either subjectivism or a false universality. I also challenge Sullivan's conception of truth as transactional flourishing by appealing to the "terrible truths" of violence and oppression. (shrink)

This essay is a first attempt at thinking through the ways in which Native American Coyote stories can illuminate options for lesbian and feminist politics. I follow the metaphors of trickery and shape-shifting common to the stories and recommend the laughter they evoke as we engage in feminist politics and philosophy.

Despite traditionally having been studied within the field of Musicology, the analysis of music in film should be approached as an aesthetic study of the relationship between «image» and «music» which is central to the cinematographic framework. From this interdisciplinary perspective numerous theoretical and methodological issues emerge. The aim of this article is to investigate, using both a synchronic and diachronic focus, some of the key issues arising from this joint music-image approach, in an attempt to develop a theoretical framework (...) for a joint aesthetic of music and image: a study of «cinematographic expression» that brings together the visual and the sound dimensions and which we call the «musicalised image», a neologism of our own creation. (shrink)

Marx's call for a materialism capable of engaging reality as ‘sensuous human activity’ opens a question about the role of representation in relation to data. Images have increasingly been seen as significant forms of data in the history of education. Derrida's theory of the spectre—a variation on the positions established in his earlier works on the trace, the supplement and differance—offers a way of rethinking visual images, their relations with existing discourses of knowledge and with positioned subjects who makes sense. (...) Two early twentieth-century photographs are explored here in relation to ideas derived from Derrida as an exercise in the philosophy of representation. (shrink)

This review offers a critical analysis of Shannon Sullivan's “feminist pragmatist standpoint theory” as a framework for thinking about issues of identity and truth. Sullivan claims that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on an anonymous or pre-personal quality to bodily experience commits him to a false universality and that his understanding of bodily intentionality traps him in a subjectivist philosophy that is incapable of doing justice to difference. She suggests that phenomenology in general is theoretically limited because of its alleged subjectivism and (...) universalism, and she turns to Dewey's pragmatism to develop a “transactional model” of identity and truth. In response, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's descriptions of anonymity and intentionality do not entail either subjectivism or a false universality. I also challenge Sullivan's conception of truth as transactional flourishing by appealing to the “terrible truths” of violence and oppression. (shrink)

Zeev Sternhell and Hans Sluga show that fascism and Nazism were part of an early twentieth?century intellectual rebellion against universalism, liberalism, and Enlightenment rationalism. Western technology, values, and political institutions were seen as outmoded, but instead of wanting to return to the traditions of the past, as conservatives wished, these intellectuals thought that fascism could transcend modernity. Sorel, Heidegger, and other fascist modernists offered different radical solutions to what was conceived of as the decadence of liberal Western civilization. It remains (...) an open question whether the discontent with modernity is an intellectual construction or a result of actual defects in modern life itself. (shrink)

Resumen El objetivo principal de este texto es el análisis de la concepción poético-filosófica propuesta Peter Sloterdijk (1989) en su libro Thinker on Stage; Nietzsche's Materialism, en el cual intenta revalorar El Nacimiento de la Tragedia de Nietzsche y su influencia en la Modernidad filosófica y las prácticas artísticas contemporáneas. Explorando los conceptos Cosmonáutico y Psiconáutico propuestos por Sloterdijk, indagaremos la relevancia de la interpretación nietzscheana de la tragedia griega para las prácticas artísticas actuales. Cómo es afectada la filosofía al (...) encontrarse con conceptos tales como estilo, práctica y performance es la pregunta central que guía este análisis. El concepto de acción es la herramienta a utilizar en esta exploración.This text aims at the analysis of the poetic-philosophic conception in Peter Sloter-dijk (1989) in his book Thinker on Stage; Nietzsche's Materialism, in which he revalues Nietzsche's The Origin of Tragedy and its influences in philosophical Modernity and contemporary artistic practices. How is philosophy affected in the encounter with concepts such as style, practice, and performance is the main question guiding this analysis. The concept of action is the conceptual tool used for this exploration. (shrink)

Nothing surprised the promoters of the Enlightenment more, and left them standing more incredulously before the failure of what they thought were their ultimate exertions, than the survival of the contemptible old stories - the continuation of work on myth. (Blumenberg, 1985: 274)1.