_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 1, pp 5 - 35 In this essay, I place Buber’s thought in dialogue with Eckhart. Each understood that the theopoetic propensity to imagine the transcendent in images is no more than a projection of our will to impute form to the formless. The presence of God is made present through imaging the real, but imaging the real implies that the nonrepresentable presence can only be made present through the absence of representation. The goal of (...) the journey is to venture beyond the Godhead in light of which all personalistic depictions of the divine person are rendered idolatrous. Perhaps this is the most important implication of Eckhart’s impact on Buber, an insight that may still have theopolitical implications in a world where too often personifications of the God beyond personification are worshipped at the expense of losing contact with an absolute person that cannot be personified absolutely. (shrink)

Since its 1929 publication, philosophers have been more or less unsure what to make of Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Although it wielded more than its fair share of influence over the course of the twentieth century, its chief interpretive claims are mostly untenable today. Of course, it has always been recognized that the book was never intended as a straightforward piece of Kant interpretation. But neither does it appear to be a reliable presentation of Heidegger's own thought. (...) The result has been that, for all its influence, Heidegger's book has fallen into a kind of academic limbo, a concern for neither scholars of Heidegger nor scholars of Kant. My goal is to help return to Heidegger's reading of Kant its provocative power. I do so by means of a conceptual genesis of Heidegger's reading of Kant that takes both thinkers, as far as possible, on their own terms, but includes an investigation into why Heidegger was so convinced--for a few decisive years, at least--that he had to be able to find in Kant a precedent for his own path of thinking. (shrink)

This article looks at the practice of educational questioning using the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans‐Georg Gadamer. It first looks at questions and statements from a hermeneutic perspective, demonstrating some of the differences and similarities between the two. It then details Gadamer's notion of the ‘true question’, asking whether it is possible for teachers to ask ‘true questions’. Then, it turns to some concrete ways to rethink educational questioning. Three themes are proposed, themes to keep in mind when educational questions are (...) used: non‐superficiality, humility, and circuitry. (shrink)

With the consideration of some issues in contemporary philosophy, this thesis attempts to analyze being, thinking and language as philosophical subjects, and clear up the multiple meanings for each of them. It will also inquire the traditional methods in both Chinese and Western philosophy, and those in contemporary thinking. Finally, it puts forward a theory of "the critique without principles". The thesis aims to explore a new way to solve the problems of contemporary philosophy by changing its subjects and methods.

This article first outlines the importance of Brentano’s doctrine of inner perception both to his understanding of the science of psychology in general in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and to his new science of descriptive psychology in particular which he later advances in his lecture courses on ‘Descriptive Psychology’ at the University of Vienna in the 1880s and early 1890s. It then examines Husserl’s critique of that doctrine in an ‘Appendix: Inner and Outer Perception: Physical and Psychical Phenomena’, (...) which Husserl added to the 1913 re-issue of his Logical Investigations. This article argues that, though Husserl promotes a very different method in phenomenology to the method of ‘inner perception’ which Brentano designs for descriptive psychology, one cannot fully understand the significance of the method that Husserl advocates in phenomenology, both in the Logical Investigations and in Ideas I, without distinguishing four different meanings for ‘inner perception’ in Brentano’s thought and addressing the problematic issue of the particular kind of scientific method for his new science of descriptive psychology which Brentano bequeaths to Husserl. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the moment where speech becomes violent because it wants to name at any price - something that can be felt as a desire in speech, a tension of creation and destruction. I discuss Habermas' theory of communicative action and the propositional conception of truth that underpins it. That conception of truth can be contrasted to the theory of truth as event, as it has been developed by Alain Badiou. A similarity between Badiou's theory of truth (...) and the latent utopianism of Adorno's negative dialectics shows that, for contemporary philosophy, the first phase of Frankfurt School theorising remains important. A philosophy that is able to 'motivate and guide the will' (Habermas) needs to include a non-propositional conception of truth; only with a non-propositional conception of truth can we articulate what is involved in communicative violence and come to understand what the place of what cannot be said is, in thought as well as in private, social and political life. (shrink)

This study seeks to identify a coalition of philosophy and literature in the work of Franz Kafka, and begins with a grounding of his output in the philosophical context from which it emerged. This relatively under-researched philosophical backdrop consists in Kafka's study, at university and in a discussion group, of philosophical positions derived from the "descriptive psychology" of Franz Brentano. Kafka was hence conversant with several philosophical agendas, notably those of logic, Gestalt psychology, and a nascent form of phenomenology, which (...) all derived their impetus from Brentano's work. The initial issue, therefore, is that of assessing the extent of a purported influence of such theories on Kafka's texts. What emerges as a "strategy" of Kafka's work is the aesthetic exploitation of such positions; a tactic which constitutes an almost parodistic subversion of these early forms of phenomenological thought. Thus on the one hand it is implied that the narrative technique of Kafka's work, and in particular the representation of consciousness and its "world", is derived from Brentanian thought, and on the other that this influence is modulated in a specific direction, which renders these texts so singularly amenable to post-structuralist thought. My project consequently proceeds to examine the post-structuralist response to Kafka while juxtaposing this analysis with the grounding of his work in proto-phenomenology. Central to this stage of the study are Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, and the scrutiny of their perspectives will be organized by the themes of authorship, interpretation, power, and desire. The exploration of the "deconstructive" standpoint, represented primarily through Blanchot and Derrida, will be guided by an account of why such a stance seems to be accommodated so readily by Kafka's work, and also of the extent to which his texts could be said, on the basis of the influence of Brentanian thought, to resist such appropriation. (shrink)

This article revolves around the debate surrounding the lack of a coherent definition for corporate social responsibility (CSR). I make use of Jacques Derrida’s theorizing on contested meaning to argue that CSR’s ambiguity is actually necessary in light of its functional role as a “supplement” to corporate profit-seeking. As a discourse that refuses to conclusively resolve the tension between profit-seeking and prosociality, CSR expresses an important critical perspective which demands that firms act responsibly, while retaining the overall corporate frame of (...) shareholder supremacy. CSR does this by ambivalently affirming both profit-seeking and prosociality, a necessary contradiction. Attempts to reduce CSR’s ambiguity can thus only succeed by undermining its viability as a normative discourse that captures how certain elements of society understand how firms should act. The analysis suggests that greater scholarly attention is needed with regard to the material discursive environments within which discourses such as CSR are deployed. A discursive approach to research could thus benefit future practitioners, who have to act according to fluid standards of responsibility that cannot be authoritatively defined, but which can be better understood than they are at present. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the second part of Of Grammatology constitutes the most systematic, extensive example of deconstructive reading. Nevertheless, the problem of whether Derrida reproduces Rousseau’s basic claims adequately has remained a peripheral concern. This has meant that this may constitute a misreading and the consequences that this would have for the deconstructive operation itself have not adequately examined. Hence, this enquiry into Derrida’s reading of Rousseau centers upon the extent to which Derrida distorts Rousseau’s text (...) in order to be able to confirm deconstruction’s radical theoretical positions. (shrink)

Research focusing on the relationship between measures of Corporate Social Responsibility and company financial performance has led to mixed results in the North American context. In addition, the ethical attitudes and approaches toward CSR investments of both companies and rating agencies are not necessarily the same in Europe and the United States. In this study, we use CSR ratings issued by a major European CSR ratings agency to examine in a bi-directional manner the relationships between CSR ratings and financial performance (...) in the European context. By bi-directional, we mean an examination of the relationship between prior CSR ratings and subsequent accounting and financial performance and reciprocally, the impact of accounting and financial performance of year N − 1 on CSR ratings of year N. Our principal findings are: the greater the market capitalization of a company, the higher the Vigeo rating, the higher the risk of the company, the lower the Vigeo rating, and the greater the stock market return of a company, the lower the Vigeo rating. Based on these findings, we propose a concept of “political visibility” pursuant to which enterprises of a greater size are exposed to greater pressure to conform to norms of socially acceptable behavior, a concept of “priorities” in which enterprises that have resolved their most urgent financial needs have a greater ability to invest in CSR, a concept of “rating downgrading” which reveals the sanctioning role of the rating agency from an ethical standpoint. (shrink)

This article explores the significance of the following fact: in neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey does one find a simile about Zeus. I argue that just as ancient Near Eastern texts characterize a god by declaring it impossible to fashion a comparison about him or her, so the Homeric epics characterize Zeus by avoiding statements in the shape “Zeus (is) like X.”.