In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding? Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding to (...) music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since “the ear has no eyelid” (Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears. The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy’s skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy takes the concept of "essence" in order to indicate its drawbacks on the singularity of being. The concept of essence is not a universal and necessary origin, but contingent and historical meanings for Nancy. This historicity in meaning leads Nancy to question the concept of the individual and the rules of the social/public sphere allocated through individuality. Nancy's argument on the ontological environment of finite beings aims to highlight those beings are mixed singular, (...) not belonging to a universal unit. This allows us to discover that being is singular and also singular-plural to the extent that it is with the other. Thus, essential historical concepts invalidate individual or social organizations at this point. Nancy calls this “finitude” which is the only transcendental concept that makes possible the “being with” (Mitsein). It is possible to think that finitude is the only property to make a community of singularities rather than ready-made concepts of social sciences. I argue that this position is methodological for an alternative socio-ontology. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy would appear to have avoided the aura of conceptual determinativeness plaguing John Caputo's reading of Derrida. His rendering of the interweaving of experience is vigilant at depriving us of the ability to capture and possess a temporary presence in the event itself. In 'Elliptical Sense' (Research in Phenomenology,pp.175-190) and `Differance' (Sense of the World, pp.34-36) he thinks Derrida's quasi-transcendental as a being-singular-plural. But is Nancy's differential communication of events understanding itself as Derridean differance? Nancy (...) himself reminds (Ellipsis34) that while there is a great proximity between his work and Derrida, it is not a complicity. What might Nancy not be apprehending of Derrida's thought? (shrink)

Taking his critique of totalitarianizing conceptions of community as a starting point, this text examines Jean-Luc Nancy's work of an ‘ontology of plural singular being’ for its political implications. It argues that while at first this ontology seems to advocate a negative or an anti-politics only, it can also be read as a ‘theory of communicative praxis’ that suggests a certain ethos – in the form of a certain use of symbols (which is expressed only inaptly by the (...) word ‘style’) that would render the ontological plurality of singulars perceptible and practically effective. Finally, some recent texts by Nancy even sidestep the ontology of being-with and face the question of what politics, faced with demands of justice, could be and what a democratic politics could provide. Both of these aspects in Nancy's work, however, still remain to be spelled out more politically. (shrink)

A philosophical obituary on Jean-Luc Nancy, who died in 2021, published in the German journal Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie. Ein philosophischer Nachruf auf den 2021 verstorbenen Jean-Luc Nancy, erschienen in der Allgemeinen Zeitschrift für Philosophie.

Translation (French to English) of Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'Annoncée.".

Dignity, according to some recent arguments, is a useless concept, giving vague expression to moral intuitions that are better captured by other, better defined concepts. In this paper, I defend the concept of dignity against such skeptical arguments. I begin with a description of the defining features of the Kantian conception of dignity. I then examine one of the strongest arguments against that conception, advanced by Arthur Schopenhauer in On the Basis of Morality. After considering some standard accounts of dignity, (...) showing how they fail adequately to address Schopenhauer’s concern, I propose and defend a new account of dignity, drawing on the ontology of Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

In this paper, we turn to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. In his work La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation of 2002 the French philosopher analyses the process of globalisation. Rather than denoting a new homogeneity, the term refers to a world horizon characterized in its interpalpable multiplicity of cultural, socio-economical, ideological and politico-moral content. According to Nancy, globalisation refers to ag-glome-ration: the decay of what once was a globe and now nothing more than a glome. (...) On the one hand, Nancy indicates that the world has changed by an unknown increase of techno-science, the worsening of inequalities between growing populations and by the changing and disappearing of given certainties, views and identities of the world and of man. On a large scale, this deformation is due to the relation between the capitalist evolution and the capitalising of worldviews. On the other hand, due to the inter-palpability of the multiplicity, this means that on our planet there is only space for one world. The world gradually becomes the only world. In this paper we will investigate what Nancy means with the becoming-world of the world and how this relates to our being in the world. For Nancy globalisation reveals two possible destinies of our relation with the world. In La Création du Monde ou la Mondialisation he discerns globalisation from mondialisation to analyze these two possibilities. We will investigate this distinction of Nancy and its consequences for everyday life. (shrink)

This paper is an analysis of one theoretical facet of the problem of Buddhist participation in closed nationalist discourses: the essential relationship between the dislocation of subjectivity (or the emptying of ego) and the formation of communities (such as a nation-state or a Volk). Through this, I hope to explore the effects disciplines of subjectivity (including Buddhism) might have on socio-political formations (such as closed nationalism or imperialism). In order to do so, I will compare two key works in which (...) the existential structure of ethical community is examined: Watsuji Tetsurō's Ethics (Rinrigaku jōkan 倫理学 上巻 1937) and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community (La Communauté désœuvrée 1983). -/- In the first section, after briefly introducing the two thinkers, I will examine their views on the basic structure of the individual and community and how it leads to a sense of ethics. In the second section, I will delve into the essential differences between Watsuji and Nancy, beginning with their differing responses to Heidegger's notion of being-toward-death. I will then proceed to a critical re-reading of Watsuji's ethics possible from Nancy's thought. I will end by connecting the results of this comparative study to the problem of Buddhist involvement in immanent nationalism, in hopes of shedding light on one key theoretical aspect of this multi-faceted problem. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis von Einheit und Vielheit als ein Grundproblem der Philosophiegeschichte erfährt in den Werken von zwei der gegenwärtig einflussreichsten französischen Denker, Gilles Deleuze und Jean-Luc Nancy, eine je spezifische Reformulierung mit weitreichenden ontologischen sowie politischen Konsequenzen. Durch einen innovativen, aber dennoch einführenden Vergleich kontrastiert und verschränkt Ralf Gisinger erstmalig Ansätze beider Philosophen, indem er sein originäres Konzept der „Pluralisierung“ entwickelt. In einem Feld zwischen Allgemeinheit und Partikularität lassen sich so insbesondere klassische Kategorien der politischen Philosophie wie Identität, (...) Subjekt oder Gesellschaft radikal neu begreifen. -/- Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, two of the most influential thinkers of our time, both engage with the classic philosophical problem of the one and the many. Ralf Gisinger develops his original concept of ‘pluralization’ by contrasting and intersecting these two philosophers, while shedding a light on the consequences of these pluralizations on an ontological as well as political level regarding notions like identity, subject or society. (shrink)

Das Verhältnis von Einheit und Vielheit als ein Grundproblem der Philosophiegeschichte erfährt in den Werken von zwei der gegenwärtig einflussreichsten französischen Denker, Gilles Deleuze und Jean-Luc Nancy, eine je spezifische Reformulierung mit weitreichenden ontologischen sowie politischen Konsequenzen. Durch einen innovativen, aber dennoch einführenden Vergleich kontrastiert und verschränkt Ralf Gisinger erstmalig Ansätze beider Philosophen, indem er sein originäres Konzept der „Pluralisierung“ entwickelt. In einem Feld zwischen Allgemeinheit und Partikularität lassen sich so insbesondere klassische Kategorien der politischen Philosophie wie Identität, (...) Subjekt oder Gesellschaft radikal neu begreifen. Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, two of the most influential thinkers of our time, both engage with the classic philosophical problem of the one and the many. Ralf Gisinger develops his original concept of ‘pluralization’ by contrasting and intersecting these two philosophers, while shedding a light on the consequences of these pluralizations on an ontological as well as political level regarding notions like identity, subject or society. (shrink)

At a distance of more ten years from publication (2000 French/2005 English translation), with this essay I will re-read, comment and discuss, in different way and in form of anthological sketch, the Derridean volume ‘On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy’, focusing in particular on its ‘tangents and its metonymies’, its manifold entanglements with the metaphysics of touch and bodily connections. Making use of the geometrical figure of the tangent, Derrida affirms that "[if] philosophy has touched the limit [my emphasis-J. D. (...) ]. of the ontology of subjectivity, this is because philosophy has been led to this limit”. To touch is to touch a limit, a limit without depth or surface. How have we regarded touching in the past? The body? My thesis is that if Derridean reflection remains mostly anchored to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, it is inspired nevertheless by a different deconstructive gesture/s similar to different geometric tangents (the deconstructive practice is similar to the tracing of many tangents). Discussing in particular Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Derrida’essay ‘Deconstruction of Christianity’ and devoting an entire section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels, Derrida gives us numerous and special considerations on deconstruction and the deconstruction of touch in Christianity, admitting as well the enormity of this task. A reflection on the Kas Saghafi, “Safe, Intact”: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” will follow in an exemplary way. Following a discussion of touch and the body in both animal and human spheres, in the closing section of the essay, I will comment on the Patrick Llored’s essay A Philosophy of Touching Between the Human and the Animal: The Animal Ethics of Jacques Derrida, recently published in A Companion to Derrida (2014). This study addresses highly topical questions such as: ‘What does it teach us about touch, but also about the body and the life of the animal? To what extent is it capable of renewing our knowledge [connaissance] of non-human life and of generating an animal ethics reconceived from top to bottom? If touching is coextensive with the living body, that implies not only that we place the haptical question at the centre of reflection on the animal, but also that we take into account the consequence that is most disruptive for us today (A Companion, p. 512). And conclude along with Patrick Llored that the question of touch promises to transform everything we have understood until now about animality. (shrink)

Reseña en español del diálogo entre A. Badiou y J.-L. Nancy, editado por Jan Völker y publicado en 2017.

My intention in this paper is to respond to Jean-Luc Nancy’s claim that poetry, along with philosophy, is essentially incapable of what Nancy describes as "thinking love." To do so, I will first try to come to an understanding of Nancy’s thinking regarding love and then of poetry as presented in his essay "Shattered Love." Having thus prepared the way, I will then respond, via Pablo Neruda’s poem "Oda al Limón," to Nancy’s understanding of poetry (...) vis-à-vis "Shattered Love." This response, in acting out Nancy’s thinking regarding love, will suggest a greater plurality within poetry than Nancy acknowledged. (shrink)

Two ideas of Jean-Luc Nancy stand out: the subject as a plurality of possibilities open to the world in a constant event and the importance of the body in understanding the subject’s situation in the world. These ideas are drawn from the works of Jean-Luc Nancy A subject? And Corpus. First, the main ideas of A Subject? And secondly, those of Corpus. In a final section, the main conclusions of these two ideas are drawn, among which (...) stand out the importance of understanding the subject as a plurality open to the becoming of the world and the importance of the body as the entity that experiences, thinks, and lives reality without intermediaries. (shrink)

Community has been both celebrated and demonized as a fortress that shelters and defends its members from being exposed to difference. Instead of abandoning community as an antiquated model of relationships that is ill suited for our globalized world, this book turns to the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Jean-Luc Nancy in search for ways to rethink community in an open and inclusive manner. Greg Bird argues that a central piece of this task is found in (...) how each philosopher rearticulates community not as something that is proper to those who belong and improper to those who are excluded or where inclusion is based on one’s share in common property. We must return to the forgotten dimension of sharing, not as a sharing of things that we can contain and own, but as a process that divides us up and shares us out in community with one another. This book traces this problem through a wide array of fields ranging from biopolitics, communitarianism, existentialism, phenomenology, political economy, radical philosophy, and social theory. (shrink)

The problem of the intensification and remission of qualities was a crux for philosophical, theological, and scientific thought in the Middle Ages. It was raised in Antiquity with this remark of Aristotle: some qualities, as accidental beings, admit the more and the less. Admitting more and less is not a trivial property, since it belongs neither to every category of being, nor to every quality. Rather it applies only to states and dispositions such as virtue, to affections of bodies such (...) as heat and sweetness, and to affections of soul such as anger. However, the property of admitting more and less was a matter of importance for the qualitative physics that had reigned up to about the time of Descartes, a physics which was concerned with concepts such as heat, coldness, lightness, heaviness, and so on. (shrink)

A brief account of the work of Giorgio Agamben and its relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.

I explore the possibility that the feminine, like art, can be thought in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the singular plural. In Les Muses, Nancy claims that art provides for the rethinking of a technë not ruled by instrumentality. Specifically, in rethinking aesthetics in terms of the debates laid out by Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, he resituates the ontological in terms of the specificity of the techniques of each particular artwork; each artwork establishes relations particular to (...) its world or worlds. What is at stake in the singular plural is the multiplicity of relations that are lost in the unifying gestures that arise out of radical oppositions. I rethink the singular plural through a phenomenological encounter with Barb Hunt’s artwork, Antipersonnel, a collection of hand-knitted replicas of antipersonnel landmines. (shrink)

This paper explores the origins of the term "causa sine qua non" used by Durand de Saint-Pourçain to describe the role of material things in knowledge. I show that its technical meaning comes from the Stoics and was transmitted to the Middle Ages by Boethius' commentary on Cicero's Topics. The expression "sine qua non" here does not have the ordinary and restricted meaning of "indispensable", "necessary condition", which can also apply to direct, per se causes of an effect. In the (...) present context, sine qua non causes do not act on the effect in question, either as concomitant, secondary, or instrumental causes, or as remote causes. They act only on that which hinders the actualization of a potentiality, in order to remove that obstacle. For example, the removal of a support that prevented something from falling does not act on that thing, nor does it add anything to its tendency to fall; it simply enables that thing to exercise its own actualization. Similarly, in cognitive processes, external things do not impose anything on the soul, but simply give it the opportunity to actualize its faculties of its own accord. I situate Durand's use of this form of causality in the context of late 13th/early 14th century theories of cognition, among several other attempts to find an alternative theory to the standard Aristotelian model and to maintain the pure activity of the soul with respect to the body. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the problem of Bayle's skepticism. I show that he is not a wholesale skeptic. Rather, he thinks that reason is plagued by internal conflicts. But its principles, which clash with each other, can be adopted separately from each other. It is often what we have to do when dealing with metaphysical problems. This also entails that reason is not to be rejected as a whole when it happens to be contradicted by faith; only some of (...) its principles have to be denied, and solely in that case. Further, Bayle believes that we possess absolute certainly in our knowledge of ethical principles. I show how this is compatible with his relativism in other domains by putting back his contention in the context of Reformed thought. (shrink)

This book proposes a substantially new solution to a classic philosophical problem: how is it possible that morality genuinely obligates us, binding our wills without regard to our perceived well-being? Building on Immanuel Kant’s idea of the fact of reason, the book argues that the bindingness of obligation can be traced back to the fact, articulated in different ways by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, and Jean-Luc Nancy, that we find ourselves responsive, prior to all reflection, to a pre-personal, (...) originary dimension of sense. (shrink)

Este ensayo expone la manera en que el pensamiento deconstructivo de Jean-Luc Nancy desarrolla un modelo de democracia que va desde sus primeros escritos interpretando a Heidegger y lo elemental del ‘ser-con’ como la categoría por la cual recibimos nuestra experiencia del ser (en un pensamiento que llamamos ‘proto-democrático’) que luego se relacionarán de forma explícita con sus trabajos tardíos sobre la democracia. Siguiendo este trabajo exegético, proponemos una lectura interpretativa que busca argumentar que el pensamiento de (...) class='Hi'>Nancy puede ser considerado como un pensamiento infrapolítico en cuanto busca pensar la aporía constitutiva de la democracia que se encuentra perfectamente ilustrado en la noción del ‘nudo’ (como el momento tanto de unión como separación—entre el ‘sí’ y el ‘no’). La noción del ‘nudo infrapolítico’ se utilizará como una forma de darle mayor refinamiento a estos esbozos deconstructivos que aparecen implícitamente en el trabajo de Nancy. -/- This essay elucidates the way in which Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstructive thought develops a thought of democracy that begins with his first interpretive writings on Heidegger and the ‘being-with’ as an existential category (in a thought that we term ‘proto-democractic’) that will then explicitly relate to his later works on democracy. Following this exegetical work, we offer an interpretive reading that seeks to argue that Nancy’s thought can be considered as an infrapolitical one insofar as it seeks to think the constitutive aporia of democracy that is perfectly captured in the notion of the ‘knot’ (as the moment of both union and separation—between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’). The notion of an ‘infrapolitical knot’ will be used as a way of giving further refinement to the deconstructive sketches that appear implicitly in Nancy’s work. (shrink)

This article takes a close look at the discussion of singularity in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community and Being Singular Plural with the aim to comment on subject-object dichotomy and create a new context for its relationship with resistance. The philosophy of singularity is critical of humanism and the individualist model of subjectivity it advocates. By placing a challenging scenario of antihumanism against the humanist sense of responsibility, the philosophy of singularity questions whether it is possible to do philosophy (...) without saying ‘I’. This antihumanist stance, which replaces the ‘I’/‘other’ differentiation with Nancy’s ‘the other of another,’ chooses to strengthen the link between ontology and resistance in the notion of coexistence; beyond traditional hypotheses on immanence and transcendence. To discuss the merits and limits of this coexistence, the article digs under the notion of individualistic subjectivity and proceeds to ground Nancy’s ‘ekstasis’ on the Freudian theory of drives. Against this theoretical background, the values of modesty and responsibility come to formulate an alternative moral consciousness, which no longer relies on the humanist jargon to work toward the common ground between 'I' and 'we'. (shrink)

A brief description of phenomenology and of its relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.

A brief description of ontology and of its relation to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy.

Ian James has carved a rigorous analysis of four philosophers—Jean-Luc Nancy, François Laruelle, Catherine Malabou and Bernard Stiegler—who not only engage with the limits of thought through variegated, albeit embedded, disciplinary tendencies but have also, arguably, spearheaded a critical reorientation of continental philosophy, slowly opening the doors for transcending the traditional terms of the analytic-continental divide by engaging with a pluralized understanding of the sciences. A parallel plexus of American naturalist philosophy accompanies James’ analysis, as he stakes the (...) claim that these four thinkers engage with pluralist ontologies and the limit-conditions of the real to stoke a proximal entanglement between philosophy and science. However, The Technique of Thought is by no means a synoptic account of Nancy, Laruelle, Malabou and Stiegler, as James surveys discourses in philosophy of mind, quantum gravity, causality and biosemiology to index various recent horizons of thought and their developments. The rigor and deft with which James approaches scientific-realist perspectives produce a rich picture of post-metaphysical thinking. (shrink)

With catastrophic events of «nature» like global warming, arguments emerge that insinuate an equivalence of vulnerability, responsibility or being affected by these catastrophes. Such an alleged equivalence when facing climate catastrophe is already visible, for example, in the notion of the «Anthropocene» itself, which obscures both causes and various vulnerabilities in a homogenized as well as universalized concept of humanity (anthropos). Taking such narratives as a starting point, the paper explores questions about the connection between catastrophe, temporality, and history, following (...) mainly Walter Benjamin, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Jean-Luc Nancy with the goal to provide (1) a critique of the concept «Anthropocene» on the basis of nonequivalence while retaining its key features to still grasp the catastrophic present, (2) an analysis of anthropocenic time and the chronical structure of catastrophe, (3) philosophical considerations on the intersection of catastrophe and history. (shrink)

The “shrinking” of the globe in the last few centuries has made explicit that the world is a tense unity of many: the many worlds are forced to contend with one another. Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto school, once stated that to be is to be implaced. We exist by partaking in “the socio-historical world.” More recently, Jean-luc Nancy has conceived of the world in terms of sense. What is striking in both is that the world (...) emerges out of a nothing, created ex nihilo—the phrase stripped of its theistic connotations. While for Nishida the world is ultimately implaced in the “place of absolute nothing,” Nancy speaks of the nothing that is the basis of the world’s self-creation. I will explore a possible convergence between these and any light it may shed upon our contemporary situation of globalization and its implications for praxis. I look to a sense of the nothing as a chōratic spatiality, an opening that provides space for co-being and serves as the source of creativity. In face of globalization, the project for meaning through mondialisation (in Nancy) and within a multi-cultural world (in Nishida) would imply the appropriation of such an originary spatiality. (shrink)

Contrary to what many interpretations claim, according to Bayle faith does not completely eliminate reason. It intervenes to reveal factual truths that can only be known through revelation (for example, that God allowed Adam and Eve to sin). To these factual truths can be applied a rational principle (an axiomatic and evident one, according to Bayle, which he calls a "common notion"), namely, that "what God does is well done." God allowed sin, so we must think it was justified, even (...) if we don't understand why. This approach is what I call, cum grano salis, Pierre Bayle's theodicy. (shrink)

El propósito del presente ensayo es desarrollar una lectura existencial del poema “Del país de la pena” escrita por la poeta venezolana Hanni Ossott con el fin de pensar el término “expatriación” como concepto filosófico. Luego de una introducción histórica que busca situar el poema de Ossott al filo de una tradición poética que busca recuperar la sensación de extranjeridad frente a lo propiamente nacional, éste ensayo se propone trazar los horizontes metodológicos de la interpretación del poema a través de (...) una lectura del ensayo “Paysage avec dépaysement” [Paisaje en desorientación] escrito por el filósofo francés Jean-Luc Nancy. La lectura del ensayo de Nancy posibilitará la lectura existencial del poema de Ossott con la que el presente ensayo buscará demonstrar la riqueza filosófica de este poema y la manera en que tematiza la expatriación. A modo de conclusión, se sugerirá que la expatriación puede entenderse como una condena pero no necesariamente de modo negativo sino a través de una valencia positiva que éste término puede tener para la conceptualización contemporánea sobre América Latina. -/- The purpose of this paper is to develop an existential reading of the poem “Del país de la pena” written by the Venezuelan poet Hanni Ossott with the aim of thinking the term “expatriation” as a philosophical concept. Following a historical introduction that seeks to situate Ossott’s poem within a poetic tradition that tries to recuperate the feeling of strangeness in the face of the properly national, this essay attempts to trace the interpretative and methodological horizons of the poem through a reading of the essay “Paysage avec dépaysement” [Uncanny Landscapes] written by the French philosopher Jean- Luc Nancy. The reading of Nancy’s essay will facilitate the existential reading of Ossott’s poem with which the present essay will seek to demonstrate the philosophical richness of this poem and the way in which it thematizes expatriation. By way of conclusion, it will be suggested that expatriation can be understood as a sentence, but not necessarily in a negative manner; rather, it can be thought through a positive valence that can aid in the contemporary conceptualization about Latin America. (shrink)

Successful biomedical data mining and information extraction require a complete picture of biological phenomena such as genes, biological processes, and diseases; as these exist on different levels of granularity. To realize this goal, several freely available heterogeneous databases as well as proprietary structured datasets have to be integrated into a single global customizable scheme. We will present a tool to integrate different biological data sources by mapping them to a proprietary biomedical ontology that has been developed for the purposes of (...) making computers understand medical natural language. (shrink)

Bringing together two aspects of Thomas Aquinas's thought that have been studied separately: his theory of God's concurrence and his theory of instrumental causality, I show how he uses the latter (which I discuss first) to clarify the Proclusian principle that the first cause has a greater influence on an effect than the proximate causes. Thanks to this theory, Aquinas accounts for the fact that it is God who confers existence to every new being that is produced by natural processes, (...) without however negating the agency of secondary, created causes. (shrink)

The Dominican theologian Durand of Saint-Pourçain (ca. 1275–1334), breaking from the wide consensus, made a two-pronged attack on concurrentism (i.e., the theory according to which God does more than conserving creatures in existence and co-causes all their actions). On the one hand, he shows that the concurrentist position leads to the unacceptable consequence that God is the direct cause of man’s evil actions. On the other hand, he attacks the metaphysical foundations of concurrentism, first in the version offered by Thomas (...) Aquinas and Giles of Rome, and then in a more general way. Against Thomas and Giles, he challenges Neoplatonic assumptions about causality and being. More generally, he establishes that God’s action and a creature’s action can be neither identical nor different, and thus cannot both be direct causes of the same effect. Without claiming that Durand’s series of objections are definitely unanswerable, we may at least observe that they have generally been underestimated (which earned him the lowly role of the mere foil of the concurrentist view in the history of philosophy) and are able to do considerable damage to concurrentism. (shrink)

Building on the theory of humor advanced by Yves Cusset in his recent book Rire: Tractatus philo-comicus, I argue that we can understand the phenomenon in terms of what Jean-Luc Nancy, following Roland Barthes, has called the exemption from sense. I attempt to show how the humorous sensibility, understood in this way, is entirely incompatible with the experience of others as contemptible. I conclude by developing some of the normative implications of this, focusing specifically on the question whether (...) it is ever morally permissible to treat others with contempt. (shrink)

According to Stephen Darwall, being with others involves an implicit, second-personal respect for them. I argue that this is correct as far as it goes. Calling on Jean-Luc Nancy’s more ontological account of being-with, though, I also argue that Darwall’s account overlooks something morally very important: right at the heart of the being-with that gives us to ourselves as answerable to others on the basis of determinate, contractualist moral principles, we encounter an irreducible excess of sense that renders (...) those principles questionable. Following Nancy, I characterize this exposure to excess as adoration and develop some of its moral implications. (shrink)

In the early modern period, contempt emerged as a persistent theme in moral philosophy. Most of the moral philosophers of the period shared two basic commitments in their thinking about contempt. First, they argued that we understand the value of others in the morally appropriate way when we understand them from the perspective of the morally relevant community. And second, they argued that we are naturally inclined to judge others as contemptible, and that we must therefore interrupt that natural movement (...) of sense-bestowal in order to value others in the morally appropriate way. In this paper I examine in detail the arguments of Nicolas Malebranche and Immanuel Kant concerning the wrongness of contempt, emphasizing the ways in which they depend on conceptions of community and of the interruption of moral sense-bestowal. After showing how each of these arguments fails to comprehend the nature and the wrongness of contempt, I argue that we can find the resources for a more adequate account in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and specifically in his reflections on ontology and on the meaning of community. (shrink)

I examine Bayle's infamous statement that Christian mysteries are not only "above" human reason, but are "against" it. I put it back in the context of 16th-17th century Reformed thought. I then discuss the relation between reason and faith according to Bayle.

Pierre Bayle shows that, in order to avoid devastating objections, materialism should postulate that the property of thinking does not emerge from certain material combinations but is present in matter from the start and everywhere—a hypothesis recently revived and labelled “panpsychism”. There are reasons for entertaining the idea that Bayle actually considers this enhanced materialism to be tenable, as it might use the same line of defence that Bayle outlined for Stratonism. However, this would lead to a view similar to (...) Locke’s superaddition theory, and I contend that such cannot be Bayle’s position because he embraces the Cartesian principle that each substance has only one principal attribute. This makes untenable, in his eyes, any system that conjoins thought with matter in the same simple substance. By contrast, this makes clear which kinds of metaphysics and epistemology panpsychists need to adopt to defend their view. (shrink)