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 1999 - 2009 |
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Idealistic Studies - Full Table of ContentsVolume 39, Number 1/3 - 2009 Gary Overvold, Editor’s Note James R. Mensch, The Phenomenological Status of the EgoFor phenomenology, the study of appearances and the ways they come together to present a world, the question of the ego presents special difficulties. The ego, itself, is not an appearance; it is the subject to whom appearances appear. As such, it cannot appear. As the neo-Kantian, Paul Natorp expresses this:
“The ego is the subjective center of relation for all contents in my consciousness. . . . It cannot itself be a content and resembles nothing that could be a content of
consciousness.” Husserl will wrestle throughout the whole of his career with the issue of how to handle phenomenologically an ego that cannot be considered as
a content of consciousness. In this article, I will outline the stages of his journey toward resolving this question. Christopher Arroyo, The Role of Feelings in Husserl’s EthicsThough Husserl tends to receive less attention than other phenomenologists, there is growing interest in his ethics. Proponents of Husserl’s ethics argue that his moral philosophy is not merely of historical interest; Husserl, they claim, can contribute positively to contemporary debates in ethics, specifically debates about the role of feelings in moral agency. This paper raises questions about this last claim. I argue that, on the one hand, Husserl’s moral psychology proves superior to some of his modern predecessors, insofar as Husserl accounts (1) for the intentionality of emotions and (2) for their cognitive content, and (3) for the connections between emotions and evaluation and between emotions and reasons. On the other hand, I argue that Husserl mistakenly claims that all valuing requires some feeling on the part of the person valuing. This error, I argue, is due to Husserl’s conflation of desires and emotions. I defend my critique of Husserl by reference to an Aristotelian account of rational and non-rational desires. Tracy Colony, Concerning TechnologyMartin Heidegger’s 1953 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” has been one of the most influential texts in English language philosophy of technology. However, within this field Heidegger’s understanding of technology is widely seen to be a conventional essentialist account of technological phenomena. In this essay, I argue that a close reading of what Heidegger exactly demarcated as the essence of technology can be seen to limit the degree to which Heidegger’s understanding of technology should be interpreted as a traditional form of technological essentialism. Maria Granik, Mary Troxell, The Autonomy of Art in Heidegger and SchopenhauerMany recent discussions of aesthetics have suggested that a genuine dialogue between philosophy and art is impossible. This essay aims to counter
such claims by arguing that philosophical thinking about art need not be either dismissive or domineering. The authors argue that a model for a productive dialogue between philosophy and art can be found by means of a comparative reading of two seemingly very different philosophies of art: those of Schopenhauer and Heidegger. The overall philosophical positions of these two thinkers are often at odds with each other. However, a careful examination of their views of art reveals a fundamental connection between art and truth, a connection that makes artworks indispensable counterparts for philosophical thinking, without at the same time undermining their autonomy. Emilia Angelova, A Continuity Between the A and B Deductions of the CritiqueHeidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics controversially claims that the A deduction is superior to the B deduction because the imagination, as the
“common root” of understanding and sensibility, opens the first Critique to metaphysical ground. Drawing on Dieter Henrich, this paper reinterprets Heidegger’s
reading by moving beyond the Analytic and taking the Dialectic into account. This suggests a continuity between the A and B deductions, namely that the imagination, as more than an ontic faculty, remains a basic power that keeps open a metaphysics of being in Kant—a metaphysics whose site is a radicalized unity of transcendental apperception. Revisiting Heidegger in this way shows how Kant is both linked to and differentiated from German Idealism’s debate about the imagination, a position suggested in both Heidegger and recent scholarly discussion. Lisa Folkmarson Käll, Expression Between Self and OtherIn discussions concerning intersubjectivity the notion of expression has come to play a part of increasing significance. Expression shifts our point of departure away from subjectivity as something mysterious hidden within the body to subjectivity as altogether embodied and embedded in the world. In this article I engage writings by Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that expression is essentially something that happens in a communicative space in between self and other while at the same time giving rise to both. I show how locating expression in a shared space between self and other is a way of emphasizing that self and other are not only expressive of selfhood, but are also expressed by one another and emerge in relation to one another. I point to this understanding of expression as a way of recognizing that there is both a fundamental reciprocity and asymmetry between self and other. Elena Ficara, Hegel’s Dialectic in Twentieth-Century Continental PhilosophyIn this paper I consider Benedetto Croce’s interpretation and critique of Hegel’s dialectic in Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto della filosofia di Hegel (1906)
and I compare it with a very similar critique elaborated by Gilles Deleuze around sixty years later (in Différence et répetition, 1968, Nietzsche et la philosophie,
1962 and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? 1991). Even if they are two very different authors, belonging to very different traditions and contexts, both Croce and
Deleuze criticise Hegel with a very similar argument, namely by saying that Hegel did not adequately take into account the concept of difference, and subordinated it to opposition (or negation). In addition, albeit by taking different roads, both Croce and Deleuze thought that philosophy has its own specific logic, and this logic is a logic of concept. Jennifer Holt, Nihilistic PraxisThis essay explores similarities in the arguments of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin in order to claim, against the commonplace assumption
that social actionism is the only legitimate mode of political engagement, that actionism bears within it both fear and refusal of critical thought. In contrast, the
author argues that the works of these two thinkers offer an alternative approach to political regeneration: The attentiveness of speculative thought and interpretation to distortion, to the accumulated garbage of history, and to thought’s own powerlessness or lack of efficacy in the world is necessary for a realization of the possibilities for real political change. On this reading, speculative philosophical thought is tasked with developing the capacity to sustain remembrance of the horrors of the past and the demand for critical thought placed by those horrors upon our own mutilated capacity for thinking. Farhang Erfani, We Are Not Saints, But We Have Kept Our AppointmentIn this essay, I closely read one of the last major works of the late Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, along with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot. Ricoeur argues that recognition has not received sufficient attention in the philosophical tradition. Those who have approached the question come mainly
from a Hegelian perspective, which posits recognition in terms of struggle. Against this model, Ricoeur argues that we ought to make room for mutual recognition, not grounded in violence and reciprocity but in mutuality. While Beckett illustrates Ricoeur’s point, especially at the affective level—one of Ricoeur’s possible “states of peace”—I argue that Beckett pays greater attention to friendship in comparison to Ricoeur. Christopher Lauer, Kierkegaard and Aristophanes on the Suspension of IronyIn The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard aims to show the inadequacy of an ironic standpoint not through a generalized dialectical account of its failure on
its own terms but through an empirical examination of the actual life of Socrates. Crucial to his methodology, I argue, is his use of the term “suspend” (svæve).
Socratic irony is not overcome, superseded, or annulled, but rather “suspended” in its incomplete connection to its community. In both his depiction of Socrates
as hanging in a basket and his deification of insubstantial clouds, Aristophanes provides a model for Kierkegaard’s conception of suspension. By bringing Socrates into direct engagement with the Clouds, Aristophanes shows Kierkegaard not just the tendency of Socratic irony to suspend itself, but a way of approaching irony that does not reduce it to a moment of a greater totality. Jacob M. Held, Marx via FeuerbachAlthough there has been consistent interest in Marx and Marxism there has been little sustained interest in the origins of Marx’s ethical thought and his relation to the German philosophical tradition as a whole. Work has been done linking Marx to Fichte, and a great deal more linking him to Hegel. However, the fundamental concept joining them all is recognition, or interpersonal relations in general. In this regard, none of the German thinkers can be understood without
first grasping their understanding of the human person as one among many. This article begins this process for Marx. Although some literature has been devoted
to the explication of Marx’s notion of species-being it is sparse and dated. In this article I proceed to reiterate how important species-being is as the foundation
to Marx’s ethical philosophy. However, my main focus is on simply how to understand the concept itself. I, therefore, devote the majority of the article to an
analysis of Marx’s use of the concept in his early work as well as his critique of Ludwig Feuerbach’s use of it. This account provides the basis for understanding
Marx’s concept of human essence and is the beginning of a project of rephrasing Marxian ethics around the concept of recognition thus reconnecting him to the
German philosophical tradition. Dwayne A. Tunstall, Transcendental PragmatismsIn this article, I contend that there are at least two contemporary types of Kantian transcendental pragmatism: Sami Pihlström’s naturalistic transcendental
pragmatism and Josiah Royce’s absolute pragmatism. Each one of these transcendental pragmatisms represents one side of the Kantian transcendental
tradition. Pihlström’s naturalistic transcendental pragmatism represents the side of the Kantian transcendental tradition that is familiar to most philosophers, namely, the transcendental inquiry into the conditions for the possibility of human experience. Royce’s absolute pragmatism represents the other, more neglected, side of the Kantian transcendental tradition, namely, the transcendental analysis of the meaningfulness of moral, aesthetic, and religious experience, especially theistic religious experience. I contend that Royce’s pragmatism is more representative of the Kantian transcendental tradition than is Pihlström’s pragmatism. Index to Volume 39 |
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