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Category Archive: Philosophy

Gift of the Text - November 14, 2007
Robyn Horner helpfully expounds on Derrida's deconstruction of the gift by considering whether the text can be construed as a gift. In a section of Given Time, Derrida discusses a text by Baudelaire, noting that it is a given "not...

Derrida on Gifts - November 13, 2007
Stephen Webb has an illuminating discussion of Derrida's views on giving in his book The Gifting God. Webb begins by saying that "deconstructionist has always been a critique of the event of the gift." Derrida's musings on the gift parallel...

Signs and domination - November 07, 2007
Only God, Augustine argues in his treatise on music, acts on rational souls directly, "per seipsum." Human beings operate on one another's souls through intervening bodies, that is, through the words and other signs. God has arranged the world this...

Signs, instructions, interpretation - November 03, 2007
Eco (in a 1981 article in The Bulletin of the Midwest MLA) surveys the problems of sign theory. A fundamental objection to a general theory of signs is that the concept of "sign" is being used for things that are...

Eco on metaphor - November 03, 2007
Linguistic wisdom from Eco: "It is true that signs in themselves, e.g., the words of verbal language in their dictionary form, look like petrified conventions by comparison to the vitality and energy displayed by texts in their production of new...

Elizabethan Seneca - November 01, 2007
Wallace again on Seneca in Shakespeare: "The first separate publication of De Benficiis in an English translation was Nicholas Haward's The Line of Liberalitie in 1569, which included only the first three books, but William Baldwin's popular Treatise of Morall...

Gift of the Interval - October 31, 2007
Michael Oakeshott says that the university provides one central gift, the "gift of the interval": Here was an opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here was...

Vico Pro Romanticism - October 27, 2007
According to Verene, Vico's emphasis on child psychology makes him "the authentic precursor of Rousseau" and also a forerunner of Romanticism: "Misleading as may be the view that Vico was an outright pre-Romanticist, there is a whole aspect of the...

Vico Contra Dialectic - October 27, 2007
Vico was not opposed to logic, but thought that its centrality in modern educational systems was damaging: "it throws into utter confusion, in our adolescents, those powers of the youthful mind each of which should be regulated by a systematic...

Vico Contra Descartes - October 27, 2007
Donald Verene writes that Vico's opposition to Descartes and Cartesian thought rests on a "different conception of man." For Vico, humans are "an integrality (not sheer rationality, not mere intellect, but also fantasy, passion, emotion)," and Verene also remarks on...

Hamann's Style - October 26, 2007
Hamann's style was as critical to his protest against Kant and the Encyclopedists as the content of his opaque essays. As Kenneth Haynes points out in the introduction to the recent Cambridge volume of Hamann's writings, "The style he cultivated...

Kant on Ingratitude - October 22, 2007
In his Lectures on Ethics, Kant says that ingratitude is among the vices that "are the essence of vileness and wickedness." He adds, "It is inhuman to hate and persecute one from whom we have reaped a benefit, and if...

Fear and Trembling - September 22, 2007
Some more notes from Kierkegaard. 1. In the Problemata sections of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard, posing as Johannes de Silentio, poses a series of questions that arise from his reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac, within the Hegelian...

Ethical and Religious - September 20, 2007
Calvin O. Schrag helpfully clarifies what Kierkegaard means by the "teleological suspension of the ethical" (Ethics, 70, 1959). It's essential to distinguish between the "ethical" as a mode of existence and the ethical as universal moral requirements. When Kierkegaard uses...

Fear and Trembling - September 20, 2007
Some notes on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. 1. Kierkegaard uses Abraham as the exemplar of the limitations of the Hegelian system. The Hegelians claim to have arrived at the eschatological form of philosophy, encompassing everything, including Christianity, within its scope....

I Banish You - September 19, 2007
Kierkegaard's theatricality, sensitivity, and sense of importance, are evident in his diary entries during 1848-49, when he was under fairly scathing attack from the journal The Corsair. One entry reads: "And even though Denmark were willing to do so, it...

Caputo's oversignt - September 17, 2007
A friend, Bret Saunders, writes the following in response to my post summarizing Caputo's account of the "postmodern turns": "Caputo appears to have omitted the so-called 'theological turn,' such as is found in J.-L. Marion and J.-F. Courtine. Of course,...

Aesthetic rationality - September 12, 2007
Hamann: "The connection and agreement of concepts is precisely the same in a demonstration as the relation and sympathy of numbers and lines, sounds and colours are in a musical composition or painting."...

Kant's eschatology - September 12, 2007
Postmodernism is rigorous disbelief in eschatology, in final judgment. And this arises from and is a reaction to Kant, who (as Hamann recognized) believed he had somehow arrived at the eschaton ahead of schedule and spend his life sending back...

Kant, Religion, Book 4 - September 10, 2007
Kant's Book 4 is on "counterfeit service" or "religion and priestcraft." In this book, Kant launches a critique of cultic religion. He is not condemning cult and ritual per se, but says that it must not be construed as divine...

Kant, Religion, Book 3 - September 10, 2007
Some notes on Book 3 of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Having established that there is an evil principle at work in humanity as well as a predisposition to good, Kant begins book 3 with the claim that...

Kantian sacrifice - September 06, 2007
Milbank's criticisms of Kantian ethics begin from the observation that feeling enters into the ethical mix only as "the paradoxical feeling of 'the sublime' which is the feeling of a break with feeling, or the counter-attractive attraction of sacrifice." This...

Kant avec Oedipus and Hegel - September 06, 2007
In a web essay, Jean-Michel Rabaté traces the background to Lacan's notorious coupling of Kant and Sade. One mediating figure is Freud. In an essay on the "economic problem of masochism," Freud linked the Kantian categorical imperative with the cruel...

Allegory of salvation - September 05, 2007
Part 2 of Kant's treatise on rational religion is a philosophical allegorization of traditional Christology and soteriology, which he pursues in an effort to explain the formation of a humanity pleasing to God. Some notes on this section: 1) Kant...

Honor and cruelty - September 05, 2007
In a reduction worthy of Nietzsche (or Augustine), Kant explores the motives behind honor: "the perpetual war between the Arathapescaw Indians and the Dog Rib Indians has no other aim than mere slaughter. In the savages' opinion, bravery in war...

Solomon on Kant - September 04, 2007
Robert Solomon offers a helpful fairly traditional summary of Kant's philosophy in his little book on Continental Philosophy. Kant's overall agenda, Solomon says, was (in Kant's own words) to "deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith." Much as...

Caputo on Kant's Theology - September 04, 2007
One of Kant's central contributions to philosophy was the invention of the notion of "critical philosophy," which means epistemology, which means philosophy as a critique of knowledge. Philosophy is the queen of the sciences that polices the borders between sciences...

Kant, Things, and Knowledge - September 04, 2007
Paul D. Janz offers a favorable interpretation of Kantian epistemology in his God, the Mind's Desire. Janz begins with an assessment of Kant's project in the first Critique. It is, he points out, a Critique of Pure Reason, not a...

Kant's fundamental tension - September 04, 2007
What is the problem Kant is trying to solve? Near at hand, there are a host of problems: He wants to respond to Hume's skepticism; he struggles with the problem of evil; he wants to affirm the advances of Newton...

End of Metaphysics? - September 04, 2007
Kant is often accused of bringing an end to metaphysics. He didn't think so: "Metaphysics, with which it is my fate to be in love, although only rarely can I boast of any favours from her, offers two advantages. The...

Suarez and Descartes - September 03, 2007
Searching for precedents for Descartes' notion that God is causa sui Jean-Luc Marion finds that "Suarez anticipates Descartes' daring formula, de ipso Deo . . . , because, like him, he begins by submitting God to what will become the...

Augustine's non-Aristotelian Universe - August 30, 2007
Augustine argues in Confessions that time is not reducible to the movement of the celestial bodies. Aristotle agreed; but, as Ricoeur points out, the arguments that Augustine used departed radically from Aristotle. First, if the sun and stars stopped moving,...

Intention and action - August 20, 2007
In his summary of "identity description," which he ultimately applies to Jesus, Hans Frei speaks of "the irreversible passage or movement from . . . intention to action. The enactment of intention always differs from the intention to enact; and...

Fruhromantik and postmodernism - July 12, 2007
It is widely argued today that the early German romantic movement anticipates postmodernism; the early romantics were postmoderns before their time. Frederick Beiser differs, and notes three critical differences between German romanticism and the mainstream of postmodern philosophy. First, the...

Germans Against Descartes - July 12, 2007
German idealism is often seen as the completion of the subjectivization of knowledge and reality begun by Descartes. Not so, says Frederick Beiser in his massive 2002 history of German idealism (Harvard): "In fundamental respects it is more accurate to...

Amo, ergo sum - July 12, 2007
Jean-Luc Marion challenges the Cartesian cogito by stressing the primacy of the erotic. According to Descartes's formula (Ego sum res cogitans), "it follows by omission that I am no longer supposed to love, nor to hate; or better: I am...

Argue, or obey? - July 10, 2007
Kant bristles at the demand that he claims to hear "on all sides": "Don't argue!" Officers tell us to obey, tax-officials to pay, clergy to pray in a certain way. But Kant wants to argue. Or does he? Maybe not:...

The duty of enlightenment - July 10, 2007
Kant's appeal in "What Is Enlightenment?" is not primarily intellectual but ethical. Enlightenment, Kant says, "is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity." Immaturity he defines as "the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another," and this...

ERH - June 28, 2007
An essay of mine on Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy is currently available on the First Things web site, here: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=786....

Mirrors, ancient and modern - June 26, 2007
In her recent book The Mirror of the Self, Shadi Bartsch argues that ancient notions of introspection and self-examination do not employ the image of the mirror in the way we do in post-Cartesian philosophy. In the words of the...

Overcoming Metaphysics - May 01, 2007
Metaphysics is making a comeback, but Merold Westphal (Modern Theology, April 2007) thinks that the project of overcoming metaphysics is still worth the trouble. His article examines Kant, Heidegger, Marion, and Milbank. Along the way he says the following about...

Typology and postmodernism - January 26, 2007
Zizioulas locates the central difference between patristic and postmodern views of "otherness" in the way each conceives the relation of old and new. For postmodernism, "alterity involves negation, rupture, 'leaving behind', for patristic thought the 'new' relates to the 'old'...

Fallen Philosophy - January 25, 2007
In his 2006 volume, Communion and Otherness, John Zizioulas pretty directly connects Western philosophy with the fall of Adam. Adam claimed to be God and thus "rejected the Other as constitutive of his being." As a result, Self took "ontological...

Rousseau and Voltaire - January 25, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy's discussion of Voltaire and Rousseau depends on his prior discussion of the role of inspired literature in the formation of a nation. They are adherents to the revolutionary creed of literary inspiration, the "cult o f an inspired literature."...

Farewell to Descartes - January 18, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy's brief essay on Descartes (included in I Am An Impure Thinker, extracted from Out of Revolution) highlights a number of recurring themes in Rosenstock-Huessy's work: He discusses his own formula, Respondeo etsi mutabor, in contrast to the cogito of...

Shaftesbury's Natural Self - January 17, 2007
Lori Branch describes the paradoxical pursuit of "natural" self in Shaftesbury's private "Exercises." It is not a pretty sight. He seeks integrity in unified affections, but this unity is achieved only at the cost of dismemberment: "In search of the...

Idealism to Textualism - January 06, 2007
In a 1980 essay, Richard Rorty offers a quick overview of the development of European thought from idealism through romanticism and pragmatism to what he calls textualism. The two ends of this development, idealism and textualism, are similar in various...

Peirce and signs - January 05, 2007
Menand offers a useful summary of Peirce's views on signs, in a way that highlights both similarities and differences with Derrida. Peirce taught a notion of differance: "The meaning of a representation," he wrote, "can be nothing but a representation....

Pragmatism - January 05, 2007
In his very readable The Metaphysical Club (2001), Louis Menand gives a number of pithy summaries of pragmatism, its sources, its varieties, and its fundamental beliefs. The common attitude or idea among pragmatists has been "an idea about ideas." Whatever...

Seeing as - January 03, 2007
Contrary to empiricism, perception is never pure, never merely a response to stimulus. That it is is merely a kind of "epistmological dogmatism" (Gadamer), which can only be defended if all instinct and fantasy is removed. In actual life, we...

American Confucius - January 02, 2007
Rosenstock-Huessy offers this synopsis of the beliefs of Dewey's pragmatic followers: 1. God is immanent in society. 2. "Hman speech is merely a tool, not an inspiration; a set of words, not a baptism by fire." Dewey exhorts us to...

Preferences - December 26, 2006
Responding to Isaac Watts's claim that we love things purely out of our choice, Jonathan Edwards deftly isolated the problems of that position: When we choose one thing over another, we are clearly preferring that thing, but "that the mind...

Anti-Linguistic Turn - December 19, 2006
Philosophers claim that European/American thought has gone through a linguistic turn in the last several decades. The truth is the opposite. Rorty says, "The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with...

Multiple universes - December 16, 2006
Playwright, novelist, and philosophy Michael Frayn offers this critique of David Deutsch's claim that quantum mechanics implies multiple, perhaps infinite, worlds: "If only we knew what proportion of David Deutsches was putting forward each of these theories we should be...

Nietzsche and Foucault - November 29, 2006
If postmodern theorists are Marxists, they are Marxists of a particular stripe, in that their Marxism is crossed by Nietzschean pessimism. They believe that power struggles are at the center of history but no longer believe that these power struggles...

Skeptical theism - November 18, 2006
One of Wright's respondents argued for what he called a "skeptical theism" with regard to the problem of evil. The main points are: 1) We don't have the cognitive equipment to figure out whether God intends to achieve goods that...

Heidegger in his woods - November 15, 2006
Latour is tired of being accused of having forgotten Being, and offers this clever brush-off of Heidegger: "If, scorning empiricism, you opt out of the exact sciences, then the human sciences,, then traditional philosophy, then the sciences of language, and...

Postmodern truth - November 13, 2006
In a review of Harry Frankfurt's On Truth (a sequel to Frankfurt's widely read On Bulls***), Oxford's Simon Blackburn offers a neat summary of postmodern notions of truth. He questions the tendency to use postmodernism as a "whipping boy" against...

Hyper-Cartesians - November 09, 2006
Walter Truett Anderson suggests that postmoderns may be distinguished from others by the fact that they not only have a culture, but know that they have it. Or, put differently: "You do not choose to be premodern. If you choose,...

Descartes's myth - November 08, 2006
In the delightful opening chapter to his Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle explains that Descartes's mind-body dualism ("ghost in the machine," as Ryle famously put it) was a response to the mechanization of the world: "Descartes found in himself...

Hegel on Descartes - November 08, 2006
In his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor summarizes the crique Hegel brings against Descartes. For Hegel, Descartes aims to unite thought and external reality, but the manner he uses to do that ends up losing both. The cogito is an...

Relational identity and resurrection - November 07, 2006
According to the account of Raymond Martin and John Barresi in their recent book on the rise and fall of the soul and self, several of the church fathers answered the dilemma raised by personal continuity through death and resurrection...

Cognitive Metaphor - October 09, 2006
Steven Pinker (TNR, October 9) has a field day demolishing George Lakoff's recent Whose Freedom? Lakoff attacks conservatives' use of freedom to justify their political agenda and argues that liberals can regain political power by reframing political debate using new...

Nothing outside the text? - October 09, 2006
John Frame distinguishes between facts as states of affairs and facts as statements concerning those states of affairs: "It would not be true to say that facts in the sense of states of affairs are identical with our interpretations of...

Lovers and Theorists - October 02, 2006
In Is There A Sabbath For Thought? William Desmond distinguishes thinkers that are "lovers" from those that are "theorists": "When I was in love with my beloved, I sang my beloved. Now that I am not sure about my beloved,...

On the other hand.... - September 14, 2006
In certain respects, Continental philosophy has a strong "Protestant" thrust: As Critchley describes it, the philosophical vocation is to produce crisis in a world where the crisis is that there is no recognition of crisis. Through critique of everyday praxis,...

Continental v. analytic - September 14, 2006
Continuing through Simon Critchley's book on Continental philosophy, the following analogy seems to capture some aspects of the contrast of Continental and analytic: Continental is Catholic: conscious of tradition, respectful of saints, aware of historical contextualization. Philosophy is the history...

Continental Philosophy - September 11, 2006
In his Oxford "very short introduction" to Continental philosophy, Simon Critchley suggests that Continental philosophy is "a professional self-description" and a "cultural feature." The former is "a necessary - but perhaps transitory - evil of the professionalization of the disciple."...

Virtue and Violence - August 28, 2006
Mandeville made explicit the connection between violence and ancient virtue that Milbank and others have commented on: "The Word Moral, without Doubt, comes from Mos, and signifies every Thing that relates to Manners: The Word Ethick is synonimous with Moral,...

Hermeneutics v. Semiology - August 26, 2006
According to Michel Foucault, what Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud introduce is an age of interpretation. He develops one of the implications of this by suggesting there is a "fierce war" between semiology and hermeneutics, between treating words as signs and...

Hegel and Hermes - August 16, 2006
In a 2001 book (Cornell), Glenn Magee argues that Hegel must be understood as a hermetic thinker. Hegel claims to have moved beyond the ancient notion of philosophy as "pursuit of wisdom" to an absolute knowledge that is simply identical...

Logos: Harmony and Recipe - August 16, 2006
One Marc Cohen of the University of Washington, offers this account of the "logos" of Heraclitus in an online lecture outline: First, "There is an orderly, law-governed process of change in the universe. (Compare fragment 80 with Anaximander, who equates...

Mind-Body and Energy - August 14, 2006
Murphy offers an amusing discussion of the question, Assuming a Cartesian dualism of mind and body, how can the mind cause a physical object like the body to move? If one assumes that physicists are correct that physical energy can...

Coherence - August 14, 2006
All truth is unified and coheres. That's true, and is not only inherent in the definition of "truth" but a specifically Christian confession: In Him who is Truth, all things hold together. But - how do all things cohere? What...

Decentered Self of Modernity - August 11, 2006
Bishop Joseph Butler of Durham worried about the consequences of Locke's empiricism: "That personality is not a permanent, but a transcient thing: that it lives and dies, begins and ends continually: that no one can any more remain one and...

Birth of the Modern Self? - August 11, 2006
Seigel views with "considerable skepticism" the notion that Descartes constructed "a general theory of the human self and subject on the basis of the cogito." In his treatise on the Passions of the Soul, Descartes claimed that the soul was...

Descartes's Double Self - August 11, 2006
In his history of modern Western views of the self (The Idea of the Self, Cambridge 2005), Jerrold Seigel offers what he believes is a fresh interpretation of the implications Descartes's cogito. He asks, Who is the subject, the "I,"...

Truth - July 30, 2006
In his recent Simply Christian, NT Wright offers this clever retort to skeptical relativism: "Saying 'It's true for you' sounds fine and tolerant. But it only works because it's twisting the word 'true' to mean, not 'a true revelation of...

Foucault the conservative - July 20, 2006
Foucault is normally classified as a radical postmodern, but there is a strong "conservative" thrust to his work on the prison and other "disciplinary" mechanisms of the early modern period. His attention is mainly on the social, architectural, and political...

Illusion and Truth - June 27, 2006
Illusion and truth are opposites, right? But isn't it the case that illusion is an integral part of true perception. The sofa across the room is no bigger than my thumbnail, and I can blot out the tree with my...

Augustine's Decentered Self - June 23, 2006
Maguire again, this time describing Augustine's idea of memory and self: "This dynamism of relation, manifest above all in the way that God's love permits the love of creatures for God, and the love among creatures through God, is for...

Descartes, Soul and Body - May 10, 2006
Some highlights from a recent TLS article on Descartes by Desmond Clarke: 1) Personally, Descartes was a mess. An exile from France for most of his life, he never held any paid position except for a brief stint in the...

Metanarratives - April 29, 2006
Many Christians find Lyotard's claim that postmodernity is incredulity toward metanarratives directly contrary to Christian faith, but James KA Smith offers an interpretation of Lyotard's that is not hostile to Christianity. For Lyotard, he argues, the issue is not so...

Highlights of Marion, Being Given, Books 1-2 - April 26, 2006
I have been greatly helped here by Cynthia Nielsen's online summaries of Marion's book. 1) One of Marion's main ambitions is to move beyond the Western concern with being with its concomitant focus on the "object." In place of "objectness,"...

Notes on Derrida, Gift of Death - April 19, 2006
Some of the summaries below were previously posted on my site, and are reproduced to help my students. 1) Derrida begins the book with a discussion of Jan Patocka's treatment of the distinction between "enthusiasm" or the "demonic" and "responsibility."...

Derrida on Gift - April 18, 2006
INTRODUCTION Our discussion of Mauss brought us to the verge of talking about postmodernism and the gift. We will do this primarily by examining Derrida, but to understand Derrida we need to spend some time with Levinas, one of the...

Gift and relation - April 13, 2006
MG Anspach says that "To give a gift in return, to recognize the generosity of the first giver through a corresponding gesture of reciprocity, is to recognize the relation for which the initial gift is only a vehicle." This helpfully...

Words and Pictures - April 12, 2006
In The Republic 588d, Plato writes, "words are a more plastic material than wax." We can construct any manner of phantasmagorical creature in words, but think of how inept any pictorial depiction of Revelation appears, or how bizarre a portrait...

Continental v. Analytic - April 09, 2006
R. R. Reno helpfully explains the attractions of Continental philosophy to theologians by suggesting that Continental philosophy has "become a form of theology." More elaborately: "As an intellecutal practice, this branch of modern philosophy organizes itself around the task of...

Descartes, Meditations - April 06, 2006
A few notes on Descartes, Meditations 1-2, with lots of help from Jean-Luc Marion. Descartes's ego cogito, ergo sum is not, Marion points out, original, at least in its form. It has origins in Augustine, who offered this response to...

Existing - March 30, 2006
JL Austin once suggested that many people think of existing as something over and above the various activities of a thing, something things do all the time: "like breathing, only quieter - ticking over, as it were, in a metaphysical...

Aporia of responsibility - March 11, 2006
Derrida captures the aporia of responsibility very nicely in this passage: "Saying that a responsible decision must be taken on the basis of knowledge seems to define the condition of possibility of responsibility (one can't make a responsible decision without...

Derrida and self-possession - March 11, 2006
Derrida is perhaps best known for his assault on self-presence, but in The Gift of Death he is eager to find out some place where the self is in absolute possession of something. Following Heidegger, for instance, he insists that...

Beginnings - March 04, 2006
A man went searching for the beginning of the road he was traveling. He traced his footsteps back the way he had come, until he came to where he started. But the beginning of the road was not a beginning....

Foucault on man - March 04, 2006
Another discarded fragment. Perhaps the best-known of the postmodern theories of the self is that of Michel Foucault. According to Foucault, "man" is an invention of the recent past, of the modern world. Contrary to popular opinion, "man" has not...

Structuralism's nihilism - March 04, 2006
A discarded fragment from a larger paper. Structuralism arose from the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. He distinguished between the langue, the system of a language, and the parole, the particular utterances of a language. There is a circular...

Descartes' city - March 02, 2006
Margaret Jacobs summarizes what she describes as "one of the most powerful metaphors in the Discourse: Descartes repudiates the wisdom of the ages, comparing it to those 'old cities' build on the foundations of ancient and medieval ruins. With a...

Descartes, Melville, and the Nihilism of Modernity - March 02, 2006
That's quite a weighty title for a small thought. Melville's Ahab says that the world is nothing but a pasteboard mask, and all the colors of the world, its variety of shapes and its beauties, are nothing but a harlot's...

Descartes' Hermeticism - March 02, 2006
Some paragraphs from an illuminating paper by Michael Allen Gillespie concerning Descartes' links with Rosicrucians: "The Rosicrucians were essentially a Hermetic society that sought to understand the hidden order of nature in order to gain power over and through it....

Theory - February 28, 2006
Postmodern theory, Mike Featherstone says, "argues for the abandonment of longstanding ambitions within modernity to develop foundations for knowledge: in effect the abandonment of the quest for unity, generality and synthesis." Postmodern theory claims to find greater complexity than other...

J. L. Austin, Deconstructionist? - February 27, 2006
JL Austin famously distinguished between "performative" and "constative" utterances, the former of which perform the action to which they refer and the latter of which make assertions that can be judged as true or false. Modern philosophy has treated the...

structuralism, linguistic and other - February 27, 2006
How did the linguistic theory of Saussure become a model for anthropologists, sociologists, and analysts of pop culture? Jonathan Culler suggests that this move rests on "two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects...

Anthropologized science - February 27, 2006
Foucault, in Canguilhem's summary, argues that an anthropologization of the sciences took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when Kantian philosophy combined with biology, economics, and linguistics to raise the question What is Man? Foucault argues: "From...

Episteme - February 27, 2006
Georges Canguilhem gives this illuminating description of Foucault's episteme: "In order to perceive the episteme, it was necessary to exit from a given science and from the history of a given science; it was necessary to defy the specialization of...

Computer Communications and the Self - February 23, 2006
Poster lists four effects that computer communications (email, chat groups, etc) have on the self: "1 they introduce new possibilities for playing with identities; 2 they degender communications by removing gender cues; 3 they destabilize existing hierarchies in relationships and...

Computers, subjects and objects - February 23, 2006
Descartes famously contrasted the mind (res cogitans) with the external world (res extensa), but Mark Poster suggests that computer writing fudges that distinction: "the computer dematerializes the written trace. As inputs are made to the computer through the keyboard, pixels...

Meta-Narrative's Revenge - February 21, 2006
Postmodern intellectuals believe they have seen through the arrogant or naive efforts of earlier generations of intellectuals. Now we see the folly of foundationalism, now we see that all knowledge is intertwined with regimes of power-knowledge, now we know that...

Universalism and relativism - February 21, 2006
Is truth universal? Is the only alternative to an idea of the universalism of all truth an affirmation of the relativism of all truth? This seems to be a false dichotomy from the beginning. Upon a moment's reflection, it seems...

Metaphysics of presence - February 15, 2006
Derrida, famously, challenges what he calls the metaphysics of presence. What is challenging is not the reality of presence as such, but the notion that we can arrive at some pure presence of a thing, a moment, a self that...

How Deconstruction Works - February 15, 2006
Culler offers an example from Nietzsche that provides an excellent example of the ju-jitsu of deconstruction. Nietzsche argues that causality is not something given, but is the product of a rhetorical operation, a chronological reversal (chronologische Umdrehung). I feel a...

Kant and the Creator - February 02, 2006
In her brilliant book, Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman summarizes Kant's epistemology as torn between two themes: One, Kant's insistence that our knowledge is not God's knowledge, and that we should be content with finitude; two, that we still...

Machiavelli to Descartes - February 01, 2006
Machiavelli offered a practical politics that emphasized image over reality: "it is not necessary for a prince to have all of the above-mentioned qualities, but it is very necessary for him to appear to have them. Furthermore, I will be...

Eucharistic Epistemology - February 01, 2006
"Denken ist danken." I've repeated Heidegger's axiom a number of times, but what makes this true? One angle: Our thoughts are distorted by fear, bitterness, hatred, anger, frustration, discontent, envy. But thankfulness is a solvent of all these; the thankful...

No dry light - January 25, 2006
Francis Bacon offered this wise caution, "The human understanding is no dry light but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would.' For what a man had rather were...

Same and Other - January 20, 2006
Evaluating Levinas and his criticisms of Husserl, Derrida probes the coherence of Levinas' notion of "infinitely other." Contrary to Levinas, who argues that we are incorrectly seduced by everyday life to think of the other as an "alter ego," Derrida...

Eros and epistemology - January 19, 2006
For Aquinas, knowledge begins with knowledge of the effects of a thing. When faced with those effects, we naturally have a "desire to know about the cause what it is. This desire is one of wonder and causes inquiry." The...

Derrida, Closet Platonist - January 18, 2006
In Specters of Marxism, Derrida advocates a strongly eschatological Marxism but without committing himself to the specifics of a Marxist analysis of capitalism (must as he advocates a "messianism without messiah"). In both cases, he reaches for a formal structure...

Postmodernity and Social Theory - January 18, 2006
The late Gillian Rose characterized the postmodern rejection of metaphysics as a triumph of social theory over philosophy, a triumphy that "re-enacts the earlier reaction, coterminous with the founding of modernity, according to which philosophy after Kant was 'superseded' by...

The Hebraism of Postmodernism, 2 - January 11, 2006
James Smith offers this summary of one strand of Derrida's essay, "Violence and Metaphysics": "since philosophy is 'primarily Greek,' 'it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium.' . . . But could one conceive...

Theology and the Decentered self - January 11, 2006
Questioning the "self-present" ego did not begin with postmodern skeptics. Pascal already raised the question, what is the ego? and answered, "Suppose a man puts himself at a window to see those who pass by. If I pass by, can...

PostmodernismS - January 07, 2006
In Missional Church (1998; edited by Darrell Guder), Craig Van Gelder offers a helpful summary of the various meanings of postmodernism: 1) Economic: For Frederic Jameson and others, postmodernism is marked primarily by a shift to a globalized and consumer-oriented...

Objectivity and incarnation - January 06, 2006
In his early work on Husserl's treatise on the origins of geometry, Derrida highlights the critical insight that the objectivity and universality of geometric axioms depends, paradoxically, on their embodiment in writing. On the one hand, geometry is "there for...

The Hebraism of Postmodernism - January 06, 2006
Postmodernism, as I've indicated in previous posts, is many things, some of which are quite inimical to Christian faith. But in important respects, postmodernism - especially the thought of Derrida - is a Hebraic protest against Hellenized philosophy. In his...

Skepticism - January 06, 2006
The arguments in favor of skepticism were summarized by Aenesidemus in the first century B.C. in his Pyrrhonian Principles. Aenesidemus brought together the arguments under "ten modes" or "ten tropes," helpfully summarized at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-ancient/#LPA as they were stated by Sextus...

Foundations and Tribunals - January 04, 2006
The architectural model of building a structure of thought on "foundations" is among the metaphors employed by modern thinkers, and in this as in other areas there was a close alliance of philosophy and political action. Bauman notes that this...

Speech - January 04, 2006
Franz Rosenzweig saw that philosophy proceeds only through humility, which means through speech and dialogue rather than abstract thought: "The 'speaking thinker' cannot anticipate anything: he must be able to wait because he depends on the word of the other:...

What I Think of Postmodernism - December 29, 2005
As if anyone cares, here are some unfinished and amateurish comments on "what I think of postmodernism." 1) First, it is helpful to distinguish, as many writers do, between postmodernism and postmodernity. The latter is a cultural/political mood or condition,...

Derrida and metaphor - December 23, 2005
In his essay, "White Mythology," Derrida offers this critical discussion of Aristotle: "This is the difference between animals and man: according to Aristotle both can emit indivisible sounds, but only man can make of them a letter... Aristotle does not...

Collapsing Foundationalisms - December 23, 2005
Wells quotes from British sociologist Anthony Giddens, who argues that postmodernism is not so much a rejection of modern foundationalism as "unmasking what has been hidden in the modern." In classic Enlightenment foundationalism, reason is self-grounded, and faith in reason...

Mirror and Lamp - December 20, 2005
In his classic study of romanticism and literary theory, The Mirror and the Lamp, MH Abrams points out the crucial change in images of the mind - from the mind as a "mirror" of outside reality to the mind as...

Necessity and Derrida - December 16, 2005
Near the end of a lengthy TLS review of a posthumously published series of interviews with Jacques Derrida (Apprendre a vivre envin), reviewer Ramona Fotiade quotes several intriguing selections from the interview. Derrida admits that life is "irreducible to what...

Denken ist Danken, again - December 10, 2005
In his fascinating book on aging and the brain (The Wisdom Paradox, 2005), Elkhonon Goldberg focuses attention on the phenomenon of "pattern recognition," the "ability to recognize a new object or a new problem as a member of an already...

Aesthetics and counter-modern philosophy - December 06, 2005
Andrew Bowie's *Aesthetics and subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche* emphasizes the role of aesthetic theory in the development of post-Kantian notions of the subject. He points out that some philosophers challenged Cartesian and Kantian views by direct appeal to aesthetic...

Privileging Sight - December 05, 2005
For postmoderns, there is a close link between the timeless self of ancient and modern thought and the primacy of the gaze. The exaltation of the visual that Foucault attacks is expressed quite openly in an essay by Hans Jonas,...

Oracular and Death - December 05, 2005
Michel Foucault suggests that the modern exalation of sight, the gaze, particularly the medical gaze, is associated with death: "That which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up...

Identity and time - December 05, 2005
The Western quest for "personal identity" rests, in part, on a confusion of different senses of the term. We recognize that there are degrees of sameness among things: Identical twins are never strictly identical. Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, further,...

Against Foundationalism - December 04, 2005
Calvin O. Schrag has this helpful critique of what he calls the "foundationalist paradigm": It "profeers a theoretical construct of mind that is designed to determine in advance the criteria for what counts as knowledge, both knowledge of oneself and...

A word for Scotus - November 24, 2005
Jonathan McIntosh, a student at the University of Dallas, challenges Vanhoozer's (and Radical Orthodoxy's) reading of Scotus that I summarized in a previous post, arguing that Scotus does not deny analogy. He has a point. The following discussion of Scotus'...

Postmodern Theology - November 24, 2005
Kevin Vanhoozer has done a great service by editing the Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (2003). Though the authors of the various articles differ among themselves, they are all well-informed about postmodern thought and culture and are making an effort...

Postfoundationalism - November 19, 2005
John Franke's lecture at ETS argued that postfoundational theology must be joined to a postcolonial attention to the "margins" of the Christian church. Though the postcolonial point was the thrust of the lecture, I was interested, given some current controversies...

Denken ist Danken - November 17, 2005
One of the important themes that emerges from Lundin's book (mentioned in the previous post) is the centrality of gratitude in thought. Heidegger, he says, "was fond of the seventeenth-century Pietist phrase Denken ist Danken, 'to think is to thank.'"...

Culture of Interpretation - November 17, 2005
Roger Lundin's Culture of Interpretation (1993)is a very thoughtful discussion of the American cultural context of postmodernism. He argues persuasively for a strong continuity between the Enlightenment and Romanticism (both look to the transcedent self, albeit in different ways, as...

Signs - October 05, 2005
Augustine distinguishes natural and given signs. The first signify with no intention of signifying, while the latter signify because a person has an intention to signify. The distinction, at least in part, is a distinction of will. Peirce's typology of...

Philosophy and Theology - October 01, 2005
Some reflections on a lecture by Mitch Stokes, a new fellow at NSA, concerning the differences between philosophy and theology. Ultimately, I don't believe there is any room for an absolute distinction of theology and philosophy. This is what Stokes...

Art - September 14, 2005
The following thoughts are largely inspired by Rowan Williams previously-mentioned book. 1. Art is about making, not primarily about making a point. It is not fundamentally self-expression, or copying something that's already there. It's about constructing a new thing, an...

Plataristotelians? - September 05, 2005
Lloyd P Gerson has just published a book entitled Aristotle and Other Platonists, an effort to show that the two great philosophical opponents of ancient Greece are not opposed at all. He points to the "Neoplatonic" writers of antiquity, who...

Transcendence and Immanence - August 27, 2005
There's a slight false step, in the midst of a very helpful point, in Bruce Ellis Benson's superb Graven Ideologies: He has been explaining the "double transcendence" of Platonism - metaphysical (Truth's being is beyong the sensible world) and epistemological...

Pure Thought - August 25, 2005
There should be - probably there is - an anthropological study of Western philosophy as a highly rarefied form of dirt avoidance. Plato with his "pure and unadulterated" access to truth; Descartes' clear and distinct ideas; Kant's purity of reason....

Essence/Existence - July 28, 2005
Marion points to Husserl's suggestion that essence and existence are not really different principles but rather "two modes of being in two modes of self-givenness." This is attractive, and perhaps not incompatible with the Thomistic tradition that sees the distinction...

The Reduction - July 28, 2005
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) provides this helpful summary of Merleau-Ponty's notion of phenomenological reduction: "The transformation of the object of perception into the thought of the object of perception, that is to say, the attempt to reconstitute the...

Method - July 26, 2005
Jean-Luc Marion points out that "method" comes from the Greek meta-hodos, and explains why phenomenology is not methodological: "The method does not run ahead of the phenomenon, by fore-seeing it, pre-dicting it, and pro-ducing it, in order to await it...

Death of the sign - July 14, 2005
Still on Pickstock on Derrida. Famously, Derrida says that speech dies with its author, the sound fading on the air. Writing survives. But he claim that speech is always under erasure makes the prior assumption that death and life are...

Giving and receiving - July 14, 2005
Pickstock offers a theological alternative to Derrida's concern that giving is impossible since any hope of a return robs the gift of its character as gift and puts it instead into the category of mutually advantageous capitalist exchange. Pickstock points...

Lists - July 14, 2005
Pickstock uses the "list" as a crucial example of the dominance of asyndeton of modern discourse. Lists provide "a powerful organization of random phenomena," but at the same time the order slips into chaos because there is nothing linking the...

Derrida's indifference - July 14, 2005
Pickstock again: For Derrida, there is ultimately no real difference, since all difference is univocally violent. There are particular differences of this and that, but they are all different in the same way - violently different - so there is...

Hamann and Bible - June 02, 2005
John R. Betz continues his efforts to introduce contemporaries to the riches of the thought of Johann Georg Hamann in a fine article in Pro Ecclesia (14:2) about Hamann's early London writings that reveal the core of his theological aesthetics...

Literary Wittgenstein - May 13, 2005
Terry Eagleton reviews a new book on The Literary Wittgenstein (edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer) in the April 29 issue of the TLS. There are a number of highlights: 1) Eagleton sets Wittgenstein firmly in the glitzy, kitchy...

Cinematic perception and Zeno's arrow - May 05, 2005
Henri Bergson attempted to solve the paradox of Zeno's arrow (which can never cover the infinite points between the bow and the target, and yet does) by calling attention to the implicit spatialization of time within the paradox. The space...

Jokes and Unintended Meanings - April 04, 2005
Another benefit of considering hermeneutical issues through reflection on humor: People can say and do things that are unintentionally funny. On a strict construal of authorial intention as the source and foundation of meaning, this would have to be explained...

Interpretation and Jokes - April 02, 2005
I have found it useful to think about hermeneutics by considering how jokes mean what they mean. Jokes mean "intertextually," that is, only in relation to presupposed texts and discourses and cultural practices that are present in the joke only...

Life and Political Life - March 28, 2005
Giorgio Agamben opens his 1995 Homo Sacer with a discussion of the origins of "biopolitics" (Foucault's term). According to Foucault's account, Aristotle's politics instituted a basic distinction between life per se and the good life, which is "politically qualified life."...

Bulls*** - March 19, 2005
I caught a few minutes of an interview with Harry Frankfurt on some late night TV show recently. In a venue dominated by stars, the appearance of an Ivy League philosopher was, shall we say, surprising. Less surprising, though, when...

Westphal on Onto-theology - February 19, 2005
Merold Westphal offers this helpful definition of "onto-theology" in an article found here: "The term is often used by assistant professors who have appointed themselves campus terrorists and, alas, by senior scholars who should be more careful, as a kind...

Beauty - February 14, 2005
Umberto Eco, ed. History of Beauty. Translated by Alastair McEwen. New York: Rizzoli, 2004. 438pp. Bursting with splashy reproductions of art work from the ancient Greeks to the present, Eco's History of Beauty could pass for a survey of Western...

Funny Philosophers - January 10, 2005
David Bentley Hart contests Thomas Oden's claim that Kierkegaard is the most humorous of Western philosophers, offering Hamann as an alternative. In challenging Oden's nomination, Hart has this important comment about Kierkegaard's attack on Christendom, particularly K's complaint about Christian...

Hegel's Phenomenology - November 01, 2004
Merold Westphal is a remarkable philosopher. Extremely well-informed and careful, he is also remarkably lucid, even when he writes about philosophers that, to put it delicately, are far less so. In his dauntingly titled 1979 History and Truth in Hegel�s...

Narrative Selves? - October 26, 2004
Galen Strawson, philosophy editor of TLS, challenges the current widespread idea that human lives either are or should be narrative. He distinguishes between the "Psychological Narrative" thesis, which claims that "ordinary human beings experience their lives" in a narrative fashion,...

Hamann - October 19, 2004
Ever since first reading Milbank's Theology and Society Theory, I've been intrigued by the work of JG Hamann. A recent brief article by John R. Betz in Modern Theology (April 2004) raised my interest again. Betz reviews Oswald Bayer's recent...

Nonidentical Repetition - August 30, 2004
Is identical repetition possible? It would seem not. Sequence A (say, a musical theme) is repeated as sequence A'. The same notes are played. Is it identical repetition? No, because A' has the distinct quality of coming AFTER A, and...

Bloom on Republic - August 19, 2004
The late Allan Bloom points out in his interpretive essay on Plato's Republic that Socrates' attack on poets is qualified by the fact that he ends the Republic with a myth, the reincarnational myth of Er. Socrates banishes the poets,...

Romanticism - August 18, 2004
According to Robert Solomon's account, Romanticism did not LEAD to nationalism; it was nationalism. In particular, it was a German nationalist reaction to the perceived threat of French and English Enlightenment thought: "Cosmopolitan philosophers in London or Paris might pretend...

The Other Frenchman - August 13, 2004
Descartes is often credited with being the fountainhead of modern philosophy, but Robert Solomon suggess instead that the modern notion of the self comes from Rousseau: "What Rousseau discovered in the woods of France was a self so rich and...

On the Idea of a "Word" - July 12, 2004
During his studies of Serbo-Croatian oral poets that contributed so much to the contemporary understanding of Homer, Albert Lord discovered that the Yugoslavian poets could not grasp the notion of "word." They thought of language as a stream of sound,...

Derrida's Modernism - June 17, 2004
Derrida believes the idea of a "gift" is contradictory. As David Hart summarizes, for Derrida, even if the gift is given with no expectation of tangible return, it still cannot be truly a gift, because the gift elicits recognition of...

Robert Solomon on Love - June 01, 2004
Robert C. Solomon's About Love (1988) is a wise and important book. I have some reservations about some themes: that love must be defined as the redefinition of the self in terms of another; his acceptance of a largely discredited...

Art of Living - May 27, 2004
The phrase "art of living" can have an aestheticist ring to it. Life becomes a "work of art," a self-conscious dramatization. Someone concerned about the "art of living" may well forget to be concerned with living itself. Of course, self-forgetfulness...

Derrida's Platonism - April 20, 2004
No doubt I've said this before, but perhaps not so clearly: 1) Derrida makes the point that all language is fundamentally metaphorical, and that even what appears as pure dialectic is rhetoric all the way down. 2) Derrida says that...

Feminism and Identity - April 05, 2004
Feminism is a case study in the need to define identity through relationship, rather than by cutting the bonds of relationship. In a brief review of Dr. Laura's new book for the Weekly Standard (March 22), Tammy Bruce suggests that...

Pierre Bouretz - March 29, 2004
George Steiner has a lengthy review of Bouretz's Temoins du Futur in the February 27 issue of the London Times Literary Supplement. Bouretz's book traces the history of Jewish social thought, and particularly the connection between philosophy and messianism, from...

Beliefs & Desires - February 26, 2004
A trio of authors argue in the January 2004 issue of American Philosophical Quarterly that conscious desires are impossible. They begin with a distinction between beliefs and desires, showing that the difference has to do with the "direction of fit"...

Moral Luck - February 11, 2004
Nussbaum's problematic of moral luck is quite intriguing: A good man is like a tree, she says at the beginning, quoting Pindar. But that means that the good man is dependent for his flourishing on all kinds of things beyond...

"The New Essentialism" - February 09, 2004
In the December 12, 2003 issue of the TLS, Jerry Fodor reviews a book by Brian Ellis on "the new essentialism." In a nutshell, the new essentialism challenges an important feature of modern accounts of knowledge and reality. As Fodor...

Quotations from Michel de Montaigne - January 13, 2004
Some fun quotations from Michel de Montaigne, taken from Stephen Toulmin's excellent Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity: "He who wants to detach his soul, let him do it. When his body is ill, to free it from the contagion;...

Zizek on Modernity - January 12, 2004
Slavoj Zizek has this to say at the beginning of his The Puppet and the Dwarf: "One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural...

Derrida on Presence and Absence - January 12, 2004
Joel Garver helpfully explains Derrida's deconstruction of "presence/absence" by suggesting that Derrida is attacking a particular view that assumes absolute presence and absolute absence. Either a thing is here or it is not, we instinctively thing, but in fact in...

Books and Culture Reviews - January 01, 2004
A potpourri of interesting reviews in Books & Culture: 1) Gerald McDermott reviews several recent evangelical books on Christianity's relation to non-Christian religions. He is critical of attempts (Paul Heim, e.g.) to root a pluralist or inclusivist view of other...

Eroticization of Death - December 31, 2003
At a number of points in his book, Dollimore explores the "eroticization" of death, the tendency of Western writers (and visual artists) not only to describe death as a desirable erasure of desire (or desirable for some other reason) but...

Dollimore on Postmodernism - December 31, 2003
Dollimore has some thoughtful things to say about postmodernism, especially in relation to Lacan: "what I find in Lacan is an overtheorized expression of something more significantly and relevantly expressed elsewhere (in Freud and before)." (He cites specifically Schopenhauer and...

Hegel on Love - December 30, 2003
Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion includes the following: "Love is a distinguishing of the two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two - to be outside...

Thoughts Inspired by Dollimore - December 30, 2003
Some thoughts inspired by Dollimore's book: It would seem that desire is inherently tragic. First, because desire arises from lack. We only desire what we do not yet have. But when our desires our satisfied, our lack is filled. When...

Perception - December 29, 2003
Perception is never merely sensible. A professional photographer points out that our "visual" impressions of people are formed not merely by visual factors but by such factors as the context in which we see someone, their personality and our rapport,...

Thanatos and Eros - December 29, 2003
Jonathan Dollimore argues in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture that the West has been defined by a particular linking of thanatos and eros, which is associated with the problem of mutability. He quotes Yeats to the effect that...

Autonomy and Tragedy - December 10, 2003
Early in his Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno captures the profound connection between autonomy and tragic character in a passage of hyperventilating passion: "The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of self-preservation, becomes all to narrow...

Final Cause - November 04, 2003
For Thomas, the "final cause" is the first cause. That is, the purpose for which a thing is done is what initiates doing the thing. I plan to retire to Tahiti; that is my final purpose. And that is the...

Postmodern Tragedy - October 30, 2003
Postmodern tragedy is also rooted in Freud: For Freud, the id desires but is blocked and opposed by the superego. The ego negotiates, and finds ways for the id to express itself without violating the standards of the superego. This...

Worldview - October 29, 2003
Evangelicals these days are positively giddy about worldview. For many, developing a Christian worldview is the answer to all or most of the ills that plague the contemporary church. When I see a bandwagon, however, I tend to wonder why...

Plato and Fear - October 29, 2003
To what extent does Platonism arise out of fear of contaminants, of miasma, of impurity? On Derrida's reading, Plato dreams of an uncontaminated origin and presence that can never be arrived at or achieved, and he sees every supplement as...

More Reflections on Postmodernism - October 28, 2003
Back to reflections on post-modernism: It seems that Freud, not Nietzsche, is the really grandfather of the movement, though, not unexpectedly, some sons and grandsons efface his memory and resist his influence (not all, of course)....

Postmodernism and the '60s - October 28, 2003
It's not at all accidental that postmodernism takes its rise in the mid-1960s. Bloom wrote the first draft of the anxiety of influence in 1967, and revised it over several years before its initial publication in 1973. Derrida's annus miraibilis...

Murder of Father - October 28, 2003
Turns out that Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" is just another variation on the same set of themes that Derrida is obsessed with -- the son's murder of the father. For Bloom, the son is the "strong poet" who resists...

Ree on Realism - October 27, 2003
Jonathan Ree has this to say to the Platonic realist who is afraid of attacks on realism: "you're worried about being deprived of something that actually you haven't got, and you wouldn't know if you had. . . . it's...

Derrida on Plato's Dualism - October 27, 2003
Derrida explains Plato's dualism as an effort to dominate writing (and, I suppose, reality) by the imposition of organizing contrasts and differences. Words are ambiguous; pharmakon means remedy or poison. Rather than leave this ambiguity lie, and simply follow out...

Wyclif's Philosophy - October 23, 2003
Emily Michael in the July 2003 issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas examines the views of John Wyclif on atoms, hylomorphism, and the mind-body problem, and argues that he represented a "first step towards a modern account...

Ingraffia and Influences - October 22, 2003
Rereading the chapter on Derrida in Brian Ingraffia's Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology (Cambridge, 1995), I realize just how much my understanding of Derrida was formed by reading this book several years ago. Ingraffia highlights (as I have done in...

Smith on Derrida - October 15, 2003
James Smith's conclusions regarding Derrida express more clearly than I've been able to do my own sense of Derrida. These are scattered quotations from The Fall of Interpretation, pp. 127-129: "Derrida is honest about not challenging for a moment Rousseau's...

Another Benefit of Derrida: Because - October 14, 2003
Another benefit of Derrida: Because he puts philosophical issues in mythological and metaphorical terms, he moves philosophy into the field of theology. As I've pointed out in a number of posts, Derrida (following Plato) speaks of the relationship between speaker...

Pharmakos - October 14, 2003
Well, here's an interesting coincidence (pointed to by Derrida, still in "Plato's Pharmacy"): Derrida is discussing the ritual of the pharmakos, which he is connecting to Plato's various uses of pharmak- words in discussions of knowledge, language, and other issues....

Why is Derrida Fun? - October 13, 2003
What is it that makes Derrida so stimulating and fun to read? At least for his treatment of standard philosophical works (I'm reading "Plato's Pharmacy" in Disseminations), I think it's mainly that he shows that philosophy is not about what...

Derrida on Plato on Writing - October 13, 2003
Derrida on Plato on writing says "In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply EXTERNAL to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the...

Babel - October 12, 2003
Babel has become a key image for postmodern Western thought. A number of years ago, Princeton's Jeffrey Stout wrote Ethics After Babel, reacting to the Babelic move of some moral philosophers (such as MacIntyre and Hauerwas), who pointed to the...

More Derrida - September 24, 2003
From Derrida, still talking about the analogy of father-son and origin-speech:the father is not the generator or procreator in any "real" sense prior to or outside all relation to language. In what way, indeed, is the father/son relation distinguishable from...

Derrida, Hesiod, Fathers, and Sons - September 24, 2003
Back to thinking about Derrida, Hesiod, fathers, and sons. If the origin of speech is, as Derrida says, the "father" of the discourse, then the opposing myths of father-son (i.e., Hesiod and the gospel) are also opposing theories of signification...

Milbank on Derrida - September 17, 2003
Here's a summary of part of Milbank's critique of Derrida (from Theology and Social Theory, pp. 307-311). Derrida attacks Western metaphysics by focusing on the attempt to separate a "meaning" out from the "play of signs." In most Western systems,...

A Note Against Empiricism: Derrida - September 17, 2003
A note against empiricism: Derrida quotes Scheler (in his essay on Levinas, "Violence and Metaphysics") to this effect: "I see not only the eye of an other, I see also that he looks at me." That is, what is SEEN...

Levinas on Absolute Other - September 17, 2003
Levinas claims that an absolute other must necessarily be invisible. If the other is visible, I can at least "capture" and "grasp" and "encompass" him in my gaze, which is the first moment in a sequence that could lead to...

Progress - September 17, 2003
In his history of the ancient concept of progress, E. R. Dodds says that one "fundamental limitation on the idea of progress was imposed by the theory of Forms, both in Platonic and in the Aristotelian version. For Plato all...

Auden on Greek Philosophy - August 21, 2003
In an introduction to a volume called The Portable Greek Reader, W. H. Auden made these comments about Greek philosophy: The great difference between the Greek conception of Nature and later ones is that the Greeks thought of the universe...

Graven Ideologies - August 08, 2003
Bruce Ellis Benson's Graven Ideologies, a study of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion, confirms something I've suspected from my sketchy reading of Derrida. Benson says that Derrida emphasizes that all thought is set in a structure of "not yet but still...

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