Form Of Philosophy Research Articles

Kierkegaard's “Anti-Rationalism” in the Service of Reason and Faith: A Response to the Hegelian System

This article explores the prevailing understanding that Kierkegaard's criticism of the Hegelian system constitutes an attack against reason as such. As paradox is encountered through reason, I look to Hegel in order to discover Kierkegaard. In this way the inadequacies of Hegel's idealism, revealed in his philosophical formulation of the incarnation, demonstrate the necessity of Kierkegaard's existentialism, expressed in terms of ‘faith’. By this means one may begin to revise any dualistic notions of faith and reason as competing alternatives for articulating the Christian vision.

Henry Miller to Henry James

Henry Miller to Henry James Ronald Sukenick (bio) Consider things from the point of view of Lady Chatterley’s husband. Physically deprived of his passions all he could do was roll around in that big old house and think, or rather, maintain a state of sentience, assuming thinking and feeling are included in the term. With which he seemed quite happy until the gamekeeper started sniffing around his wife. Lawrence believed that anything arising from the passions was well, yes, virtuous. He invented a new, inverted, kind of morality. But in doing so, naive as it seems now, he preserved the very idea of morality for a generation of liberated readers. Or at least, that was the effect on me of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and of Lawrence’s offspring, Henry Miller: the presumptive morality of a life force that undercut traditional morality. Now, in a post-fascist world, it’s easy to see the disastrous consequences of a vitalistic morality, just as, in a post-Marxist world, the malignancy of a purely rational mentality has become obvious. But the history of consciousness staggers, it seems, from doctrine to doctrinaire to correction to over-correction. One could argue that for a kid growing up in the ultra conventional ‘50s of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the Lawrence-Miller axis was the most liberating path given the going hypocrite/conformist morality. The ‘60s, Vietnam and the baby boomers gave the coup de grace to that conventional mentality. But the loosening up of the psyche in the direction of liberated passions eventually enlisted passions in the service of hypocrite conformity. One could argue optimistically that we are a loop higher in a spiral of liberation. Sexuality, though more exploited, seems to be more free. Relations between parents and children, when there are any at all, seem to be more open and affectionate. Men are more expressive and women have more drive. One heritage from the Lawrence-Miller mode that seems beneficent is a matter of style—in a word: the extemporaneous. The appeal of the extemporaneous is a combination of the freshness of spontaneity combined with the moral [End Page 171] bonus of a presumed honesty. The biographer John Tytell tells us that Miller found his enabling style by writing the way he talked rather than the way he had been writing. The spontaneous quality of speech is what gives Miller’s style its power. The case of Lawrence is more subtle as regards speech. He moves in the direction of the incantatory, which is the direction of ritual and magic, hypnotizing the conscious mind to allow more primal understanding to make itself felt. I use the word hypnotic in this connection advisedly since there are passages in his work whose rhythms appear to be intentionally mesmerizing. So here we have a polarity: Miller’s speech patterns leading him to an improvisational freedom, and Lawrence’s leading to a kind of releasing compulsion. But there is a problem common to both styles. Lawrence’s invocation of the incantatory leads to a numbing repetition, just as Miller’s garrulousness leads to a loss of sensitivity, of introspective reflection. If these two writers stylistically are similar in their celebration of passion they are also similar in their suppression of thinking. I say “thinking” rather than thought because I do not wish to imply intellectual, much less philosophical formulation. Rather, I mean the normal train of thought of sentient individuals reflecting on the course of things. I mean the kind of monologue that sifts through the mind of Joyce’s Bloom, or Conrad’s narrators, or most notably through Proust’s Marcel. I once had a job as a nightwatchman in a factory loft building. I had little to do. It was in that unlikely setting that I came across this sentient strain in the work (and it is possibly no accident that the three practitioners above-mentioned are all European) of Henry James. An American. But an American steeped in the ambience of Europe, and therefore a bridge. Reflection does not come easy to a modern American, it having been elbowed out of the way by a simplistic pragmatic tradition. This was especially true of a twenty...

IS COMMUNITARIAN THINKING ALTRUISTIC?

1. Introduction It is a common belief among contemporary ethicists that community-oriented, or communitarian, thinking is more naturally altruistic than its rivals--especially most common strands of thought. The idea is, roughly, that liberals emphasise significance of individuals, and are therefore likely to stress personal, egoistic concerns, while communitarians call attention to groups and societies, and are hence more amenable to ideas of social or communal dependence and mutual help. Our aim in this paper is to examine whether or not this belief is justified and, if it is, in what sense. Since communitarian thinking comes in a variety of packages, we shall start by briefly defining what we mean by it in our considerations. Because altruism, too, can mean different things in different contexts, we shall also quickly outline two main senses in which we talk about it. After these preliminaries, our examination will proceed in two stages. The first is to show that communitarian thinking, as such, is not necessarily altruistic, or at least that there is no conceptual reason to hold that it is. The second is to further demonstrate that, even in comparison, communitarian thinking is not necessarily more altruistic than main versions of individual-based, or liberal thought. If both our arguments are valid, then community-oriented ideologies and policies cannot, without strict specifications, be supported by claiming that they are altruistic, or more altruistic than their rivals. This does not, of course, show that there is anything wrong with these ideologies or policies. Egoism may be a better alternative than altruism. And some forms of communitarianism may well be more altruistic than some forms of liberalism. But if we are right, a stock defence of community-based ethics in terms of is unfounded. 2. Philosophical and political communitarianism For purposes of our analysis, it is useful to make distinction between philosophical and political versions of communitarianism. Communitarian thinking in its contemporary philosophical form was originally a reaction to John Rawls's contractarian political doctrine in his influential book A Theory of Justice (1972). Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), Michael Sandel (1981), Charles Taylor (1985), and Michael Walzer (1983) all questioned some liberal tenets that Rawls held, and although they did not label themselves as communitarian, their work gave rise to philosophical movement of communitarianism. Within this movement, it is generally held that liberalism is based on a skewed notion of human personhood; an over-emphasis of individuality; and an impossible commitment to universality and neutrality. The communitarian alternatives to these are a notion of human persons and selves as socially constructed entities; a view of communities as important sources of value; and a conviction that traditions should play a considerable part in moral and political reasoning. (1) Communitarianism in its recent political form is a more complex phenomenon. As presented by one of its main champions, Amitai Etzioni, it is an attempt to restore moral order and to consolidate common goals with individual self-interest by emphasising traditional concepts of education, family, and values (Etzioni 1995, 1997, cf. Frazer 1999, Putnam 2000). (2) Whatever moral and political strengths or weaknesses of this doctrine, which has some links with Third Way Socialism of Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair in United Kingdom, philosophical assessment of within it is very difficult (Giddens 1998). Etzioni seems to dislike term altruism in first place, and he asserts that the pursuit of self-interest can be balanced by a commitment to community, without requiring us to lead a life of austerity, altruism, or self-sacrifice (Giddens 1985). In Giddens and Blair, it is not too easy to see if in sense of caring for others is a means to a thriving communal life, or communal life a means to increasing altruism. …

Jürgen Habermas's Theory of Cosmopolitanism

AbstractIn this paper we explore the sustained and multifaceted attempt of Jürgen Habermas to reconstruct Kant's theory of cosmopolitan right for our own times. In a series of articles written in the post‐1989 period, Habermas has argued that the challenge posed both by the catastrophes of the twentieth century, and by social forces of globalization, has given new impetus to the idea of cosmopolitan justice that Kant first expressed. He recognizes that today we cannot simply repeat Kant's eighteenth‐century vision: that if we are to grapple with the complexities of present‐day problems, it is necessary to iron out certain inconsistencies in Kant's thinking, radicalize it where its break from the old order of nation‐states is incomplete, socialize it so as to draw out the connections between perpetual peace and social justice, and modernize it so as to comprehend the “differences both in global situation and conceptual framework that now separate us from him.”1 His basic intuition, however, is that Kant's idea of cosmopolitan right is as relevant to our times as it was to Kant's own. If it was Kant's achievement to formulate the idea of cosmopolitanism in a modern philosophical form, Habermas takes up the challenge posed by Karl‐Otto Apel: to “think with Kant against Kant” in reconstructing this idea. What follows is a critical assessment of Habermas's response to this challenge. We focus here on the dilemmas he faces in grounding his normative commitment to cosmopolitan politics and in reconciling his cosmopolitanism with the national framework in which he developed his ideas of constitutional patriotism and deliberative democracy.

On the Phrase "Ass Backwards"

There are many lines of flight in actuality: the ellipse of a boomerang, the zigzag of a bluebottle, the deadly vector of a bullet. Pynchon's parabola, the trajectory of the rocket, is another such abstract diagram: a meniscus tethered by gravity. The title of Stefan Mattessich's <em>Lines of Flight </em>refers to that famous example, but it also draws attention to his own theoretical trajectory through a philosophy of abstract forms. As a "line of flight" is one of the principal concepts in Deleuze and Guattari's <em>Thousand Plateaus </em>(1980), the allusion should alert us at once to the critical thrust of Mattessich's approach. Mattessich assumes the reader's knowledge of Deleuze and Guattari's post-1968 philosophy, but only as part of a "welter of French theory" (2) with which the book is saturated. <em>Lines of Flight </em>is no undergraduate primer.

The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents

Foreword Preface PART ONE: INTRODUCTION: The Struggle to Create a New Culture Political Origins Scientific and Religious Origins The Public Sphere Enlightened Feminism Seventeenth Century Formal Philosophy and its Reworking A Clandestine Universe A Protestant Odyssey Travel Literature Anglophilia Crisis at Mid-Century Rousseau The International Republican Conversation, 1775-1800 Slavery The Legacy of Enlightenment PART TWO: THE DOCUMENTS John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693 The Treatise on the Three Impostors Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nations, 1733 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters, 1716-1718 Denis Diderot, Encylopedia, 1751 Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, 1772 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762 Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?, 1784 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, 1783 Chronology Selected Bibliography Index

Toward a Formal Philosophy of Hypercomputation

Does what guides a pastry chef stand on par, from the standpoint of contemporary computer science, with what guides a supercomputer? Did Betty Crocker, when telling us how to bake a cake, provide an effective procedure, in the sense of `effective' used in computer science? According to Cleland, the answer in both cases is ``Yes''. One consequence of Cleland's affirmative answer is supposed to be that hypercomputation is, to use her phrase, ``theoretically viable''. Unfortunately, though we applaud Cleland's ``gadfly philosophizing'' (as, in fact, seminal), we believe that unless such a modus operandi is married to formal philosophy, nothing conclusive will be produced (as evidenced by the problems plaguing Cleland's work that we uncover). Herein, we attempt to pull off not the complete marriage for hypercomputation, but perhaps at least the beginning of a courtship that others can subsequently help along.

Blake's Material Sublime

1. Kantian Blake IN AN ESSAY OF 1833, ENTITLED THE BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE in the productions of Modern Art, Charles Lamb lambasts what he calls the (1) of John Martin's paintings. In an argument that passionately privileges spirituality over materiality and imagination over visual presentation, Lamb criticizes Martin's panoramic canvas Belshazzar's Feast (1820) for being too material. Although Lamb considers the towered structures of Martin's art as belonging the highest order (Elia 259) of the the term itself--invented, it seems, by Coleridge--is not an honorific. In Table Talk, Coleridge uses the term describe the furious images of Schiller's dramas, the sheer sensual tumult of Schillerian theatricality: its excess of effect over spiritual meaning. Schiller has the sublime, he remarks; to produce an effect, he sets a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their mothers into the flames.... Shakspear drops a handkerchief, and the same or greater effects follow. (2) For Coleridge, the sublime of Schiller's drama is mired in materiality and sensation; Shakespeare's, however, rises effortlessly into the region of mind. For Lamb, too, the sublime designates a privative attachment materiality, a fixation on sense that in Martin's case discloses a defect of [the] imaginative faculty (Elia 262). Wedded matter over mind, sublimity seeks present in a pictorial, corporeal form ideas that should properly, according Lamb, have a poetic (Elia 264), supernatural or imaginative denotation. In the case of Belshazzar's Feast, the fearful judgment of God upon the self-regarding King Belshazzar at his table in his stupendous palace is too material because Martin presents the written judgement of God in a blaze of flight on an immense wall: a brilliant blaze that is seen both by the crowds at the feast and by the spectators of the canvas. Lamb insists, however, that this divine writing is seen only by the King in the Biblical account, and not by the spectators. For this reason, the sublimity of the scene resides in the immateriality of the King's terrified, phantasmal reception of God's sentence, and not in any gaudy materiality of blazing light on a panoramic, architecturally immense structure. In the way Lamb sets it up, Martin's painting sustains only a perilous hold on the sublime. For this kind of art is, he says, the product of a [d]eeply corporealized mind, enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality. Against this, the sublime for Lamb belongs the intellectual (Elia 264), not the eye. The sublime is, in this sense, well on the way being engulfed in--and identified with--a kind of debased spectacle: specifically, with crude theatricality and sensationalism. Effecting an erasure of mind and of the imaginative faculty, sublimity becomes a vitiating, privative and expropriatory simulacrum of the sublime. Lamb's formulation of the sublime belongs, of course, that broad shift in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries that saw the displacement of sublimity away from the materiality of the external object, and its relocation in the self-conscious interiority of the subject. If the eighteenth-century sublime variously staged a crisis in the subject's relation an overwhelming externality--whether figured as nature or God--the romantic which received its privileged philosophical formulation in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790), installed the scene of that sublime in and as an agon of the subject's mental faculties. The empirical, physiological emphases of Burke's sublime in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) were themselves, indeed, part of this resituating of the sublime in the passions of the subject rather than the qualities of the object: part of what Thomas Weiskel calls the eighteenth century's nascent psychological aesthetics. …

Frege, Nietzsche, and the Analytic/Continental Polemic

There are epochs in which the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side, the one fearful of intuition, the other filled with scorn for abstraction, the latter as unreasonable as the former is unartistic.1 To paraphrase an old joke, there are two kinds of philosophers: those who divide philosophers into two kinds and those who don't. Those who do may be inclined to think that polemics between analytic and continental philosophers are based upon a determinate concept, while those who don't are likely to deny this. This disagreement-not the one between analytic and continental philosophers but the meta-level one about the nature of the analytic/continental polemic, can be regarded through the lens of Kant's antinomy of"taste. The thesis of Kant's antinomy states that judgments of taste are not based upon concepts, for if they were we should be able to resolve aesthetic disagreements; the antithesis states that they must be based upon concepts, for otherwise we would not argue about matters of taste at all.2 Kant solves the antinomy by distinguishing among three different kinds of disagreements. Disagreements about what things are good (in either a moral or a non-moral sense) are based upon a determinate concept that can be grasped by the understanding; they are resolvable in the sense that the disputing parties should in principle be able to reach uncoerced consensus about what is and is not objectively the case. By contrast, disagreements about what sorts of things are agreeable to the senses are not based upon any concept at all; we recognize that our different assessments are based upon entirely subjective criteria and so do not bother to argue about them at all. Aesthetic disagreements fall between these two extremes. Unlike disputes they are not resolvable (except by force), yet unlike mere differences about which sensations are pleasant or unpleasant they compel us to argue on behalf of our own judgment. To argue that something is beautiful, i.e., to contend that the form of a particular intuitable object occasions a pleasurable free play among our cognitive powers, is to "quarrel" (streiten) rather than "dispute" (disputie ren), a quarrel being based upon a feeling for an indeterminate concept that haunts us without ever quite coming into view. Returning to our meta-level polemic about the nature of polemics between analytic and continental philosophers, perhaps we can resolve it by suggesting that the analytic/continental polemic has the character of an aesthetic quarrel. Instead of being a polemic about which forms of intuitable objects are beautiful, the analytic/continental polemic would be a quarrel about which forms of thought are philosophical, each party being motivated by a feeling for an indeterminate concept. Were it possible to grasp this concept we would possess a sure criterion for distinguishing between genuine and false philosophical forms of thought; the quarrel between analytic and continental philosophers could then be transformed into a resolvable dispute. But so long as this concept remains indeterminate and so eludes the understanding, the quarrel may simply resist uncoerced resolution. But now it is necessary to proceed to a meta-meta-level perspective on the analytic/continental polemic. For there can be a disagreement as to whether the analytic/continental polemic ought to be regarded as a quarrel rather than a dispute. What looks like a quarrel based upon an irreducibly indeter-minate concept to one philosopher might appear to another philosopher as a badly formulated dispute that is based upon a vague concept that needs to be clarified. The latter philosopher will think it is possible to clear up the confusion by determining the concept that had remained only contingently indeterminate hitherto, thereby transforming an apparent quarrel into a genuine dispute. The other philosopher will insist upon the necessary obscurity of the concept for which we have a feeling, in this way maintaining the quarrel-like status of the polemic. …

Aristotle's Use of Examples in the Prior Analytics

AbstractThis paper examines the relevance and importance of the large number of examples which Aristotle uses in his Prior Analytics. In the first part of the paper three preliminary issues are raised: First, it investigates what counts as an example in Aristotle's syllogistic, and especially whether only examples expressed in concrete terms should be considered as examples or maybe also propositions and arguments with letters of the alphabet. The second issue concerns the kinds of examples Aristotle actually uses from everyday life as well as from various scientific and philosophical forms of discourse; among these, it seems that biological examples, rather than mathematical ones, have a predominant place. Finally, I discuss what Aristotle himself has to say about the use of examples, and in particular about the similarity between the use of an example and the use of induction. The second part of the paper focusses on the functions of Aristotle's logical examples. It is of course obvious that some of the examples in the Prior Analytics are used to illustrate, and thus to clarify, a definition, a logical rule, a type of argument. However, I think that Aristotle's logical examples have another function, which is philosophically more interesting, namely as integral parts of the procedure of proving something. To support this claim, I analyse three passages from the Prior Analytics in which examples are used either in order to prove that something is not the case, i.e. as counter-examples, or in order to prove positively that it is possible for something to be the case. At the end, I argue that for such uses of examples Aristotle uses the notion of 'ekthesis', which seems to have a wider sense than usually suggested; that is to say, it is used to refer to any proof by means of an example, and not only for the procedure which Aristotle uses to reduce imperfect to perfect syllogisms.

Platono dialoginis kalbėjimas

Plato was a thinker who initiated a specific philosophical discourse in the classical period of Athenian culture. He may rightly be called the creator of the philosophical dialogue as a genuine trend in Greek thought. The present research discloses the specificity of Plato's philosophical discourse by asking these questions: What is the specificity of Plato's dialogical philosophizing? In what sense can we speak of his dialectical path as a fundamental form of philosophical existence and philo- sophical discourse? The specificity of Plato's dialogical speaking becomes clear when the actual use of the conceptual words dialėgesthai, dialektike and dialektikos is analysed. The study shows that the Greek word dialogos, by which Plato's works are usually named, is a derivative from the verb dialėgesthai. This Greek word denotes the primary situation of Plato's philo- sophical thinking. In Plato's texts three semantic components which actualize the meaning of dialėgesthai may be distinguished: 1) 'to speak with somebody', 2) 'to speak about something', and 3) 'to speak in some way'. Plato's dialogical philosophizing is articulated not with the help of formal rules and definite terms, but in keeping with everyday language, Hellenic religious and literary traditions. It is true that the criterion of Plato's philosophizing is a rational argument as well as the imaginative dimension of language. The latter explains the specific property of Plato's philosophy, i.e. the concreteness of his thought. Plato's philosophical text is treated not only as a source of knowledge, but also as a source of spiritual exercise. It is important to stress that Plato's philosophy is the turning point from the fact of saying to the content of saying. In Plato's philosophical language the Greek verb dialėgesthai implies reflection as a decisive step toward an objective thinking of being. Moving in this direction, Plato emphasizes the semantic ambivalence which is characteristic of the word in everyday language. Moreover, the Greek thinker makes a radical division between the true (alethes) and deceptive (pseudės) speech. On the one hand, he implicitly claims that discursive grounding of the word's content must become an indispensable condition for the specificity of philosophical language. On the other hand, Plato stresses the boundaries of philosophical language and claims that some fundamental things in philosophy could not be expressed by any propositional statement. Plato not only created a dramatic and dialogical form of philosophizing, but also opened a way to Aristotle's post-dialogic and non-dramatic form of philosophical discourse. Possibly Aristotle was a thinker who conceptualized Plato's word dialegesthai and related it with the paradigm of formal logic. Plato's dialectic, however, must not be confused with Aristotelian logical argumentation. Nevertheless, the concept of rational and objective truth is the concept that bounds philosophical meaning of Platonic and Aristotelian word „dialectic". This concept historically is rooted in Greek philosophical thinking and is characteristic of the intellectual life of Western world.

Material Progress and the New Morality: Russia as Probing Ground

John Lachs’s essay is a wonderful expression of the mind and soul of an outstanding philosopher and American. My long-term friendship with John Lachs is the best evidence, in my own eyes, that his every moral judgment is proved with his practical deeds and public positions. His every sentence is full of hidden or even open passion that goes beyond the rationalized boundaries of formal philosophy. This is a rare and precious case in our life today and thus it should be emphasized. In return, I would like to repay John Lachs with the same passion. After reading and rereading his essay I concluded that my reply should also go beyond a formal disciplinary, academic framework. My response to his essay is also rooted in passion, but the source of my inspiration is slightly different. John Lachs questions the problem of moral progress and the possibility of optimism from, and for, almost a pure American perspective—i.e., a rather balanced society in the state of seemingly perpetual economic growth. I agree that such a state may raise issues concerning moral improvement and the relation of moral improvement to material growth and progress. Does moral progress parallel economic growth? Alternatively, is there perhaps a reverse relation? In a different place, from a different perspective, is there a different relation?

Sainte-Beuve between Renaissance and Enlightenment

For a period of eight years in the 1840s Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve held a post of conservateur at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. 1 Each day he traversed the gallery of hommes illustres which decorated the reading room. This held busts of major figures from history and literature. In one of his portraits littéraires from these years Sainte-Beuve pretended to derive inspiration from this legion of intellectual heroes. Among the busts stood one of Gabriel Naudé, Mazarin's first librarian in the 1640s. Sainte-Beuve dreamt, he wrote at the time, of placing Naudé's bust beside that of Charron, or even better, between those of Montaigne and Bayle. Through Naudé, Sainte-Beuve avowed to discover the genius loci of the Bibliothèque Mazarine. Yet whatever local reasons there were for the presence of Naudé's bust at the Mazarine, Sainte-Beuve set out in this essay to find a place for Naudé among the pantheon of French thinkers on his own merits. Such playfulness with a biographical conceit of both the literary and visual arts belied serious purpose. If it fuelled Sainte-Beuve's claim to have found in the seventeenth-century thinker "un sceptique moraliste sous masque d'érudit," 2 it was also expressive of a critical campaign devoted to the revision of a received tradition of French thought and learning. Sainte-Beuve [End Page 473] juxtaposed a seventeenth-century tradition of "literary" skepticism independent of formal philosophy with an Enlightenment inheritance he was eager to disown. Central to this task was a disciplinary turn away from philosophical inquiry and the history of philosophy to literary history. This in turn entailed a full embrace of the shadowy inhabitants of the margins of pre-Enlightenment thought from the late Renaissance to Bayle.

Economic theory as political philosophy

I defend the integrity of the question of what the cognitive status of economic theory could amount to, and I argue that the theory is best understood as a compartment of formal political philosophy, in particular a species of contractarianism. This seems particularly apt as an account of general equilibrium theory. Given the intentional character of the explanatory variables of economic theory and the role of information in effecting choice, it is argued that economic theory is unlikely to secure the predictive power that would enable it to function as a factual instead of a normative theory.

From Deluge to Discourse: Myth, History, and the Generation of Chinese Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: From Deluge to Discourse: Myth, History, and the Generation of Chinese Fiction Patricia Sieber (bio) Deborah Lynn Porter . From Deluge to Discourse: Myth, History, and the Generation of Chinese Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. xviii, 284 pp. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-7914-3034-0. In this provocative and original study, Deborah Lynn Porter examines what has generally been considered one of the earliest examples of Chinese fiction, the Mu Tianzi zhuan (MTZ), a narrative of the early Zhou king Mu's journey to the West. Given the text's originary status, it is perhaps not surprising that Porter's study does not simply examine this foundational text, but attempts to present a general theory of the generation of Chinese fictional texts. A psychoanalytically informed but historically particularized interpretation of the MTZ is at the heart of Porter's book; however, in the concluding chapter, Porter seeks to broaden her insights beyond a single case study. In particular, she seeks to account for other foundational moments in the history of Chinese fiction, namely the emergence of tales of the strange during the period of North/South division and the generation of vernacular fiction in the Ming. The strength of the book lies in its integration of a clearly defined psychoanalytic framework with an acute awareness of historical particulars on the one hand and rigorous attention to textual detail on the other. Porter's framework is indebted to the philosopher and psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham's theory of the symbol. As Porter explains in chapter 3, according to Abraham, symbols cannot simply be reduced to a given meaning, but must be interpreted as an encoding of the particular trauma that led to the generation of the symbol in the first place. Hence, symbols are predicated on an act of silencing, and can only be properly read if the circumstances surrounding that act are reconstructed. In short, what precipitates the generation of symbols is what Porter terms an "obstacle to being." Thus, in her view, such symbols represent a discursive mode that always inscribes its own production. Porter proceeds to provide a context for a trauma-based, literary reading of the MTZ. Earlier studies of this text, which Porter discusses in detail in chapter 1, primarily concerned themselves with questions on the date of composition, textual transmission, and the historicity of the events described. By contrast, while extensively resorting to philological analysis, Porter seeks to locate her study of the MTZ in the context of the broader historical and intellectual issues of the Warring States period. Since she believes that the force of her arguments depends on her ability to reconstruct the mythic framework in which the story of the MTZ is embedded, she devotes chapters 3 and 4 to an analysis of some of the key myths during that era. Her main contention is that some of these myths, especially the Yu flood myth, were formulated in response to a cosmogonic crisis. As the precession [End Page 518] of the equinoxes made the seasonal function of a particular constellation obsolete, a cosmogonic crisis arose, resulting in differing reactions among early thinkers. While formal philosophy sought to erase this cosmogonic trauma, myth incorporated an awareness of the crisis through its use of symbolism. In particular, key figures and sites in the MTZ, namely Kunlun Mountain, the River God Hezong, and Xiwangmu, were all associated with the cosmogonic crisis outlined above. Porter suggests that Kunlun represents a boundary between chaos and a new order. Hezong functions as a vehicle of transportation across a watery divide. Xiwangmu represents a figure with the power to rejuvenate life through transformation. In view of this sustained interlacing of symbolism within the MTZ with a broader mythical framework, King Mu's journey should not be understood as a historical narrative, but as a symbolic journey involving rebirth. In chapter 5, Porter addresses more specifically what she sees as the motivating event for the generation of the MTZ. King Zhao, King Mu's father, drowned with his entire army during a military and mining expedition. This catastrophic event called into question the legitimacy of the Zhou court...

The Dilemmas of a Search for Cultural Synthesis: A Portrait of Cemil Meriç as a Conservative Intellectual

The altered psychological environment demanded a shift in emphasis from a pure critique of traditions to a critique of traditions coupled with a critique of modernity.Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny and UtopiasModern conservatism, at least in its philosophical form, is a child of what it attacks—modernity. If the central ethos of modernity is a belief in the plasticity of society and the individual, the central ethos of conservatism is a belief in the sanctity of community, kinship, tradition. Modernity's fascination with the new is matched by conservatism's defense of past tradition. It is on the priority of a past order bequeathed by history, and its traditional institutions, that the conservatives base their critique of modernity. The modernist idea that societies can be shaped, molded, and steered in new directions, and that individuals can direct their own destinies, finds its counterpart in conservative thought in the rediscovery of the past-its institutions, values, themes, structures.

Chinese modernism in the era of reforms: cultural fever, avant-garde fiction, and the new Chinese cinema

Blending history and theory, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms offers both a historical narrative and a critical analysis of the cultural visions and experiences of China's post-Mao era. In this volume, Xudong Zhang rethinks Chinese modernism as a historical genre that arose in response to the historical experience of Chinese modernity rather than as an autonomous aesthetic movement. He identifies the ideologies of literary and cultural styles in the New Era (1979-1989) through a critical reading of the various new waves of Chinese literature, film, and intellectual discourse. In examining the aesthetic and philosophical formulations of the New Era's intellectual elites, Zhang first analyses the intense cultural and intellectual debates, known as the Great Discussion or Cultural Fever that took place in Chinese urban centers in the mid - and late 1980s. Chinese literary modernism is then explored, specifically in relation to Deng Xiaoping's sweeping reforms and with a focus on the changing literary sensibility and avant-garde writers such as Yu Hua, Ge Fei, and Su Tong. Lastly, Zhang looks at the the making of New Chinese Cinema and films such as Yellow Earth, Horse Thief, and King of the Children - films through which Fifth Generation filmmakers first developed a style independent from socialist realism. By tracing the origins and contemporary elaboration of the idea of Chinese modernism, Zhang identifies the discourse of modernism as one of the decisive formal articulations of the social dynamism and cultural possibilities of post-Mao China. Capturing the historical experience and the cultural vision of China during a crucial decade in its emergence as a world power, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms will interest students and scholars of modernism, Chinese literature and history, film studies, and cultural studies.

Aquinas and Empowerment: Classical Ethics for Ordinary Lives ed. by G. Simon Harak, S.J.

480 BOOK REVIEWS Accordingly, it is useful in understanding this commentary to distinguish a properly metaphysical creationist discourse from both a theological one and a doctrinal one. When the formulation that God is Qui est and the maker of all that exists is expounded scientifically in theology as meaning that God is in everything that exists according to his essence, presence, and power, the religious doctrine undergoes an important translation into philosophical terms that are analogically inflected by theology for its own purposes. On the other hand, when Aquinas in his commentary on Propositio IV of the De causis argues that the 'being' affirmed by the author to be the first and simplest of created things is not a Dionysian esse participatum communiter in omnibus existentibus, nor a Platonic esse separatum, but rather an immanent esse participatum in primo gradu entis creati, he is dealing with philosophical formulations that stand or fall on their philosophical merits. In a word, when a theologian does philosophy, it is still philosophy. In his commentary on the De causis Aquinas is performing the offices, ncit of a preacher of the faith, nor of a master oftheology, but of a philosophical commentator, albeit always with the overarching concern to show the convergences and consonance among these different modes of knowing and speaking the same truth. At any rate, the Commentary on the Book ofCauses, read with the grain of salt c~lled for by the traducements in any translation of another's words or thought, offers the English reader the benefit of a synoptic view of Aquinas's most mature metaphysics and hermeneutics. JOHN TOMARCHIO Boston University Boston, Massachusetts Aquinas and Empowerment: Classical Ethicsfor Ordinary Lives. Edited by G. SIMON HARAK, S.J. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1996. Pp. 240. $60.00 (cloth), $23.95 (paper). ISBN 0-87840-60'\-2 (cloth), 0-87840-614-X (paper). This collection of essays by five relatively young moral theologians is constructed around a capital idea: let us see how Aquinas might speak to moral matters much discussed in our time, matters such as child abuse, friendship, or the liberation of oppressed peoples. All the contributors argue that Thomas does indeed have something to say that surpasses in precision, truthfulness, and theological insight what one hears otherwise in modern parlance. By and large their arguments are well crafted and compelling. The book accomplishes BOOK REVIEWS 481 what is undoubtedly its most important task, namely, it demonstrates that Aquinas's work represents a key resource, perhaps still the very best one, for considering modem ethical questions. Yet this last statement should not be taken to imply that Aquinas's insights can be appropriated into modem morality without disturbance; Thomas cannot be mingled in as one more voice in the cacophony of the contemporary discussion. To its great credit, the book resists the temptation to "apply" Aquinas to the top ten moral dilemmas of our time. As one of the contributors, Paul Wadell, points out, Aquinas's vision of the moral life is generally foreign to modernity. Hence, whatever modem moral concern we bring Thomas's thought to bear upon, we must expect a significant change in the way that concern is described, ordered, and understood. There is some variation from essay to essay in how deeply this point is taken to heart. The book's first three essays are similar in structure: each has two parts, one in which Aquinas's ideas and texts are systematically discussed and another in which they are brought to bear on a contemporary concern . In the first essay, "Getting Egypt out of the People: Aquinas's Contributions to Liberation," Judith Kay begins by discussing Aquinas on habits, virtues, and vices. It is of benefit to the collection that Kay's relatively thin but broad discussion of Aquinas's ethics appears first. Readers cannot be entirely new to Aquinas's ethics and find their way in this book, but those for whom it lies shadowed in dim memory will find Kay's discussion a help in recalling its basic structure and an apt preparation for the treatments of more specific components of Aquinas's ethics in subsequent chapters. Kay remarks on the...

Axiomatic world theory: An overview the general theory of evolution in brief

The world, its many subsystems and all their theories, starting with logic, can be reduced to two related functions: a combinatorial system generator and a hamiltonian system organizer. These can be derived, in turn, from an Axiom of Lawfulness, the expansion being guided by pseudo‐category and pseudo‐functor analysis to produce an axiomatic theory of the world or general theory of evolution. Specifically, world evolution is generated by a constrained combinatorial world generator, F:G(X), deduced from two related axioms: I. The Axiom of World Lawfulness and II. The Axiom of World Constraint Constants, c = c1, c2, of primordial physical combinatee (substance), c1, and physical combinator (motion), c2. Axiom I postulates a lawful analysis by an analyzer adhering to appropriate coordinate systems, CS, of a lawful analysand obeying a conservation law, X = X. The analysand consists of a base combinatee (the set and elements), X = {x1, x2,… xn}, and a base combinator, namely, the universal Boolean operator, NO...

Constituting Critique: Kant's Writing as Critical Praxis

Kant's philosophy is often treated as a closed system, without reference to how it was written or how Kant arrived at its familiar form, the critique. In fact, the style of the critique seems so artless that readers think of it as an unfortunate by-product-a style of stylelessness. In Constituting Critique, Willi Goetschel shows how this apparent gracelessness was deliberately achieved by Kant through a series of writing experiments. By providing an account of the process that culminated in his three Critiques, this book offers a new perspective on Kant's philosophical thought and practice. Constituting Critique traces the stages in Kant's development to reveal how he redefined philosophy as a critical task. Following the philosopher through the experiments of his early essays, Goetschel demonstrates how Kant tests, challenges, and transforms the philosophical essay in his pursuit of a new self-reflective literary genre. From these experiments, critique emerges as the philosophical form for the critical project of the Enlightenment. The imperatives of its transcendental style, Goetschel contends, not only constitute and inform the critical moment of Kant's philosophical praxis, but also have an enduring place in post-Kantian philosophy and literature. By situating the Critiques within the context of Kant's early essays, this work will redirect the attention of Kant scholars to the origins of their form. It will also encourage contemporary critical theorists to reconsider their own practice through an engagement with its source in Kant.