Philosophy Of Action Research Articles

Artistry as Methodology: Aesthetic Experience and Chinese Philosophy1

AbstractAlthough aesthetics has been to some extent marginalized in western philosophy, within the Chinese philosophical tradition aesthetics plays a key role. This article explores Chinese aesthetics as a site of valuable resources for rethinking the ways in which we conceptualize philosophical activity. After introducing a few distinct features of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, the article examines aesthetic distance in terms of guan, he, and ying, Chinese conceptions of artists and participants, and aesthetic suggestiveness or the inexhaustibility of a work of art, in order to suggest that the Chinese philosophical tradition might contribute its sense of connection between style or method of doing philosophy and aesthetics to a contemporary metaphor of philosophy as aesthetic experience.

Una didáctica situada de la filosofía: dispositivo para acompañar el extrañamiento docente

<p>La formación de docentes de filosofía, en los marcos de un curriculum deductivo, genera la extrañeza al volver a la escuela en quienes transitan su residencia y sus primeras prácticas laborales. ¿Cómo acompañar este extrañamiento desde una didáctica específica de la filosofía sin negar la tensión entre los planos técnico, práctico y experiencial? Proponemos para ello un dispositivo que hemos denominado didáctica específica situada de la filosofía. Ella tiene a la base, además de la consideración de que la educación está constituida por la tensión de los planos referidos, una concepción de filosofía denominada filosofía filosofante. Esta última considera tanto al sujeto de la actividad filosófica como al objeto disciplinar y se opone al academicismo desde una perspectiva que abreva en el pensamiento situado como categoría filosófica y la experiencia en el sentido de transformación del sujeto. Por esto el dispositivo didáctico mentado rompe con la explicación como eje de la enseñanza universitaria y se apoya en la narración como punto de contacto entre quienes están en la formación de formadores y aquellos que se inician en la enseñanza de la filosofía.</p>

Francis Bacon’s Common Notion

To what extent can scientific method and the history of scientific shed light on the formation of concepts? On their definition and the difficulties associated with arriving at these definitions? These questions are central to Francis Bacon's entire corpus, with continued relevance for today's theory, especially in its ecological, assemblaged, and other posthuman varieties.1 For Bacon's philosophy of Nature depends on principles that derive directly from the of his moment in ways that are fairly obvious, although this same claim can be stated somewhat more subtly, or in a more genealogical way, by saying that Bacon's account of Nature and of his reformed method tends to decompose, to re-organize, and to redefine several components of philosophical in general that are coming to have an important dimension in his period. That is, his work can be said to refract existing ideas in order to reveal their internal composition, but it also politicizes (as in polarize or catalyze) broader philosophical ideas by endowing them with a new application or new set of meanings. Approached in this way, Bacon's method reveals to us less a prior existing domain of political thought than the conceptual ingredients that are necessary to that domain and that Bacon also finds operating in natural bodies.2 These ingredients include:1. the more general relationship between parts and wholes, plurality and unity, and the problems of scale and ontology these imply;2. the definition of a body as a provisional unity formed out of collected particulars, and thus also the nature of its internal organization;3. the nature of collecting as a philosophical activity, one that is simultaneously mental and physical, intellectual and manipulative, speculative and operational;4. the nature of action and force as principles that determine the characteristic of natural and bodies alike, and thus also the nature of formal ideas in Bacon's method, a famous and explicit problem for him.All four problems structure Bacon's account of authentic philosophical knowledge as well as the way he seems to regard ideas. Looking closely at Bacon's method thus sheds considerable light not only on how his natural philosophy implies a philosophy, and vice versa, but also on the prior problem of defining philosophy itself-a meta-philosophical concern, as it were, that runs throughout all of Bacon's work. His Instauration can be described quite simply as one of the first and richest inquiries into the identities of philosophy, science, politics, theology, history, and fiction as distinct domains of human thought, and the ways in which they interact with one another around a set of shared ideas and problems. Since this argument remains far too large to demonstrate in a single essay, I will be concentrating on relationships between the first three domains, as these are articulated in Bacon's Novum Organum (1620).3In light of the theme of this journal's special issue, I propose to look closely at the way Bacon treats the problems of commonness and of collectivity: my guiding question will be whether these ideas are complementary to one another or whether they are in tension, and my hypothesis is that commons and collectivities do not go together as we might expect. The Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito has sharply posed a version of the problem: should community and commonality be understood as a question of shared qualities, i.e., of participation, coincidence, agreement, and the possession of an array of attributes, positively defined? Or is communitas and commonality the result of an alienating gesture: a giving away of the proper, a donation of self that renders the common only as the effect of a subtraction, a seam, or a scar? The particular form of commonality I will be focusing on is Bacon's idea of a notion in general and how it is made-we would say concept, but Bacon himself does not use the term, which the Oxford English Dictionary helpfully dates for us only as of the middle of the seventeenth century. …

Basic characteristics of the development of Serbian philosophical periodicals

This work discusses the creation, development, and key characteristics of philosophical periodicals in Serbia, as one of the most important institutional pillars for the development of a philosophical culture. The author shows that Serbian philosophical periodicals played a significant role in the development and dissemination, not only of its primary goal, philosophical culture, but also in building general standards of criticism, necessary for critical thinking in science and our society. At the end of the account, the author emphasizes that Serbian philosophical periodicals, in over a century of development, have managed to establish a broad philosophical communication with various traditions, directions and streams of philosophical thought. However, due to strong ideological breaks in history, it was not able of maintaining the continuity necessary for establishing clear and strong scientific criteria in assessing philosophical output and other philosophical activity in our milieu.

The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thought (review)

Reviewed by: The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thought Scott Jenkins Krzysztof Michalski. The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thought. Translation from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff. Princeton, NJ-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 231. Cloth, $39.50. The subtitle of this book is potentially misleading. The book is not a typical interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought, but rather a series of reflections on time and human existence that take Nietzsche as their starting point. Throughout The Flame of Eternity, the nine chapters are referred to as essays, which seems appropriate since they are diverse, somewhat self-contained, sometimes personal, and arguably inconsistent. The subtitle of the original Polish edition (2007) also describes the contents of the book as essays, and it is unfortunate that this terminology was not retained. I cannot comment on the merits of the English translation more generally, though I can say that Paloff’s English is clear, lively, and a pleasure to read. Michalski presents Nietzsche as a philosopher whose writings express deep truths about our existence. One of those truths is, paradoxically, that our concepts cannot express deep truths about our existence. On Michalski’s reading, Nietzsche is not engaged in the traditional philosophical activity of using concepts to construct potentially true theories about this or that, theories that might be contrasted with other, false theories. Instead, Nietzsche aims to make us aware of the limitations of theoretical activity and the knowledge it creates. These limitations are both epistemic and practical—we cannot articulate the deep truths about our lives, and no conceptual activity satisfies the fundamental needs of human life. This approach to Nietzsche raises all sorts of methodological questions that Michalski would likely answer through appeal to our lived experience. While Michalski does not describe his approach as phenomenological, he often appeals to distinctive human experiences to ground his investigations. The appeal to experience is supplemented by Michalski’s view that Nietzschean terms such as ‘overman,’ ‘will to power,’ ‘eternal recurrence,’ ‘life,’ and ‘courage’ are not concepts but “meta-concepts” that refer to aspects of “the limit of knowledge,” or perhaps entities beyond this limit (197). This notion of a metaconcept is hazy, but the idea seems to be that Nietzsche’s writings possess a distinctive power to direct our attention to aspects of our existence that cannot become objects of philosophical theory. Elsewhere Michalski states more straightforwardly that he regards metaphor as essential to Nietzsche’s project (122). At times this emphasis on lived experience sheds light on Nietzsche’s thought. Michalski’s account of “On the Vision and the Riddle” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra succeeds in showing that Nietzsche takes some features of time to be manifest only from a standpoint within a [End Page 140] human life (181–84). Sometimes Michalski’s approach results in implausible readings, as when he reads Nietzsche’s remark that life is will to power as concerning only the quality of our lived experience, and not at all the nature of living things generally. In pursuing this reading Michalski also misuses passages from Nietzsche’s writings. For example, a late discussion of nihilism begins with the claim that life, for Nietzsche, is a will to the thinkability of all beings, while Zarathustra actually uses this formula to characterize the will to truth, not life itself (191). Unsurprisingly, The Flame of Eternity is at its best when it focuses on the most poetic elements of Nietzsche’s writings, such as life portrayed as the feminine object of Zarathustra’s love. Michalski illuminates Nietzsche’s characterization of life as a series of masks (146) or mere appearances (173) that shimmer and gleam (187), though again, the connection with will to power is strained. Less enlightening is Michalski’s novel account of eternal recurrence as a “meta-concept” concerned with the quality of time, not with its quantity or shape (189). These interpretations of will to power and eternal recurrence combine in Michalski’s image of our existence as flickering and ungraspable, but somehow complete at every moment—a flame of eternity. This, Michalski claims, is the content of Zarathustra’s wisdom, something nonconceptual that is manifest in Zarathustra...

Intending to Aid

Courts and commentators are notoriously puzzled about the mens rea standards for complicity. Accomplices intend to aid, but what attitude need they have towards the crimes that they aid? This paper both criticizes extant accounts of the mens rea of complicity and offers a new account. The paper argues that an intention can commit one to an event’s occurrence without committing one to promoting the event, or making it more likely to take place. Under the proposed account of the mens rea of complicity, an accomplice must have an intention that commits him to the crime’s occurrence, but need not commit him to making it more likely that the crime occurs. The paper traces the implications of this view both for several difficult complicity cases, and for ongoing debates among philosophers of action about the necessary and sufficient conditions of joint agency.

American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (review)

Reviewed by: American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Larry S. McGrath Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen. American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2012. 450 pages. Nietzsche’s corpus offered European philosophers a conceptual playground. Throughout the twentieth century, monographs systematically reinterpreted and reconciled Nietzsche’s master concepts such as the will to power, the [End Page 1263] eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and the revaluation of values. The most prominent include Heidegger’s four-volume study (1936–1940); Karl Jaspers’ Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity (1936); George Bataille’s On Nietzsche (1945); and Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962). Jennifer Ratner-Rosnehagen reminds readers in American Nietzsche. A History of an Icon and His Ideas that Americans were also probing readers of Nietzsche; even if their readings did not always assume an exclusively philosophical form. Ratner-Rosenhagen dedicates her book to unearthing the rich and forgotten American archives of Nietzsche’s cultural receptions that paralleled his metaphysical treatments on the other side of the Atlantic. She demonstrates how Nietzsche remained a fixture throughout the long American twentieth century by tracing his receptions across literary, religious, political, as well as philosophical realms. American Nietzsche is a reception history. Behind it lurks the thorny problem that Nietzsche has always posed for reception histories. For those giants of twentieth century European philosophy, reading Nietzsche was like playing on a conceptual jungle gym with him. That is to say the value of their monographs depends less on their fidelity to what Nietzsche really said than on their playfulness: how idiosyncratically each recruits Nietzsche in service of the author’s own project. The problem for reception histories is thus: does an authoritative account of Nietzsche exist that could serve as a basis for comparing his disparate readings? Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tackles the problem by writing American Nietzsche as a Rezeptionsgeschichte, or a history of creative appropriations. She affords each reception equal weight, regardless of whether it conforms to the Nietzschean letter. The problem of what Nietzsche really meant is never posed. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s is not the first Rezeptionsgeschichte of this kind. Steven Ascheim’s The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992); Eric Forth’s Zarathustra in Paris (Illinois: Northern Illinois UP, 2001); and the recent edited volume Interpreting Nietzsche: Reception and Influence (London: Continuum, 2011) are exemplary. Given the density of Nietzsche studies, it is a feat that American Nietzsche manages to rejuvenate the field by following his reception to fertile American soil. The impact also resonates through intellectual history generally. Ratner-Rosenhagen extrapolates from Nietzsche’s case to reflect on what constitutes the very notion of a reception. In a methodological interlude, she examines personal letters written to Nietzsche that did not formulate their authors’ thoughts in systematic, let alone published form. She takes it as her project to rethink what counts as a reception by resisting the picture of readers as passive vessels into which the historian pours Nietzsche’s ideas. Fan mail demonstrates a productive dimension in “how readers used Nietzsche’s words to imagine new moral and intellectual worlds for themselves” (208). Ratner-Rosenhagen’s project of writing, as it were, a production history animates the book’s close attention to Nietzsche’s cultural influence and sets the book’s methodology apart from other histories of his reception abroad. [End Page 1264] Each chapter is organized chronologically and thematically. They march through the long twentieth century following the waves along which Americans read Nietzsche. Each wave concerns both the content of ideas received and the channel of reception. The book opens with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Nietzsche read as a young Gymnasium student. Ratner-Rosenhagen mines Nietzsche’s personal library at Weimer both to illuminate the neglected influence on Nietzsche and to signal her recurring method of closely reading marginalia. Following her account of Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the American philosopher, Ratner-Rosenhagen demonstrates how, like in Europe, Nietzsche was first read as literature outside the academy. The first chapter examines how the arts critic James Gibbons Huneker first popularized Nietzsche in the States...

Gilles Deleuze, clínico da atividade filosófica: paradoxo do filósofo trabalhador

Propõe-se abordar Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) como filósofo trabalhador, operário dos conceitos. Afirma-se a filosofia como atividade produtiva no contexto capitalista, o que implica a militância do filósofo. Esta luta se faz pela análise da atividade filosófica, como meio de interferência nos processos de produção social, acompanhada pela clínica do trabalho filosófico, como desvio desenvolvido a partir das rupturas analíticas. Discute-se a composição do coletivo de trabalho e a sustentação do gênero de atividade em filosofia por Deleuze. A intercessão com a atividade docente se coloca como crucial. Apresentam-se situações concretas tratadas por Deleuze em sua filosofia: droga, literatura, loucura.

The volitive and the executive function of intentions

Many philosophers of action, including Bratman and Mele, conceive intentions functionally, as executive states: intentions are mental states that represent an action and tend to cause this action. In the philosophical tradition (e.g. for Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Kant) another function of intentions, which may be called “volitive”, played a much more prominent role: intentions are mental states that represent what kind of actions we want and prefer to be realised and thus, in a possibly rational way, synthesise our motivational, desiderative, and perhaps affective as well as cognitive attitudes towards this action. This paper argues that intentions must fulfil both functions and then develops a concept of ‘intention’ that integrates both functions. One reason for including the volitive function in the definition of ‘intention’ is that only via this function the value of actions as such is realised, namely to enable the person, the kernel of the self to express herself and to control the world. Various forms of dissociation of the two functions are discussed and a proposal how to deal with such cases in the definition of ‘intention’ is developed.

The Concept of Active Consciousness in Marcien Towa

AbstractIt is a question of seeing through the study of certain philosophical positions of Marcien Towa how philosophical activity is an experience of freedom, an active consciousness in motion. Indeed, in Marcien Towa, freedom is the result of a process of rediscovery of self that animates the subject aware of its existence in the world. The unveiling of the essence of me is a necessity or an imperative whose effectiveness is the result of questioning the essence of the self that is reborn from its treating myself as a goal, as a consciousness of freedom. This is where there is reconciliation of the self with itself, the advent of a new subject that can take care of themselves as free and autonomous entity and that supports his destiny.

The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (review)

Reviewed by: The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam Mehmet Karabela The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. By Rémi Brague. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 287. Hardcover $35.00. The majority of The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam has been published previously in different forms, but this edition has been completely revised by the author, the well-known French [End Page 605] medievalist and intellectual historian Rémi Brague. It was first published in French under the title Au moyen du Moyen Âge in 2006. The book consists of sixteen essays ranging from Brague's early years at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I) in the 1990s up until 2005. As a collection of articles, therefore, The Legend of the Middle Ages is not designed to be a monograph; one should not expect a single argument from the book, although it does explore key intersections of medieval religion and philosophy that I will touch upon later. The Legend of the Middle Ages opens with an interview that clearly establishes the character of the author. In this section, Brague makes a distinction between institutionalized philosofia and private falsafa in Islamic countries, where philosophy remains a matter for small numbers of individuals. According to Brague, the tensions between philosophy and religion were not negotiated in the same way in the Muslim world as they were within Christianity: even though Jewish and Muslim philosophers achieved something like the Christian Scholastics, they were often isolated, and their influence was largely concentrated on the margins of society rather than in the center. On the other hand, philosophy became a university course of studies in medieval Europe, and more importantly, in practical terms, it became a breadwinning career (pp. 1-2). Within this context, the reader encounters a type of Christian exceptionalism while enjoying Brague's style of witticism and seriousness (not only in the interview section but across the whole book). For example, one of his arguments is that "philosophic activity, in the Middle Ages, was institutionalized only within Christianity [whereas] in Islamic lands and in the Jewish communities, it remained a hobby, a passion indulged in apart from one's true occupation" (p. 228). Averroes is cited as a core example; it is pointed out that his true occupation was "religious law," not philosophy, a fact that Brague establishes quoting Warren Z. Harvey: "Socrates was judged; Averroes and Maimonides were judges" (p. 49). These differences in the Christian and Islamic philosophical worlds, Brague explains, were due to different models of revelation that produced dissimilar interpretations of ancient Greek sources. Previously, Leo Strauss had spent a great deal of effort demonstrating the antagonistic relationship between Greek philosophy (reason) and the Biblical understanding of the world (revelation) in order to understand the transformation of Western civilization. For Strauss, this tension between reason (represented by Athens) and revelation (represented by Jerusalem) was a rich source for the vitality of the West. Within this broader context, Brague, in his Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (St. Augustine's Press, 2002), has expanded the Straussian dialectic of revelation and reason by emphasizing that Greek wisdom was always in the service of Qur'anic revelation and never accommodated the autonomy of the philosophical enterprise. Instead it was "a kind of Greek wisdom in an Islamic mantle," or a sort of theologically approved philosophy. However, in the first part of The Legend of the Middle Ages, Brague concludes (as opposed to his method in earlier works) by submitting an antithesis to the use of the term "Islamic philosophy." For him, this term can only be used with the condition that "we understand 'Islamic' to denote a civilization, rather than a religion" (p. 70). This brings two elements to mind: (1) religious-flavored Islamic philosophy, and (2) [End Page 606] philosophy in Islamic civilization (referring to any philosopher, both Muslim and non-Muslim, under Islamic rule). In the second part of the book, Brague narrows his focus to common themes and considers three topics in medieval philosophical...

Hume e os propósitos da filosofia

Hume é geralmente visto como um filósofo que, além de defender princípios céticos, pretendeu oferecer uma nova fundação para as ciências, baseada no estudo minucioso da natureza humana. De fato, não há dúvidas de que esse seria, para ele, um dos principais propósitos a que sua filosofia precisava servir. Procuraremos mostrar, no presente trabalho, que essa visão da filosofia humiana é, no fim das contas, limitada, já que perde de vista o fato de que, em textos posteriores, o filósofo escocês tentou estabelecer que a atividade filosófica deveria ser construída de modo a colaborar para a formação moral de seu público.

Alexandre Fradique Morujão

Abstract This paper addresses the meaning and importance of Alexandre Morujão’s work for the reception of husserlian phenomenology in the Portuguese university. It gives also an overall view of his philosophical activity and interests, either as a university professor and researcher, or as a translator of philosophical works. The paper tracks also some of philosophical influences, sometimes hidden in the author’s published works, such as the influence of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett. Regarding phenomenology (and especially husserlian phenomenology), the paper shows that Alexandre Morujão’s work tried to highlight the following three main themes: 1) the radical character of phenomenological attitude, as the science of origins and as a unitary theoretical connection of propositions grounded in ultimate evidences· 2) the ensuing radical awareness of the phenomenological Ego, not only as a pole of identity but above all as a set of habits, i.e. a series of synthesis passively persisting in his own personal life; 3) the relation of transcendental subjectivity to the life-world, as the world of intuition and immediate experience, and the ultimate ground of meaning.

From the Tower of Babel to the Ladder of Jacob: Claude Imbert Reading Merleau-Ponty

Claude Imbert often declares that the activity of philosophy now needs to be in line with the teachings of anthropology. In her book Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the very fact that the last course of the author of Phenomenology of Perception, questioning ‘The Possibility of Philosophy’, sketched out ‘the anthropological outline of an intellectual activity unburdened by any a priori’ [les contours anthropologiques d'un activité intellectuelle délestée de tout a priori] is considered by her as more evidence for such a necessity. My contribution explores the meaning of Claude Imbert's affirmation that today the possibility of philosophy is deeply connected with anthropological knowledge. It will, in particular, confront such an affirmation with the debate among African philosophers, concerning the relationship between philosophical activity and ethnography.

Conceptual Invention

By taking into account those operations of modernity initiated by Stendhal and Cézanne, Manet and Proust, which were continued by Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss, this paper considers Claude Imbert's writings from the perspective of the formative role that literature and painting had and still have in mapping a new rationality. The aim is to show how the philosopher reintegrates such priceless experiences, captured by peculiar literary forms, syntagms, and juxtaposition of genres or pictorial manners, into a conceptual and stylistic invention affecting the very core of philosophical activity.

ARCHEOLOGIA WIDZIALNEGO I NIEWIDZIALNEGO

The article describes the final period of development of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, during which he wrote The Visible and the Invisible . Using the interpretations and commentaries of French scholars, I try to show that the subject-object dualism which the French philosopher tried to overcome throughout his philosophical activity continues to persist. In fact, it would seem that it cannot be overcome.

A Imaginação nos Braços de Vénus de Milo

A partir de textos de João Boavida sobre a didáctica da filosofia, reconhecemos o seu valor, a importância e a razoabilidade dos seus comentários e propostas para tornar o «ensinar a filosofar» uma actividade não só verdadeiramente filosófica como pedagogicamente rica e entusiasmante. Como proposta e reforço das suas reflexões, consideramos que uma abordagem do «ensinar a filosofar» através da recuperação da imaginação na actividade filosófica pode ser uma das vias mais poderosas e eficazes.

The Transition from Studying Philosophy to Doing Philosophy

In this paper I articulate a minimal conception of the idea of philosophy that informs a curriculum and pedagogy for producing students who are capable of engaging in philosophical activity and not just competent with a specific domain of knowledge. The paper then relates, by way of back- ground, the departmental assessment practices that have played a vital role in the development of my department's current curriculum and in particular in the design of a junior-year seminar in philosophical research required of all majors. After a brief survey of the learning theory literature that has informed its design, I share the content of this junior-year seminar. In the paper's conclusion I provide some initial data that indicates our approach to curriculum and pedagogy has had a positive impact on student achievement with respect to reaching the learning goals associated with doing as opposed to merely studying philosophy.

The Principle of Civility in Academic Discourse

several months ago New York Times columnist David Brooks addressed the lack of civility in recent public discourse. “so . . . you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth. . . . You get people who prefer monologues to dialogue. . . . You get people who . . . loathe their political opponents.”1 one might think that by contrast academia, and especially academic publications, would provide a bastion of civil discourse. alas, even academia has been infiltrated. at least it so appears to me when I read some of what has been recently published in the name of the philosophy of music education. I find that disheartening. However one defines “philosophy,” it minimally entails raising questions whose answers are reasonably debatable. the key word here is “reasonably.” those who are committed to philosophical activity criticize positions they oppose by formulating arguments, giving examples, calling on accepted facts, clarifying the meaning of terms, and bringing to bear the principles of formal and informal logic. and thus they open themselves to counter-criticism of the same

Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew (review)

Reviewed by: Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew Matthew LaGrone (bio) Sharon Portnoff, James A. Diamond, and Martin D. Yaffee, editors. Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew. Brill. xviii, 340. US$148.00 A former University of Toronto professor, Emil Fackenheim (1916-2003) first cut his teeth as a scholar of nineteenth-century Germany philosophy but is best remembered as the foremost interpreter of Jewish religious and philosophical responses to the Holocaust. Works such as To Mend the World and The Jewish Return into History are part of the syllabus for any discussion of Jewish thought after the Holocaust. As Ken Green declares, Fackenheim initiated 'the effort to recover authentic theological significance for Jewish religious faith in the wake of the catastrophe of the Holocaust.' Scholars such as Green are now assessing his critical contributions to this discussion, and Brill has issued a new volume of essays - Emil L. Fackenheim: Philosopher, Theologian, Jew - that will set the standard for future Fackenheim research. Most of the essays are penned by former students, and while the authors are affectionate in remembrance of their teacher, they are also willing to challenge him on philosophical or religious grounds; Fackenheim, surely, would have demanded no less. While all of the essays stress one thread of Fackenheim's thought - whether in his role as a philosopher, theologian, or Jew - each essay rightly acknowledges that these three threads are in the end inextricably [End Page 400] bound together, as the controlling question for Fackenheim from the mid-1960s onward centred on how religious life and philosophical activity would persist when faced with what he called the 'epoch-making event' of the Holocaust. While the destruction of European Jewry haunts either the foreground or the background of most of the papers, others are devoted to the intellectual relations between Fackenheim and, among others, Spinoza and Leo Strauss. Of biographical interest are the reflections that constitute the first part of the book, with John Burbidge's personal remarks being particularly notable. With his philosophical weight and commitment to tradition, Fackenheim brought the Holocaust to a central position in contemporary Jewish philosophy. As Michael Oppenheim notes, the philosophical response to the Holocaust represents the 'first stream of modern Jewish thought that is not anchored in the problematic of Jewish Emancipation, that is, the Jewish entry into Western political, social and cultural life.' A late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century phenomenon, Emancipation was the attempt to secure equal civil, political, economic, and religious rights for European Jews. Prior to the Holocaust, the dominant strain of Jewish philosophy was directed towards the negotiations between Jewish and secular/political identity in Western liberal democracies. The Holocaust, for Fackenheim, challenged, if it did not fully undermine, the optimism of previous thinkers who believed that Jews would flourish in a neutral public sphere. As Oppenheim writes, the 'Holocaust has forced Jewish thought to abandon the single task of translation and to struggle with a terrifying event in order to forge at least a hint of a meaning for Jewish existence.' The challenge, however, was not only political, but also philosophical. Michael Morgan argues that Fackenheim's writings on the Holocaust and its intersection with philosophy drives a wedge between the 'objective' philosophical reasoning of the past - that is, the philosopher stands outside of historical and even personal contexts in his or her arguments - and the much more contextual philosophical reasoning of the present. Philosophy has a personal and political task: it 'must think as resistance' to radical evil. If philosophy is now resistance, so too is Judaism. From this resistance emerges Fackenheim's celebrated formulation of the '614th commandment' - the directive for Jews not to hand Hitler 'posthumous victories' by abdicating their public identity as Jews. Martin Plax and Lionel Rubinoff write eloquently on this formulation. This collection is a signal contribution to the life and work of Fackenheim. The essays gathered here represent the full narrative of his scholarship - from German thought to Jewish life - and allow us to glimpse his private life as well. This volume will be of great value to those who wish to trace the intellectual trajectory of a first-level thinker. [End Page 401] Matthew LaGrone Matthew LaGrone, Program in...