Philosophical Project Research Articles

The Powers of Reflection and The Myth of the Given Mode of Presentation

This article discusses the way Matthew Boyle conceives of "reflection", a notion situated at the very heart of his philosophical project. After surveying how Boyle defines the notion and its function through the conceptual articulation of certain aspects "implicit" in our mental states, I highlight some issues that emerge from this approach. These issues stem from how Boyle thinks about the relationship of reflexive dependence between the domain of implicitness and its conceptual articulation provided through reflection. For Boyle, reflection “simply” abstracts certain features of the modes of presentation, which are always implicitly given. This, however, generates what I call the “myth of the given motion of presentation,” which I try to illustrate and problematize.

SNOW, REPETITION AND OBLIVION: ECOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS IN BEAT FURRER'S RECENT WORK

AbstractThe natural world is a frequent touchstone for the Swiss-born Austrian composer Beat Furrer. In the operatic work Violetter Schnee (2019), for instance, images of snow and coldness take on a central role. Other works, such as Wüstenbuch (2009) and the Spazio Immergente triptych (2015), refer more indirectly to notions of barren landscapes and ecological excess. At the basis of all these works are sentiments of slippage and loss, of far-reaching melancholia and an unrepairable detachment from reality. The composer's multi-layered use of repetition further underlines these sentiments and aids in the creation of constantly shifting sonic landscapes. This article argues that the recurrent use of nature imagery in Furrer's work signposts a latent ecological dimension in his oeuvre. In doing so, the article focuses on the slipperiness of musical repetition, and more particularly on the heavily destabilising power of the loop. Taking Violetter Schnee as the starting point for inquiry, and using Timothy Morton's philosophical project of ‘dark ecology’ as a heuristic framework, the article reads Furrer's recent work against the background of ecological critique.

Hogyan tehetünk szert közvetlen tapasztalatra egy tapasztalatvesztett korban? A dialektika kritikája és a tapasztalat destrukciója Agambennél

In Agamben’s 1978 book Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, the unusual pair of concepts can be equated with transcendental categories of experience: language and time (or the lack of them), although the question of their relationship to each other is left open. Yet, what stands at the intersection of the two is, for Agamben, initially, the notion of childhood, and afterwards the notion of potentiality, which extends later in his work into a philosophy of possibility. The work takes account of the problem of experience in three chapters: the destruction of aesthetics, then of tradition, and finally of experience itself. While for Benjamin the ‘devaluation of experience’ was caused by a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe, the First World War, for Agamben the loss of experience has become a ‘basic experience’ of the bleak everyday: the loss of personal experience means that it has become untellable and inexpressible. The present paper reconstructs the destruction of experience in Agamben’s essay and attempts to connect it with Agamben’s theory of power, known from his long-run philosophical project Homo sacer thus giving both contemporary theories a new relevance.

Philosophy of J. Wahl as an independent phenomenon and as an interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy

The article is aimed at comprehending the perception of J. Wahl’s philosophy in Russia. The central role is assigned to the notion of “unhappy consciousness” in Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit” and to the interpretation of this notion in J. Wahl’s philosophy. The analysis of Russian–language studies dealing with his philosophy allows to outline two primary strands of engagement with it: within the framework of “French Neo–Hegelianism”, and within the framework of existentialism. Th e need to renounce this established characteristic of his philosophy is shown. Two arguments are stated in favour of this, conceptual and substantial. As for the former, the restriction of J. Wahl’s philosophy to the two aforementioned frameworks narrows the real horizons of his research. For the latter, the “unhappy consciousness” in J. Wahl’s philosophy besides the tragic–religious interpretation of Hegel’s ideas also contains pluralistic criticism of Hegel’s “monism” as a part of J. Wahl’s own philosophical project of “metaphysical empiricism”. It is argued that treating the entire corpus of J. Wahl’s writings will allow for a more thorough insight into the history of 20th century French philosophy, in particular “French Neo–Hegelianism” and the Franco-German debates concerning phenomenology and existentialism.

The philosophical questions of the counselees

I propose the view that the philosophical counselling has to be “client oriented” that is, oriented by the counselees’ philosophical questions. Counselees are not always aware of the philosophical aspects of the dilemmas, confusions, conflicts etc. behind their sense of inability to deal satisfactorily with their difficulties. Unless they are already philosophers, they do not tend to conceive their personal philosophical problem as a particular instance of a general philosophical problem. Even if they do, they are not always capable to formulate philosophical questions. Yet they do have philosophical questions. They have such questions because, whatever have caused them to conceive something as a problem in their problem-situation, some ready-made, mostly inherited unexamined, taken for granted philosophical answers to possible philosophical questions are, so to speak, “called into question”. People, including philosophers, learn such answers unknowingly (of course, not as answers but as “evident truths”, “facts”, “moral imperatives” etc.), before it occurs to them that such questions can be asked. Most of our beliefs, including the philosophical ones, belong to that category of answers to unasked questions. The pretension to be able to hold only examined beliefs is, therefore, non-realistic, and it is mistaken to assume that the unexamined ideas are the cause of our difficulties. The philosophical counsellor, as a trained philosopher, should know how to help the counselees realize what is at stake, formulate explicitly their questions, examine the unsatisfactory answers and explore alternatives ones - that is what philosophers normally do when they want to help colleagues, students (or past philosophers) who “got stuck” in their philosophical projects. I deal with the implications of that conviction for philosophical counselling.

The Idea of Communism and the Communism of the Idea

This essay articulates a double helix at work in Badiou’s thought on politics as a condition of philosophy and philosophy as such by focusing on what Badiou calls “the Idea of communism” and we will call “the communism of the Idea.” The former refers to communism as an Idea par excellence, while the latter concerns the Idea as a philosophical communism. The first section of the essay unpacks the Idea of communism as a composite interaction of politics, history, and subjectivity insofar as each of these elements cannot be taken in themselves. Contrary to post-ideology, Badiou condemns the claim that we should live without an ideological framework insofar as this asks us to live without an Idea. The second section will focus on the communism of the Idea as the result of Badiou’s broader philosophical project and its major Platonic gestures. Badiou’s broader concerns pertain to the commitment to live with an Idea as finite, infinite, and transfinite to the endpoint that philosophy itself is characterized to be destined for communism. The crux that anyone can become a serious philosopher if, to paraphrase Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, they gracefully lend themselves to the process of truths as their fundamental commitment.

Making Sense of Hacking

I argue a useful way to conceptualise all of Hacking’s work is through his styles project. This provides us with a simple structure to organise many of Hacking’s main texts and brings into sharp relief two of his major philosophical projects. The first is to explain the stability of science. The second is metaphilosophical: to understand why scientific activity gives rise to certain philosophical difficulties, for example realism disputes. In its most ambitious form, Hacking called his project Philosophical Anthropology, and his aim was to explain how creatures like us, in a world like this have happened to alight on methods of finding out that work so well. I end with a brief discussion of how successfully he realised his goals and an even briefer comparison with two naturalist philosophers, Mark Wilson and Penelope Maddy, who share some of his interests and ambitions.

Primary Sources of History of Russian Philosophy of the XIX-XX Centuries in Russian State Archives: the Current Condition and Prospects of Study

The study contains the review, analysis, assessment of the current state and prospects for further scientific study of the materials of the Russian state archives, including the personal funds of philosophers and philosophical institutions of Russia in the 19th-20th centuries, which are of the greatest relevance to historians of Russian philosophy. In this regard, on the one hand, the study considers the largest research and scientific-publishing historical and philosophical projects, testifying to the already achieved results of the scientific development of vast arrays of archival documents; on the other hand, a number of collections of Russian state archives (federal, regional, municipal, departmental) have been monitored in order to identify archival collections that were little or insufficiently studied from this point of view. The results of the collective research presented in the article can be considered as the beginning of a large systematic work on the analytical mapping of the content of Russian archival collections relevant to the problems of the history of Russian philosophy. The study shows the importance and productivity of conducting parallel research work both with the personal funds of Russian philosophers of the 19th-20th centuries, and with funds containing documentation of philosophical institutions (magazine editorial offices, faculties, departments, research institutes, publishing houses of philosophical literature, professional and thematic associations of philosophers). In this regard, the question was raised about the need to develop historical and philosophical archiving and source studies in Russia, to include this set of subjects into the system of training historians of philosophy, and also about the need to coordinate the joint efforts of historians of Russian philosophy towards the formation of an archive of Russian philosophy as a significant and publicly available mapped resource. The results obtained in the course of the study should contribute to the emergence of the history of Russian philosophy as a dynamically developing branch of Russian science to a qualitatively new source study and methodological level, necessary for solving the large-scale research tasks, related, in particular, to the scientific preparation of academic collections of works by Russian philosophers and the development of modern fundamental history of Russian philosophy.

Imaging emptiness

Abstract Nishitani’s later works, particularly the seminal essay “Kū to soku” and several lectures given at Ōtani University, were devoted to thinking about image and imagination. In this article, I try to reconstruct Nishitani’s theory of imagination in light of these writings. I discuss the role that imagination plays in his philosophical project and how his ideas can contribute to philosophically understanding the phenomenon of imagination itself. The paper starts from Nishitani’s conception of the “elemental imagination”, closely related to Aristotle’s phantasia, from which, according to the Japanese philosopher, artistic and religious images emerge. Since this raises the question of the degree of reality accorded to the imagined and of the cognitive and affective value attributed to artistic and religious images, then the question of the ontology of images in the Greek, Christian and Buddhist traditions, in which the image serves as a means of manifesting the real, is examined. Finally, since Nishitani’s theory of imagination moves between the being and non-being of images, their subjectification and objectification, an attempt is made to situate it with respect to two opposing tendencies in contemporary philosophy, i.e., to recover the ontophanic value of images or to de-ontologize them.

The Potency of Thought

This publication is the first translation into Russian of a text that is key to understanding Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical project. First presented in the form of a paper at a conference in Lisbon in 1987, this text is known to the general reader under the title “On Potentiality”, published in the English-language collection Potentialities (1999). The translation is based on an expanded and refined version of the text, which was first published in Italian in 2005. The article is a detailed commentary on two key concepts of Aristotle’s philosophy — potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia) — clarifying the relationship between them, which plays a key role in Agamben’s works. Wondering about the ontological status of the statement “I can,” Agamben shows that one of the most important forms of potency (potenza) is the experience of deprivation. Clarifying the mode of existence of this kind of experience leads Agamben to the fundamental aporia of the Aristotelian theory of potency, according to which every capacity/potency is at the same time its own incapacity/impotency. The proposed archaeology of the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy aims to highlight not only the ontological but also the ethical and political problems of the Western tradition of thought rooted in this aporia. Agamben links the proposed solution to the posed problem with the development of a mode (modality) of being that prevents every capacity/potency from being fully exhausted in action (actualization). By reading the Aristotelian doctrine of potency as an archaeology of subjectivity, Agamben lays the foundations for his own concept of form-of-life, which is central to his Homo Sacer project.

The I, the Eye, the Voice

This publication marks the first Russian translation of an essay by Giorgio Agamben, originally published in 1980 as a preface to the Italian edition of Paul Valéry’s cycle of works on Monsieur Teste. Agamben’s essay delves into the philosophical genealogy of Valéry’s character, Monsieur Teste, presenting him as an extension and radicalization of the Cartesian gesture of self-justification through the experience of cogito. Through Valéry’s texts, Agamben uncovers a constitutive link between Descartes’ legacy and the ultimate experience of language as revealed in Valéry’s poetry. This exploration identifies the aporia of Cartesian subjectivity, characterized by an inherent split between the experinces of seeing (eye) and hearing (voice). The significance of this essay lies in its connection to Agamben’s broader project on the human voice, which he contemplated throughout the 1980s. While some ideas from the never-completed book The Human Voice surfaced in other works, such as “Childhood and History: The Destruction of Experience” (1978) and “Language and Death: The Place f Negativity” (1982), “The I, the Eye, the Voice” holds a special place in this series. It not only offers an interpretation of Valéry’s experiences within a philosophical context but also lays the groundwork for several key ideas about voice in Agamben’s recent writings. Particularly, these concepts are elaborated upon in the chapter on voice from What is Philosophy? (2016). Therefore, this commentary on Valéry’s writings not only stands as an independent work but also serves as a pivotal element of Agamben’s overarching philosophical project.

“The Music of Being”: a note on a metaphor from Giorgio Agamben’s last volume of <i>Homo Sacer</i>.

The article attempts to clarify the place and meaning of musical-acoustic metaphors that appear in the last volume of Homo Sacer, The Use of Bodies, in connection with the project of modal ontology. The definition of philosophy as the “supreme music,” increasingly common in the pages of his later texts, suggests that this is not just a figurative meaning of musical images but an attempt to give them conceptual weight. To clarify the musical basis of philosophy, the article offers an analysis of a number of statements from The Use of Bodies in the context of Agamben’s early reflections on language and voice (most notably in Language and Death). The analysis allows us to show that musical metaphors mark the direction of Agamben’s positive program, particularly the project of modal ontology, which seeks to resolve the aporia of the ontological apparatus thattraces back to Aristotle. Although the aim of the article is mainly technical — to fit only apparently incidental musical metaphors into the logic of Agamben’s entire philosophical project — it seems that this analysis may be useful in clarifying the basis for understanding and critiquing the thought of the Italian philosopher.

The Event of Deactivation and Deactivation of Event

The paper addresses the notion of the messianic event in the philosophical project of Giorgio Agamben. The central reference for this paper is the book The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, in which the Italian philosopher proposes his conception of messianism. The central event that lies at the foundation of this conception is the event of deactivation of the apparatus of law, which introduces the time of anomia. Based on a close reading of The Time that Remains, the author singles out three key features of the messianic event: 1) This event has already taken place in the past. 2) The event, as conceptualized by Agamben, is deprived of its capturing power and is deactivated and decomposed into parts. 3) The messianic event cannot be a foundation of any positive historical power, which constitutes an important aspect of the critical component of Agamben’s project. As the fifth section of the paper demonstrates, such understanding of the messianic event leads to an abolishment of the horizon of the future itself, which poses obstacles to the political potential of messianism and introduces serious limitations to Agamben’s philosophical strategy: if we abolish the possibility of the future event itself, we have nothing to do but to overlook and neglect the future.

The metaphysics science needs: Deleuze's naturalism

AbstractThis article is aimed at those interested in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the sciences—and this includes philosophers of science working out of the analytic tradition. Deleuze's writings are riddled with references to science and mathematics. And yet, the relation between these references and his philosophical thought is not well understood. In this essay, I investigate the nature of this relation—and I do so by asking whether it is naturalistic. Importantly, I draw on insights from contemporary philosophy of science to contribute to a proper understanding of this issue. I show that and how commentators are hamstrung by their lack of engagement with the philosophy of science; I present an interpretation of Deleuze's philosophical project as attempting to articulate an immanent and primitive form of objective modality; I draw together parts of Deleuze's corpus that are relevant to his treatment of the sciences but are nonetheless rarely studied in conjunction (including his and Guattari's distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ science and his under‐scrutinized statement of interest in ‘the metaphysics science needs’); and I propose a naturalistic interpretation of his engagements with science.

On struggle as experiment: Foucault in dialogue with Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals, for a new approach to theory

Abstract If critical thought is to contribute to liberatory struggle, it arguably requires a general, even structural, theorisation of the nature and sources of power and oppression. This appears to be at odds with the critical project of questioning the immanence of truth to power, as famously framed by Michel Foucault. Yet Foucault’s philosophical project in fact hinged upon his own attempts to grapple with this tension. What is more, his ultimate failure to resolve it led to ambiguities that might be considered generative (especially in light of increased rapprochement between Foucauldian, Marxian, and decolonial International Relations [IR]). Reading Indigenous and decolonial movement intellectuals in tandem with Foucault, alongside the philosophy of science of one of his major influences – Gaston Bachelard – we advocate attentiveness to the ‘experimental’ way in which struggles against capitalist extraction and (neo)colonialism hold together dissonant theoretical – and ontological – commitments when putting forward structural accounts of power. This leads us to an ethos of inquiry that starts from lived thought, as well as to a non-linear approach to the relations between method, theory, and associated ontological commitments, from which scholars are traditionally trained away in social science.

Archaeologies of the Future: Deconstruction, Fantasy, and the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (Fall 2019)

In a 1989 essay entitled “Of Lunacy and Laundry Trucks,” Kath Filmer castigates Derridean deconstruction as “the deluded intelligences of a philosophical cloud-cuckoo-land,” against which she posits mythopoetic fantasy fiction as an alternative form of deconstructive writing that initiates transcendence by simultaneously affirming and unsettling the familiar. Although her oppositional argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Derrida, Filmer’s characterization of fantastic worldbuilding as deconstructive activity also inadvertently highlights the homologous structures and radical potentiality shared by fantasy and Derridean deconstruction, and suggests that a re-evaluation of the two disciplines’ relationship to each other is overdue. This essay will posit that despite its conservative reputation, fantasy fiction, like Derrida’s philosophical project, carries the potential to disrupt received wisdom, unifying grand narratives, and binary hierarchies not by disavowing them, but by, in Derrida’s words, “[i]nhabiting them in a certain way” and “constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed.” The fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin embodies a deconstructive endeavour to contend with radical alterity and the religious, political, racial, cultural, gendered, and sexual difference(s) located in the margins, silences, and traces of myths and grand narratives. With particular attention to the Earthsea novels, I will demonstrate how Le Guin’s writing draws attention to deconstructive movements at work in her mythmaking through her embrace of polyvocal storytelling and her emphasis on magic and religious practice as the continual making and unmaking of worlds through speech acts. In Le Guin’s hands, mythopoetic writing is not the re-inscription of a unified grand narrative, but an affirmation of fragmentary and plural mythologies as openings toward (im)possible sites of encounter with difference and the advent of a justice which is yet-to-come.

A criticism of the notions of Nwansa and Nwanju in the conversational approach to African philosophy

This paper undertakes a critical exposé of the nature of the notions of Nwansa and Nwanju in the conversational approach to African philosophy. Conversational thinking is a philosophical method that allows individual thinkers to engage with each other philosophically on phenomenological issues. It is a formal, intellectual exercise orchestrated by philosophical reasoning in which critical and rigorous questioning creatively unveils new concepts from old ones. I reveal the limitations of this approach as articulated by Jonathan Chimakonam in his contribution to the methodological issues in African philosophy. In doing so, I demonstrate that these limitations are present, in part, in Chimakonam's unclear distinction between conversationalism on the one hand, and Socratic-Hegelian dialectics on the other hand. I also show that Chimakonam's claim that the engagement between Nwansa and Nwanju in conversational relationship does not result in a synthesis but, rather, perpetuates the reshuffling of thesis and anti-thesis, raises questions on the conversational nature of conversationalism, and poses a challenge when applied to existential situations. I argue that conversational philosophy should be perceived as a reconstruction of Socratic-Hegelian Dialectics or a tacit improvement of it. For this reason, I conclude that despite its limitations, a conversational approach through the dynamics of Nwansa and Nwanju is still significant in the development of contemporary African philosophy and in the management of some ideological issues confronting the African philosophical project.

Serious Jokes: Friedrich Schlegel and the Philosophical Use of Irony

Abstract Though irony is a category familiar to rhetoric and literature, its philosophical forms are far less explored, and this is especially true with regards to its articulation in the work of Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel’s engagement with irony is essential to the Romantic philosophical project, one that is fundamentally concerned with contradiction and posits itself as a challenge to and continuation of idealism. Through exploring his relation to the philosophies of Kant and Fichte, this essay demonstrates that Schlegel can deploy irony as a method of taking up the philosophical paradigm of idealism without limiting himself to their systems. He can use Kant and Fichte against themselves, making sincere philosophical arguments through a brazen playfulness. Further, Schlegel’s concept of irony is shown to be a philosophical faculty that is concerned with the limits of philosophy in language. Irony is much more than a rhetorical device – it is a form that allows Schlegel to approach the limits of discursivity from within and so continually stage instances of philosophical contradiction, undermining systematicity. This centering of contradiction is one of Schlegel’s major contributions to the development of German philosophy, critical of those who precede him and spurning their presuppositions of univocal logic. The outworking of Schlegel’s philosophical concern with irony is unmistakably humorous, full of puns, jokes and witticisms, which nevertheless need to be taken seriously. This paper contends that irony is at the crux of Schlegel’s philosophical project, simultaneously the content and mode of his criticism, the source and justification of his humour, and one of Romanticism’s most significant conceptual developments.

Easy games are still games for Suits

ABSTRACT Bernard Suits is commonly thought to have defined games as challenges. This paper argues that Suits could not have done so without ruining his larger philosophical project. It then argues that he did not do so. Suits defined game playing in quantitative terms (i.e. being more or less efficient) not qualitative ones (e.g. difficulty, struggle). The paper concludes by exploring the consequences of this shift in perspective.

Revisiting the Kantian legacy in Habermas: the philosophical project of modernity and decolonial critiques to rationality and cosmopolitanism

This paper deals with Amy Allen’s critique of Habermas's theory of modernity, democracy, and cosmopolitanism. I will focus on her arguments that touch on the role of rationality. Allen's critique of Habermas will be presented, especially where she argues that focusing on rationality is ethnocentric and promotes the political exclusion of subaltern groups. The extent to which Allen's critiques affect the emancipatory potential of Habermasian theory will next be assessed. It is finally argued that Allen's position leads to a denial of the distinction between social rationality and irrationality as legitimate criteria. The consequences of such a position for the political sphere will then be analyzed.