Philosophical Project Research Articles

Alien technology, conjunction and ergodicity

AbstractIn a recent refreshing paper, Cowie (2022, The Philosophical Quarterly) analyses the hypothesis of artificial origin of the mysterious interstellar object 1I/2017 U1 ʻOumuamua, as well as the wider question of justification of the artefactual origin explanation for anomalous astronomical phenomena. This highly commendable philosophical project should be further developed in order to establish more general methodology for dealing with traces and manifestations of extraterrestrial intentional actors. In the present note, I demonstrate a couple of weaknesses of the standard account, mainly dealing with philosophy of technology, and suggest ways of improving upon it.

Pathways to Interactions in Philosophical Training: Dewey’s Educational Philosophy and Embodied Learning

"This paper builds on John Dewey’s views on interactions to suggest pathways for enriching the study of philosophy. Along with the notions of body-mind and organism-environment transactions, interactions are part of a philosophical project with transformative implications for education as well. The first part of the paper will contextualize Dewey’s discussion of interactions with regard to his philosophy of experience and democratic theory. The second one will propose two criteria with regard to enriching philosophical training in ways that engage the mind and the body - increasing sociocultural awareness and generating integrative learning experiences – and will add a few examples of how the study of philosophy could benefit from applying an interactionist perspective. Keywords: education, experience, interaction, philosophy, John Dewey. "

Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy by Myles F. Burnyeat

Reviewed by: Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy by Myles F. Burnyeat Allison Piñeros Glasscock and Elizabeth C. Shaw and Staff* BURNYEAT, Myles F. Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xii + 395 pp. Cloth, $120.00 The eleven essays in this collection were originally published while Burnyeat was at All Souls College, Oxford (1996–2006) and during his subsequent retirement. Like volume 3 of the same series, the collection was published posthumously, with editorial work undertaken by Carol Atack, Malcolm Schofield, and David Sedley. Part I contains seven essays on topics in ontology and epistemology; part II contains four essays on physics and optics. The figures examined include the usual suspects—Plato and Aristotle (plus an appearance by Aquinas)—but Burnyeat also draws our attention to some less appreciated accomplices to the ancient philosophical project: the Platonist commentator Numenius of Apamea, the Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, and Anaxarchus of Abdera, a follower of Democritus. The result is a collection that showcases one of Burnyeat's greatest strengths: his ability to identify the clues left for us in ancient texts and to produce from them compelling and exquisitely detailed accounts of what ancient philosophers were thinking and why. One of the final papers of the volume illustrates Burnyeat's detective acumen. "Archytas and optics" starts from the following question: Why is optics absent from the mathematical curriculum Plato sketches in the Republic? Burnyeat hypothesizes that if mathematical optics existed when the Republic was written, Plato likely excised it from the curriculum on the grounds that the discipline would lead the student to focus on visible things and their appearances. The bulk of the paper is devoted to establishing the antecedent of this conditional. Burnyeat argues that mathematical optics did exist at the time of the Republic's writing, and he posits the noncanonical Pythagorean Archytas as its founder. To recognize the significance of this lacuna in the Republic's curriculum and to provide a persuasive identification of the founder of an entire discipline is already to make a substantial contribution to scholarship. But how Burnyeat arrives at his central conclusion is equally impressive. He takes the reader on a tour of Aristotle, Plato, and Iamblichus, fragment 4 of Archytas, and the Apologia of Apuleius (whom readers might better recognize as the novelist responsible for The Golden [End Page 345] Ass). The result is not only an answer to the paper's central question, but a deeper understanding of the broader intellectual network in which canonical figures like Plato and Aristotle operated. No fragment is too small to catch Burnyeat's notice, nor is any line in a manuscript too faint. Part I of the collection includes Burnyeat's famous paper "Kinēsis vs. energeia: a much-read passage in (but not of) Aristotle's Metaphysics." The central argument is that Metaphysics 9.6.1048b18–35 is out of place. It was written by Aristotle for a different context and should not be printed in book 9. Because this article is so well known, I will not dwell on the details of the argument, but once again Burnyeat's methodology is worthy of comment. The first part of the paper offers a careful examination of the Metaphysics's manuscript tradition that attends both to what is present and to what is absent. For example, we learn that the focus passage is missing from an entire branch of the tradition, which Burnyeat suggests is the result of a learned excision. Later, Burnyeat develops a psychological sketch of the scribe of manuscript Ab beginning from the observation that a faint line is drawn through part of the focus passage. He argues that the scribe's motivation is not disapproval of the passage's contents but a desire to keep his text and commentary in sync. Observations like these provide the foundation for Burnyeat's thesis about the philosophical import of the focus passage, and they demonstrate that the physical record can be just as vital to reconstructions of ancient philosophy as the words that the record preserves. Occasionally, Burnyeat offers more direct admonitions to his readers about how to approach ancient philosophy. A key lesson...

Epoché and Reduction in Husserl's Phenomenology

The text outlines some of the main theoretical-methodological procedures in Edmund Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. The first part offers a brief introduction to Husserl's general philosophical project. In the second part, the question of the phenomenological epoché is considered, as a first, negative procedure of the phenomenological reduction. A comparison is also made between the practice of epoché by Husserl and Descartes’ methodical doubt. The third part turns to the different types of reductions and examines the relationship between them.

Fielding Fractured Masculinities: Implications for Nonrepresentational Educational Research Methodology in the Philosophy of Erin Manning

In this paper, I put Erin Manning’s philosophical project into conversation with gender theory and consider possibilities regarding what it means to theorize masculinities in educational research methodology. To do this, I first speak to the urgency for reconceptualizing masculinities in education, outline how educational researchers have previously theorized the field, and problematize previous work that theorized masculinity as a relatively stable and monolithic identity marker. Following this, I consider what Manning’s process philosophy might offer educational researchers in the field of masculinities. In thinking with masculinities, the ongoing and lived experiences of gender, and Manning, I offer “fractured masculinities,” which theorizes masculinities as multiple, mobile, relational, contextual, intersectional, and fractured.

Not-knowing-in-advance: Trying to think and see as if not doing a PhD.

In this piece, the writer offers up a tentative exemplification of how reframing a thesis in terms of what it can do rather than what it is has the potential to generate a joyful-artful engagement with the PhD process and to engender a more response-able relationship with the world. By refusing to engage in the dis-abling processes prescribed by institutional expectations of doctoral study, the act of writing emerges as a powerful antidote to the constraints of the neoliberal, neurotypical, university. Exploring a mode of expression that intertwines text and image, the writer enacts Erin Manning’s philosophical projects of research-creation, artfulness and thought-in-motion.

:Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800

:<i>Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800</i>

SOME-WHERE OVER THE RAINBOW

"Nowadays, a far graver mistake is made: race is confused with nation and a sovereignty analogous to that of really existing peoples is attributed to ethnographic or. rather linguistic grqups. " Ernest Renan.18821 Although Jacques Derrida is not usually thoLlght of in terms of the problematics of nations and nationalism, the term "endless deferral" cannot help but evoke his philosophical project, and it is to his picture of logocentrism that I initially tum in elaborating ,South Africa's "preeminent" status as a nation whose identity always seems to reside in some "elsewhere" space. Apartheid may well be considered as the last 10- gocentric colonial structure (unless, that is, one wishes to included Bosnia under this unpleasant rubric) to finally collapse.1 Further its collapse may be considered the end of a state apparatus formed as an institutionalization of logocentric thinking (something unusual for Derrida who very rarely talks in terms of practices). Let me then begin this paper by turning to the idea of logocentrism and slowly proceed through it to the theme of national identity and its deployment by various theorists. The purpose of this paper is not to tum to a specific example of a form of national identity and offer an analysis, but rather to outline or sketch some of the current theoretical debates on the subject in broad brushstrokes so that one might begin to notice the similarities and differences, the links and discontinuities, the global and the particular characteristics of both South Africa and those other places and times that have witnessed the births of new nations from their previous (colonial) incarnations.

Hume’s Transformation of Academic Skepticism

Hume described himself as an Academic skeptic and aligned himself with the skepticism of Socrates and Cicero. I argue, though, that Hume transformed the meaning of Academic skepticism by associating it with an experimental rather than dialectical method. In this essay, I distinguish between those aspects of Cicero’s Academic skepticism that Hume adopted and those he discarded in his presentation of mitigated skepticism in the first Enquiry. I then consider the implications of Hume’s transformation of Academic skepticism for Hume’s polite eloquence in the Essays, particularly the essays on happiness, which are often described as possessing “Ciceronian” and “dialectical” elements. Hume’s transformation of Academic skepticism is essential to helping readers understand not only Hume’s alleged neo-Hellenism, but also the aims of his philosophical project.

A turning point? Interview with Emmanuel Falque

An interview with the professor and philosopher Emmanuel Falque, in the context of his passage through the University of Coimbra, in the context of the Journée Internationale d’études philosophiques, which will take place on 26 May 2022, at the Faculty of Letters, entitled: «L’im‑pensable : Aux confins de la phénoménalité». In this interview, In this interview, our author coming to his entire philosophical project, from its origins to his most recent scientific production. The philosopher tells us about the provenance of his thought through his main philosophical works and his existential interpretation and phenomenological reading of patristic and medieval philosophy as well as his debates with phenomenology and contemporary philosophy, particularly French philosophy. Here the epistemological and metaphysical question between philosophy and theology, literature and aesthetics, psychoanalysis and phenomenology is also addressed; the concept of «corps épandu», the corporeality or the embodiment as the cardinal point of human finitude and its incessant search to think our «humanity in common». Emmanuel Falque also presents us in this interview the genesis and the fundamental idea of Hors phénomène, as the central axis of his global philosophical project, but also as the revelation of a certain «turning point», inflexion or even of «radicalization» of his démarche, as well as its possible consequences to rethink aesthetics, ethics, politics and theology. The French thinker also talks to us here about the future of philosophy and the new horizons of his reflection (the new triptych...), about the authors and figures in the history of thought (philosophers or others) who have influenced and impacted his own philosophical‑existential path. Thus, the work of a thinker-philosopher is always an ex-position of himself to others, permanently thinking the world of life, the embodiment of reason in the folds of history.

Obliquity of the impastoed being

In this article we will try to elaborate a reflection around aesthetic experience, more specifically a phenomenology of artwork (Soutine/de Kooning), in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought. Even if the French philosopher has not yet dedicated an autonomous work to the aesthetic question, such reflection appears abundantly dispersed and sparse in his various writings. Among others, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were Falque's artists of choice, their work most closely reflected his underlying philosophical thesis. The preference for the figurative, that which in us resists phenomenology, the incarnation as such, would thus bring the philosophical concept and the artistic intuition closer together. However, between figurative and non-figurative or abstract thought, is there not another possibility of thinking them together, without necessarily having to give primacy to one or the other or opposing them? The idea of an oblique incarnate thought (figuration-abstraction, resistance-deflagration, word-silence), or of the diagonal/oblique impastoed being (presence in absence, metamorphosed transcendental materiality, indirect ontology), might also be a third way of thinking about the great philosophical questions between realism and idealism, immanence and transcendence, visible and invisible, metaphysics and phenomenology. In this sense, the artistic work of Chaïm Soutine and de Kooning may be the aesthetic expression of incarnate thought, as a way of primordial access to being, to the world and to another, in the joining in act of the figurative and the abstract, as if multiple possibilities or dimensions of being inhabited in the same being (the articulation of the in-itself and the outside of the self, madness and normality, dream and reality...). Not by chance both were the subject of a recent joint exhibition, from which we propose this reflection, in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought on finitude, which his most recent book radicalises. Our thesis, based on these two artists, aims to affirm that art, whether figurative or abstract, starts from an inalienable material dimension, that is to say, a sensitive dimension, the impasted (body) being, to the point that we may say that Hors phénomène maintains in itself this possibility of articulation between presence to the self and the outside of the self, distance and proximity, immanence and transcendence, even if here and there one can glimpse in its philosophical project an ontological preference for the figurative. However, in our view, what brings together Falque’s philosophy and the work of both artists is the fact that they are the expression of an embodied thought, whether through conceptual experience (philosophy) or through perceptual experience (aesthetics).

Konkrete Geschichtlichkeit?

Abstract This article reconstructs Herbert Marcuse’s first and widely ignored philosophical project, as set out in his texts published from 1928 to 1933. In these texts, Marcuse tried to put in dialogue ideas from Heidegger and Marx to articulate a dialectic phenomenology of historical existence. This attempt, of great originality and philosophical ambition, was marked by tensions arising from the peculiar status given to the ontology of historicity in a framework of thought that maintained strong links with Marx. By analysing this early philosophical project of one of the icons of the international student movement, theoretical tensions can be detected, which clarify the subsequent approach of this thinker as a member of the so-called Frankfurt School.

Verschil en gewoonte: Deleuzes anti-Hegeliaanse kritiek van het bewustzijn

Difference and Habit: Deleuze anti-Hegelian critique of consciousness Since Antiquity, habit has been understood as a second nature, as something that we develop in a conscious or unconscious way, and which directs and structures both our cognitive and practical lives – our consciousness and our actions. For Hegel, habit effectuates the transition from nature to spirit or consciousness, thus forming the basis of morality. Habit thus constitutes an essential stage in the development of the mind and a crucial aspect of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology. Habit also plays a crucial role in the thinking of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who characterizes his philosophical project as anti-Hegelian or anti-dialectical. Even though many works examine the relationship between Deleuze and Hegel, almost none of these discuss the concept of habit of these authors, and the role that it plays in Deleuze’s so-called anti-Hegelianism. In this article, I address the concept of habit in Difference and Repetition, and the role it plays in Deleuze’s critique of Hegel. I also compare this concept with Hegel’s own conception of habit in his Anthropology. I show that Deleuze certainly does not understand repetition as second nature as Hegel does, because then it is impossible to account for the productive power of the unconscious or the sub-representative, and of real creativity. I distinguish my interpretation of habit in Deleuze from that of a number of other authors, who, in my view, do not draw all the conclusions from Deleuze’s interpretation of Hume. I then expound Deleuze’s original notion of habit and compare it with Hegel’s.

Ética participativa em Bakhtin. Pandemia e pansemia

ABSTRACT The philosophical project that Bakhtin conceived at the beginning of the 20th century aims to find a moral philosophy that modifies the performance of man in daily life and in culture. The date [1924?] on which its writing is presumed would indicate the direction that Bakhtinian thought was taking, proposing an utopian cultural transformation in a time marked by enormous political tensions, and the social construction of a real subject, whose moral responsibility historically situated would turn into a mode of participatory action. Since that historical moment, a century has passed, and today it may be opportune to confront it with our present, in a planet governed by the capitalist economy with its population living a pandemic of great proportions. Far from establishing a comparison with that ethic project, we will offer some notes and images that encourage reflection on a philosophy that we do not believe we can cover in its complexity.1

Современные исследования философии Владимира Соловьева: Томас Немет

The article examines the research of Thomas Nemeth, the largest modern American specialist in the history of Russian philosophy, related to the reception of Kantian philosophy, phenomenology in Russia, as well as the work of V.S. Solovyov. Russian philosophy has historically been characterized by a weak interest in epistemological problems, which affected the ways of development of “Kantian studies” in Russia: the perception of the ideas of the German thinker was set by ethical and ontological perspectives, which led, among other things, to the fact that the so-called ontological turn, having started in German neo-Kantianism in the last quarter of the XIX – first quarter of the XX centuries, was largely consonant with Russian philosophy of the beginning of the last century. It is concluded that the key role in such a perception of Kantian philosophy was played by the early Vl. Solovyov. The article T. Nemeth's interpretation of Solovyov's legacy is critically comprehended as an evidence of the failure of the philosophical project proper, the author's thesis about the inherent “ontological error” of V. Solovyov's philosophy, allegedly not allowing the Russian philosopher, with all the depth of the formulation of philosophical problems, to develop ways to resolve them properly, is analyzed. The conclusion is made that trying to comprehend the Russian philosophical tradition as a whole, Nemeth continues, albeit with a number of reservations, the line of its humanistic interpretation. The new English translation of “The Justification of Good”, made by T. Nemeth, is compared with the previous translation made by N. Duddington, being widely used in the English-speaking world. The conclusion is made about the comparative advantages of the new translation.

A Gadamerian-Hermeneutic Reflection on T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats’s Poetics

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the hermeneutical dimension of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats’s poetics vis-à-vis H.-G. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. The study stems from a remarkable observation that Eliot and Yeats not only anticipate what Gadamer has systematically explained in his philosophical project, but they also present a new kind of poetry that can easily yield itself to a Gadamerian reading—one that is primarily based on the principle of hermeneutical situation and dialogue. The article strives for a critical study that focuses on the relevance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to reading and interpreting the poetry of Eliot and Yeats, as well as uncovering the underlying kinship between their hermeneutic reflection on the nature of poetry, truth, history, and understanding. The analysis undertaken has yielded interesting results, bestowing Eliot and Yeats as poets-philosophers who are genuinely aware of what Gadamer has advanced in his philosophy. This hermeneutic consciousness ingrained in Eliot and Yeats’s thoughts is the main motive that drives them to experiment with tradition, myth, symbolism, and musicality, in order to provide the reader with dialogic poetry, which Gadamer himself highly admires for its ability to facilitate the disclosure of truth.

‘The Father of the Experimental Philosophy of the Human Mind’: Descartes and the Scottish Enlightenment’s Moral Philosophers

Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart were exponents of the experimental philosophy of mind in the Scottish Enlightenment. The unique character of their philosophical project lies in the adoption of the mind-matter dualism as a necessary condition for the study of mental phenomena. This fact led them to recognize the importance of Descartes, both for being the first to clearly delimit the mental and material realms and for emphasizing the relevance of reflection as an instrument for the study of mind. But at the same time, the Frenchman was also the target of their criticism for dismissing the value of experimentation and appealing to hypotheses to explain natural behaviour. This paper aims to review this group of Scottish philosophers’ views of the mind, explaining, at the same time, the reasons for their ambivalent attitude towards Descartes. In order to make sense of this ambivalence, I will argue that it is useful to bear in mind two different aspects of the methodology that the Scots put forward to study mental phenomena: firstly, the one between analogy and reflection and, secondly, the one between induction and hypothesis making.

Decolonizing American Philosophy

Decolonizing American Philosophy

Response‐dependence and normativity

AbstractA non‐normative, response‐dependent view about morality can avoid metaphysical extravagance and explain why the extension of some non‐normative concepts can non‐accidentally match the extension of moral concepts. These features make it a plausible reductive account of moral properties. However, some philosophers believe that a response‐dependent account of morality must contain an irreducibly normative component. I argue that it is impossible to defend such a position while retaining the response‐dependent nature of morality in the ordinary sense. However, I believe that philosophers' motivation for engaging in such a philosophical project should be taken seriously. The underlying concern is that the plausibility of a response‐dependent view makes people's strong commitment to irreducible normativity a puzzle that requires an explanation. I explain why people systematically fail to give up this commitment without claiming that they rationally cannot give it up, which means a non‐normative response‐dependent view is immune from such a challenge.

Introduction: Special Issue on the Twelfth-Century Logical Schools

Abstract This special issue grew out of a small conference The Known &amp; the Unknown: Exploring Twelfth-Century Philosophy, which was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, hosted by the Saxo Institute, and held at the University of Copenhagen in April 2018. Its central topic was the many, mostly unexplored, commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry that constitute the key textual evidence for a fascinating phenomenon that, although it played a pivotal role in the philosophical revival of Western Europe, remains frustratingly underexplored to this day: the logical schools of the twelfth century. The present introduction has two parts. In the first part, John Marenbon lays out the background to this special issue of Vivarium as a whole, explaining both what the philosophical project pursued by twelfth-century logicians was and how, and how far, the historical project of understanding it has progressed over the last two hundred years. In the second part, Heine Hansen briefly presents the issue and its contents.