Version Of Philosophy Research Articles

Goethean Morphology, Hegelian Science: Affinities and Transformations

Goethean Morphology, Hegelian Science: Affinities and Transformations Brady Bowman I Goethe’s conception of morphology had a major impact on Hegel’s philosophical methodology at a point in time when Hegel was beginning to distance himself from Schelling and to confront dead-ends in his own previous conception. In 1803, Schelling left Jena to accept a chair in Würzburg, thus effectively ending the symphilosophical partnership that formed the element of Hegel’s first years at the university.1 At about this time, Hegel must have begun to question the viability of Schellingian “intellectual intuition” as a mode of philosophical cognition, and to have doubts whether his own conception of a “skeptical” logic was sufficient to justify it via negationis. Up to this point, Hegel had proposed that a methodical construction of self-contradictions (antinomies) in the concepts of the finite understanding was enough to demonstrate that the absolute standpoint of intellectual intuition was the only positive alternative; but now he presumably recognized the inherent limitations of the skeptical method as originally conceived.2 At what therefore appears to have been a moment of incipient reorientation, Hegel was introduced to Goethe’s methods of botanical and optical inquiry, both through Goethe himself and through Franz Joseph Schelver, newly arrived in Jena to fill the vacated chair of botany and to manage the botanical garden under Goethe’s direct supervision.3 The channels through which Hegel gained familiarity with Goethean science and the extent of his knowledge have been reconstructed by Eckart Förster from the historical evidence.4 Förster has also pointed out the ways in which Goethe’s “method of intuitive understanding” was able to be made fruitful for what eventually became the Phenomenology of Spirit. Förster has clearly seen a key influence here which, remarkably, previous scholars failed to recognize, and I find his reconstruction both of Goethe’s methods and of his influence on Hegel persuasive and fruitful. However, I also see a number of difficulties confronting Förster’s thesis, and they are not merely problems of detail. Rather, they concern the very possibility of adapting Goethe’s methods to the philosophical project Hegel was specifically pursuing. Although I do think the difficulties can be overcome, doing so entails the introduction of metaphysical assumptions that weigh against Hegel’s claim to be working out a scientific philosophy without presuppositions.5 [End Page 159] So what I want to do in the following is first, in the second section, to review Förster’s reconstruction of Goethe’s “method of intuitive understanding” and its applicability to Hegel’s procedure in the Phenomenology and elsewhere. On the basis of this reconstruction, I will then, in the third section, point out the fundamental difficulties it must successfully confront if it is to become fully convincing. In the fourth section, I will draw on Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s analysis of the relational structure of the Hegelian “concept” (der Begriff) in order to suggest how the aforementioned difficulties can be resolved. The fifth section offers a thumbnail sketch of the sequence of development of the first four chapters of the Phenomenology, illustrating how Hegel’s relational ontology of the “concept” grounds his morphological procedures. The brief concluding section discusses the significance of my findings for judging the independent plausibility of Hegel’s philosophy. Before I turn to the main business of this paper, however, an important clarification is in order. It is necessary to adapt Goethe’s methods (and to some extent their underlying methodology) in order to make them applicable to the kinds of philosophical objects Hegel is concerned with. The necessity of such adaptation ought not to be misunderstood as indicative of any imperfection in Goethe’s methods; nor ought it to suggest that the Goethean methods undergo any refinement in the hands of the philosopher Hegel. The claim to be argued for in this paper is not that Hegel somehow outdid Goethe by giving an improved philosophical version of Goethe’s methods. Hegel’s adaptation is necessitated wholly by the nature of the objects whose morphogenesis they are intended to make visible. In exactly similar fashion, Goethe himself clearly was forced to adapt the methods he...

HAS THE GREAT SEPARATION FAILED?

In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla illuminates why “political theology” remains relevant today, in a world we might have assumed was thoroughly secularized. Lilla suggests that political theology is the norm, and that Christianity inadvertently gave birth to an exception. But the exception—liberal theology, or a separation of church and state that would give full play to religious impulses—was doomed. Religious impulses were not satisfied by mere moral sentiment, as offered by Rousseau and Kant; and Hegel opened the door to messianism—and eventually to Hitler—by bringing a philosophical version of redemption into liberal theology.

A Postmodern Defence of Universal Liberal Legal Norms

The idea of universal liberal legal norms has long been under attack from a variety of sources. One of the most sustained and sophisticated philosophical versions of such an attack is found in the work of Martin Heidegger. His argument from the social embeddedness of the self to the ultimate contingency and groundlessness of any claims of normativity has been highly influential across a number of fields. This paper argues that legal theorists who wish to contest such a view should look to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In his critique of Heidegger, Levinas affirms the significance of the human beyond the particular context in which we find ourselves embedded. Levinas wrote very little about law; his main focus was on ethical responsibility and the claim that an “other” makes on me. I argue that legal responsibility is fundamentally different, concerned instead with the claims that a self can make on others. Drawing upon Levinas’ understanding of the self as constituted through ethical responsibility, I argue that a Levinasian account of justice can support liberal-democratic norms such as freedom, equality and dignity. Indeed, Levinas himself endorsed universal human rights and even indicated a strong affinity with Kant’s idea of justice. What he denied, however, was that justice is a fully rational and coherent concept. I argue that this does not render justice incoherent or call into question the basic status of the norms of justice. Rather, a Levinasian account of justice shifts the emphasis to the community practice of reasoning about universal norms, a practice that is never complete. I further suggest that such a practice of reasoning should be familiar to lawyers as it bears a strong resemblance to common law reasoning.

Vari aspetti del nulla assoluto nelle filosofie di Nishida e Tanabe

This paper deals with the conception of Absolute Nothingness (zettai mu), one of the pivotal terms in Japanese contemporary philosophy. This idea is generally considered as the philosophical version of the Buddhist notion of Śūnyatā (emptiness). In the thinking of Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime, two leading philosophers of the so called Kyōto School, Absolute Nothingness becomes the fundamental tool to build a dialectics which is meant to overcome Hegelian system.

Nietzsche’s Unmodern Thinking

In his four Unmodern Observations (Unzeitmassige Betrachtungen) of the 1870s, Nietzsche confronted early philosophical versions of positions more recently discussed under such rubrics as globalization and the end of history. What he intended by marking these essays as unmodern or untimely was to designate their critical stance toward both the philistine self-congratulation of the era and the Hegelian philosophy with which it explained and justified itself. Basic to this Hegelian conception of history is a concept of the world-historical event, a turning point that manifests itself in the world of political states. The Unmodern series broke off with Nietzsche's essay on Wagner, where he attempted to articulate his own non-statist version of a great event. The current essay diagnoses the interruption of this project as a failure to fully abandon Hegelian thinking, and outlines a reading of Nietzsche's later, more compelling (and unHegelian) concept of the great event.

Introduction: “More Trouble than They Are Worth”

This essay, which is the editor's introduction to part 1 of a multipart symposium on quietism, also constitutes his call for symposium papers. The symposium is meant be comprehensive. It is described as political and broadly cultural as well as religious, and in religious terms is said to cover not only the Catholic and Protestant quietisms (most properly so called) of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also the proto-quietisms of the medieval Western church and reputedly quietist aspects of the Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, early Hasidic, Shi'ite, Jain and other Indic, Taoist, and Zen religious traditions. This introduction emphasizes the secular approaches, mostly antipolitical or postphilosophical, that wear the adjective “quietist” metaphorically, including the postmodern currents that Martha Nussbaum has named “hip quietism” and the “minimalist” philosophical version developed by Wittgenstein and some of his successors, notably Richard Rorty. This introduction concludes with attention to Rorty's late essay “Naturalism and Quietism,” then with a dedication of the entire symposium to Rorty's memory.

Is Standpoint Theory a Resource for Feminist Epistemology? An Introduction

Like most questions, the title of the session on which this collection of papers is based delineates a particular set of options and shapes the space of possible answers.1 In this sense, it is a loaded question that reflects the shift in focus as standpoint theory has been revisited in recent literature. As Janet Kourany notes in her contribution, the question is not whether standpoint theory is the resource for feminist epistemology; the question is whether, and if so how, it might be a resource to serve the goals of feminist epistemology successfully. Sandra Harding's anthology, The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, both documented and fueled this shift (Harding 2004). The fundamental ideas underlying the more recent conversation about standpoint theory begin with its successes as a methodology, particularly in the social sciences. These successes strongly suggest that there is something worth exploring in standpoint theory, even if it is not possible to develop it fully as a feminist epistemology. Some of these successes also raise questions about knowledge production in the sciences more generally and thus about the broader implications of feminist epistemology and research.2 Each of the contributors to this collection has responded to the title question affirmatively, although not without ambivalence. Each offers sugges tions for how standpoint theory might be a resource for feminist epistemology and philosophy of while at the same time indicating its limits. In her contribution, Harding notes, It is reflection on its [standpoint theory's] uses in feminist research ... that informed its initial formulations as an epistemology and philosophy of science (emphasis added). Harding notes that this makes the philosophical version of standpoint theory a naturalized epistemology. However, as Harding now sees it, this abstract version of standpoint theory becomes controversial in part because of the diversity of its uses as a logic of inquiry. Rather than resolving these controversies through further abstraction, Harding welcomes the controversies as a means of furthering feminist knowledge projects. For Harding, the plurality of standpoint theories and the controversies to which they give rise are themselves a resource for feminist epistemology.

Are our emotional feelings relational? A neurophilosophical investigation of the James–Lange theory

The James–Lange theory considers emotional feelings as perceptions of physiological body changes. This approach has recently resurfaced and modified in both neuroscientific and philosophical concepts of embodiment of emotional feelings. In addition to the body, the role of the environment in emotional feeling needs to be considered. I here claim that the environment has not merely an indirect and thus instrumental role on emotional feelings via the body and its sensorimotor and vegetative functions. Instead, the environment may have a direct and non-instrumental, i.e., constitutional role in emotional feelings; this implies that the environment itself in the gestalt of the person–environment relation is constitutive of emotional feeling rather than the bodily representation of the environment. Since the person–environment relation is crucial in this approach, I call it the relational concept of emotional feeling. After introducing the relational concept of emotional feeling, the present paper investigates the neurophilosophical question whether current neuroimaging data on human emotion processing and anatomical connectivity are empirically better compatible with the “relational” or the “embodied” concept of emotional feeling. These data lend support to the empirical assumption that neural activity in subcortical and cortical midline regions code the relationship between intero- and exteroceptive stimuli in a relational mode, i.e. their actual balance, rather than in a translational mode, i.e., by translating extero- into interoceptive stimulus changes. Such intero-exteroceptive relational mode of neural coding may have implications for the characterization of emotional feeling with regard to phenomenal consciousness and intentionality. I therefore conclude that the here advanced relational concept of emotional feeling may be considered neurophilosophically more plausible and better compatible with current neuroscientific data than the embodied concept as presupposed in the James–Lange theory and its modern neuroscientific and philosophical versions.

Language, Belief and Human Beings

We may think of the core of Cartesian dualism as being the thesis that each of us is essentially a non-material mind or soul: ‘non-material’ in the sense that it has no weight, cannot be seen or touched, and could in principle continue to exist independently of the existence of any material thing. That idea was, of course, of enormous importance to Descartes himself, and we may feel that having rejected it, as most philosophers now have, we have rejected what is of greatest philosophical significance in Descartes' conception of the self. That would, I believe, be a mistake. Something akin to the Cartesian mind-body contrast still has a pervasive grip on philosophical thought across a whole range of issues. The contrast is, I believe, reflected in common philosophical versions of the contrasts between mind and body, fact and value, reason and emotion, word and deed, reason and persuasion, and no doubt others. My central concern in this paper is, however, a familiar philosophical understanding of the relation between, on the one hand, belief and its articulation in words and, on the other, action or feeling.

The grammar of fate in Lorca’s Bodas de sangre

Though tragic fate is traditionally taken as an emblem of what is inevitable and given, here I argue that Lorca’s tragedy Bodas de sangre at once re-enacts and disturbs fate’s inevitability. While the characters lament being controlled by destiny, they simultaneously construct their own destiny in their use of language. The revelation of fate’s fictionality is important for the present, because the modern philosophical versions of subjectivity that still define us today are predominantly tragic. Since the rational subject of law that enables liberal democratic politics emerges from tragic conditions, what would we gain by becoming aware that essentialized constructs such as destiny are not given but created? Would this realization free subjective agency from the constraints from which it emerges? What is the status of ‘necessary fictions’ such as destiny, the subject or the law, fictions that are created but we cannot easily renounce, because they constitute what we are?

The grammar of fate in Lorca's Bodas de sangre

Though tragic fate is traditionally taken as an emblem of what is inevitable and given, here I argue that Lorca’s tragedy Bodas de sangre at once re-enacts and disturbs fate’s inevitability. While the characters lament being controlled by destiny, they simultaneously construct their own destiny in their use of language. The revelation of fate’s fictionality is important for the present, because the modern philosophical versions of subjectivity that still define us today are predominantly tragic. Since the rational subject of law that enables liberal democratic politics emerges from tragic conditions, what would we gain by becoming aware that essentialized constructs such as destiny are not given but created? Would this realization free subjective agency from the constraints from which it emerges? What is the status of ‘necessary fictions’ such as destiny, the subject or the law, fictions that are created but we cannot easily renounce, because they constitute what we are?

Culture

Culture

Mixed Feelings

Diaspora 8:1 1999 Mixed Feelings Ken Hirschkop University of Manchester Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress. Bruce Robbins. New York: New York University Press, 1999. At the very beginning of Feeling Global, Bruce Robbins remarks that "it is not a surprise or scandal that any given version of internationalism turns out to be local and conjunctural rather than universal" (7). Not a surprise, because it's axiomatic for recent thinking about culture that every attempt to transcend the limits of a "local" standpoint is doomed from the outset. Not a scandal, because Robbins thinks he can fashion a version of left-wing internationalism that has moral force in spite ofthis. It's a difficult task, and Robbins not only refuses to cut corners, he insists on describing each corner in detail before carefully navigating his way around it. Had he been a sailor on Odysseus's ship, he would have thrown the Sirens megaphones before attempting to sail past their island. From the very beginning, then, Robbins wants us to understand that the internationalism he will argue for is, as he would put it, "worldly": not "an infinitely deferred ideal ofjustice for all" (3), but a kind of feeling and sympathy—really a mix of feelings and sympathies —tied to a particular "conjuncture." And when I say from the very beginning, I mean not from the very first page, but from the cover of the book, which announces, so to speak, the first and most difficult element of this conjuncture. The striking aerial photograph of Florence that dominates it, and the similar photographs of Naples, Athens, and Rome that front the separate chapters, all taken from a bomber piloted by Robbins's father in World War II, are visible metaphors for American post-war hegemony. The ability to project military force, to push capitalist relations and commodities across borders, and to restructure the cultures of other nations through the virus of the mass media are all neatly summed up by "the confident mobility and the implicit threat that go with the aerial perspective" (3). The violence of bombing has always signaled a peculiar combination of detachment and force in the popular imagination, and here this nexus is the point. For in the world of cultural and literary theory it's commonly 81 Diaspora 8:1 1999 assumed that detachment is itself a kind of violence or force, that to pretend to move beyond the confines of a culture, to intervene or even to think about cultures from above, depending on some kind of rational calculus, is to do violence to them. Having absorbed Foucault, "today's critical standpoint," Robbins points out with characteristic understatement, "tends to look at heights and distances with mistrust" (3). Robbins' choice of cover therefore announces not one, but two ambiguities. The first is the problem that will beset any project for a distinctively American internationalism. Won't any American internationalism mean simply the projection of American national interests, however conceived, around the globe? If American internationalism , no matter how well intentioned, always entails the deployment of resources of power and money concentrated in the world's only superpower, then internationalism in the moral sense, as sympathy for people beyond one's borders, would seem to entail a kind of conscious self-limitation. As Robbins points out, this is the conclusion drawn by many cultural critics: You want to be sympathetic to others? Leave them alone! You want to show international solidarity with those who are exploited and oppressed? Focus on getting America and Americans to do as little as possible!1 The second ambiguity is a kind of philosophical version of the first, with the general and universal taking the place of America. If detachment as such is violent, then any attempt, no matter from what locale it is launched, to know cultures from above rather than from within can only lead to their obliteration. According to this line of thought, the only solution to this problem is to avoid pretensions to detachment altogether, placing one's faith in the power of local movements and cultures to resist every universalizing hegemony. Robbins will refuse the celebration of the local for reasons we'll meet below...

Socrates and Plato

The idea that Plato's Socrates even the Socrates of the 'Socratic' dialogues is a construct (see Book Notes on Socrates and Plato, Phronesis 1999/1) is fundamental to Alexander Nehamas's The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (based on his Sather Lectures of 1992-3).' Plato operates like a kind of philosophical version of Thomas Mann, enticing us, his audience, into a position where we think, wrongly, that we know where we are with his characters: '[his Socratic dialogues] revolve around a character who remains completely mysterious to the other figures that share his fictional world, to the dialogues' readers, and finally, like Hans Castorp [in The Magic Mountain],2 to his own author as well. And though Castorp and Socrates are vastly different characters, Mann's novel and Plato's Socratic dialogues are two of the most scornful displays of the weakness of readers who assume they are morally superior to various characters while they are in fact revealing that they are made of the same stuff as those they deride' (32). Thinking we have recognised Euthyphro's selfdelusion, we tum away from the Euthyphro, but in doing so 'we demonstrate [selfdelusion] to be ruling our own lives as well which is really the aim of this Whole mechanism' (41; author's own italics). We are being invited to make our lives chime with our beliefs, in this case identified with Socrates' call to perpetual examination of ourselves; but we refuse the invitation. For 'the art of living', read 'philosophy as a way of life'. Plato's depiction of Socrates again, in the 'Socratic' dialogues is a description of one properly philosophical way of living, which he thought the way. (Nehamas himself is less certain than 'Socrates', or Aristotle, that there is any single philosophical way of life.) Plato's 'Socrates' is a construct at once philosophical and literary (like The Art of Living itself): literary, because it has in the end to be a written construct, even if in Socrates' case it had to be written for him. Plato's chief weapon is

Comme or the Last Word

An Afterword to the Evans/Kates/Lawlor Debate and Correspondence July, 1996 Joshua Kates At the end of these encounters it is customary to take stock of the situation, to give an account of where things have ended up. Recently the protocol for this has become more complicated. To be sure, it is still usual to summarize areas of agreement. disagreement, conclusions reached, etc. These valedictory gestures continue-in conformity with a version of philosophy in which its own limits and project are not in question. Another approach recently has also taken hold. At the end of interchanges where genuine communication seems doubtful, it has become common to raise the problem of discussion or dialogue itself. A discussion having failed to take place, one interrogates the conditions ofthe interchange as such. And precisely because philosophy's assumptions (about the possibility of dialogue, debate, consensus) are here in doubt, this style of afterword tends to focus on the problem of reading: have the discussants read one another, have they read the texts upon which each purports to comment, what in general can be expected from such reading. I think above all of Derrida's well-known afterword to his debate with Searle (Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion), but such instances could be multiplied. Neither alternative appears suitable here, however. Certainly, it would be difficult to simply summarize what conclusions have been reached. Though everyone involved has proceeded in good faith, though Professor Evans initiated our correspondence precisely in order to find areas of agreement or minimally reach consensus on our differences, no one reading what is collected here would think this has been achieved. It is as if the parties from the first have moved in courses skewed to one another. More narrowly, I fear I have always found Professor Evans' reading of Derrida unconvincing, and even his interpretation of Husserl sometimes hasty. In general, Professor Evans prefers doctrines to questions. He multiplies citations in the hope of constructing the edifice of an author's thought. He sometimes fails, however, to suffciently scrutinize any single brick. In my most recent paper appearing here, The Problem of Bedeuten in Derrida and Husserl, I tried as best as I could to untangle and clarify one small yet decisive piece of this edifice. Though Professor Evans recognized the point at issue (and this I appreciate), he has simply multiplied his citations further. On my view, he continues not to recognize all the interpretive problems these pose-particularly those that concern Derrida. I will come to Professor Lawlor in a moment. Though a superficial interpretation would put us in agreement, here too I think there are differences that do not allow for consensus. In turn, the latter alternative is also not available. To question the possibility of our discussion, to focus on the protocols at issue-well, this is precisely where I began. From the initial review of Professor Evans' book, these questions, and perhaps these alone, have been the ones that interested me. All along I have wished to make reading a theme or what I would also call the pragmatic dimension of philosophical discourse. And this starting point, anticipating the limits of dialogue, may in part have accounted for these limits as well. If our discussion has been skewed, no common ground available, in part this may be because from the first these protocols have been in question. Such questions, then, are what make final agreement even between Professor Lawlor and myself impossible. In his essay published here, Distorting Phenomenology, Professor Lawlor claims that though Derrida's reading may be a distortion, this is legitimated by the philosophical problems that Derrida manages to raise. Surely, there is some irony in Lawlor's statement. Yet his essay has gone to great trouble to anchor Derrida's early work in the existing discourse of French philosophy at that time. …

The Problem of Reality

Underlying the practice of cognitive science is a basic tension in its goals that to me has much the flavor of a paradigm split in the sense of Kuhn. The tension has to do with how one phrases the fundamental question for a theory of mind. I have been trying to articulate this split for some time, at least since Jackendoff 1983, but its history certainly goes back much further than that. For convenience, I will call the two competing versions of this fundamental question the philosophical version and the psychological version, although they are hardly the exclusive property of philosophers and psychologists respectively-hence the scare quotes.2 The philosophical version grows out of questions of epistemology and might be stated something like this:

Is AIDS a just punishment?

There are religious and philosophical versions of the thesis that AIDS is a punishment for homosexual behaviour. It is argued here that the religious version is seriously incomplete. Because of this incompleteness and because of the indeterminacies that ordinarily attend religious argumentation, it is concluded that the claim may be set aside as unconvincing. Homosexual behaviour is then judged for its morality against utilitarian, deontological, and natural law theories of ethics. It is argued that such behaviour involves no impediment to important moral goals and is not therefore immoral. Where natural law might be used to condemn homosexual behaviour, it is argued that the theory itself is not well established. Consequently there is a prima facie reason for rejecting the philosophical version of the punishment thesis. This conclusion is further supported by noting the lack of proportion between the purported immorality of homosexuality and a punishment as devastating as AIDS.

Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism (review)

106Philosophy and Literature Ifwe accept that the essays are, albeit loosely, centered around one main idea, we might proceed to read the book conscientiously from beginning to end. As the reviewer, I felt compelled to do just that, but too frequently for comfort found myselfbogged down in sentences like the following, chosen almost at random : "And the subject is pure not only in its manipulatory detachment from the object but also in its distance from the realm of togetherness with other subjects, which (bereft of an epistemological status of its own) has itself become 'objectified '" (p. 23). Interestingly enough, the three essays in the volume translated from Holdheim's original German text by one of his students read rather more lucidly than the others, although they too are by no means smooth and easy reading. Thus, while some pages and sections were stimulating (notably the "chapters" on Dostoyevsky, Gide, and "Poetic estrangement"), others had me painfully entangled in the coils of serpentine sentences and paragraphs, struggling in vain to cling to die main thread of argument. "The essay," we are told (p. 30), "is the hermeneutic genre par excellence." Agreed. And the word "hermeneutic" derives from the name of the god Hermes, whose principal task was to deliver messages. It is surely the hermeneutist's responsibility to ensure that his particular message is clear and that his critical comments on this or that writer, work or literary topic shed new light, not cast deeper darkness. In my more cynical moments I sometimes wonder if aposdes of "the hermeneutic mode" might be involuntary (or perhaps voluntary?) worshippers of another Hermes: Hermes Trismegistos, the thrice-greatest, the Greek version of the Egyptian deity Thoth, god of magic or alchemy, from which comes the word "hermetic." Professor Hondheim struck me as being radier more preoccupied widi the task of bewitching and enchanting his reader with verbal alchemy, blinding him with science, real or pseudo, dian widi mat of helping him clarify his own ideas on a literary text by writing in a lively, clear, and stimulating way. Thus die ideas in his book too often seem more hermetically sealed than hermeneutically revealed. University of Canterbury, New ZealandJohn Goodliffe Heidegger and the Question ofRenaissance Humanism, by Ernesto Grassi; 103 pp. Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983, $12.00. Students of Heidegger and of Italian Renaissance humanism should not be put offby the apparently strangejuxtaposition of themes indicated by this book's title. Ernesto Grassi has been a creative and productive scholar regarding both Heidegger (with whom he studied at Freiburg) and of humanism, although because of die vagaries of translation and transatlantic reception he is probably Reviews107 best known to those who read only in English as an important commentator on Vico. The present book is a brief and clear version of theses that Grassi has developed in more detail in his many German publications. He challenges Heidegger's ambitious story ofthe history ofphilosophy, thinking part ofwhat is unthought in that brilliant but overly schematic account of the metaphysics of presence from Plato to NATO ("The Question Concerning Technology," and "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking"). Heidegger had attacked humanism and Sartrean existentialism in his 1946/47 "Letter on Humanism" (published, incidentally, by Grassi). Yet while identifying humanism — as exemplified by Hegel, Sartre, and the implicit voluntaristic metaphysics of die technological worldview — as the destiny and denouement of Western philosophy , Heidegger never mentioned Renaissance humanism. (As Grassi notes, Heidegger's view of Latin as a coarser, less profound language than Greek — or German— tells us much about the reasons for Heidegger's ignorance here.) Grassi argues two interrelated claims: (1) In Renaissance humanism's concept of poetry and metaphor as productive of the truth, one finds a significant movement of thought that does not fit Heidegger's version of philosophy's history as a continual rationalization and narrowing ofthe concept of the world; (2) Renaissance humanism suggests the possibility of a thought that is both informed by an attempt to draw on the poetic resources of language for philosophical illumination and sensitive to the radically historical character of human existence, while yet (in contrast to Heidegger...

The Dematerialization of Matter

1. The philosophical version of the primary-secondary distinction concerns (a) the ‘real’ properties of matter, (b) the epistemology of sensation, and (c) a contrast challenged by Berkely as illusory.The scientific version of the primary-secondary distinction concerns (a′) the physical properties of matter, (b′) a contrast essential within the history of atomism, and (c′) a contrast challenged by 20th century microphysics as de facto untenable.2. The primary-secondary distinction within physics can be interpreted in two ways:a. it can refer to content; e.g. ‘Matter has the properties of mass, shape, density… etc. — it only appears to have the properties of warmth, fragrance, etc.’ Or,b. it can refer to form; e.g. ‘Whatever properties our best theories accord to primary matter, e.g., electrons, these are by definition primary. All other properties of, e.g., macromatter, are derivative.’Concerning 2.a., this interpretation is simply false when 17th, 18th, or 19th century values for the property-variables are introduced. Concerning 2.b., this either uninformative or misleading. It is uninformative when it constitutes no more than a decision to use the word ‘primary’ as an umbrella-word for all the properties contemporary micro-physics accords to fundamental material particles, whatever these may be. It is misleading when it turns on an implicit contrast between certain properties particles may be said to have when ‘harnessed’ to a detector, and certain other properties these particles have when free and unharnessed to any detector. This contrast does not exist. Quantum-theoretic information is always about particles-and-their-detectors-in-combination. Dissolve this combination and you destroy any possible knowledge of the particle. Hence the notion of ‘completely objectifiable properties of particles’ is in principle unsound. (Cf. Hanson, American Journal of Physics, 27 January, 1959).

On "What is a Poem?"

W HEN children ask, is a poem ? the question rarely troubles us; but when philosophers ask it, and in a way that associates it with is art? or is beauty?, the question is likely to impress us as being difficult, and perhaps even profound. Now it can scarcely be doubted that the philosophical version of the question has led people to discuss important issues. And its outward simplicity may at first seem all to the good; or at least, if it is a fault to ask complicated questions in simple words, it is one that is more easily tolerated than its opposite. But in the present case I think the question is stated much too simply. What is taken to be one question is likely to become several quite distinct questions, each confused with the others. The result is then in accord with an all-too-familiar pattern: the muddle that comes from our efforts to answer several questions all at one time makes us suppose that the issue is unusually deep; and meanwhile our legitimate problems-those that attend our several questions taken separately and which, if a little less deep, may nevertheless be of genuine interest-are left without a proper answer. So in the present essay I shall divide is a poem? into a relatively manageable set of part questions. When the latter are simple I shall attempt to answer them. When they are complicated, however, I shall merely state and clarify them; for my aim is not so much to answer the part questions as to show the need of distinguishing them.