Form Of Philosophy Research Articles

Imagine There Are No Lesbians: Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory and the Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Parenting

Law reform in the area of homosexual rights usually proceeds as if heterosexuality is outside its scope and interests. What remains unthought, therefore, is the way in which heterosexuality functions not simply as a paradigm of the rights to be enjoyed by all but as the constitutive limit to their deliverance. This quarantining of heterosexuality from homosexuality is a common feature of discourse in general, but it is one that has been thoroughly critiqued in queer theory and psychoanalysis where it is acknowledged that homosexuality, as heterosexuality's Other', is what heterosexuality requires to stabilise and give continuous effect to its own boundaries. Homosexual identities, then, are identities in which heterosexuality also has an investment, and their various identifiers ('gay', 'lesbian', etc) help to keep heterosexuality's boundaries in place. Queer theory's intervention in this economy has been (at least at the level of theory) to destabilise the borders of heterosexuality, to deconstruct the hierarchically ordered binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality in a move aimed at queering 'straightness'.3 However, the continual use of the term 'queer' as simply a synonym for 'gay' or 'lesbian', or even as a more inclusive descriptor of sexual identity also containing 'bisexual' and 'trans-gendered' fellow travellers strips it of its political force and eradicates its capacity to destabilise the heterosexual paradigm. Such usage of 'queer' is common both within the 'gay and lesbian community' as well as more broadly; it is a product of an identity politics which keeps in place the heterosexual-homosexual binary just as effectively as the other terms used in the identity/sexuality continuum. Queer and identity, however, do not mix: to be queer (at least in theory) is not indexed by sexual practices or type of relationships, but rather aims to express the notion of sexuality beyond identity, and it therefore raises questions for all of us as to how the boundaries of our sexuality (in the broadest sense of that term) can be located, if at all. Some of the resistance to queering heterosexuality can be understood as the resistance to the renunciation of homosexual identity, which can, in part, be understood as an investment in keeping the hierarchically ordered binary heterosexual-homosexual in place. But investments in this binary cannot be understood primarily or even most helpfully in terms of sexual identity, and are more productively analysed as investments in the paradigm of heterosexuality itself. As a paradigm, it functions as a principle of social order, a normative frame through which one learns to imagine, and a principle through which one comes to know, one's sexuality. As such, it belongs to homosexuality too, whatever may become of it within the lived articulation of sexuality for people who love others of the same sex. The resistance to applying queer theory in its radical philosophical formulation is an instance where this mutually constitutive formation heterosexualhomosexual shows the force of its bond. Neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality can renounce the heterosexual paradigm, in which homosexual is the necessary other to the constitutive norm. Yet the dual aims of destabilising heterosexuality as the superior term in the binary, and of critiquing the general system which makes this possible, are together the sine qua non of queer theory. A politics simply focussed on contesting the position of heterosexuality as the superior term (that is, an equality politics) would fail the deconstructive purpose of displacing the general system. This would be to annul queer, and to remain within the paradigm which queer critiques in which the various sexual identities remain relatively coherent and stable categories. This is to say, also, that the extent to which the term 'queer' is clung to as an index of homosexual identity is the extent to which its capacity to function as properly queer, as it were, is disabled. …

The Poet's Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance. Timothy Kircher

<i>The Poet's Wisdom: The Humanists, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance</i>. Timothy Kircher

Philosophy as Inspiration: Blaise Pascal and the Epistemology of Aphorisms

In five stages, this essay works out an account of the aphorism as a philosophical genre. First, I outline a preliminary, general strategy for elucidating the aphorism as an expression of “aphoristic consciousness.” Then I discuss Blaise Pascal's aphoristic style, concentrating on exegetical issues surrounding his Pensées. Next, I demonstrate that aphoristic consciousness (understood in an appropriately epistemological sense) has been a constant (though now largely unrecognized) theme in the history of Western philosophy. Following this survey of Pascal's predecessors, I show how Pascal's own epistemological account of the aphorism reiterates and encapsulates this traditional understanding in its own distinctive way. And finally, I provide a new theoretical account of the aphorism as a literary and philosophical form, for which Pascal's thought provides both a theoretical framework and an excellent example.

A Chronicle of Type Logical Grammar: 1935–1994

Categorial grammar predated Syntactic Structures by two decades. While dramatic linguistic revolutions occupied centre stage, it tended to be the preserve of formal philosophy and philosophical linguistics: the philosophers’ grammar. Fashions change but style endures. The 1980s saw the rediscovery of the categorial calculus of Lambek (1958) and the advent of linear logic and substructural logic generally providing a context for categorial grammar so-construed, since named type logical grammar (TLG). I think the history of the genesis and evolution of type-logical ideas is not widely known, but that the interpretation of the past is important to give direction to the future. This is the story of how a field came to a new pass.

Portraits in painting and photography

This article addresses the portrait as a philosophical form of art. Portraits seek to render the subjective objectively visible. In portraiture two fundamental aims come into conflict: the revelatory aim of faithfulness to the subject, and the creative aim of artistic expression. In the first part of my paper, studying works by Rembrandt, I develop a typology of four different things that can be meant when speaking of an image’s power to show a person: accuracy, testimony of presence, emotional characterization, or revelation of the essential “air” (to use Roland Barthes’ term). In the second half of my paper this typology is applied to examples from painting and photography to explore how the two media might differ. I argue that, despite photography’s alleged ‘realism’ and ‘transparency,’ it allows for artistic portraiture and presents the same basic conflict between portraiture’s two aims, the revelatory and the expressive.

Formal Philosophy ‐ Edited by Vincent F. Hendricks and John Symons

<i>Formal Philosophy</i> ‐ Edited by Vincent F. Hendricks and John Symons

The Paradox of Beginning: Hegel, Kierkegaard and Philosophical Inquiry

This paper reconsiders certain of Kierkegaard's criticisms of Hegel's theoretical philosophy in the light of recent interpretations of the latter. The paper seeks to show how these criticisms, far from being merely parochial or rhetorical, turn on central issues concerning the nature of thought and what it is to think. I begin by introducing Hegel's conception of “pure thought” as this is distinguished by his commitment to certain general requirements on a properly philosophical form of inquiry. I then outline Hegel's strategy for resolving a crucial problem he takes himself to face. For his account of the nature of thought depends upon the idea of a form of inquiry in which nothing whatsoever is presupposed; but this idea appears basically paradoxical inasmuch as the mere act of beginning to inquire in a certain way embodies an assumption about how it is appropriate to begin. Turning to Kierkegaard, I consider a key objection to the effect that Hegel's strategy for resolving this paradox depends on the incoherent idea of a purely reflexive act of thinking. Finally, I draw out some central features of the alternative account of “situated” thought and inquiry which Kierkegaard presents as distinctively Socratic.

FORMAL INDICATION, PHILOSOPHY, AND THEOLOGY

FORMAL INDICATION, PHILOSOPHY, AND THEOLOGY

Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia (review)

Reviewed by Frederic D. Schwarz Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia. Edited by Sal Restivo. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xxiv+701. $150. Encyclopedias come in many varieties. Diderot's Encyclopédie is a masterpiece of philosophy and literary style; the Baseball Encyclopedia is short on weighty pensées, but it does reveal that Moses Solomon of the New York Giants was nicknamed "The Rabbi of Swat." Each kind has certain situations where it is indispensable, and most of us have had the experience of searching like Goldilocks through different reference sources to find one with the proper fact density. Evaluating an encyclopedia, then, requires a knowledge of whom it is meant for and what it is trying to do. Even a cursory examination of Science, Technology, and Society: An Encyclopedia shows that it is intended as a map of current scholarly inquiry rather than a look-something-up reference. Typical sentences begin: "Academic ethicists divide ethical arguments into . . ." (p. 37), or "Multisited ethnographies aim to provide a new understanding of . . ." (p. 288). The index mentions Thomas Edison just six times, three of which turn out to be single sentences; Shockley, Lavoisier, and Lister, among other prominent figures, get no mention at all. Taken together, the encyclopedia's 150-plus article topics provide a good picture of the breadth of current STS research, with entries ranging in focus [End Page 879] from narrow ("Tuskegee Project") to broad ("Invention in History and Culture") to theoretical ("Concepts of Nature") to metaphysical ("Knowledge Construction"). In general, the more specific the title of an entry, the more down-to-earth it is. Rudi Volti, for example, heroically compresses the entire history of the automobile into a page and a half, hitting all the high points and throwing in a few unexpected facts along the way. Michèle Martin's "The Telephone" is virtually devoid of wires and switches, but gives a fascinating account of how the telephone, its users, and its service providers have influenced and interacted with one another. Leslie Brothers's "Brain and Mind Sciences" is an excellent and easily understood account of the current state of research in cognition. As in any good multiauthor encyclopedia, some entries are idiosyncratic. "Sex and the Body in Science" is almost completely devoted to a consideration of intersexuality and the transgendered. "Representation and Science," in classic philosophical form, barely gets beyond asking what is meant by the word representation, while "Representation and Technology" is entirely concerned with medical imaging and the Global Positioning System. Most directly on point for readers of Technology and Culture is the umbrella entry "Technology in History," which is divided into eight sub-entries covering different parts of the world. These will be particularly useful for scholars seeking an entry point into the technological history of a particular region, or those whose work touches on, say, African or Latin American technology, but not enough to read an entire treatise on the subject. Although history receives scant attention in many of the entries (there is virtually none under "Computers," for example), technology and science are treated evenhandedly throughout, in contrast to some works that view these twins like Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in their 1988 film of that name. There is a list of authors at the end, but no indication there of which articles they are responsible for, and STS veterans can make a surprisingly entertaining game out of guessing who wrote what. The book contains no illustrations and very few charts. Researchers trying to familiarize themselves with contemporary thinking on a broad subject will usually find something helpful here, with copious bibliographies pointing to further information. Those seeking basic facts about a specific technology will often be disappointed. Students scouting for a paper topic will find plenty of points to investigate further, and those with a general interest in STS will enjoy browsing. For neophytes, the book gives a good idea of what the field is about, though expecting them to grasp some of...

The poet's wisdom: the humanists, the church, and the formation of philosophy in the early Renaissance

The poet's wisdom: the humanists, the church, and the formation of philosophy in the early Renaissance

ON THE ROLE OF THE RESEARCH AGENDA IN EPISTEMIC CHANGE

The standard way of representing an epistemic state in formal philosophy is in terms of a set of sentences, corresponding to the agent’s beliefs, and an ordering of those sentences, reflecting how well entrenched they are in the agent’s epistemic state. We argue that this wide-spread representational view – a view that we identify as a “Quinean dogma” – is incapable of making certain crucial distinctions. We propose, as a remedy, that any adequate representation of epistemic states must also include the agent’s research agenda, i.e., the list of question that are open or closed at any given point in time. If the argument of the paper is sound, a person’s questions and practical interests, on the one hand, and her beliefs and theoretical values, on the other, are more tightly interwoven than has previously been assumed to be the case in formal epistemology.

Disrupted conventions or diseased selves: The relationship between philosophical and psychotherapeutic forms of questioning

Abstract This paper describes the relationship between modernist psychotherapeutic and philosophical forms of “dis-ease.” It shows how modernist psychotherapeutic forms of disease are focused around disturbances of the self whereas philosophical forms of dis-ease are focused around disturbances in the context or conventions in which the self is situated; psychotherapeutic forms of dis-ease are concerned with “means” while philosophical forms are concerned with ends, in modernist psychotherapy it is assumed that patients know what they value but are blocked by internal obstacles from realizing their values while in philosophical counseling it is the very values themselves which are in question. Philosophical counseling provides a framework in which individuals can explore the values that are in question. Examples embedded in the philosophies of Plato, Heidegger, Kuhn, and Gellner are used to develop the notion of philosophical counseling and examples from the writing of Rollo May, Joel Kovel, and Christoph...

Adorno's Conception of the Form of Philosophy

This essay concerns Adorno's articulation of an idea of philosophy as it is developed through his considerations of philosophy's form or mode of presentation. It hereby attempts to illuminate some of what remains obscure about Adorno's understanding of a renewal of philosophy after Marx and the crisis of German Idealism. Various forms–from "anti-system" and "constellation" to "essay," "fragment," "encyclopaedia" and "dictionary"–are examined for what they contribute to an idea of philosophy. This focus distinguishes this essay from other studies of form in Adorno that have predominantly literary or musical concerns.

Evald Il’enkov as an Interpreter of Spinoza

E.V. Il’enkov is regarded as perhaps the most “Spinozist” of Soviet philosophers. He used Spinoza’s ideas extensively, especially in developing his concept of the ideal and in his attempts to give a more precise philosophical formulation to the “activity approach” of the cultural- historical school of Soviet psychology. A more detailed analysis reveals, however, that Il’enkov’s reception of Spinoza was highly selective, and that there are substantial differences between them.

Learning to Perform Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb

The purpose of this research was to examine the way three high school students perceived and experienced a choral composition they were learning to perform. This case study, conducted over a period of five months, chronicled the experiences and perceptions of three students from a large midwestern high school mixed choir as they learned to perform the extended choral composition Rejoice in the Lamb by Benjamin Britten. Three categories of experience (found to correlate with three philosophical forms of knowledge) emerged through data analysis: (1) impression (prepositional knowledge), (2) construction (procedural knowledge), and (3) understanding (acquaintance knowledge). Participants generally experienced these knowledge forms progressively, but also shifted between them idiosyncratically. Singers tended to focus on the technical skills needed to perform the music with accuracy. Deeper levels of understanding were contingent on each participant's personal history, openness, and effort in relation to the composition. July 8, 2004 May 4, 2005.

The Question Lacking at the End of Art

Arthur Danto's influential "end of art" thesis argues that art relinquishes responsibility for answering the question "What is art?" and that as a consequence the question of what art is, is passed to philosophy to answer. But in spite of the fact that Danto attaches a great deal of weight to the terms "question" and "answer," neither he nor his many commentators have explicitly addressed what exactly is meant by them. Danto takes these important terms for granted, despite likening the way in which art raises the question of its identity to Heidegger's account of Dasein as self-questioning. That the manner in which definitional accounts of art of the sort Danto seeks are made impossible by the way modern art performatively transforms what is meant by "question" in its asking itself what art is should be so close to the way in which, for Heidegger, definitional accounts of what the human being is are ruled out by how they raise the question of their being in their being only exacerbates our puzzlement. In his version of the end of art thesis Heidegger takes great pains to unfold what he means by "question" and "answer," for art is the privileged means by which modernity can be put into question. Yet although he accords art this status in the "history of the truth of being" Heidegger, unlike Danto, has very little to say about art of the post-war period on, a time characterized by Danto as the history of art's self-questioning, the very time in which the question of what art is becomes part of what it is, indeed as much part of what art is as the art object itself. Instead, beginning with his writings in the late-1930s, Heidegger suggests that the "truth about being" might only emerge in a time lacking art, and that modern art, or as I shall go on to say modern visual art, has little role to play as a questioning activity. Ostensibly opposed ontologies of art notwithstanding, both Danto and Heidegger appear to give up on art as a questioning activity. This essay argues that Danto avowedly, and Heidegger in an unacknowledged and ambiguous way, aggregate to philosophy the right to answer for art, and that their shared but differently expressed claims that art of the mid-twentieth century gives up on questioning in a serious way are arbitrary, largely because of the privilege accorded perception and representation in their respective conceptions of the history of art. Danto Danto claims that after Warhol's Brillo Box (1964), which for the first time as far as art is concerned casts the question "What is art?" in its "pure" and "true" philosophical form, "art no longer bears responsibility for its own philosophical definition.'" If artists wish to participate in the process of answering the question of what art is (which Danto sees as the next stage of its progress), "they would have to become philosophers," since art has "turned the responsibility for progress over to philosophy."2 Danto would have it that the way in which art cedes to philosophy the right to define art, the authority to define it, has a direct bearing on artistic responsibility in that it relieves art of a certain responsibility for itself, of the responsibility for answering the question of its own identity that it itself raises. But if the answer is philosophy's, how can art be said to have raised the question of its own identity in its own way? Indeed, can it raise the question of its identity in its own way if it cannot answer it, or if it does not have any responsibility of its own with which to answer? Does not passing responsibility for answering over to philosophy mean that the question too is given over to philosophy? The question What is art? has always been philosophy's question about art insofar as it seeks a definition of art; and the question What is art? has been art's question about itself from the start, ever since it had reason to welcome different ways of making art. But Danto elides the latter, which he refers to as the "identity question," art's question about what it is, with the question of art's definition. …

Alan Paton's sublime: Race, landscape and the transcendence of the liberal imagination

This article develops a postcolonial reading of the sublime by suggesting that aesthetic theories of the sublime were, in their classical philosophical formulations by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, founded on problematic assumptions of racial difference. In the colonial sphere, it is argued, the sublime could discursively manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested landscapes. This is particularly evident in the Alan Paton's writing. This article looks at the origins and the influence of rhetoric of the sublime in Paton's work, particularly in his novel Cry, the Beloved Country, and argues that the sublime is a key discursive structure in the shaping of Paton's complex and ambivalent representation of South Africa's politicised and racialised landscape.

Robert Kagan, un « néo-conservateur » emblématique

This article is an analysis of the new rhetoric of imperialism developed by Robert Kagan and the wrongly named "neo-conservatives" who have shaped the foreign policy of the Bush Administration. Kagan resorts to a gendered view of international relations which idealizes the use of force and reinvigorates the concepts and mental categories of Theodore Roosevelt. Kagan’s dismissal of and scorn for the Europeans critical of the Bush Administration take a pseudo philosophical form but boil down to shopworn biological conceptions. Rather than being typical of American views of Europe, Kagan’s neo-imperialist musings are those of a clearly identified ideological group that now exerts enormous influence over the White House, and are strongly opposed by other Americans.

Gadamer's repercussions: reconsidering philosophical hermeneutics

Acknowledgments Preface Introduction. From Word to Concept: The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by Richard E. Palmer I. GADAMER'S INFLUENCE 1. After Historicism, Is Metaphysics Still Possible? On Hans-Georg Gadamer's 100th Birthday Jurgen Habermas, translated by Paul Malone 2. Being That Can Be Understood Is Language Richard Rorty 3. On the Coherence of Hermeneutics and Ethics: An Essay on Gadamer and Levinas Gerald L. Bruns 4. Gadamer and Romanticism Andrew Bowie 5. Literature, Law, and Morality Georgia Warnke 6. A Critique of Gadamer's Aesthetics Michael Kelly II. GADAMER AND DIALOGUE 7. On Dialogue: To Its Cultured Despisers Donald G. Marshall 8. Gadamer's Philosophy of Dialogue and Its Relation to the Postmodernism of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Strauss Ronald Beiner 9. Meaningless Hermeneutics? Joel Weinsheimer III. GADAMER IN QUESTION 10. Radio Nietzsche, or, How to Fall Short of Philosophy Geoff Waite 11. The Art of Allusion: Hans-Georg Gadamer's Philosophical Interventions under National Socialism Teresa Orozco, translated by Jason Gaiger 12. On the Politics of Gadamerian Hermeneutics: A Response to Orozco and Waite Catherine H. Zuckert 13. The Protection of the Philosophical Form: Response to Zuckert Teresa Orozco, translated by Paul Malone 14. Salutations: Response to Zuckert Geoff Waite Contributors Index

How Free Became Open and Everything Else under the Sun

How Free Became Open and Everything Else under the Sun