Post-war Philosophy Research Articles

Чи можлива «філософія після Бучі»: внесок війни в філософію

The article analyses the problem of the current state of philosophy in the context of Russian aggression against Ukraine. It is argued that contemporary philosophers are faced with the question: «How is philosophy possible after Bucha?». It is argued that, on the one hand, this questioning and situation is in many ways similar to similar discourses on «philosophy after Auschwitz» and «philosophy after the Gulag», and on the other hand, it shows a number of ideological and moral flaws in modern society and politics that made this question possible. Another consequence is the failure to learn the lessons of history, which leads to the emergence and growth of new totalitarian leaders who are ready to start wars to achieve their goals, which in the future threaten to escalate to the level of a new World War or the use of nuclear arsenals. Thus, there are grounds to state that not only international organisations such as the UN and the Red Cross are unable to resist authoritarianism and totalitarianism, but also that the worldview and value positions on which their activities are based are ineffective.
 Particular attention is paid to the theological aspects of this problem, the peculiarities of its formulation and solution by contemporary theologians. The authors analyse the criticism by Ukrainian intellectuals-philosophers of the prejudices of the Western philosophical establishment, touch upon the doctrine of the «Russian world» as a civil religion with its corresponding dogmas, and finally offer some philosophical conclusions that, in the authors’ opinion, formulate, if not new imperatives, as they somewhat pretentiously call them, then at least new significant accents that Ukraine brings to the world philosophical sphere. Thus, Ukrainian scholars of the social sciences and humanities face a crucial task, not just to reflect or comprehend the reality of life «under the bombs», but to formulate new imperatives that can become the basis for a new post-war philosophy, politics and culture.

Filozofia – autonomia i dominacja

The purpose of the paper is take a look from the perspective of the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu at the history of the Polish post-war philosophy with special attention given to the so-called Christian philosophy. In reference to Bourdieu’s research practice, the author postulates application of research strategies of the sociology of science/philosophy to historical and philosophical studies with a belief that they enhance the picture of philosophical dynamics of the past. From this point of view, the author focuses on relations between the field of Christian philosophy and the field of church authority, exposing the issue of philosophy’s autonomy.

False Differends

The Holocaust serves as a foundational critical resource in postwar philosophy. Interventions into the logic of its exemplarity tend to treat exemplarity as a matter of archival selection that ignores earlier histories of genocide and slavery. A recent example is Alexander Weheliye’s critique of Giorgio Agamben (Habeaus Viscus), which seeks to restitute racial slavery as a theoretically significant moment of biological precarity. In a continuation of this logic, this essay introduces the history of Indian Ocean slavery, which precedes transatlantic slavery but is comparatively lesser known. In doing so, I suggest that complaints against archival selection do not go far enough, for they do not address the problem of a kind of event whose very nature is to destroy its own archive. Reading Jean-François Lyotard’s differend as a critique of the modern genre-supremacy of historiography, I argue that the very ground of historical examples (namely, the demand that there be proof) demonstrates the regressive nature of exemplarity itself.

Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons by Lisa Siraganian

<i>Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons</i> by Lisa Siraganian

Mediation and Its Shadow

Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno never spoke to one another. Both thinkers were of Jewish ancestry, though their lives would be impacted in distinct ways by the rise of Nazism. With these historical parallels in mind, this paper seeks to place these thinkers in a productive juxtaposition with regard to the status of ethics and politics in either’s work. In particular, I examine the ramifications of philosophical reflection on Auschwitz as a mediating event in post-war European philosophy, reading Levinas’s and Adorno’s theoretical differences as alternate philosophical responses to this momentous event. I argue that Levinas’s thought is ailed by the problem of immediacy, exemplified by his positing ethics as first philosophy and his rejection of the category of totality which, as Adorno highlights, is an important critical tool for an analysis of the form of society which produces Nazism.

The Institute of Philosophy in Communist Romania Under the Regime of Gheorghiu-Dej, 1949-65

This paper examines some aspects of the institutional history of post-war Romanian philosophy, with a special focus on the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of People’s Republic of Romania. The aim of this article is to shed more light on the main aspects of philosophical research during cultural Stalinism, and to underline the inflexion points within Romanian “philosophical” writings between 1948 and 1965. I examined the lack of human resources and its impact on the emergence of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, as well as the main research topics studied at the Philosophy Section of the Institute of History and Philosophy and Institute of Philosophy especially in the 1950s. I focused also on the context of unmasking and purging of the “philosophical” front mainly in late 1950s, underlining the Agitprop fight against Revisionism and “bourgeois” influence in social sciences. The avatars of the philosophical field are analysed through the lens of professor’s Constantin Ionescu Gulian’s destiny as an important manager of the institutions producing philosophy during the aforementioned period.

Hamish Ford (2012) Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time

Hamish Ford (2012) <i>Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time</i>

Identity Formation through Cinematic Explorations of the Past: Harald Friedl’s Austrian Trilogy

While Harald Friedl’s 2001 documentary Africa Representa and his most recent project based in Bhutan, What Happiness Is (2013), clearly reinforce the filmmaker’s international self-image, the individuals at the center of Friedl’s Land ohne Eigenschaften (2000), Aus der Zeit (2007), and Mein Leben als Apfelbaum (2012) also share an existence profoundly influenced by international forces, even if they live and work in and around Vienna. From globalization to exile identity to postwar sociopolitical philosophy, the experiences that Friedl portrays in his “Austrian Trilogy” are indicative of a nation that reverberates both the bygone transnational Habsburg Empire and the two most significant international events of the twentieth century: the First and Second World Wars. This article will focus on Friedl’s approach of making complex connections between Austria’s past and future with balanced and compelling portraits of humanity through a distinctly international lens.

Music as an Aid to Philosophizing about Religion

Music and religion have long been experienced together, yet music’s significance for implicit religion awaits thoroughgoing study. This paper tackles a related task: using music as an example to help develop a philosophical approach to religion as a whole, which is broad and flexible enough to do justice to contemporary religious studies, including the study of implicit religion and spirituality. D.Z. Phillips’s (Wittgenstein-influenced) “contemplative” philosophy of religion offers a promising development, beyond the predominantly Western, monotheistic and conceptual approach of much post-war philosophy of religion. However it needs fresh and accessible examples of distinctive “forms of life” drawn from beyond religion. Here is where music can help. Music, whether lay or professional, highbrow or lowbrow, reminds us of an area of life which has its own distinctive discourse, within which notions of transcendence, spirit, perfection and the like seem thoroughly at home. To understand this fully requires a contemplative (or “appreciative”) approach of involvement and participation. Comparing word-use in religious and musical contexts shows up significant common aspects such as performance, recreation and entertainment. When religion is appreciated as more like music and other arts, then modern scientific theories as to its origins, and philosophical questions about its truth or falsity, ontology, epistemology or rationality, seem less obviously applicable, or troubling.

DONALD DAVIDSON AND THE ANALYTIC REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY, 1940–1970

ABSTRACTHistories of analytic philosophy in the United States have typically focused on the reception of logical positivism, and especially on responses to the work of the Vienna Circle. Such accounts often call attention to the purportedly positivist-inspired marginalization of normative concerns in American philosophy: according to this story, the overweening positivist concern for logic and physics as paradigms of knowledge displaced questions of value and social relations. This article argues that the reception framework encourages us to mistake the real sources of the analytic revolution in post-war philosophy. These are to be found in debates about intentional action and practical reasoning – debates in which ‘normative’ questions of value and social action were in fact central. Discussion of these topics took place within a transatlantic community of Wittgensteinians, ordinary languages philosophers, logical empiricists, and decision theorists. These different strands of ‘analytical’ thinking were bound together into a new philosophical mainstream not by a positivist alliance with logic and physics, but by the rapid development of the mathematical and behavioural sciences during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. An illustrative application of this new framework for interpreting the analytic revolution is found in the early career and writings of Donald Davidson.

Reading Camus “With,” or After, Levinas

Jacques Derrida has remarked that what occurred in Emmanuel Levinas's post-war philosophy : a discreet but irreversible mutation, one of those powerful, singular, and rare provocations in (Derrida 1996, 9). It certainly holds, if we accept the premise of Levinas' postwar philosophy, that then the entirety of the Western philosophical tradition is to be called to account before something that would at once precede and exceed its terms. In a way that challenges the age-old distinction between theory and praxis, asserts that philosophy answers to a more fundamental ethical exigency which all humans undergo, practically, all the time. This is the exigency, simple yet finally incomprehensible, of being faced by another (or precisely Other) person. It would be a difficult task, and one that is not mine here, to condense in a few words Levinas's accounts of this primal ethical encounter. The focus of this essay is on a path less well travelled in philosophic circles: Albert Camus's post-war ethical and political philosophy. Needed here is only a stress on how Levinas's ethics is an ethics of radical responsibility. As readers will know, Levinas's pivotal contention is that, in encountering the Other, a certain (non)relation is lived through by the subject, radically outside his/her conscious control. The Other is, if we can still say this, a uniqueness who signifies to us at that moment otherwise than through her/his relation to any informing semantic or historical totality (e.g., Entre Nous, 194-45; Totality and Infinity, III B). Rather, the Other's alterity manifests itself to the subject in this encounter as a lasting ethical call to answer for itself and to justify its place in the sun. For Levinas, indeed, we always - as speaking subjects - have responded to the Other. And this ineradicable responsibility, maintains, is the transcendental origin of language, and thus underlies (as it undermines) our capacity to give meaning to our Being. This is the discreet but powerful mutation in the history of ideas that Derrida sees first essayed in Levinas. This essay presents three contentions. First, through bringing the later ethico-political philosophy of Albert in The Rebel into an engagement with the more widely known ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I will contest the lasting silence concerning Camus's political philosophy in philosophical literature.1 Secondly, I argue that Camus's account of political subjectivity in L'Homme Revolte decisively anticipates that later expounded by Levinas. What unites with on the nature of subjectivity, I will maintain - and this is the essay's third contention - is that Camus, before Levinas, ties subjectivity to a primordial responsibility before and for other subjects. To be a subject for Camus, as for Levinas, I contend, is - before it is anything else - to have been called to take a stance vis-a-vis the others in whose time one lives.2 These contentions are carried out in the essay's three parts. Part I presents an exposition of Camus's ethical position in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. This exegesis of Camus with Levinas presents Camus's argument as an alternative attempt, before Levinas's, to conceptualize an ethics refractory to all totalizing philosophical systems. Part II then considers Camus's ethics after Levinas, as it were. There are resources in Camus's texts which, I contend, importantly at once resist and anticipate the kind of criticisms that offers of the occidental philosophical heritage, and which we can feasibly imagine he might accordingly have leveled at Camus's mature - avowedly Graecophile - position. The horizon of the essay, which is explicated in the Conclusion, is that Camus's theoretical voice is a potentially timely one in today's theoretical scene. What he offers, we will see, is a very rare thing: namely, a post-metaphysical ethical contention that is at once post-Nietzschean, yet avowedly universalist. …

Ecology and Pedagogy: On the Educational Implications of Postwar Environmental Philosophy

Environmentalism, an ethical imperative to preserve and protect nature, has become in the last decade a central ethical, political and pedagogic theme. Against this background, this article focuses on the postwar philosophy of the German-Jewish scholar Hans Jonas (1903–93). It points to Jonas's radical theory of pedagogic responsibility, and to the manner in which this theory advocated conciliation between ecocentric and anthropocentric ecological approaches. The article further shows how this theory was informed by Jonas's theological reflections on a God who is concurrently transcendent and immanent – a God who is both ‘exiled’ from the world and ‘at home’ within the world. Jonas's specific approach demonstrates the manner in which theology informs eco-pedagogy; ecological education is thus demonstrated as secular-theological phenomena.

On the Relationship between Political Philosophy and Empirical Sciences

Abstract In this paper, I will focus on the role that findings of the empirical sciences might play in justifying normative claims in political philosophy. In the first section, I will describe how political theory has become a discipline divorced from empirical sciences, against a strong current in post-war political philosophy. I then argue that Rawls’s idea of reflective equilibrium, rightly interpreted, leads to a perspective on the matter of justification that takes seriously empirical findings regarding currently held normative beliefs of people. I will finally outline some functions that empirical studies might have in political philosophy.

Better Red than Dead—Putting an End to the Social Irrelevance of Postwar Philosophy of Science

This paper asks what is necessary in a theory of science adequate to the task of empowering philosophers of science to participate in public debate about science in a social context. It is argued that an adequate theory of science must be capable of theorizing the role of values and motives in science and that it must take seriously the irreducibly social nature of scientific knowledge.

Introduction to Two Unpublished Lectures by Leo Strauss

These two lectures by Leo Strauss, “What Can We Learn from Political Theory?” delivered in July 1942, and “The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews,” delivered November 7, 1943, include not only Strauss's most elaborate statement about the relation of political philosophy and political practice (in the first), but what may well be his fullest written public statements about matters of contemporary foreign policy. Both lectures obviously were carefully considered, composed, and corrected, but Strauss did not attempt to publish either. He may have had second thoughts about some of the arguments he advanced in these lectures, or he may simply have chosen to concentrate his literary efforts elsewhere. Other lectures he prepared during this period but did not publish himself have since been published: “The Living Issues of German Postwar Philosophy,” delivered April 1940 at Syracuse University, and “Reason and Revelation,” delivered January 1948 at Hartford Theological Seminary, both in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006); “German Nihilism,” delivered to the New School's General Seminar February 26, 1941, is in Interpretation 26:3 (Spring 1999).

When Did They Copyright the World Without Us Noticing?

When Did They Copyright the World Without Us Noticing?

Funny Face Humanism in Post-War French Photography and Philosophy

The cultural reconstruction of post-war France was dominated by an ideology of humanism that marked both philosophical discussion and photographic practice. While the humanist consensus concealed philosophical divergences between conservative and progressive visions of society, photography found itself split between its dual possibilities of recording the real and expressing a subjective vision. If Malraux enlisted photography as the means to assimilate other cultures to his imaginary museum, Sartre praised the capacity of the photograph to convey the independence of others. Stanley Donen’s Paris-set musical Funny Face (1956) articulates these concerns in the dilemma faced by its librarian-turned-fashion-model protagonist, who is torn between the competing claims of photography and philosophy. Paradoxically, these post-war debates suggest that the instrumental use of photography in the service of ostensible humanism denies the difference of others, while the medium’s anti-human or mechanical attachment to the real guarantees an openness to and respect for alterity.

Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior

A N Prior has a special place in the history of postwar philosophy for his highly original work at the intersection of logic and metaphysics. His logical innovations have found many applications in the areas of philosophical logic, mathematics, linguistics, and, increasingly, computer science. In addition, he made seminal contributions to debates in metaphysics, particularly on modality and the nature of time. This volume presents a selection of current research in the areas that were of most interest to Prior: temporal and tense logic, modal logic, proof theory, quantification and individuation, and the logic of agency. Both title and contents reflect Prior's view that logic is 'about the real world', and the orientation of the volume is towards the application of logic, in philosophy, computer science, and elsewhere. Following Prior, modal syntax is now widely applied to the formalization of a variety of subject matters, and tense logic has found numerous applications in computing, for example in natural language processing, logical deduction involving time-dependent data, program-verification, and VLSI. A special feature of the volume is the inclusion of three hitherto unpublished pieces by Prior on modal logic and the philosophy of time, along with a complete bibliography of Prior's published philosophical writings.

Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior

Book Review| April 01 2000 Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior LOGIC AND REALITY: ESSAYS ON THE LEGACY OF ARTHUR PRIOR. By J. Copeland, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. x, 545. Christopher Menzel Christopher Menzel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2000) 109 (2): 281–286. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-109-2-281 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher Menzel; Logic and Reality: Essays on the Legacy of Arthur Prior. The Philosophical Review 1 April 2000; 109 (2): 281–286. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-109-2-281 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsThe Philosophical Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Cornell University2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Post-war philosophy and empirical sociology in France: The connection of the sixties and after

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