Philosophy Today back issues from January 2005:
Recovering First Philosophy in Philosophy of Physics
Jan 01, 2005; ... First Philosophy? Most of us will recall Quine's pronouncements on the subject: First Philosophy is the philosophical disease for which naturalism is the cure. Naturalism, the fifth and final milestone of empiricism, the cap crowning empiricism's triumphal arch, mandates the "abandonment of the ...
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION
Jan 01, 2005; ... Each year, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosts an annual meeting attended by some 500 philosophers and scholars-primarily North American, but increasingly including scholars from Europe, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere-working in the various traditions of ...
IF SCIENCE HAS NO ESSENCE, HOW CAN IT BE?
Jan 01, 2005; ... In his recent work, Michael Friedman argues that, contrary to the standard interpretation which depicts the logical positivists as a species of especially rigorous empiricists, they are better seen as in fact much more influenced by late nineteen- and early twentieth-century developments ...
Self, Other, and Moral Obligation
Jan 01, 2005; ... James Mensch has recently claimed that an ethics must at a minimum guard against "the moral collapse that accompanies genocide."1 As a crime not merely against human individuals but against humanity as such, genocide, on Mensch's view, has as its condition that one adopt a standpoint outside ...
Transcendental Philosophy and Twentieth Century Physics
Jan 01, 2005; ... Thomas Ryckman's new book, The Reign of Relativity, represents a fundamental breakthrough in our understanding of the complex interrelationships between philosophy and mathematical physics in the first quarter of the twentieth century.1 Ryckman shows, in particular, that the philosophical ...
LEVINAS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF HISTORY
Jan 01, 2005; ... In Totality and Infinity Levinas speaks disparagingly of history, particularly of what he calls the judgment of history, which he consistently associates with totality.1 It is clear that he has Hegel's teleological conception of history in mind and the idea that it is with reference to the end ...
GADAMER'S ACCOUNT OF FRIENDSHIP AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO AN ACCOUNT OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Jan 01, 2005; ... Michel Theunissen, in his classic work The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, distinguishes two kinds of theories of intersubjectivity: transcendental theories and dialogical theories.1 Transcendental theories focus on the way an alter-ego is present ...
MCDOWELL AND HABERMAS IN A POST-TRADITIONAL WORLD
Jan 01, 2005; ... John McDowell indicts modern philosophy's contrast between the "space of reasons" and the "organization of nature."1 He challenges this framework as a limitation of options-meanings marked off from causes, mind segregated from world-and outlines an alternative, which draws upon Aristotle's ...
TOWARDS A LIVED UNDERSTANDING OF RACE AND SEX
Jan 01, 2005; ... David Theo Goldberg postulates a paradox in present day western societies, "race is irrelevant, but all is race."1 Linda Martín Alcoff, elaborating on this paradox, writes, "the legitimacy and moral relevance of racial concepts is officially denied even while race continues to determine job ...
FEMINIST POLITICS AND THE HUMAN SITUATION: A REREADING OF MERLEAU-PONTY
Jan 01, 2005; ... Alison Jaggar's "ovial" (if I may) 1983 book, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, correlates liberal, Marxist, radical, and socialist feminist theories with their "malestream" counterparts in political theory. She then shows how those theories, in turn, are derived from underlying metaphysical ...
TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVES ON RACE: Simone de Beauvoir's Phenomenology of "Race" in America Day by Day
Jan 01, 2005; ... In January of 1947, Simone de Beauvoir boarded a plane bound for New York, on her first transatlantic trip to the United States. Once there, she would spend four months (from January to May) on a lecture tour that would take her by train, car, and Greyhound bus, from New York to San Francisco in ...
SARTRE'S ETHICS OF THE OPPRESSED
Jan 01, 2005; ... At the close of Being and Nothingness Sartre promises his readers that he will develop an ethical theory based upon the ontology elaborated in his first major work.1 While he never did so formally, the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics marks his first attempt to construct an ethical ...
MY BODY, MY SELF: FOUCAULT AND ECOFEMINISM
Jan 01, 2005; ... This essay reconsiders a position I took in my book Bodies and Pleasures regarding Foucault's work on normalization and the status of mind/body dualism in contemporary Western culture.1 I argued that Foucault's account of normalization, which I took to be a fairly accurate depiction of Western ...
STOIC METAPHYSICS AND THE LOGIC OF SENSE
Jan 01, 2005; ... In The Logic of Sense [LS], Gilles Deleuze embarks on a unique kind of metaphysical project: to articulate a program for working philosophically within the realm of sense. I choose these words deliberately. The project is a metaphysical one, and sense is a realm. Sense has a real metaphysical ...
TRANSFORMATION IN DELEUZE AND HEIDEGGER: SERIAL AND THEMATIC REPETITION
Jan 01, 2005; ... The relationship between identity and change, being and becoming, is one of the oldest problems in Western philosophy. Is it possible to bridge the gap between these apparent opposites in order to make sense of a world that seems orderly yet subject to fundamental alterations? Atomistic ...
URBAN FLESH
Jan 01, 2005; ... The Violence of Binaries Through a critical appropriation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of flesh, Luce Irigaray stresses those aspects of the flesh Merleau-Ponty merely hints at when he suggests that the flesh stylizes, by which he means the differentiations of the flesh, how the ...
DELEUZE'S METAPHYSICS AND THE REALITY OF THE VIRTUAL
Jan 01, 2005; ... Alain Badiou, in his provocative, while often misguided, Deleuze: The Clamour of Being, suggestively states that both he and Deleuze are classical thinkers. A classical thinker, according to Badiou, refuses to submit to Kant's critical injunctions that limit metaphysical speculation to the field ...
RELIABILITY, EARTH, AND WORLD IN HEIDEGGER'S "THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART"
Jan 01, 2005; ... This brief essay will be narrow in focus, its aim being to present a careful exposition of the concept of "reliability" as it is treated in Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art."1 Since in this essay's famous discussion of a painting of shoes by Van Gogh, Heidegger maintains that it is the ...
THE QUESTION LACKING AT THE END OF ART: DANTO AND HEIDEGGER
Jan 01, 2005; ... 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 ...
MCDOWELL AND HEIDEGGER ON KANT'S SPONTANEOUS RECEPTIVITY
Jan 01, 2005; ... In recent years, a growing trend has been the attempt to break down the wall, and open up the lines of communication, between the analytic and continental traditions. And a major obstacle faced by these divide-bridging endeavors is the problem of defining the traditions in the first place. One ...
THE ABSENT FOUNDATION: HEIDEGGER ON THE RATIONALITY OF BEING
Jan 01, 2005; ... Nihil est sine ratione, "nothing is without reason." For everything that is, there is an answer to the question why it is just so and not otherwise-and, ultimately, there is a reason (ratio) grounding the fact that there is something rather than nothing. Reality as a whole is thus "rational" or ...
MODERNITY AND INTENTIONAL HISTORY: EDMUND HUSSERL, JACOB KLEIN, AND JACQUES DERRIDA
Jan 01, 2005; ... To bring together the work of Jacob Klein and Jacques Derrida, as this essay does, may well seem unexpected.1 One reason to do so, the most obvious, is that both Klein and Derrida published interpretations of Husserl's late fragment Die Ursprung der Geometrie, "The Origin of Geometry."2 They ...
JACOB KLEIN'S REVISION OF HUSSERL'S CRISIS: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL HISTORY OF REIFICATION
Jan 01, 2005; ... The stated intention of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, especially as it gained increasing clarity in his late work, was to cure the "crisis of the European sciences" which was, or is, also the "crisis of European humanity." This intention must be limited by the historical and critical analyses ...
THE WONDER OF QUESTIONING: HEIDEGGER AND THE ESSENCE OF PHILOSOPHY
Jan 01, 2005; ... In the 1937-38 winter semester lecture course, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected "Problems" of "Logic," Heidegger subjects wonder to a prolonged analysis. Within this disposition, philosophers were first granted the subject matter of metaphysics, beings as beings. Curiously, though, wonder ...
The Problem of the Motivation for the Phenomenological Reduction
Jan 01, 2005; ... From the time when Husserl first began talking about the phenomenological reduction (around 1906) until the end of his life, he never tired of emphasizing its importance for phenomenology. But the great effort he devoted to the reduction in his last decade-documented in the research manuscripts ...
HUSSERL'S EGO: ANOTHER THRASHING OF A DEAD HORSE?
Jan 01, 2005; ... John Locke appears to have held that we possess, as part of our whole being, a soul substance, a thinking thing rooted squarely in the Cartesian tradition. But Locke adds that our awareness of personal identity does not depend on that soul and should not be confused with substantial identity ....