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Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and the Problem of Contingency

Thomas Claviez and Viola Marchi (eds)

Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face ... More

Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.Less

Class Acts: Derrida on the Public Stage

Michael Naas

Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links ... More

Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.Less

Couch City: Socrates against Simonides

Harry Berger

Ward Risvold and J. Benjamin Fuqua (eds)

In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a ... More

In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a literary interpretation of the poem’s involvement in the dialogue, how the dialogue itself may be read literarily, and, most importantly, how these readings work together rather than as discrete, incidental literary interventions in Socrates studies. It uses concepts like the performatives of speech-act theory to demonstrate how the structure of the dialogue sanctions the poem’s transgressive playfulness as much as how Socrates’s performance of the poem informs that structure as well as its execution. As much as Couch City examines classical rhetoric and philosophy, it reverberates just as much into contemporary literary studies. The book marries careful structural reading of the poem and dialogue with broader conceptual investigation that may be applied to or re-read in the poem or its reading, producing an argument that rejects the notion that Socrates fails Plato’s philosophical project, but rather complicates it in literary fashion by performing sophistry in order to defeat sophistry.Less

Radical Hospitality: From Thought to Action

Richard Kearney and Melissa Fitzpatrick

This volume addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger. Drawing on key critical ... More

This volume addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger. Drawing on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book engages with urgent moral conversations regarding the role of identity, nationality, immigration, peace, and justice. The volume is divided into two parts. In the first part, entitled “Four Faces of Hospitality: Linguistic, Narrative, Confessional, Carnal,” Richard Kearney develops his recent research on the philosophy of hospitality, which informs the international Guestbook Project of which he is a founder and director (guestbookproject.org). This part elaborates an ethics of hosting the stranger. In the second part, entitled “Hospitality and Moral Psychology: Exploring the Border between Theory and Practice,” Melissa Fitzpatrick adumbrates a new ethics of hospitality in a robust reengagement with the philosophies of Kant, Levinas, Arendt, and contemporary virtue ethicist Talbot Brewer. In the concluding chapters, Kearney and Fitzpatrick chart novel options for the pedagogical application of an ethics of hospitality to our contemporary world of border anxiety, boundary disputes, migration crisis, and the looming ecological challenge.Less

Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology

Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet (eds)

Staging for the first time in extant scholarship a rigorous encounter between German thought from Kant to Marx and new forms of political theology, this ground-breaking volume puts forward a distinct ... More

Staging for the first time in extant scholarship a rigorous encounter between German thought from Kant to Marx and new forms of political theology, this ground-breaking volume puts forward a distinct and powerful framework for understanding the continuing relevance of political theology today as well as the conceptual and genealogical importance of German Idealism for its present and future. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as essentially a secularizing movement, this volume approaches it as the first speculative articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Via a set of innovative readings and critiques, the volume investigates anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, mediation, indifference, the earth, the absolute, or the world, bringing German Idealism and Romanticism into dialogue with contemporary investigations of the (Christian-)modern forms of transcendence, domination, exclusion, and world-justification. Over the course of the volume, post-Kantian German thought emerges as a crucial phase in the genealogy of political theology and an important point of reference for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and secularity. As a result, this volume not only rethinks the philosophical trajectory of German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective, but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.Less

Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique

Nathan Brown

Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy ... More

Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy is rethinking the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing claims of those competing schools, any speculative critique of Kant will have to reopen and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to both extend and delimit one another has always been at the core of philosophy and science, and that coordinating their discrepant powers is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux, while showing how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism is a book that reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.Less

Scatter 2: Politics in Deconstruction

Geoffrey Bennington

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it ... More

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.Less

Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, With a New Introduction

Jacques Derrida

John D. Caputo (ed.)

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to ... More

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida's most influential readers elaborates upon Derrida's comments and supplies material for further discussion. The new Introduction discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida's death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, the book will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida's work.Less

Theosemiotic: Religion, Reading, and the Gift of Meaning

Michael L. Raposa

This book is an attempt to adapt some of Peirce’s ideas, particularly his theory of semiotic, for the purpose of re-thinking certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy ... More

This book is an attempt to adapt some of Peirce’s ideas, particularly his theory of semiotic, for the purpose of re-thinking certain issues in contemporary philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. It begins with an historical sketch that links Peirce’s thought to that of earlier figures, certain contemporaries, and later thinkers and developments. Drawing on Peirce’s thought, the book then develops a semiotic conception of persons/selves and of community. It analyzes in some detail the role that acts of attention play in shaping human inferences and perception, while also exploring the relationship between attention, volition, and love. Its central Peircean presuppositions are that all human experience takes the form of semiosis and that the universe is “pefused” with signs. Theology is portrayed here in its manifestations as inquiry, therapy, and praxis. The book dramatically closes the gap between what would typically be recognized as the nature and purpose of a philosophical theology and a theology of the spiritual life. It draws on both Peirce’s logic of vagueness and his logic of relations to make sense out of how we talk about the nature and reality of God, and also about the relationship between different religious communities. Theosemiotic is portrayed here as a form of religious naturalism, broadly conceived. The book also argues that there is a natural affinity between a theosemiotic inspired by Peirce’s pragmatism and liberation theology.Less

Critique of Journalistic Reason: Philosophy and the Time of the Newspaper

Tom Vandeputte

This book examines an encounter recurring throughout the modern philosophical tradition: that between philosophy and journalism. It focuses on the images of reporters and newspaper readers, ... More

This book examines an encounter recurring throughout the modern philosophical tradition: that between philosophy and journalism. It focuses on the images of reporters and newspaper readers, messengers and town criers, and announcements and rumors punctuating the work of three thinkers who understood themselves to be writing at the limits of this tradition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin. As this book argues, the preoccupation with journalism of these three thinkers cannot be separated from their philosophy “proper” but plays a pivotal role in their philosophical work, where it marks the nexus between their theories of history, time, and language. Journalism, for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin alike, figures before anything else as a cipher of the time in which they understood themselves to be writing. If the journalist and newspaper reader characterize what Kierkegaard calls “the present age,” it does so by marking it as a present marked by the crisis of the philosophy of history. But journalism does not simply mark the end of history as a philosophizable concept; for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, journalism takes on an exemplary role in the attempt to think time and history in the wake of this demise. As this book shows, the concepts around which these attempts crystallize—Kierkegaard’s “instant” (Øieblik), Nietzsche’s “untimeliness” (das Unzeitgemäße), Benjamin’s “actuality” (Aktualität)—all emerge from the philosophical confrontation with journalism and its characteristic temporalities.Less