Walter Brogan

Gadamer's rethinking of the interconnection of theory and practice can lead to a resolution of the debate in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship regarding the priority of theory or practice in Aristotle's Ethics. This is especially true in light of Aristotle's treatment of friendship which, as I will try to show, provides support for Gadamer's claim. In Aristotle's notion of friendship, theory and practice come together, and the activity of friendship is for Aristotle the highest expression of human life precisely because true friendship requires the unity of theory and practice. I argue that Aristotle's sense of, contemplation, his sense of ultimate happiness that is constituted by the life of theory, is conceived by Aristotle in a thoroughly practical and political sense. Specifically I claim that the practice of theory is the politics of friendship.

My essay attempts humbly to honor and celebrate the voice of Charles Scott by thematizing one of the major insights of his body of work, namely the significance of the middle voice. I attempt in various ways to show the significance of the middle voice in the work of Charles Scott and to offer some commentary on what is meant by the middle voice. Finally, I ask about the implications of a middle-voiced philosophy for an understanding of the self of human beings and for an understanding of the theme of indifference in relation to the lives of things that Scott addresses in his later work.

This essay explains what Blanchot understands as writing and the space of literature. For Blanchot, writing is the place where the impossible interruption of the destiny of things is put into play, an interruption that world-formation needs but negates and conceals. Writing belongs to an excess outside of language, an otherness of language. The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words. Writing is contrasted with dialectical language and the totalizing aim of the Hegelian system. The essay explains the connection between the disaster of writing (after the holocaust), the neuter and fragmentary style of writing and the passivity of writing