Bernard Freydberg

This book addresses the breach within contemporary philosophy with a newly conceived foundationalism. It shows that dramatic discord has arisen between its two dominant branches. The Anglo-American branch generally takes its departure from logic and from natural science, while the Continental branch generally takes its departure from art and from the great traditional questions. However, they share this common negative feature: each side denies the view that philosophy issues from a central foundation. The book gives brief distillations of six major Anglo-American figures: Carnap, James, Quine, Davidson and Kripke; as well as six major Continental figures: Husserl (the only foundationalist), Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Gadamer, and Sallis. In each, the author discovers a hidden foundation called ruling image that animates the philosopher's thought.

Gramsci and the Italian State. By Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schecter (Manchester and New York Manchester University Press, 1993), xvi + 203 pp. Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588. By Wallace MacCaffrey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), x + 530 pp. Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603. By Wallace MacCaffrey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), xvi + 592 pp. Figures on the Horizon. Edited by Jerrold Seigel (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1993), xix + 278 pp. £29.50, $53.00 cloth. Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties. Edited by Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), xii + 218 pp., £27.00 cloth, £11.95 paper. The Origins of French Art Criticism from the Anden Régime to the Restoration. By Richard Wrigley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), xii + 427 pp. The Madness of Kings: Personal Trauma and the Fate of Nations. By Vivian Green (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), xiii + 322 pp., $35.00 cloth. The Conservative Imagination. By Philip Thody (London: Pinter, 1993), xi + 179 pp., cloth. The Longman Companion to Cold War and Détente 1941–91. By John W. Young (London and New York: Longman Higher Educational, 1993), 360 pp., £11.99 paper. The Colloquy of Montbéliard: Religion and Politics in the Sixteenth Century. By Jill Raitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xiv + 226 pp., £40.00 Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism. By Robert Wuthnow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993; first published, 1989), 739 pp., $29.95 paper. Xenophon Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary. By Sarah B. Pomeroy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), xii + 388 pp., $50.00 The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Edited by Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), xx + 315 pp., $16.95 paper. Biblical Theocracy: A Vision of the Biblical Foundations for a Christian Political Philosophy. By Stephen Palmquist (Hong Kong: Philopsychy Press, 1993), 193 pp., HK $35.00, US $4.50 paper. Considerations sur la France. By Joseph De Maistre, trans, and edited by Richard A. LeBrun; introduction by Isaiah Berlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) xlii + 132 pp., £30.00/$49.95 cloth, £12.95/$16.95 paper. Machiavellian Rhetoric. By Victoria Kahn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xv + 314 pp., $29.95, £23.50 cloth. Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre et les Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale: Correspondance, vol. 1, 1928–1933. Edited by Bertrand Müller (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1994), lx + 551pp., FF240. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. By Patricia Kitcher (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 296 pp. The End of the Salon: Art and the State in the Early Third Republic. By Patricia Mainardi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ix + 210 pp., $18.95/£12.95 paper. Aristotle on the Goals and Exactness of Ethics. By Georgios Anagnostopoulos (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), xiii + 468 pp., $50.00 cloth. A Treatise of Orders and Plain Dignities. By Charles Loyseau, edited and trans, by Howell A. Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xlviii + 255 pp., $59.95 and £40.00 cloth, $22.95 and £14.95 paper. The Philosophy of Childhood. By Gareth B. Matthews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 136 pp., $18.95 cloth. Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought. Edited by Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 480 + ix pp., $74.50 cloth, $24.95 paper. Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia. By Stephen Botterill, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), x + 269 pp., £37.50 and $59.95. The Boundaries of Modern Iran. Edited by Keith McLachlan, SOAS Geopolitics Series 2 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994, ix + 150 pp., $49.95 cloth. New French Thought: Political Philosophy. Edited by Mark Lilla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) 239 pp., $45.00 cloth; $14.95 paper. Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean. By Irad Malkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xvii + 278 pp., £37.50 and $59.95 cloth. The Interpretation of Order: A Study in the Poetics of Homeric Repetition. By Ahuvia Kahane (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), xi + 190 pp., £25.00 cloth. History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of Metaphor. By Frank R. Ankersmit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), vii + 244 pp., $40.00 cloth. Anglo‐Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture. By Julian Moynahan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xiii + 288 pp., $24.95 cloth. The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes. Edited by Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), Vol. 1: 1622–1659, lxxv + 511 pp., £60.00 doth; Vol. 2: 1660–1679, xv + 495 pp., £60.00 cloth. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. By Shadi Bartsch, Revealing Antiquity 6. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), vi + 309 pp., $37.50 cloth. Divine Power: The Medieval Power Distinction up to its Adoption by Albert, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. By Lawrence Moonan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), xii + 396 pp., £40.00 cloth. Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918–1922. By Vladimir N. Brovkin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xiii + 455 pp., $43.50 and £55.00 cloth. The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age. Edited by Gerard Chaliand (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), xliii + 1072 pp., 8 maps, $75.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment. By Jack R. 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By Otto of Freising, trans, and edited by Charles Mierow (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 366 pp., $16.95 paper. In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. By Robert Kegan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), viii + 396 pp., $29.95 cloth. Tudor Political Culture. Edited by Dale Hoak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xxiii +310 pp., £45.00 Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945–1950. By Yule F. Heibel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 207 pp., $45.00, £33.50 cloth. The Uses of the University, 4th ed. By Clark Kerr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), xv + 220 pp., $15.95 paper. The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science. By John Dupré (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 308 pp., paper. The Stop. By David Appelbaum (Albany: State University of New York Press, New York, 1995), xi + 154 pp., $14.95 paper. Walter Benjamin's Passages. By Pierre Missac, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 233 pp., $25.00 cloth. Spinoza: The Enduring Questions. Edited by Graeme Hunter. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), xviii +182 pp., North American $70.00, Europe $78.00, UK £45.50 cloth. Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva. By Robert M. Kingdon (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), ix + 214 pp., $29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. Falsehood Disguised: Unmasking the Truth in La Rochefoucauld. By Richard G. Hodgson. (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1995), xiii + 175 pp., £28.50. Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities. By Peter Levine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), xxi + 279 pp., $18.95 cloth. Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays. By Herman von Helmholtz, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xviii + 418 pp., $52.00 cloth, $17.00 paper.

This provocative reassessment of modern philosophy explores its nonrational dimensions and connection to ancient mysteries. Delving beneath the principal discourses of philosophyfrom Descartes through Kant, Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark forces that ignite the inner power of modern thought. He contends that reason itself issues from an implicit and unconscious suppression of the nonrational. Even the modern philosophical concerns of nature and limits are undergirded by a dark side that dwells in them and makes them possible. Freydberg traces these dark sources to the poetry of Hesiod, the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and the Platonic dialogues and claims that they rear their heads again in the work of Spinoza, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Freydberg does not set forth a critique of modern philosophy but explores its intrinsic continuity with its ancient roots.

ABSTRACT The “Socratic method” seems to be well understood in general to mean some sort of “question and answer” procedure as distinguished from “lecturing.” Law schools are familiar sites for its so-called practice, and the Platonic dialogues are believed to provide models of it. However, Socrates himself never speaks of having a method except in one place in the Phaedo – where it has nothing to do with “question and answer.” The Greeks had a clear word for method, “methodos,” and Socrates applies it once and once only. He calls his method “eike phuro,” random mixing. In this paper, I shall attempt to bring this method together with the myths, jokes, and very long discourses with which the dialogues are replete.

The vastly underrated Plutus receives at least some of its due in this paper. At its beginning, I attempt to locate Plutus within both the Hegelian discourse on comedy and within Hume's poetical and philosophical fictions. Employing the same method of close textual analysis that I employed in Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros, I focus upon the thoroughgoing materialism of the poor farmer Chremylus who laments the unjust distribution of wealth, and who seeks to restore the god's sight so as to obtain a large amount of the wealth he lacks. The critical section of the play occurs in an exchange with Poverty or Need, who is depicted as an ugly hag but who speaks beautifully. Aristophanic music subtly sings the glory of need as the spur to all that is good in human actions, as it mocks wealth as a standard of human worth.

The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural science are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and thus that human beings are also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant's writings available, and the first major overview of his work to be published in more than a dozen years. An internationally recognised team of Kant scholars explore Kant's conceptual revolution in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion

Both in Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental and in his very recent Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental, John Sallis enacts a reconfiguration of the relationship of geometry to elementology, which might be regarded more generally as a rethinking of the relation of mathematics to philosophy. The paper will trace this reconfiguration in two ways: as it lies present but concealed in the history of philosophy, for example, in Descartes’ so-called “dualism” and in Kant’s pure productive imagination, and in its present creative evolution in fractal geometry, as Sallis interprets it. Sallis draws together the mathematical affinity with a fundamental aesthetic drive, likening mathematical patterns to choreographic ones. I conclude by following this strain as it points to specific dance companies, and to my own sense of aesthetic homecoming as presented in my Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason.

"Heidegger" and "comedy" are words that one seldom finds conjoined. However, in his 1943 Summer Freiburg lecture course entitled " Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens. Heraklit ," the word " komisch " occurs significantly, it is regarded as superior to " das Tragische ," and thus can open up a new vista onto Heideggerian thought. In this paper, I discuss Heidegger's interpretive translation of Heraclitus' Fragment 123: Φυσιζ κρυπτ∊σθαι φιλ∊ι. I attempt to show how Heidegger distinguishes his translation and interpretation from other great thinkers and other ways of thought, and how this distinction ultimately unfolds into that unlikeliest and untimeliest of beings, a uniquely comic Heidegger

Among Platonic images that have engaged John Sallis’s thought on Plato, the second voyage of Socrates, his deuteros plous, recurs often and provocatively. It is not too much to suggest that deuteros plous has occasioned many of Sallis’s own voyages, as well as suggesting a fruitful image of the philosopher as voyager that may be gleaned from these peculiar journeys. This essay will consist of four brief sections. The first will focus upon Sallis’s earliest reading of deuteros plous in Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue (the title of its first edition, to me the best title), in which he provides a sustained reading of Phaedo 95e–102a, in the heart of which Socrates’s second voyage is brought ..

Abstract The paper is divided into four brief but related sections: (I) a description of Figal's resuscitation and reinterpretation of the word that informs the title of his book, the word “ Gegenstand ,“ and his Heidegger-critique regarding this resuscitation; (II) an examination of an important strain of the aforementioned lineage, namely, the role of Wilhelm von Humboldt as source for Heidegger's and his own Sprachdenken ; (III) an account of the Figal-Heidegger encounter with respect to the speaking of language; and (IV) the culmination of the “ Sprache “ chapter and some comments upon the outcome with regard to philosophy of language

With particular focus on imagination, Bernard Freydberg presents a close reading of Kant’s second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason. In an interpretation that is daring as well as rigorous, Freydberg reveals imagination as both its central force and the bridge that links Kant’s three critiques. Freydberg’s reading offers a powerful challenge to the widespread view that Kant’s ethics calls for rigid, self-denying obedience. Here, to the contrary, the search for self-fulfillment becomes an enormously creative endeavor once imagination is understood as the heart of Kantian ethics. Seasoned scholars and newer students will find a surprising and provocative view of Kant’s ethics in this straightforward and accessible book

Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel -- Echoes: after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy.

This paper discloses and furthers the rebirth of comedy in Continental philosophy in three stages. The first treats Greek comedy, bringing forth the comic contours in Plato and exploring the philosophical content of Aristophanic comedy. The second examines certain German encounters with comedy, from the staid Wieland translations of Aristophanes through the thoughtful discussions of Schiller, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The third investigates twentieth-century American comedy and its connection to American Continental philosophy, and includes a close analysis of the Marx Brothers' Horsefeathers . The latter serves as a bridge to some surprising developments regarding comedy, poetry, and philosophy