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.

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

In a letter written to Gadamer after receiving a copy of Truth and Method, Leo Strauss offered many criticisms with which Gadamer took issue. However, he acknowledged the important hint cited in the title. Perhaps strangely, Gadamer never took up this hint and showed very little interest in comedy throughout his Gesammelte Schriften. In this essay, I show that there are ample resources within Gadamerian hermeneutics to answer Strauss positively, also for a rich philosophy of comedy along Gadamerian lines. Toward that end, I use Gadamer’s Aristotelian view of tragedy as a clue; interpretations of play, excess and delight (Ergötzen) also weave into the analyses

Play resides at the heart of the Platonic dialogues, shaping their insights as well as informing their style. "The Play of the Platonic Dialogues" traces the prominent role of play, both as a general philosophical characteristic and as influencing the treatment of key issues. The nature of the forms, of the city, of virtue, of the soul and its immortality - these and others have been shaped by play. This book shows how Platonic playfulness is joined with the deepest seriousness throughout the dialogues.

"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

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