Babette Babich

For both continental and analytic styles of philosophy, the thought of Martin Heidegger must be counted as one of the most important influences in contemporary philosophy. In this book, essays by internationally noted scholars, ranging from David B. Allison to Slavoj Zizek, honour the interpretive contributions of William J. Richardson's pathbreaking Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The essays move from traditional phenomenology to the idea of essential (another) thinking, the questions of translation and existential expressions of the turn of Heidegger's thought, the intersection of politics and language, the philosophic significance of Jacques Lacan, and several essays on science and technology. All show the influence of Richardson's first study. A valuable emphasis appears in Richardson's interpretation of Heidegger's conception of die Irre, interpreted as Errancy, set in its current locus in a discussion of Heidegger's debacle with the political in his involvement with National Socialism.

This essay explores Nietzsche’s visit to Orta, including his visit with Lou von Salomé to Sacro Monte. Yet there are two Sacri Monti, one at Orta and one, some distance away, at Varallo. Lou reports that Nietzsche described this visit as the «most charming dream» [entzückendsten Traum] of his life and scholars have concluded that this dream refers to Nietzsche’s erotic moment – just a kiss – with Lou. This essay argues for a hermeneutico-phenomenological consideration of the locus itself: featuring nearly a dozen (doubled that number at Varallo) architecturally unique oratories and hundreds of brilliantly painted, nearly life-size statues set in landscape designed to recreate the particular atmosphere of the Mediterranean world, both Jerusalem and Athens, transposed to the north of Italy. This “weather” would have captivated the Nietzsche who worked on the intersection between what texts tell us about antiquity and the world, the “barest hem of which”, as he once put it, we cannot begin to touch.

By now it is clear that the word postmodern has a settled into an insurmountable usage in the field of architecture and this in addition to its continuing currency for art critics and theorists, social analysts, and political and literary theorists, not to mention journalists and philosophers. Nevertheless no one less influential for the real or built presence of postmodernism than Charles Jencks could complain that with respect to architecture, critics apply the term as a kind of catchall, so that postmodernism is used for "everything that was different from high modernism, and usually this meant skyscrapers with funny shapes, brash colors, and exposed technology."1.

Excerpt“Philosophy is metaphysics”1—so Heidegger reminds us and goes on to explain what metaphysics does. As we recall his 1929 inaugural lecture, “What is Metaphysics?” the project of questioning/defining metaphysics is one he undertakes throughout his life, so that as we read in 1964: “Metaphysics thinks beings as a whole—the world, man, God—with respect to Being, with respect to the belonging together of beings in Being.”2 In addition to Descartes, and hence with implicit reference to Husserl, Heidegger's moves follow Kant on metaphysics in each of the cases noted above. They do so, first, in negative detail, as Kant reflects in…

Adorno’s phenomenological study of radio offers a sociology of music in a political and cultural context. Situating that phenomenology in the context of Adorno’s philosophical background and the world political circumstances of Adorno’s collaboration with Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio Project, illuminates both Adorno’s Current of Music and the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer and the ‘Culture Industry’. Together with an analysis of popular music in social practice/culture, this article also explores Adorno’s spatial reflections on Paul Bekker’s notion of the community-building power of the symphony, including his reflection on the radio face which he elaborated in terms of both time and the physiognomics of the time-space of sound, private and communal, and adds connections with today’s Internet and related media.

In what follows I offer a parodic brief against analytic style philosophy just as it is that style characteristic of professional philosophy of science. I discuss the ad hoc resilience and sophisticated disdain variously operative in analytic discourse, including reviews of the maverick rhetoricism of the late Paul Feyerabend and others towards a critique of the postmodern condition in science and philosophy. What I name continental style philosophical thinking primarily regards the historical and expressly hermeneutic style of thinking found in the reflections on science characteristic of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Other continental approaches to the philosophy of science growing out of the phenomenological critiques of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty may be expected to be more congenial to analytic sensibilities as suggested by the recent resurgence of interest in the common roots of continental and analytic style philosophic thinking in Husserl and Frege. An approach combining both hermeneutic and phenomenological styles with a sensitivity to the themes of mainstream or analytic philosophy of science is characteristic of the essays and books of, for one important example, Patrick A. Heelan, but also Joseph Kockelmans and Ted Kisiel, Robert Crease and Joseph Rouse, and so on - among rather not a lot of others. Although scholars advocating continental approaches to the philosophy of science routinely refer to traditional adherents of analytic style philosophy of science, there is no reciprocal recognition on the part of analytical philosophers of science. And as a result there is no received tradition of continental scholarship within the professional establishment of the philosophy of science. Thus the philosophy of science remains an analytic discipline, with continental perspectives excluded by the sovereign expedient of disregard, an absence of critical reference which effects the professional annihilation of scholarship. It is this factor that accounts for - that commands - the mixed style of the present essay.

radicalization of Kant 's critical project inverts or opposes traditional readings of Kant 's critical program. Nietzsche aligns both Kant and Schopenhauer with what he named the effectively, efficiently pathological optimism of the rationalist drive to knowledge, patterned on the Cyclopean eye of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy. For the rest of Nietzsche's writerly life, the name of Socrates would serve both as a signifier for the historical personage marking the end of the "tragic age" of the Greeks as well as a signifier for the philosophical tradition of the idealization of reason, knowledge, and truth: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer

This work presents truth as an aesthetic value in Nietzsche's epistemic account of Western morals and scientific culture. An expression of Nietzsche's special, selective style as a deconstructive hermeneutic in and among texts and readers is offered to facilitate this reading. ;Nietzsche's claim that the world is Will to Power construes all events as mutually interpretive expressions. Where truth is determined as a perspectival expression, the Real must be thought to incorporate multiple truths reflecting its ambiguous, ambivalent abundance. ;The existing tradition in the philosophy of science takes science to approximate ideal knowledge. As an interpretive position, science takes the measure of opposing perspectives: the efficacy of theory and computation testifies to the power of the scientific project. This project has its special advantage from the dynamic difference between evaluative structures seeking to overpower disparate perspectives. As the scientific focus is claimed to be exclusive, or accurate, it is a falsification. ;Beyond the computational efficiency which requires a life-denying , preservative life-orientation, Nietzsche moves towards a broader aesthetic: affirming life in its very chaotic ambivalence. As an active Will to Power, this expressive aesthetic opposes the reactive Will to Power of the ascetic aesthetic of science and religion. This is an uneven contest, for while the Will to Power can be active or reactive, the active will becomes reactive if it once encounters and resists--neither absorbing nor succumbing to--a reactive will. Given the insistent superiority of indigent Will to Power as a conservative, acquisitive will, the full possibility of a perspectival aesthetics of truth including an affirmative aesthetic is only rarely to be realised. This affirmative aesthetic articulates a life that is neither acquisitive nor fearful but purely expressive in the grand style. Finally, assumed from the perspective of such a grand style of life, the thought of the Eternal Return is prophylactic against the deadening rule of nihilism