Babette Babich

Scientists defend “impersonal, objective truth” against the postmodern claim that there is no truth, only interpretations. The hoax on cultural studies orchestrated by a physicist, Alan Sokal, has highlighted this perspective. Sokal's disclosure of the hoax and subsequent polemics has ripped through the complacency of academic disciplines, exposing the fragility of academic integrity and raising questions concerning the function of peer review. Sokal submitted a bogus article for the May 1996 issue of Social Text devoted to “Science Wars.” On Sokal's own account, the Social Text essay feigned an earnest reflection on the political and philosophical implications of recent physics research for cultural criticism.

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.

"Homer and Classical Philology," Nietzsche's 1869 inaugural lecture at the University of Basel, addresses not only the history of the Homer question as a problem but also raises the question of the discipline of classical philology as science. Thematically, Nietzsche's first lecture as a professor of classical philology focuses on the significance of style as such. In this meta-scholarly context, the issue of scholarly discernment is explored in terms of aesthetic judgment, as a judgment of taste, a focus Nietzsche subsequently resumes in the second of his Untimely Meditations, "On the Utility and Liability of History for Life."1 To be.

This essay is dedicated to elaborating some of the stylistic elements at work in Nietzsche's polemical book, On The Genealogy of Morals with particular attention to the nature of the aphorism from its inception in ancient Greek literaure, Nietzsche's specific deployment of the aphorism as such, including Nietzsche's argument structure and rhetorical technique as well as the language of Greek and Jewish antiquity, master and slave. In: Christa Davis Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham, Md., Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), pp. 177-190.

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and conclude by taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation.

Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science, is the second volume of a collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, featuring essays addressing truth, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, with a substantial representation of analytically schooled Nietzsche scholars. This collection offers a dynamic articulation of the differing strengths of Anglo-American analytic and contemporary European approaches to philosophy, with translations from European specialists, notably Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Paul Valadier, and Walther Ch. Zimmerli. This broad collection also features a preface by Alasdair MacIntyre. Contributions explore Nietzsche's contributions to the philosophy of language and epistemology, and include essays on the social history of truth and the historical and cultural analyses of Serres and Baudrillard, as well as new contributions to the philosophy of science, including theological and hermeneutical approaches, history of science, the philosophy of medicine, cognitive science, and technology.

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…

The question of the contemporary relevance of Heidegger’s reflections on technology to today’s advanced technology is here explored with reference to the notion of “entanglement” towards a review of Heidegger’s understanding of technology and media, including the entertainment industry and modern digital life. Heidegger’s reflections on Gelassenheit have been connected with the aesthetics of the tea ceremony, disputing the material aesthetics of porcelain versus plastic. Here by approaching the art of wabi-sabi as the art of Verfallenheit, I argue that Gelassenheit may be understood in these terms.