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.

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not–excluding not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger but also Husserl just to the extent that continental philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau‐Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics.

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic.

It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’s Übermensch derives from Lucian of Samosata’s hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’s Kataplous – literally, “sailing into port” – referring to the soul’s journey, ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes, into the afterlife. The Kataplous he tyrannos, usually translated Downward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire telling the tale of the “overman” who is imagined to be superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) transport into the underworld. As a reflection on the life and the death of Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same topic. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, beyond the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, no matter whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage, or indeed in the pursuit of more quotidian satisfactions.

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.

Nietzsche and Heidegger pose important philosophical questions to science and its technological projects. The resultant contributes to what may be called a continental philosophy of science and the author argues that only such a rigorously critical approach to the question of science permits a genuinely philosophical reflection on science. More than a thoughtful reflection on science, however, the heart of philosophy is also at stake in such reflections. The author defends that if Nietzsche proposes the resources of art to defend us against truth and the deadly insights of tragic knowledge, then Nietzsche's more arresting claim is his equation of science and art, just as Heidegger aligns techne and poiesis. For Nietzsche, science and art draw upon the same creative powers and both science and art are directed to the purpose of life. /// O ponto de partida deste artigo é o reconhecimento de que Friedrich Nietzsche e Martin Heidegger são dois filósofos que colocam questões profundamente relevantes acerca da Ciência e dos seus projectos tecnológicos. Neste sentido, o plano da autora consiste em demonstrar a viabilidade e a importância do modo não-analítico, ou continental, de fazer Filosofia da Ciência, argumentando que uma reflexão genuinamente filosófica acerca da Ciência não se pode dispensar de um confronto com o modo crítico de fazer filosofia representado tanto por Nietzsche como por Heidegger. Para a autora, os pensamentos críticos destes pensadores acerca da Ciência são bem mais do que uma mera reflexão filosófica acerca da Ciência; na verdade, o que aqui está em causa é propriamente saber de que se trata quando a questão é a da própria Filosofia. Assim, e na medida em que Nietzsche propõe os recursos da arte para nos defender contra as invectivas da verdade e as intuições fatais do conhecimento trágico, a autora do artigo defende que o mais interessante na posição nietzscheana tem a ver com o seu modo de equacionar a relação entre Ciência e Arte, tal como Heidegger acabará por alinhar techne e poiesis. O fundo da questão está em que para Nietzsche tanto a Ciência como a Arte recorrem aos mesmos poderes criativos, para além de que a Ciência e a Arte estão orientadas para a defesa do mesmo propósito: a Vida.

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.