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.

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, no less than Heidegger or Nietzsche, had his own critical notions of truth/untruth. But Adorno’s readers are unsettled by the barest hint of anything that might be taken to be antiscience. To protest scientism, yes and to be sure, but to protest “scientific thought,” decidedly not, and the distinction is to be maintained even if Adorno himself challenged it. For Adorno, so-called “scientistic” tendencies are the very “conditions of society and of scientific thought.” And again, Adorno’s readers tend to refuse criticism of this kind. Scientific rationality cannot itself be problematic and E. B. Ashton, Adorno’s translator in the mid-1960s, sought to underscore this with the word “scientivistic.” Rather than science, it is scientism that is to be avoided. So we ask: is Adorno speaking here of scientific rationality or scientistic rationality? How, in general, are we to read Adorno?

It is well-known that as a term, Nietzsche’sÜbermenschderives from Lucian of Samosata’shyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances by reflecting on the context of that origination from Lucian’sKataplous– literally, “sailing into port” – referring to the soul’s journey (ferried by Charon, guided by Hermes) into the afterlife. TheKataplous he tyrannos, usually translatedDownward Journey or The Tyrant, is a Menippean satire 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. InThus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, including 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 trivial satisfactions.

Beginning with Jürgen Habermas's 1968 reflection on Nietzsche's criticisms of knowledge and science, the essays in this volume engage Nietzsche's challenge to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory as well as other social and political theories of modernity and postmodernity. Juxtaposing Habermas and Nietzsche for the sake of the "future" of critical theory, the essays in this collection draw variously on Marx and Weber as well as Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and others. The distinguished authors in this book argue that critical theory is best served by responding to challenges such as those associated with identity politics and globalization and including an authentic engagement with Nietzsche. This important volume features contributions by Babette E. Babich, Karin Bauer, Howard Caygill, Rebecca Comay, Fred Dallmayr, Josef Früchtl, Jürgen Habermas, Dominique Janicaud, Alexander Nehamas, David Owen, Max Pensky, Holger Schmid, Tracy B. Strong, James Swindal, and Bernhard Taureck.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche, Biology and MetaphorBabette E. BabichGregory Moore. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 228. Cloth, $55.00.Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor is a well-written book on a topic of growing importance in Nietzsche studies. Not only concerned with offering an interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of biology and metaphor, Moore's approach offers a literary contextualization of Darwinism in the history of ideas but also in terms of an important reflection on the idea of decadence so important to Nietzsche and so influential in theorizing public health and law in the twentieth century, most perniciously in its deadly expressions in Nazi propaganda. Moore is thus able to bridge the fields of the more specifically linguistic study of metaphor and source-scholarship. To Moore's great credit, he seeks to emphasize the extent to which Nietzsche's thought was developed in active correspondence with the scientific literature and debates of his age. But this reviewer thinks it important to warn those with classical or traditional interest in metaphor that the text presupposes that the reader (and this is also to say that Moore) knows a Nietzschean metaphor when he sees one.Moore begins with the question of Nietzsche's Darwinism, focusing on the physiology of power to explore the relations between Darwin, Spencer, Lamarck, and Rolph, but also Nietzsche's favorites, Malthus and Lange, etc. The discussion of the history of the reception of Darwin's ideas is careful and extensive and offers an insightful clarification of Darwin (necessary to distinguish Darwin from Darwinism, "social" and otherwise). Some readers will find it even more Anglophone than seems justified by Darwin's heritage, despite Moore's passing references to Cuvier and (at rather greater length) Haeckel and Roux.This reviewer notes that the latter references have been well-discussed in the German literature and to some great part Moore is fair to this tradition even if it is also true that the discussion never enters the level of the history of science as this reader, for one, might have wished. In the case of Moore's interpretation of Nietzsche's texts, the readings sometimes suggest a reprise of what has come to be the consensus (and not just among Nietzsche scholars) of views on Nietzsche's thinking. Thus where certain secondary authors are in force in Moore's well-documented account (Pick, Moles, and Ruse), others are missing. Indeed, in the case of Nietzsche and Darwinism, Frederick Gregory's Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992) offers an important supplement. Another book that seems to have been overlooked is Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, 1982), and those interested in von Baer and other proponents of teleology in biology will find Lenoir's broader account useful.The second half of the book addresses degeneration and like most contemporary discussions, Moore's book is charged with the political history of the last century. Moore reviews the association of decadence with jazz music and—via physiognomy as its external signifier—to the ugly, the Jew, the Black, and, of course, to women who broke with the family role. As an instantiation, Moore uncovers the nineteenth century antipathy to "allegedly aberrant behavior such as masturbation and homosexuality" in Nietzsche's "restrictive" [End Page 348] (133) view of sexuality and precocious eroticism (134) as degeneration. However, the issue of masturbation is complicated. The nineteenth-century perspective on masturbation was less a matter of prudishness than a judgment backed with considerable social and medical force, which equated the practice with sickness or criminality, the counterpart to which today would be our judgment with regard to an addiction to cocaine or heroine. This censure drove Wagner's "exposure" of Nietzsche's personal dependence on this practice. Readers interested in this question can either take themselves to the easy-to-find because eponymous chapter in Marc Wiener's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, 1995) or to David B. Allison's account of this as the occasion for the break between Nietzsche and Wagner in Reading...

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.

Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact foregrounds claims traditionally excluded from reception, often regarded as opposed to fact, scientific claims that are increasingly seldom discussed in connection with philosophy of science save as examples of pseudoscience. I am especially concerned with scientists who question the epidemiological link between HIV and AIDS and who are thereby discounted—no matter their credentials, no matter the cogency of their arguments, no matter the sobriety of their statistics—but also with other classic examples of so-called pseudoscience including homeopathy and other sciences, such as cold fusion. The pseudoscience version of the demarcation problem turns out to include some of the details that Latour articulates multifariously under a variety of species or kinds in his essay/interactive research project/monograph, ‘Biography of an Investigation’. Given the economic constraints of the current day, especially in the academy, the growing trend in almost all disc..

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.