-
20Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (review)Common Knowledge 14 (3): 501-502. 2008.Cavell reads Nietzsche’s reference to Übermorgan, the day after tomorrow (the day after the crisis of nihilism), on the model of Übermensch, as a surpassing dawn, elucidated with examples from Emerson and Thoreau. These philosophers may not be Dionysian pessimists on the other side of Western nihilism, but they are as untimely as a midday dawn. In Cavell’s Emersonian terms, they are perfectionists, assuming “the right to seek a step toward an unattained possibility of the self, to want a world c…Read more
-
146
-
24Government in FoucaultCanadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (4): 421-439. 1991.The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says…Read more
-
3Kai Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 11 (5): 344-348. 1991.
-
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Trans. Thomas Burger Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 10 (6): 228-232. 1990.
-
1Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 8 (10): 402-405. 1988.
-
2Frederick L. Will, Beyond Deduction: Ampliative Aspects of Philosophical Reflection Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 9 (6): 255-257. 1989.
-
13Dewey and the Art of ExperiencePragmatism Today 7 (1): 93-99. 2016.Instead of following the behaviorists and abandoning the concept of experience, Dewey wanted to reconstruct it. Dewey was an ardent Darwinist, so whatever experience is, it has to be an evolved, presumably adaptive power. “Experience” became for him one word for the multiplex relation between the evolved, adapted organism and its environment. Human environments include groups and social relations mediated by language. But “experience” is not centered there, or restricted to the use of language. …Read more
-
72Forbidding KnowledgeThe Monist 79 (2): 294-310. 1996.Are there matters we should exclude from inquiry? Personal privacy apart, it seems difficult to justify. By what higher, better knowledge than the results of inquiry itself could one know what inquiry ought not know? Is such knowledge a metaphysical intuition whose authority cannot be questioned? Isn't that a fairy-tale? But what about ethics? What about ethical limitations on knowledge? Can they not concern more than simply what to do with knowledge we have, concerning instead the very dynamic …Read more
-
A. Phillips Griffiths, Ed., The Impulse To Philosophise (review)Philosophy in Review 13 (4): 158-160. 1993.
-
37Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (review)Common Knowledge 17 (1): 198-199. 2011.Gilles Deleuze has a growing readership in English philosophy, where for long he was eclipsed by brilliant contemporaries like Derrida and Foucault. It is good that we are coming to appreciate his highly original and fascinatingly intricate philosophy. He worked with integrity and genius to do something different in philosophy from everything he was hearing in contemporaries. None of the familiar labels—structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics…Read more
-
81Turning Back the Linguistic Turn in the Theory of KnowledgeThesis Eleven 89 (1): 6-22. 2007.The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, disc…Read more
-
58The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness (review)Common Knowledge 16 (3): 559-559. 2010.Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sex…Read more
-
35Postmodern Pragmatism and Skeptical Hermeneutics: Richard Rorty and Odo MarquardContemporary Pragmatism 10 (1): 91-111. 2013.
-
74Review of Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (10). 2008.
-
37Foucault's theory of knowledgeIn Christopher Falzon (ed.), Foucault and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 143--162. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: References.
-
2Foucault's nominalismIn Shelley Tremain (ed.), _Foucault and the Government of Disability_, University of Michigan Press. pp. 93--107. 2005.
-
25Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia (review)Common Knowledge 23 (1): 104-104. 2017.Wikipedia currently exists in 270 languages, with more than 20 million articles. The English-language Wikipedia has 2.5 billion words, sixty times the size of Britannica. It may be the largest collaborative initiative in history, and influences what people the world over know or think they know. Wikipedia’s distinctive feature is the non-expert, non-professional, non-certified, non-formal production of knowledge with credible content. Academics like to sneer at that, even as more of us acknowled…Read more
-
Difference UnlimitedIn Gary Brent Madison (ed.), Working through Derrida, Northwestern University Press. 1993.
-
44Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (review) (review)Common Knowledge 8 (1): 208-208. 2002.According to Davidson, Quine, by overcoming the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, made the philosophy of language a serious subject. According to Rorty, Davidson, in concluding that "there is no such thing as a language," attains its most advanced position. How impoverished philosophy has become! It even becomes a kind of accomplishment to show that work which seemed new and different (deconstruction) is really the same old thing. Wheeler's book domesticates deconstruction for An…Read more
-
81Games of Sport, Works of Art, and the Striking Beauty of Asian Martial ArtsJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 40 (2). 2013.Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and works of per…Read more
-
16To Really See the Little Things: Sage Knowledge in ActionJournal of Chinese Philosophy 42 (3-4): 359-370. 2015.Sage knowledge knows the evolution of circumstances from an early point, when tendencies may be inconspicuously, “effortlessly” diverted. This knowledge is expressed, not “represented,” being an intensive quality of action rather than of belief, proposition, or theory, and its effortlessness is not a matter of effort versus no effort, but of the intensity with which effort tends to vanish. The value of such knowledge and the explanation of its accomplishment in terms of perceiving incipience or …Read more
-
143The virtual and the vacant—emptiness and knowledge in Chan and daoismJournal of Chinese Philosophy 37 (3): 457-471. 2010.Similarities between Daoism and Chan (Zen) are often merely verbal, a skillful appropriation by Chan authors of a vocabulary that seems Daoist only to a point, and then departs in a predictable way. What makes the departure predictable is the completely different understanding of emptiness in Chan and Daoism, supporting a no less different understanding of the value of knowledge. Daoism remains optimistic about knowledge in a way Chan is not. Buddhist wisdom exhausts life, extinguishes it, does …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Knowledge |
Continental Philosophy |
Chinese Philosophy |
History of Western Philosophy, Misc |
Aesthetics |