Alejandro Vallega

The author presents this volume as “a companion to Plato’s Phaedo”; as such, one expects it to engage closely the dialogue without abandoning critical rigor, while at the same time exposing us to some of the varied and rich issues that sustain today’s readings of Plato. As Beets’s Prologue indicates, his work focuses on “the issue of the coexistence and transition from the world of becoming to that of being”. The work is divided in two parts. The first part takes up one third of the book and begins by discussing human thought in terms of two main levels of thinking: intuitive and entirely determined by the world, and purely formal and “truly free thinking”. Setting out from this differentiation, the first chapter offers a conceptual structure that will determine the rest of the book. In the same chapter Beets goes on to present philosophical thought as the task of “calling up” from the deeper recesses of our mind our knowledge of “the universal a priori,” or the purely formal, which in turn turns us toward the objective nature of reality and free thinking. The chapter closes as Beets establishes the limitations of conceptual human knowledge in terms of the striving for a knowledge of absolute being or the noumenal, which, although available to the mystic, cannot be accomplished by conceptual knowledge but does serve as “the foothold for meaningful cultural, religious, philosophical, and scientific life and for human ethics”. In following Beets’s itinerary we find out that knowledge of the intuited world can be turned to knowledge of the purely structural, and that in this sense human life through critical conceptual knowledge may be a passage toward the eternal. This occurs if one realizes that the world as it appears is a lie and if we listen to the silent voice in the recess of our mind, which tells us of the a priori. This knowledge of the purely formal in the intuited also leads to Beets’s final insight, namely, that ultimately death will lead us to know the eternal. At this point the author equates absolute being, the noumenal, and God. Thus, the path is laid for the passage from time to the eternal.

Through a discussion of “translucence” in Plato’s Phaidros and in Juan Jose Saer’s “On Line,” in this essay I attempt to engage the simultaneous experience of the concrete sense of language and of the appearing of beings in their materiality through language. The discussion ultimately suggests that, when taken in its full force, the philosophical logos figures the elemental translucence of beings in their intelligibility; a formulation meant to resist the separation of language and concreteness. Such an interpretation of the philosophical logos also leads to the understanding of thought as an elemental, interpretative, transformative, and “marginal” experience.

This article identifies temporality as a constructed and elemental level of aesthetic experience, and exposes the elemental role of such aesthetic experience in the unfolding of contemporary Latin American liberatory thought. This particularly with regard to the sense of temporality that underlies the unfolding of the development of modernity, a development that occurs throughout the colonization of the Americas in the construction of a rational European ego cogito and its "other." Temporality in the westernizing linear sense figures a projective horizon for the perception and understanding of existence and its coming. The key aim and meaning of all existence under this linear temporality is order and progress. However, ultimately in looking at Latin American thought and experience one finds a distinct sense of history and temporality beyond the possible determination of that sustaining westernizing European thought. In the recognition of distinct temporalities space-times open for rethinking modernity and the accompanying senses of humanity, life, freedom, and philosophical thought's issues and ways of articulating beings

The following article discusses a certain concrete ethical-historical sensibility that opens, in part, in the work of Hegel and serves as an introduction to two figures of spirit beyond Hegel’s onto-theological thought: namely, Frantz Fanon and Gabriel García Márquez. The discussion seeks to introduce a “thinking sensibility,” i.e., an opening toward the articulate understanding of history in and through its singularities. This figures a space for a way of thinking arising in the concrete unfolding of spirits out of singularities that overwhelm any single or universal call for unity. In terms of history, this concerns not a thinking that gives sense to history through concepts, but a thought that from its specificity and situation unfolds diverse articulations, and hence configurations of the senses of spirit or histories.

Giorgio Agamben’s thought arises out of thinking through the concrete negativity or ungroundedness figured by “life” as understood under the sovereign exception. His work is sustained by the continuous exposure of philosophical concepts to what remains excluded, silenced, and to an extent unsayable for philosophy: Thus, disfiguring, decentering, and violating the temporality of Western history and philosophy as well as the concepts that order it. This means that Agamben thinks out of the ungrounded occurrences of language and history, and that the transformative potency of his thought arises from sheer negativity and yet, in his engagement of thought’s concrete situation.