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291Self-criticism in a broken mirrorIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.If we have no transparent access to our self, what kind of self-criticism is possible? Neither modernists nor postmodernists yet this pragmatic issue correct.
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2032Postmodern sophistication: Habermas versus LyotardIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.A discussion of whether Habermas as a representative modernist and Lyotard as a representative postmodern echo the ancient dispute between Plato and the Sophists. My conclusion is that they do not quite do so. Each is more complex and ancient dichotomy should be revised.
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1531The power of the SophistIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.Plato is mistaken on both sides of his distinction between Socrates and the Sophists. He imagines the Sophists to have a formless power that cannot be resisted. This exaltation of the power of persuasion needs to be seen as motivating excessive fears in various modern debates. Pragmatic approaches can lessen our fear.
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250The Last Word in Greek PhilosophyIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. pp. 17-25. 1990.What does it take to settle an argument or debate, for the classical Greek philosophers, and how does this compare with our modern ideas about resolving disputes? Plato and Aristotle are not quite what they been reputed to be.
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231Socrates and the Story of InquiryIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. pp. 11-17. 1990.Argument and myth, historical figure and archetype, Socrates dominates our image of inquiry. How did this come about and should it continue?
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6A discussion of the pressure hypertext and linear prose put on each other when a long work is being composed in both media simultaneously.
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228The Final Name of God: Hegel on Determinate ReligionIn Kolb David (ed.), Hegel and the Tradition, University of Toronto Press. pp. 162-175. 1997.A discussion of how Hegel manages his classification and ordering of specific religions, and a critique of his method.
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154Public Exposure: Architecture and InterpretationWolkenkuckucksheim - Cloud-Cuckoo-Land - Vozdushnyizamok. 2008.How the interpretation of architecture differs from that of other artworks.
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442Impure Postmodernity -- Philosophy TodayPostmodern Openings 3 (2): 7-18. 2012.Hegel, Heidegger, Postmodernity reconsidered after 20 years.
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203Circulation Bound: Hegel and Heidegger on the StateIn Kolb David (ed.), Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community, Suny Press. 1996.
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293Science and SelfPhilosophy Today 59 (1): 91-102. 2015.What are the ontological commitments in Hegel and Heidegger’s discussion of the self? In this essay I approach these continental thinkers with a question from analytic philosophy, to see how they might respond. In different ways Hegel and Heidegger try to locate the question within a prior discourse about the conditions of the possibility of any local ontological commitments. The priority they claim can be clarified by distinguishing conditions of possibility from conditions of actuality.
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430Raising Atlantis: The Later Heidegger and Contemporary PhilosophyIn Babette Babich (ed.), From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, Kluwer. pp. 55-69. 1995.A discussion of how diggers stance with regard to contemporary analytic and Continental philosophy, with special emphasis on Heidegger's later works. The essay argues that Heidegger has now become attacks that people can interpret in many ways, and so is entered into dialogues which go against his own self-image of what he was about.
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462Many Centers: Suburban HabitusCity 15 (2): 155-166. 2011.Discussions of place and whom need to take more account of the multiplicity of centers in the modern city/suburban environment.
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150"Identity and Judgment: Five Theses and a Program"Nordic Journal of Architectural Research 37-40. 1994.The theses and program below ask about judgment and tradition in a self-consciously plural world. The little program points down a path I am exploring in a pair of texts, one on notions of identity in the history of philosophy, and one on the identity of buildings and places. The underlying issue of those texts is: what will replace the old notion of a particular identity? Places, persons, and communities do not and have never had such simple identities as our concepts often made them out to hav…Read more
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397"Hegelian Buddhist Hypertextual Media Inhabitation, or, Criticism in the Age of Electronic Immersion"Bucknell Review 46 (2): 90--108. 2002.What can it mean to criticize when you are inside the work itself? In a immersive electronic or digital environment critic is not distanced on a platform based on firm principles. Yet criticism self-awareness and commentary remain possible. This essay examines various techniques for dealing with immersive environments critically.
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220"Borders and Centers in an Age of Mobility"Wolkenkuckucksheim - Cloud-Cuckoo-Land - Vozdushnyizamok -. 2007.
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1448"Time and the Timeless in Greek Thought"Philosophy East-West 137-143. 1974.A study timeshowing that the relation of time and timeless in greek philosophers was more nuanced and complex than is commonly thought.
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182"The Logic of Language Change"In Kolb David (ed.), Hegel and Language, Suny Press,. pp. 179-195. 2006.How do changes inHegel's dialectic of categories relate, if they do, to empirical language changes over time?
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232"Real Places in Virtual Spaces"Nordic Journal of Architectural Research 3 69-77. 2006.Despite what might seem to be the case, "Virtual" reality can be used to create fully "real" places with their own grammar and norms, where real events take place.
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383"Outside and In: Hegel on natural history"Poligrafi 16 (61-62): 27-43. 2011.The relation between nature and spirit in Hegel is not as simple as slogans such as "nature has no history" or a simple interior/exterior dichotonmy would suggest.
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637"Scholarly Hypertext: Self-Represented Complexity"In Kolb David (ed.), Hypertext '97, Association For Computing Machinery, 1997,, Association For Computing Machinery. 1997.Scholarly hypertexts involve argument and explicit selfquestioning, and can be distinguished from both informational and literary hypertexts. After making these distinctions the essay presents general principles about attention, some suggestions for self-representational multi-level structures that would enhance scholarly inquiry, and a wish list of software capabilities to support such structures. The essay concludes with a discussion of possible conflicts between scholarly inquiry and hypertex…Read more
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184"Authenticity with Teeth: Positing Process"In Nikolas Kompridis (ed.), Philosophical Romanticism, Routledge. pp. 61-77. 2006.The goal or criterion of "authenticity" for judging a change in art or ethics or culture is notoriously vague and can be dangerous. This essay proposes a version of authenticity based on a quasi-Hegelian version of the process of development rather than on any specific patrimony to be preserved. Oddly enough, the proposed criterion has many similarities with one proposed by a staunch anti-Hegelian, Gilles Deleuze.
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207"American Individualism: Does it Exist?"Nanzan Review of American Studies 21-45. 1984.Does American individualism really exist as it is popularly conceived? Arguments from Hegel and Dewey suggest not. Includes a comparison with equally stereotyped images of Japanese culture.
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160Heidegger at 100, in AmericaJournal of the History of Ideas 52 (1): 140-151. 1991.The year 1989 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Martin Heidegger. What has happened to his thought in America? This essay offers a perspective on what I take to be the main trends and some representative works in Heidegger studies on the American side of the Atlantic (with perforce some simplifications both within and among the trends I mention).
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180Beyond the PaleThe Owl of Minerva 36 (1): 15-30. 2004.Frederick Neuhouser's The Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory expertly answers many standard objections to Hegel's theory, and offers a careful reading of its basic principles. However, questions remain whether Neuhouser can successfully reconstruct Hegel's theory while avoiding its links to Hegel's logic. Hegel's normative conclusions depend on logical principles about the self that are not adequately translated into Neuhouser's normative and consequentialist arguments.
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7Spirit in Ashes (review)The Owl of Minerva 21 (1): 96-99. 1989.This provocative book questions whether contemporary humanity can face death in any of the traditional ways, since the events of our century have created a new selfhood and a new death. Wyschogrod describes the “death event” and the “death world”; these refer to the Holocaust but also to the destructive bombings in World War II, and most importantly to the death-in-life of the Nazi and Stalinist concentration and labor camps. Her thesis is
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30Klaus Vieweg. Das Denken der Freiheit: Hegels Grundlinien der Philosophie des RechtsThe Owl of Minerva 46 (1/2): 129-137. 2014.
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888Darwin Rocks Hegel: Does Nature Have A History?Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 57 97-117. 2008.In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wanted rational understanding but without claims to intelligent design. He is reported to have said that nature has no history, but a closer examination will show that his ideaqs are more nuanced and that there is more room for darwinian ideas than one might expect, thou…Read more
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427Pythagoras bound: Limit and unlimited in Plato'sJournal of the History of Philosophy 21 (4): 497-511. 1983.Studying Plato's "unwritten doctrines" in the light of his discussion of limit and unlimited in his dialogue Philebus. The essay raises also the question whether there is too much "atomism" in the usual presentation of Plato's Forms as individual absolute entities, rather than as themselves derived from a more fundamental limit/unlimited ontology.