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308The Diamond Net: Metaphysics, Grammar, OntologiesIn Jakub Mácha & Alexander Berg (eds.), Wittgenstein and Hegel: Reevaluation of Difference, De Gruyter. 2019.In the introduction to his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel speaks of metaphysics as “the entire range of the universal determinations of thought, as it were the diamond net into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible. Every educated consciousness has its metaphysics, an instinctive way of thinking”. Both Wittgenstein and Hegel see our many languages and forms of life as constituted by different diamond nets of categories/grammars. I argue that both Wittgenstein and Hegel tak…Read more
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305IntroductionDialogue 39 (4): 651. 2000.Introduction to a volume on Hegel, asking why his thought continues to be relevant today.
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290Self-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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288Home on the range: Planning and totalityResearch in Phenomenology 22 (1): 3-11. 1992.This essay argues against global plans and hierarchical systems, whether in urban planning or art and life.
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287Science 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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280Self-identity and placeIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.First part of a discussion about what kind of guidelines we can find in our group or cultural identity for our place making and architectural planning.
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270The Age of the LIstIn Urban Preservation as an Aesthetic Proble, Accademica Danica. 1997.Our task is the preservation of historic towns. In America as in Europe historic town centers are surrounded by recent additions and suburban sprawl. It is tempting to imagine the task of preservation as protecting our historical heritage from a featureless wave of mediocrity, as the worldwide commercial civilization overwhelms local cultures. This story is familiar from the writings of Kenneth Frampton and others: sprawl, homogenization, loss of distinctive local and regional form. I want to di…Read more
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264Extending architectural vocabularyIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. pp. 116-129. 1990.A discussion of the role of metaphor and reinterpretation in extending architectural vocabularies.
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261The necessities of Hegel's logicsIn Angelica Nuzzo (ed.), Hegel and the Analytic Tradition, Continuum. 2009.want to question this idea of a pure presuppositionless self-developing sequence of logical categories. This is part of a larger investigation of the inherence of Hegel's thought in historical language. Concerning the necessary self-development of thought, I have three objections to propose. The first concerns the difficulty of recognizing a uniquely correct sequence of categories, when the various versions all express positive insights. The second concerns the very idea of a unified sequence. …Read more
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251Spirit 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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249The 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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242Exposing an English Speculative WordThe Owl of Minerva 31 (2): 199-202. 2000.Hegel congratulated himself on noticing that the German verb aufheben embodied a speculative dialectic in the interrelation of its multiple meanings. Translators have been hard put to find an equivalent English word. I think I have found a similar word in English, which, if not exactly a translation, still shows a similar interaction among the contrasting motions of its different meanings.
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230Socrates 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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230"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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226The 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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220"Borders and Centers in an Age of Mobility"Wolkenkuckucksheim - Cloud-Cuckoo-Land - Vozdushnyizamok -. 2007.
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219I want to tell some stories of ends and transformations in the relation of the past to the future. These stories have implications for education and enlightenment. They are stories in which modernity is seen as an end and a beginning. Modernity is the end of tradition, or oppression, or superstition, or other restrictive conditions. It is the beginning of true self-consciousness and rational human history. But there are also stories about an end of modernity. There are stories about postmodernit…Read more
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214Escaping the MuseumAG3. The Third International Arakawa and Gins: Architecture and Philosophy Conference Sponsored at Griffith University in Brisbane
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207Making places for ourselvesIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.The second part on the discussion of communal self discernment in seeking goals and values for making places and architectural planning.
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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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204Life in a balloonIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.The essay offers a thought experiment to try to clarify our distinction between our naïve ancestors and our sophisticated moderns. The effect of the thought experiment is to cast doubt upon the distinction and examine further our own myths about our ancestors. And to wonder at what it means to be truly modern.
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199Form and content in utopiaIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.A critique of Habermas is theory of the three worlds as a foundation for criticism and social philosophy.
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196Circulation Bound: Hegel and Heidegger on the StateIn Kolb David (ed.), Phenomenology, Interpretation, and Community, Suny Press. 1996.
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192Where do the architects live?In Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.discussion of the extent to which architects can float about history and the inevitable finitude of architectural possibilities from any historical standpoint.
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189Oh Pioneers! Bodily Reformation Amid Daily LifeInterfaces 2 (21/22): 283-398. 2010.Arakawa and Gins have been fomenting revolution for a long time. In the last twenty years their attention has turned more and more towards architecture and urban planning as a way of reforming our bodily existence. Their proposals enter daily life rather than staying in the isolated sphere of the museum or gallery. These constructions are to be lived in, not contemplated. Will daily life then blunt or sharpen Arakawa and Gins's power to educate and revise our "architectural bodies"?
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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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181The Logic of Language ChangeProceedings of the Hegel Society of America 17 179-195. 2006.A discussion of the relation of dialectical transitions in Hegel's speculative logic to changes in categories and grammar in the empirical historical languages.
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179Filling in the BlanksIn David Michael Levin (ed.), Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin's Philosophy, Northwestern University Press. pp. 65-83. 1998.Eugene Gendlin claims that he wants "to think with more than conceptual structures, forms, distinctions, with more than cut and presented things" (WCS 29).1 He wants situations in their concreteness to be something we can think with, not just analyze conceptually. He wants to show that "conceptual patterns are doubtful and always exceeded, but the excess seems unable to think itself. It seems to become patterns when we try to think it. This has been the problem of twentieth century philosophy" (…Read more
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177Beyond 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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177"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?