•  49
    This book addresses the breach within contemporary philosophy with a newly conceived foundationalism. It shows that dramatic discord has arisen between its two dominant branches. The Anglo-American branch generally takes its departure from logic and from natural science, while the Continental branch generally takes its departure from art and from the great traditional questions. However, they share this common negative feature: each side denies the view that philosophy issues from a central foun…Read more
  •  138
    Book reviews (review)
    with Renate Holub, Johann P. Sommerville, Peter Burke, Babette E. Babich, Jolanta T. Pekacz, Sabine Wichert, Paul Douglas, Richard J. Aldrich, Alan Ford, Vincent Geoghegan, Keith Bradley, Lucia M. Palmer, Donald J. Dietrich, John L. Stanley, John Cottingham, Benjamin F. Martin, Grace Seiberling, Gerasimos Santas, John E. Weakland, Ilana Krausman Ben‐Amos, Charles Senn Taylor, Claire Honess, Jos J. L. Gommans, Ceri Crossley, Hans Derxs, Alexander Ulanov, Georges Denis Zimmermann, David Boonin‐Vail, Ellen O'Gorman, Robert M. Burns, Fredric S. Zuckerman, James A. Aho, Harvey Chisick, Stuart Rowland, Gabriel P. Weisberg, David W. Cohen, Michael Goodich, Ignazio Corsaro, Greg Walker, Keith D. White, Henry Wasser, Noel Gray, Henk de Weerd, Steven Nadler, Joseph P. Ward, Susan Rosa, David J. Parent, and Paul Lawrence Färber
    The European Legacy 1 (8): 2290-2352. 1996.
    Gramsci and the Italian State. By Richard Bellamy and Darrow Schecter (Manchester and New York Manchester University Press, 1993), xvi + 203 pp. Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572–1588. By Wallace MacCaffrey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), x + 530 pp. Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603. By Wallace MacCaffrey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), xvi + 592 pp. Figures on the Horizon. Edited by Jerrold Seigel (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1993…Read more
  •  20
    A dark history of modern philosophy
    Indiana University Press. 2017.
    This provocative reassessment of modern philosophy explores its nonrational dimensions and connection to ancient mysteries. Delving beneath the principal discourses of philosophyfrom Descartes through Kant, Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark forces that ignite the inner power of modern thought. He contends that reason itself issues from an implicit and unconscious suppression of the nonrational. Even the modern philosophical concerns of nature and limits are undergirded by a …Read more
  •  74
    The Socratic Method, Once and for All
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 12 (3): 240-244. 2020.
    ABSTRACT The “Socratic method” seems to be well understood in general to mean some sort of “question and answer” procedure as distinguished from “lecturing.” Law schools are familiar sites for its so-called practice, and the Platonic dialogues are believed to provide models of it. However, Socrates himself never speaks of having a method except in one place in the Phaedo – where it has nothing to do with “question and answer.” The Greeks had a clear word for method, “methodos,” and Socrates appl…Read more
  •  102
    The vastly underrated Plutus receives at least some of its due in this paper. At its beginning, I attempt to locate Plutus within both the Hegelian discourse on comedy and within Hume's poetical and philosophical fictions. Employing the same method of close textual analysis that I employed in Philosophy and Comedy: Aristophanes, Logos, and Eros, I focus upon the thoroughgoing materialism of the poor farmer Chremylus who laments the unjust distribution of wealth, and who seeks to restore the god'…Read more
  •  56
    Kant and the irrational
    History of European Ideas 20 (4-6): 945-949. 1995.
  •  51
    Nietzsche in Derrida'sspurs: Deconstruction as deracination
    History of European Ideas 11 (1-6): 685-692. 1989.
  •  58
    Kant's transcendental psychology
    History of European Ideas 22 (2): 151-152. 1996.
  •  79
    The Cambridge Companion to Kant (review)
    History of European Ideas 21 (1): 75-80. 1995.
    The fundamental task of philosophy since the seventeenth century has been to determine whether the essential principles of both knowledge and action can be discovered by human beings unaided by an external agency. No one philosopher contributed more to this enterprise than Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) shook the very foundations of the intellectual world. Kant argued that the basic principles of the natural science are imposed on reality by human sensibility and understanding, and t…Read more
  •  121
  •  30
    Play resides at the heart of the Platonic dialogues, shaping their insights as well as informing their style. "The Play of the Platonic Dialogues" traces the prominent role of play, both as a general philosophical characteristic and as influencing the treatment of key issues. The nature of the forms, of the city, of virtue, of the soul and its immortality - these and others have been shaped by play. This book shows how Platonic playfulness is joined with the deepest seriousness throughout the di…Read more
  •  99
    Reveals comedy's contributions to the philosophical enterprise
  •  143
  •  64
    Book reviews (review)
    with Douglas Moggach, Louis J. Hammann, Nancy Vine Durling, Gabriel Albiac, André Mineau, Gilbert Larochelle, Henrietta Leyser, Dorothy Koenigsberger, John Collier, Gerhard Richter, Hartmut Rosenau, Margaret A. Maiumdar, Fredric S. Zuckerman, Fred S. Michael, Emily Michael, Ian Duncan, John E. Weakland, Deborah L. Madsen, David Stevenson, José Luis Nella Hernandez, David Garrioch, Howard G. Schneiderman, Terrell Carver, Tjitske Akkerman, K. Steven Vincent, Thomas M. Banchich, Richard Bosworth, Joyce S. Pedersen, Dieter A. Binder, Frederick Wasser, Bernard Zelechow, Hrvoje Lorkovic, Krishan Kumar, Kate Ince, Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, James R. Watson, Vitezslav Vellmský, William R. Everdell, Reinhard Heinisch, Hermine W. Williams, Tracy B. Strong, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Keith Bradley, Tracey Rowland, David W. Lovell, and A. S. Gratwick
    The European Legacy 1 (6): 1969-2032. 1996.
    Etudes hégéliennes: Raison et décision. Bernard Bourgeois (Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, Questions, 1992). 404 pp. FF 198.00 paper. Name, Hero, Icon: Semiotics of Nationalism through Heroic Biography. Anna Makolkin (Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992), 264 pp. DM 148 cloth. A History of Women in the West: II. Silences of the Middle Ages. Edited by Christiane Klapisch‐Zuber (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). Examination of Phar…Read more
  •  99
    _Explores Schelling’s Essay on Human Freedom, focusing on the themes of freedom, evil, and love, and the relationship between his ideas and those of Plato and Kant._.
  •  49
    In a letter written to Gadamer after receiving a copy of Truth and Method, Leo Strauss offered many criticisms with which Gadamer took issue. However, he acknowledged the important hint cited in the title. Perhaps strangely, Gadamer never took up this hint and showed very little interest in comedy throughout his Gesammelte Schriften. In this essay, I show that there are ample resources within Gadamerian hermeneutics to answer Strauss positively, also for a rich philosophy of comedy along Gadamer…Read more
  •  83
    The Romance of a Platonic Crossing
    Philosophy Today 54 (4): 401-407. 2010.
  •  135
    Recent continental philosophy and comedy
    Philosophy Compass 5 (7): 516-524. 2010.
    Recently, the philosophical significance of comedy has attracted a great deal of attention from Continental philosophers, including this author. After venturing an account for this sudden interest, this paper surveys six contemporary books that take different views of this phenomenon. This fertile field will surely benefit from the contributions and responses of Philosophy Compass' readers.
  •  112
    Mathematical and Elemental Coordinates: The Role of Imagination
    Research in Phenomenology 44 (2): 161-169. 2014.
    Both in Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental and in his very recent Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental, John Sallis enacts a reconfiguration of the relationship of geometry to elementology, which might be regarded more generally as a rethinking of the relation of mathematics to philosophy. The paper will trace this reconfiguration in two ways: as it lies present but concealed in the history of philosophy, for example, in Descartes’ so-called “dualism” and in Kant’s pu…Read more
  •  145
    Heidegger's heraclitean comedy
    Research in Phenomenology 37 (2): 254-268. 2007.
    "Heidegger" and "comedy" are words that one seldom finds conjoined. However, in his 1943 Summer Freiburg lecture course entitled " Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens. Heraklit ," the word " komisch " occurs significantly, it is regarded as superior to " das Tragische ," and thus can open up a new vista onto Heideggerian thought. In this paper, I discuss Heidegger's interpretive translation of Heraclitus' Fragment 123: Φυσιζ κρυπτ∊σθαι φιλ∊ι. I attempt to show how Heidegger distinguishes his …Read more
  •  128
    Sallis on Deuteros Plous: The Philosopher as Voyager
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 27 (2): 199-207. 2013.
    Among Platonic images that have engaged John Sallis’s thought on Plato, the second voyage of Socrates, his deuteros plous, recurs often and provocatively. It is not too much to suggest that deuteros plous has occasioned many of Sallis’s own voyages, as well as suggesting a fruitful image of the philosopher as voyager that may be gleaned from these peculiar journeys. This essay will consist of four brief sections. The first will focus upon Sallis’s earliest reading of deuteros plous in Being and …Read more