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10Toward a new foundationalism: from Carnap to Kripke, and from Husserl to SallisCambridge Scholars Press. 2021.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
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8Functions of Imagination in Kant’s Moral PhilosophyIn Michael L. Thompson (ed.), Imagination in Kant's Critical Philosophy, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 105-122. 2013.
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3A dark history of modern philosophyIndiana 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
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23The Socratic Method, Once and for AllComparative 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
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26HOMAGE TO PENIA: aristophanes' plutus as philosophical comedyAngelaki 21 (3): 27-33. 2016.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
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The Meeting of Modern and Greek Thought in Schelling's Freedom EssayDissertation, Duquesne University. 1977.
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23The unity of reason: Essays on Kant's philosophyHistory of European Ideas 21 (6): 799-800. 1995.
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19Nietzsche in Derrida'sspurs: Deconstruction as deracinationHistory of European Ideas 11 (1-6): 685-692. 1989.
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17The 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
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94Recent continental philosophy and comedyPhilosophy 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.
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18Mathematical and Elemental Coordinates: The Role of ImaginationResearch 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
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53Hearkening to Thalia: Toward the Rebirth of Comedy in Continental PhilosophyResearch in Phenomenology 39 (3): 401-415. 2009.This paper discloses and furthers the rebirth of comedy in Continental philosophy in three stages. The first treats Greek comedy, bringing forth the comic contours in Plato and exploring the philosophical content of Aristophanic comedy. The second examines certain German encounters with comedy, from the staid Wieland translations of Aristophanes through the thoughtful discussions of Schiller, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The third investigates twentieth-century American comedy and its connection to Ame…Read more
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41Sallis on Deuteros Plous: The Philosopher as VoyagerJournal 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
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21On Figal’s Heidegger-Critique in GegenständlichkeitResearch in Phenomenology 42 (3): 327-342. 2012.Abstract The paper is divided into four brief but related sections: (I) a description of Figal's resuscitation and reinterpretation of the word that informs the title of his book, the word “ Gegenstand ,“ and his Heidegger-critique regarding this resuscitation; (II) an examination of an important strain of the aforementioned lineage, namely, the role of Wilhelm von Humboldt as source for Heidegger's and his own Sprachdenken ; (III) an account of the Figal-Heidegger encounter with respect to the …Read more
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21John Sallis's Recent Contributions to Continental AestheticsEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (1): 135-141. 2014.In a sustained and protracted meditation on imagination and art, John Sallis has more than challenged the traditional metaphysical distinction between sensible and intelligible that has governed much of aesthetic discourse. In his Sense of Imagination , he excised that philosophical marker altogether in favor of a language of sense in which intelligibility occurs as a secondary function—if at all. Praising Hegel’s celebration of color, he disputes the latter’s declaration that “art is dead” in f…Read more
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24David Hume: Platonic Philosopher, Continental AncestorState University of New York Press. 2012.In the first book of its kind, Bernard Freydberg places David Hume firmly in the tradition of the Platonic dialogues, and regards him as a proper ancestor of contemporary continental philosophy. Although Hume is largely confined to his historical context within British Empiricism, his skepticism resonates with the Socratic Ignorance expressed by Plato, and his account of experience points toward very contemporary concerns in continental thought. Through close readings of An Enquiry Concerning th…Read more
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9The thought of John Sallis: phenomenology, Plato, imaginationNorthwestern University Press. 2012.Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, …Read more
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13Revisiting the "Transcendental Deduction" in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure ReasonIn Ralph Schumacher, Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Volker Gerhardt (eds.), Kant Und Die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des Ix. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. Bd. I: Hauptvorträge. Bd. Ii: Sektionen I-V. Bd. Iii: Sektionen Vi-X: Bd. Iv: Sektionen Xi-Xiv. Bd. V: Sektionen Xv-Xviii, De Gruyter. pp. 283-288. 2001.
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9Imagination and Depth in Kant's Critique of Pure ReasonPeter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. 1994.The Kerygma of the Wilderness Traditions in the Hebrew Bible examines biblical writers' use of the wilderness traditions in the books of Exodus and Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Prophets, and the Writings to express their beliefs in God and their understandings of the community's relationship to God. Kerygma is the proclamation of God's actions with the purpose of affirming faith/or appealing to an obedient response from the community. The experiences of the wilderness community, who rebelled and re…Read more
Areas of Interest
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |