Bernard Freydberg

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 dark side that dwells in them and makes them possible. Freydberg traces these dark sources to the poetry of Hesiod, the fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, and the Platonic dialogues and claims that they rear their heads again in the work of Spinoza, Schelling, and Nietzsche. Freydberg does not set forth a critique of modern philosophy but explores its intrinsic continuity with its ancient roots.

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 applies it once and once only. He calls his method “eike phuro,” random mixing. In this paper, I shall attempt to bring this method together with the myths, jokes, and very long discourses with which the dialogues are replete.

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's sight so as to obtain a large amount of the wealth he lacks. The critical section of the play occurs in an exchange with Poverty or Need, who is depicted as an ugly hag but who speaks beautifully. Aristophanic music subtly sings the glory of need as the spur to all that is good in human actions, as it mocks wealth as a standard of human worth.

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 thus that human beings are also free to impose their own free and rational agency on the world. This volume is the only systematic and comprehensive account of the full range of Kant's writings available, and the first major overview of his work to be published in more than a dozen years. An internationally recognised team of Kant scholars explore Kant's conceptual revolution in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, moral and political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion

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 speaking of language; and (IV) the culmination of the “ Sprache “ chapter and some comments upon the outcome with regard to philosophy of language

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 favor of the Nietzschean hearkening to art as the movement toward the future

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 the Human Understanding, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and the essay “On the Standard of Taste,” Freydberg traces a philosophy of imagination that will set the stage for wider consideration of Hume within continental thought.

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, Hegel -- Echoes: after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy.

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 refused to live according to God's purposes, serve as a polemic against disbelief in God and the refusal to embrace Israel's religious heritage. In the Writings, more than in the Prophets, the wilderness traditions are remembered with a notable resemblance to the traditions in Exodus and Numbers, which reflects a heightened interest in the ancient traditions in the closing turbulent period of Israelite history. Recollections of Israel's beginnings in the wilderness address problems associated with faith, obedience, and ultimately, the nature of the Israelite community.

Mind and World. By John McDowell. 191 pp. n.p.g. Art and the French Commune: Imagining Paris after War and Revolution. By Albert Boime The Princeton Series in Nineteenth‐Century Art, Culture and Society xv + 234 pp. $19.95, £14.95 paper. Individual Choice and the Structures of History: Alexis de Tocqueville as Historian Reappraised. By Harvey Mitchell 290 pp. $54.95, £35.00 cloth. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. By Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, 2d ed.. 190pp., $12.95 paper. The European Commission: Leadership, Organisation and Culture in the EU Administration. By Michelle Cini xii + 244 pp $24.95 cloth. The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations. By Barbara Abou‐El‐Haj, xviii + 456 pp. £18.95 paperback. Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha‐Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity. By David H. Weinberg, x + 385 pp., n.p.g. Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth‐century England. By Kevin Gilmartin Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 21, pp. xiv and 274. $59.95/£35.00 cloth. Social Functions of Literature: Alexander Pushkin and Russian Culture. By Paul Debreczeny xvi + 282 pp. £30. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945 By Mike Hawkins x + 344 pp. £19.95/$27.95 paper, £45.00/$69.95 cloth. Translate This Darkness: The Life of Christiana Morgan, The Veiled Woman in Jung's Circle. By Claire Douglas. 398 pp. $16.95, £11.95 paper. The Mammoth and the Mouse: Microhistory and Morphology. By Florike Egmond and Peter Mason. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). XIII + 245 pp. n.p.g. Karl Barth's Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. By Bruce L. McCormack, xviii + 499 pp. £19.99 paper. Four Neglected Essays by Immanuel Kant. By Stephen Palmquist,, 121 pp. paper, n.p.g. The Tree of Philosophy. By Stephen Palmquist 210 pp. $35.00 HK cloth, $4.50 HK paper. Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics, and English Poetry. By Theresa Tinkle Figurai, Reading Medieval Culture, 294 pp. $39.50, £35.00 cloth. Portals, Pilgrimage, and Crusade in Western Tuscany. By Dorothy F. Glass, xvii + 145 pp $39.50/£35.00 cloth. Psychoanalysis, Historiography, and Feminist Theory: The Search for Critical Method. By Katherine Kearns, xii + 171 pp. $54.95/£35.00 cloth $17.95/£12.95 paper. Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World. By Peter Brown, xiii + 91 pp. £6.95, $9.95 paper. Order in the Twilight. By Bernhard Waidenfels; translated and edited by David J. Parent, xxvi + 179 pp. $36.95/£34.95 cloth. Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866. By Thomas Nipperdey. Translated by Daniel Nolan 760 pp. $69.95 hardcover. Proudhon and His Age. By John Ehrenberg,, ix + 184 p. $45.00 cloth. To Live Together: Shaping New Attitudes to Peace Through Education. Edited by Daniel S. Halpérin, Studies in Comparative Education, vii + 186 pp. n.p.g. paper. Trade Unions and Democratic Participation in Europe: A Scenario for the 21st Century. Edited by Gerard Kester and Henry Pinaud, xiv + 296 pp. £40.00 cloth. Ontological Arguments and Belief in God. By Graham Oppy, xvii + 376 pp. £40.00, $59.95 cloth. Modernité et morale. By Charles Larmore 257pp. 160 FF paper. Liberty, Right and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought. By Annabel S. Brett, xii + 254 pp. $59.95/£35.00 cloth. Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge. By Maryanne Cline Horowitz xviii + 373 pp. $49.50, £37.50 cloth. Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex. By Henricus Cornelius Agrippa. Translated and Edited by Albert Rabil, Jr. xxxii + 109 pp. $33.00/£26.50 cloth $10.00/£11.25 paper. The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800. By Conor Cruise O'Brien, xvii + 367 pp. $29.95/£23.95 cloth. Women in Russia and Ukraine. Edited by Rosalind Marsh xvii + 350pp. $69.95/£55.00 cloth $27.95/£19.95 paper. Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan. By Gilbert D. Chaitin xii + 278 pp. $54.95/£35.00 cloth $17.95/ £12.95 paper. White Heat: People and Technology. By Carroll Pursell, 224 pp. $18.00 paper. Isaiah Berlin. By John Gray 189 pp. $ 13.95 paper. Tory Radicalism: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and the Transformation of Modern Britain, 1979–1997. By Earl A. Reitan x + 222 pp. $23.95 paper. Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. By Maria Tatar 213 pp. $14.95, £12.50 paper. Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underde‐velopment in Rumania and Brazil. By Joseph L. Love xvi + 348 pp. £50.00 cloth, £16.95 paper. The Austro‐Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866. By Geoffrey Wawro xiii + 313 pp. £40.00/$59.95 cloth. Harmonious Tensions: The Writings of Friedrich Schiller. By Steven D. Martinson 448 pp. $55.00. Early Modern Liberalism. By Annabel Patterson ix + 314 pp. $49.95/£35.00 cloth.

A recent issue of Research in Phenomenology contains a section on "The Future of Phenomenology," but none of the articles contained therein deals with a future engagement of phenomenology with science, especially mathematical natural science. In this paper, I discuss this engagement that was once so central to phenomenology and suggest lines along which its revival can fruitfully occur. Toward this end, I trace the contours of the Heisenberg-Heidegger exchange and show how recent readings of the Platonic , such as those of Sallis and Derrida, can extend this Auseinandersetzung into new regions.

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 Gadamerian lines. Toward that end, I use Gadamer’s Aristotelian view of tragedy as a clue; interpretations of play, excess and delight (Ergötzen) also weave into the analyses