Daniel Whistler

This study takes as its starting point CousinCousin, Victor’s HegelianHegelianism-sounding claim in his 1828 lectures that the history of philosophy is identical to philosophy itself—and it does so in order to interrogate the various resemblances and divergences between CousinCousin, Victor and Hegel when it comes to determining the relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy. In particular, the study investigates the difference between the “official” position CousinCousin, Victor takes up in 1833 in which spiritualistSpiritualism philosophy grounds eclectic history of philosophy and his earlier more experimental and provisional positions, which map roughly onto Hegel’s own various ways of articulating the philosophy-history of philosophy relationship.

_Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France_ is a two-volume work that documents the French reception of G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling from 1801 to 1848. It shows that the story of the "French Hegel" didn't begin with Wahl and Kojève by giving readers a solid understanding of the various ways in which German Idealism impacted nineteenth-century French philosophy, as well as providing the first ever English-language translations of excerpts from the most important philosophical texts of the era. Inside volume one, readers will find a number of interpretative frameworks to help them get to grips with this neglected field in the history of ideas. In addition to excerpted translations and a narrative of Hegel’s and Schelling’s fate in France during the early nineteenth century, this volume includes an introduction on transnational reception history, as well as an analytical catalogue of the translations of their work produced in French at this time, of the publications which appropriated or interrogated their philosophical legacy, and of the journals, institutional structures and other mechanisms of dissemination that brought Hegel’s and Schelling’s philosophy into France. The book thus details the ways in which French philosophers of the period took up the debates and concepts of German Idealism, transformed them or rejected them. In this way, it aims to contribute to a reversal of the serious neglect of early nineteenth-century French thought in English-language scholarship and, in so doing, goes beyond a nation-based narrative of the history of philosophy.

_Hegel and Schelling in Early Nineteenth-Century France_ is a two-volume work that documents the French reception of G. W. F. Hegel and F. W. J. Schelling from 1801 to 1848. It shows that the story of the "French Hegel" didn't begin with Wahl and Kojève by giving readers a solid understanding of the various ways in which German Idealism impacted nineteenth-century French philosophy, as well as providing the first ever English-language translations of excerpts from the most important philosophical texts of the era. Inside volume two, readers will find a series of scholarly studies to help them get to grips with this neglected field in the history of ideas. The contributors are world-leading and emerging experts from Europe, UK, and North America. They highlight the stakes and trace the pathways of this reception for French and German thought during the period, including the ways in which French philosophers of the period took up the debates and concepts of German Idealism, transformed them or rejected them. In this way, the volume aims to redress the serious neglect of early nineteenth-century French thought in English-language scholarship and, in so doing, goes beyond a nation-based narrative of the history of philosophy.

The argument of this paper is threefold: (a) Charles Bonnet’s naturalization of the principle of perfectibility (in the wake of Rousseau) is one example of a more general philosophical operation to be found in his writings: to naturalize the metaphysical while insisting upon its minimal difference from the material and so to generate an immaterialism that looks like a materialism; (b) this operation structures Bonnet’s entire palingenetic project which can be defined as an ‘anomalous naturalism’; (c) variants of this anomalous naturalism were available to German philosophers during the last decades of the eighteenth century – philosophers such as G. E. Lessing, F. H. Jacobi and J. G. Herder – and, to this extent, their writings also display traits of this ‘anomalous naturalism’.

Issue number 4 of "SYMPHILOSOPHIE: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism" is devoted to the Dutch philosopher François Hemsterhuis and 250th anniversary of the birth of the German romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. This fourth issue of the journal contains nearly 600 pages of new research articles, translations, review-essays, and book reviews. The main section on Hemsterhuis among the German Romantics was guest edited by Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway, University of London).

This concluding chapter to the handbook contains the editors’ reflections on the state of the relationship between theory and German Idealism by way of a narrative from the founding of “French theory” in the 1960s, through recent post-poststructuralisms, to conjectures about the future of the relationship. In particular, the editors describe the role of Nietzsche and the various returns to Kant in constituting the traditional image of German Idealism in theory and the recent splintering within theory among competing post-poststructuralisms, including the “speculative realist” movement and the “new materialisms.” The chapter ends with the idea that the relationship between theory and German Idealism will endure, first, because of the constitutive role of reading in any study of idealist philosophies and, second, because of the significance of German Idealism to the constitution of a “new humanities.”

The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism offers a wide-ranging dialogue between theory and German Idealism, joining up the various lines of influence connecting German Idealist and Romantic philosophies in all their variety to post-'68 European philosophies, from Derrida and Deleuze to Žižek and Malabou. Key features: Provides in-depth reflections on the various conversations between German Idealism and theory, including an expanded canon of Idealist philosophers and a wide range of contemporary anti-foundationalist thinkers. Includes marginalized voices and concepts that reflect both contemporary concerns as well as the sheer abundance of readings of German Idealism undertaken by European theorists over the last fifty years. Expands the existing scholarship by focusing on new, future directions emerging out of the idealism-theory relationship. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism is essential reading for researchers and students of all levels — from senior scholars to advanced undergraduates — working on the legacy of German Idealist philosophers within philosophy departments, as well as all those interested in theory from across the humanities.

Over three decades, Gillian Howie wrote at the forefront of philosophy and critical theory, before her untimely death in 2013. This interdisciplinary collection uses her writings to explore the productive, yet often resistant, interrelationship between feminism and critical theory, examining the potential of Howie's particular form of materialism. The contributors also bring to this debate a serious engagement with Howie's late turn towards philosophies of mortality, therapy and 'living with dying'. The volume considers how differently embodied subjects are positioned within public institutions, discourses and spaces, and the role of philosophy, art, film, photography, and literature, in facing situations such as sexual oppression and life-limiting illness.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kierkegaard on Faith and LoveDaniel WhistlerSharon Krishek. Kierkegaard on Faith and Love. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 201. Cloth, $90.00.Contemporary scholarship on Kierkegaard is frequently confronted by two problems. First, there is the question of Kierkegaard’s worldliness: does Kierkegaard have anything substantial to say about politics, society, and the ethical dilemmas of intersubjective existence? Second, there remains the perennial problem of the rhetorical singularity of Kierkegaard’s writings: can anything conceptually coherent be salvaged from the panoply of pseudonyms, indirections, and ironies? And, if so, to what extent do such abstractions falsify the richness of a particular text? The virtue of Krishek’s Kierkegaard on Faith and Love is that it answers both these questions in a radical and challenging manner. To the problem of worldliness, Krishek responds by insisting on the presence of a disposition to “full concreteness” or “a full return to the world” in Kierkegaard’s account of love (128). In answer to the problem of rhetorical singularity, Krishek embraces Kierkegaard’s incoherence, so as to affirm Fear and Trembling against Works of Love (or “Kierkegaard versus Kierkegaard,” as she puts it on p. 138).Kierkegaard on Faith and Love is a sustained investigation into the status and structure of love in Kierkegaard’s corpus. It thus takes its place alongside Evans’s Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Love (Oxford, 2004), Ferreira’s Love’s Grateful Striving (Oxford, 2001), Amy Laura Hall’s Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (Cambridge, 2002), Ronald L. Hall’s The Human Embrace (Penn State, 2000), and Mooney’s Love and Faith in Kierkegaard (Indiana, 2008) as one more contribution to the recent explosion of literature on the subject. However, Krishek is distinctive in limiting her scope to romantic love alone; she steadfastly reconstructs [End Page 302] a Kierkegaardian phenomenology of romantic attitudes toward the beloved—the proper and improper modes of comportment when in love.The first half of the book is split into three chapters, which together present a hierarchy of these different comportments. The reader passes by inadequate attempts to hold onto the beloved through recollection (chapter 2) and resignation (chapter 3) to arrive at the Kierkegaardian ideal of faithful or “faith-full” love. Modelled on the knight of faith of Fear and Trembling, the faith-full lover accomplishes a double movement in which he resigns himself to the loss of the beloved while simultaneously trusting in her return. Unfortunately, on the way to this ideal, some of the great lovers of Kierkegaard’s writings (Don Juan, the Seducer) are brushed aside in an overly schematic way. This is a shame because they surely have much to teach us about his views on romantic love. Nevertheless, the effect of Krishek’s whistle-stop tour through the aesthetic works is to quickly bring us face to face with Fear and Trembling, in which, she contends, we find a positive model of romantic love. Making the early, pseudonymous Fear and Trembling determinative of Kierkegaard’s conception of love is a bold move, especially in light of the tendency in recent Kierkegaard scholarship to valorize the “rediscovered” religious works. Yet it pays off: Krishek’s choice not only allows a rich and affirmative description of romantic love to emerge; it also sheds light on Fear and Trembling itself, especially the Merman episode.The final three chapters of Kierkegaard on Faith and Love take up the task of justifying this ideal of faith-full love. First, Krishek attempts to show its conceptual plausibility by appealing to non-Kierkegaardian examples: the novel On the Way Home, Kubrik’s Eyes Wide Shut, and Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. Second, she engages at length with existing scholarship, employing the double movement of love abstracted from Fear and Trembling to great effect to overturn the orthodox emphasis on resignation, failure, and asceticism in Kierkegaard’s account of love. Finally, Krishek turns to Works of Love, which is usually regarded as Kierkegaard’s mature and definitive statement of a philosophy of love. She challenges the derogatory attitude Kierkegaard takes therein to romantic or “preferential” love with her more affirmative model drawn from Fear...

In the wake of post-hermeneutic refusals of interpretation in recent continental philosophy, this essay returns to Schelling as a means of understanding what such a renewed reading practice of philosophical fundamentalism might look like. I argue that recent impetus for a Schellingian conception of literalism can be found in Grant’s attack on the metaphorizing tendencies of previous Schelling scholarship, and the ground for such literalism is to be located in the concept of tautegory that Schelling proposes in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology. Schelling is a philosopher of form, and the form of the word remains as inviolable as any other natural form

In this paper, I contend that a crucial historical precedent for contemporary interest in virtue epistemology is to be found in Leibniz-Wolffian rationalism. For philosophers from Wolff to Lessing, epistemology was thoroughly normative; that is, the task of epistemology was not to describe knowledge, but set rules for the amelioration of knowledge. Such a normative stance was transferred into cognate disciplines, such as aesthetics, as well. I further argue that after Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy in 1781 strands of this normative epistemology lived on in both Schiller’s aesthetics and Maimon’s reworking of transcendental idealism. Finally, I suggest some provisional reasons for considering Kant’s epistemology a break with this tradition

. Between 1833 and 1835, Victor Cousin and F.W.J. Schelling engaged in an “amical but serious critique” of each other’s philosophies. I argue that, despite perceptions to the contrary, key to this exchange is a common vision of an atypical, speculative empiricism. That is, against the grain of most commentaries, I contend that there are significant similarities between Cousin’s and Schelling’s philosophies of the early 1830s—similarities that converge on the possibility of a post-Kantian speculative empiricism, which they respectively dub metaphysical psychology or a priori empiricism.

Reading is not a peripheral philosophical pastime; it constitutes most of what we do when we do philosophy. And the experience of reading philosophy is much more than just a series of interpretative acts: the philosopher-reader is subject to, among other things, sensations, passions, emendations, and transformations. In this essay, I argue that a full account of philosophical reading should outline some of the sociological structures that determine how different communities of philosophers construct such experiences, as well as describe in detail the ways in which philosophers encounter truths while reading. It should, that is, describe ways in which philosophy acts upon readers and the various effects that result.

Of all the topics in the history of philosophy, the history of different forms of thinking and contemplation is one of the most important, and yet is also relatively overlooked. What is it to think philosophically? How did different forms of thinking--reflection, contemplation, critique and analysis--emerge in different epochs? This collection offers a rich and diverse philosophical exploration of the history of contemplation, from the classical period to the twenty-first century. It covers canonical figures including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant, as well as debates in less well-known areas such as classical Indian and Islamic thought and the role of speculation in twentieth-century Russian philosophy. Comprising twenty-two chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into five parts: - Flourishing and Thinking from Homer to Hume - The Thinking of Thinking from Augustine to Gödel - Images and Thinking from Plotinus to Unger - Bodies of Thought and Habits of Thinking from Plato to Irigaray - The Efficacy of Thinking from Sextus to Bataille Thought: A Philosophical History is the first comprehensive investigation of the history of philosophical thought and contemplation. As such, it is a landmark publication for anyone researching and teaching the history of philosophy, and a valuable resource for those studying the subject in related fields such as literature, religion, sociology and the history of ideas.

In this essay, I survey the different uses of the concept of the symbol at play in the philosophy of religion. Considering that historically theories of the symbol have frequently had significant religious presuppositions and implications, I suggest that one might expect that the symbol would play a significant role in current research. This is not the case, however, since the very specific metaphysical, linguistic and theological premises that have traditionally informed much theorisation of the symbol tend to be unpopular today. The main exception is Peircean symbolics which has recently been re-appropriated by a variety of philosophical fields, including philosophy of religion. To open up further contexts for contemporary deployments of the symbol, I look to contemporary public and legal debates concerning the right to wear religious symbols as an area of research unjustly neglected by philosophers of religion: much of the inchoate conceptual work being done in the legal cases themselves would naturally feed into academic philosophical discussion of the symbol.