David Hodge

The claim of this work is that philosophy is a kind of autobiographical practice. To investigate and defend this claim I look to three notable occasions in the life and work of Ralph Waldo Emerson in which the philosophical is, I argue, a translation of the autobiographical. ;There are three parts of this work, each of which aims to illuminate the autobiographical nature of philosophical tasks and problems. For special consideration, I investigate Emerson's experience of the death of others, the anxiety of inheritance, and the loss of vision. In the first part, I look at the way in which the corpse is related to the corpus , and the manner in which performances have propositional content. In the second part, I concern myself with paradoxes involved in Emerson's version of exemplarity. In the third part, I focus on how Emerson's persistent use of ocular metaphor signals a way of understanding subjectivity, namely as something that is constituted visually, and how this use is indicative of Emerson's view that perception is fatal. I consider the implications of a selfhood that is regarded to be metaphorically as fragile and limited as the human eye. ;I point out some of the significant ways in which human bodily constitution impacts moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical life. I may enjoy the experiences that attend thinking, but alas the conditions of embodiment announce themselves, and there is no amount of cognitive negotiation that can save me from having to cope with the necessities of mortality and inheritance, and with the limitations of perception. I cannot overcome my status as a body---that is, as a text---and so I cannot undo the necessity that my life is an incarnation of my philosophy, and that my philosophy is a surrogate instance of my life. No matter how distant my philosophical projects seem to be from my life, they are wholly constituted as autobiographical exercises

In one of his earliest essays, Stanley Cavell says that “... we must keep in mind how different their arguments sound, and admit that in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference”. This is so whether we discuss the antiphony between Wittgenstein and American Pragmatism, or from within Cavell's own writings. Timothy Gould has set himself to the task of showing how the sound of Cavell's texts—specifically in the form of his voice—is the constituting feature of a philosophical method. This enterprise evolves into a protracted exercise of listening to Cavell's voice for the purpose of working out how that sound can disclose another way that philosophy can be conducted. Gould's text recounts what he has heard, and why the sound of Cavell’s voice makes a difference to philosophy.

In May 1996, a five day conference was held in Copenhagen where the essays in this book were presented, among a throng of others. Only the offerings of the keynote speakers are made available here, of which there are twenty-five. It is perhaps more fitting that this collection of speeches adopts the title of David Lodge’s address “Kierkegaard for Special Purposes,” for as the editors of this volume emphasize, “While united in their interest in Kierkegaard, the participants at the conference came from a wide range of different disciplines and academic backgrounds, and each was interested in interpreting and making use of Kierkegaard in a different way, in accordance with his or her own research agenda”. That Kierkegaard was put to use in a variety of ways is clear just from the roster of titles. Yet even after reading the articles it is apparent that the only dominating common feature among them is that Kierkegaard is the subject under consideration.

“Even the most careful and sophisticated readers,” suggests Davis, “are frequently left mystified” by Levinas’s writing. In such a climate it would be beneficial, if not obligatory, to develop a clear exposition of Levinas’s project, which does not sacrifice philosophical acumen in an effort to be lucid; it is of little help to have introductions to Levinas that are more impenetrable than Levinas’s own writing. Davis has managed to write an introduction to Levinas’s thought that retains a respect for its complexity while concomitantly presenting it in a way that clearly illuminates its signature features and Levinas’s most compelling concerns.