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2034Postmodern sophistication: Habermas versus LyotardIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.A discussion of whether Habermas as a representative modernist and Lyotard as a representative postmodern echo the ancient dispute between Plato and the Sophists. My conclusion is that they do not quite do so. Each is more complex and ancient dichotomy should be revised.
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1846Postmodern Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and TraditionUniversity of Chicago Press. 1990.Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition
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1532The power of the SophistIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.Plato is mistaken on both sides of his distinction between Socrates and the Sophists. He imagines the Sophists to have a formless power that cannot be resisted. This exaltation of the power of persuasion needs to be seen as motivating excessive fears in various modern debates. Pragmatic approaches can lessen our fear.
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1453"Time and the Timeless in Greek Thought"Philosophy East-West 137-143. 1974.A study timeshowing that the relation of time and timeless in greek philosophers was more nuanced and complex than is commonly thought.
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1148Hegel's architectureIn Stephen Houlgate (ed.), Hegel and the Arts, Northwestern University Press. 2007."The first of the particular arts . . . is architecture." (A 13.116/1.83)1 For Hegel, architecture stands at several beginnings. It is the art closest to raw nature. It is the beginning art in a progressive spiritualization that will culminate in poetry and music. The drive for art is spirit's drive to become fully itself by encountering itself; art makes spirit's essential reality present as an outer sensible work of its own powers.2 (A 13.453/1.351) If Hegel's narrative of the arts creates a h…Read more
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954Learning places: Building dwelling thinking onlineJournal of Philosophy of Education 34 (1). 2000.What would it take to design a real place online where real learning would happen?
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892Darwin Rocks Hegel: Does Nature Have A History?Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 57 97-117. 2008.In the popular press and the halls of politics, controversies over evolution are increasingly strident these days. Hegel is relevant in this connection, even though he rejected the theories of evolution he knew about, because he wanted rational understanding but without claims to intelligent design. He is reported to have said that nature has no history, but a closer examination will show that his ideaqs are more nuanced and that there is more room for darwinian ideas than one might expect, thou…Read more
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770Freedom, Truth, and History (review)The Owl of Minerva 26 (2): 221-224. 1995.Stephen Houlgate has written an introduction to Hegel that is more than historical. For him, “Hegel’s is still a viable philosophical endeavour with extremely important things to contribute to modern debates, particularly the debates about historical relativism, poverty and social alienation, the nature of freedom and political legitimacy, the future of art, and the character of the Christian faith”. This ambitious book is clearly written and very thoughtful. By concentrating on a number of cent…Read more
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763Heidegger On The Limits Of ScienceJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 14 (January): 50-64. 1983.How Heidegger criticizes and "locates" science, and some problems with what he is trying to do.
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640"Scholarly Hypertext: Self-Represented Complexity"In Kolb David (ed.), Hypertext '97, Association For Computing Machinery, 1997,, Association For Computing Machinery. 1997.Scholarly hypertexts involve argument and explicit selfquestioning, and can be distinguished from both informational and literary hypertexts. After making these distinctions the essay presents general principles about attention, some suggestions for self-representational multi-level structures that would enhance scholarly inquiry, and a wish list of software capabilities to support such structures. The essay concludes with a discussion of possible conflicts between scholarly inquiry and hypertex…Read more
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624Modern versus postmodern architectureIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.A discussion of "postmodern" architecture in the sense in which the term was used in the late 1980s, namely, the introduction of historical substantive content and reference into architecture, disrupting the supposedly ahistorical purity of modernist architecture. Argues that postmodern use of history is really another version of the modern distance from history.
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609Heidegger and Habermas on criticism and totalityPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (3): 683-693. 1992.Habermas's criticizes Heidegger for insulating totalities of meaning from possible overturning by attempts to invalidate individual claims. I first state Habermas's criticism, then elaborate an example from Heideggerthat supports Habermas's attack. Then I defend Heidegger by distinguishing levels of meaning in Heidegger's "world" from Habermas's more propositional "lifeworld." I conclude by accepting Habermas's objection restated in terms of the contrast between transcendental and local conditio…Read more
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462Many Centers: Suburban HabitusCity 15 (2): 155-166. 2011.Discussions of place and whom need to take more account of the multiplicity of centers in the modern city/suburban environment.
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456Ontological priorities: A critique of the announced goals of "descriptive metaphysics"Metaphilosophy 6 (3-4): 238-258. 1975.A critique of Strawson's distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics.
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451Modernity's Self-Justification: The Thought of Robert B. PippinIdealism as Modernism: Hegelian VariationsThe Owl of Minerva 30 (2): 253-275. 1999.
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446Building together / buildings togetherIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.A discussion of the problem of creating unified places in a pluralistic multicultural society.
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443Impure Postmodernity -- Philosophy TodayPostmodern Openings 3 (2): 7-18. 2012.Hegel, Heidegger, Postmodernity reconsidered after 20 years.
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439I am a philosopher with Parkinson’s Disease. Over the past several years I’ve been trying to write about my situation. I wrote about how I was forced to face the disease. I described how the disease twists and distorts my world. Then I asked myself, as a philosophy writer and teacher, whether I could say anything that might help myself or others facing life with Parkinson’s? I found ideas in the ancient Stoics and expanded them with ideas about time, coming up with suggestions for living as exce…Read more
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432Raising Atlantis: The Later Heidegger and Contemporary PhilosophyIn Babette Babich (ed.), From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire, Kluwer. pp. 55-69. 1995.A discussion of how diggers stance with regard to contemporary analytic and Continental philosophy, with special emphasis on Heidegger's later works. The essay argues that Heidegger has now become attacks that people can interpret in many ways, and so is entered into dialogues which go against his own self-image of what he was about.
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428Pythagoras bound: Limit and unlimited in Plato'sJournal of the History of Philosophy 21 (4): 497-511. 1983.Studying Plato's "unwritten doctrines" in the light of his discussion of limit and unlimited in his dialogue Philebus. The essay raises also the question whether there is too much "atomism" in the usual presentation of Plato's Forms as individual absolute entities, rather than as themselves derived from a more fundamental limit/unlimited ontology.
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407Sellars and the measure of all thingsPhilosophical Studies 34 (4). 1978.Argues that Sellars' theories can be seen as an elaborate argument for scientific realism as an almost-transcendental condition for the meaningfulness of language.
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399"Hegelian Buddhist Hypertextual Media Inhabitation, or, Criticism in the Age of Electronic Immersion"Bucknell Review 46 (2): 90--108. 2002.What can it mean to criticize when you are inside the work itself? In a immersive electronic or digital environment critic is not distanced on a platform based on firm principles. Yet criticism self-awareness and commentary remain possible. This essay examines various techniques for dealing with immersive environments critically.
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396Hegel and Heidegger as CriticsThe Monist 64 (4): 481-499. 1981.A comparison of the ways in which Hegel and Heidegger critique modernity
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395Circulation and constitution at the end of historyNoûs 25 (2): 204. 1991.What goes round at the end of history for the two Germans.
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384"Outside and In: Hegel on natural history"Poligrafi 16 (61-62): 27-43. 2011.The relation between nature and spirit in Hegel is not as simple as slogans such as "nature has no history" or a simple interior/exterior dichotonmy would suggest.
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337Tiger Stripes and Embodied Systems: Hegel on Markets and ModelsIn Michael Thompson (ed.), Hegel’s Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Politics, Routledge. pp. 286-300. 2018.From Hegel's philosophy of nature, this essay develops a critique of economic models and market society, based on Hegel's notion of what it takes for a formally described system to be embodied and real.
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336Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Poststructuralists, by Simon Lumsden: New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. xviii + 265, US$45 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2): 402-405. 2016.A review of Simon Lumsden's book on self consciousness in Hegel and in Postmodern authors.
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332Hegel and Religion: Avoiding Double Truth, TwiceHegel Bulletin 33 (1): 71-87. 2012.When I was first studying Hegel I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher, who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any found…Read more
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328The Particular Logic Of ModernityBulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 41 31-42. 2000.A discussion of the logical role of particular concepts in Robert Pippin's reading Hegel as a theorist of modernity, with special reference to the question whether modernity can be surpassed or left behind.
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317Haughty and humble ironiesIn Postmodern Sphistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition, University of Chicago Press. 1990.A critical examination of the different kinds of irony relevant to architecture, especially romantic and postmodern irony, and a suggestion for a less self-sure haughty kind of irony.