Jason Wirth

The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy celebrates and situates this emphasis in the genre of the gift and its giving. The process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is so present in the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and need for identities beyond our own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses; it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds and receive the blessings of logos from each other. The increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a regressive narcissism that shows the ego's reassertion in the light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy itself has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Although not an invective against thinking nor against modern and contemporary philosophy's genuine advances, The Gift of Logos portends to shed the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are. This transformation is our greatest gift to each other. To give it voice is the gift of Logos and what this collection of essays commemorates.

My dissertation proposes a reevaluation of the philosophy of F. W. J. von Schelling by reexamining the tension between system and freedom. I call this tension the "conspiracy of Being." ;The work itself is divided into two parts, corresponding to Schelling's negative and positive philosophy respectively. The first part takes up the question of the negative philosophy by tracing this tension in the figure of Spinoza. Schelling claimed that his project was a "counterpart " to Spinoza. My strategy is as follows: to suggest some of the character of the Pantheism Debate, in which the scandalous figure of Spinoza was central. Schelling attempted to locate in Spinoza a tension that could help articulate the relationship between philosophy and freedom and thereby make bearable the irresolvable yet necessary contradiction that a system of freedom entails. This relationship will be charaterized by the form of tragedy which will serve as an image for the tension within Spinoza and a system of freedom itself. This relationship will be implicated as the conspiracy within Schelling's Philosophy of Nature. I will conclude with a short discussion of Schelling's complex relationship with Hegel. Schelling characterized Hegel's thought as a "Spinozism rewritten in the ideal." I will try to read this claim as emblematic of Schelling's reading of Hegel in general. ;The second part will take up the question of the positive philosophy and, in so doing, take up the question of Schelling's reevaluation of philosophy's own power. In the negative philosophy, philosophy serves divine works by implicating them in the ideal. It is therefore ascensive. The positive philosophy is testimony to the history of light, that is, the dark transfigured into light within time and places. This is the Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation, the descensive history of freedom. I begin with a close reading of the 1809 Freedom essay and conclude with a discussion of the figure of time and its relationship to the figure of Dionysos. Here one finds Dionysian philosophy embodying the conspiratorial tensions of Being itself

This is an essay on place in light of the ecological crisis as an exercise in what Pierre Charbonnier has recently called ecological reason, that is, “the environmental reflexivity of our species.” How do the roots of our prevailing political and economic relationships to the many lands that sustain us appear retroactively from the perspective of ecological reason? In a kind of tragic reversal, the mad rush to global prosperity and political dignity now appears as the emerging catastrophe of our failure to heed the terrestrial affordances that sustain us. I explicate this problem and root about for responses to it by lacing together the recent work of Charbonnier as well as John Sallis, Bruno Latour, and Brian Burkhart in a single weave of place-specific thinking. How can we begin to rethink place from the ground up?

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic awakening to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene.