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17Happiness and Joy in Aristotle and Bergson as Life of Thoughtful and Creative ActionOpen Philosophy 7 (1): 317-40. 2024.The view of happiness that I propose in this article and derive on the basis of Aristotle’s and Henri Bergson’s ideas recommends that we must first understand life as an activity – not as a sum of accumulated experiences and things; nor a set of projects; nor fateful or haphazard events that befall us, but as a formative activity in which we play a key role. Ἐνέργεια or de l’action are at the core of life and it is by getting a hold of this creative core that we stand to live happily (Aristotle)…Read more
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23The Mythological Aspect of Plato’s Phaedo as Disclosing the Soul’s Ontological SignificancePhilosophies 9 (3): 89. 2024.This essay offers an interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo, which proceeds in two parts: (1) methodological interpretation of myth and (2) application of the method to the analysis of the soul. The paper claims that the myths in this dialogue are not limited to the explicitly mythical sections but that the entirety of the Phaedo—including the arguments that it presents—is saturated with myth. Through this interpretive lens, the soul, as it appears in the Phaedo, ceases to be characterized as a mere t…Read more
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12Self-abnegation, Decentering of Objective Relations, and Intuition of Nature: Toomas Altnurme’s and Cao Jun’s ArtOpen Philosophy 7 (1): 79-100. 2024.This article analyzes the artwork of two seemingly distant contemporary artists – Toomas Altnurme and Cao Jun – elucidating their creative processes through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson. In Section 1, I offer reasons for a side-by-side examination of Altnurme’s and Jun’s art. In my discussion of Altnurme’s art in Section 2, I argue that his process exemplifies Heidegger’s view that artists must abnegate themselves in order for their creations t…Read more
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72“We Understand Him Even Better Than He Understood Himself”: Kant and Plato on Sensibility, God, and the GoodOpen Philosophy 7 (1): 295-310. 2024.Kant criticizes Plato for his interest in positing ideas that are entirely purified from any sensible elements, but which, nonetheless, exist in some supra-sensible reality. I argue that Kant’s criticism can be repositioned and even countered if, in our assessment of Plato, we assign a wider scope of significance and greater value to the senses. In order to lend focus to my article, I analyze Socrates’ presentation of what I translate as the “look of the Good” (τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέαν, 508e) in theRepu…Read more
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17Colloquium 2 The Contemplative Community: Pre-Socratic Teachings and Their Appropriation in the PhaedoProceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 37 (1): 29-52. 2023.This paper elucidates how the thinking about opposition that we find in the surviving passages of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and in the fragments of Heraclitus of Ephesus informs discussions of the separability of the body and the soul in the Phaedo. I offer a reconstruction of the way in which these pre-Socratic ideas of opposition are appropriated and refracted in Plato’s Phaedo (especially at 85e–86e, 92a–95a, 102c–e, 102b–107a). I treat Anaxagoras first, in order to explicate how his ideas mak…Read more
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30Repression and Return of Nature in Hegel and BeyondPhilosophies 8 (5): 80. 2023.Taking its departure from the destruction of ethicality (Sittlichkeit), as envisioned by Hegel in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (PG §443–475), this paper constructs a concept of a contemporary subject whose self-reliant autonomy fractures in the face of the truth. This truth is revealed as an upsurge of nature, whose role and significance has been denied in favor of comfort and security of the subject. The move to yoke and subdue nature by placing science—as Bacon saw fit—in service of technolo…Read more
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30Philosophical Method of Dioscorides’s De Materia MedicaHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1): 180-198. 2023.It is commonly thought that Dioscorides’s view on medicine is purely pragmatic, focused entirely on the effectiveness of medicines, and derived from trial and error. One reason for this interpretation is that Dioscorides himself wrote little about his theory of medicine. In this article, however, we argue that he would have arranged De Materia Medica in a way that would have been useful only to a skilled practitioner. This argument implies that Dioscorides had a medical theory, as the arrangemen…Read more
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37Negativity in the Heart of Nature: A Study of Art of Vincent Van Gogh through Hegel, Nietzsche, and HeideggerJournal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 7 (2): 139-157. 2020.The focus of this essay is the art of Vincent van Gogh and the way in which van Gogh’s understanding of nature informs his landscape painting. Van Gogh’s descriptions of the relationship between na...
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17Boundless care: Lacoste’s liturgical being refigured through Heidegger’s SorgeInternational Journal of Philosophy and Theology 81 (3): 328-342. 2020.I. Liturgical practices, whether solemn or celebratory, mark our transcendence of the everyday. In liturgy, the common and the worldly fall away. Our spirit is tasked with the work dedicated to the...
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38The Tragedy and Comedy of Tyranny: Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes's FrogsPhilosophy and Literature 44 (2): 207-225. 2020.ARRAY
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23The Ancient Knowledge of Sais or See Yourselves in the Xenoi: Plato’s Message to the GreeksAKROPOLIS: Journal of Hellenic Studies 3 129-149. 2019.It is easier to criticize others and their foreign way of life, than to turn the mirror of critical reflection upon one’s own customs and laws. I argue that Plato follows this basic premise in the _Timaeus_ when he constructs a story about Atlantis, which Solon, the Athenian, learns during his travels to Egypt. The reason why Plato appeals to the distinction that his Greek audience makes between themselves and the ξένοι is pedagogical. On the example of the conflict between Atlantis—a mythical a…Read more
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30In Dialogue with Plato’s Politics and EducationComparative and Continental Philosophy 12 (3): 165-166. 2020.
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19“Life Death” in Plato and Derrida: A Review of Michael Naas’s Plato and the Invention of Life: Plato and the invention of life, by Michael Naas, New York, Fordham University Press, 2018, 288 pp., $32.00 (pbk), ISBN: 978-0823279685 (review)Comparative and Continental Philosophy 12 (1): 66-75. 2020.Michael Naas’s Plato and the Invention of Life, which I review in this essay, formulates the question that is at the core of Plato’s thought. This question is: What is life? Naas’s inquiry into life indicates a field for prolific research in ancient and continental philosophy, as it calls on us to rethink the difference, the priority, and the relationship between beings and Being. Our understanding of this coupling, which first set into motion the “gigantomachia” of Western philosophy, depends o…Read more
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42Tragic Rationality in Nietzsche’s Misreading of Plato in The Birth of Tragedy and BeyondEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (2): 425-445. 2021.Shortly before the first publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche identified his philosophy as an “inverted Platonism.” Although, as Martin Heidegger warns, “we may not overlook the fact that the ‘inverted Platonism’ of his early period is enormously different from the position finally attained,” nonetheless, Nietzsche’s suspicion about otherworldly truths and optimistic faith in reason runs as a strong current throughout his works. I argue that Nietzsche’s view of Plato as the i…Read more
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20Analysis of evil in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift through Heidegger’s account of dissemblance and ΑλήθειαInternational Journal of Philosophy and Theology 82 (2): 97-115. 2021.In this paper, I offer an analysis of evil in Friedrich W. J. Schelling’s Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809). Schelling develops an account of the sui-genesis of God out of the two principles. These principles are 1) the dark ground (dunkler Grund) that belongs to God and 2) the self-revelation of God, who actualizes the dark ground, which grounds God antecedently. These two principles also contain in themselves the possibility and the intelligibility o…Read more
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29Temporality in Psychosis: Loss of Lived Time in an Alien WorldThe Humanistic Psychologist 43 (2): 148-159. 2015.The question that drives this paper is: How does time function in psychosis? Given the altered or inhibited relation to speech in psychosis, I think that it is worth working out a notion of temporal or, to borrow Bessel van der Kolk’s term, “rhythmical. .. .interactions” (Listening to Trauma, 2014) with the afflicted persons. Using Freud’s analysis of non-linear psychic time, I construct a theoretical model of temporal modifications in psychosis. I then use this model, along with Lacan’s writing…Read more
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87Masks and Monsters: On the Transformative Power of ArtPli 29 102-112. 2018.Drawing on texts in psychology, philosophy, and literature the paper argues that art avails us of a distance from ourselves. Art has a potential to change our perspective on monstrosity and to make us question our moral categories and presuppositions. The study focuses on a single painting by Paul Gavarni, Two Pierrots Looking into a Box (1852), which I have discovered holds two images in one representation. I turn to Gavarni's work in order to prompt a literal gestalt shift in my readers. I di…Read more