Mike Regier

Fear and Trembling’s enigmatic weaning analogies have received a variety of interpretations, recently presenting them as analogizing the relationship between God, Abraham, and Isaac as mother, breast, and child—an insight offering fertile new discussions. Our interest is to continue developing this interpretation by highlighting the role of Isaac in Fear and Trembling, as he is often treated only marginally. Adopting this perspective reveals the importance Kierkegaard places on living faith. We argue the Akedah is a radical illustration of the transmission of faith and its reliance on faithful activity to inspire the appropriation of faith and subjective upbuilding.

In his essay “Love and Justice,” Paul Ricoeur proposes an interrelationship between love and justice such that, rather than oppositional forces, they complement each other in important ways. Where justice reaches rulings, love is open-ended; where justice has a normative power provided by popular assent, love has, and seeks, no monopoly of power; etc. This interrelationship is important to the way Ricoeur structures selfhood and interpersonal interactivity—he recognizes the need for active engagement with others, but tempers this with an ethos that is not reducible to a closed-system (as justice is often assumed to be). Rather, what Ricoeur suggests is that from love justice receives an enduring “but…” that leaves space for reconsideration. It is this reconsideration that we aim to highlight in this article. We will begin with a discussion of love and its ethical dimensions in Ricoeur’s thought, especially as it appears in Oneself as Another. As an ethical concept, love is an openness to alterity, inviting difference rather than seeking to dominate or repudiate it. This is essential for Ricoeur because it provides avenues for understanding oneself as well as others, and instantiates an openness to reassessing values (love keeps an open mind, as it were). We start on this interpersonal level because it is only when we love face-to-face that we can begin to think about justice properly, as justice is the codification of that love beyond our direct engagement with the other—justice extends our ability to love the other beyond those we meet in the world to those we may never meet. Thus, justice finds itself inextricably linked with self-flourishing, which requires love as the reciprocal care for the other as oneself (and oneself as an other). Love provides justice a critical apparatus, one which refines and refocuses it on self-flourishing and compassion.

Philosophy is a discipline which, perhaps more than any other, is preoccupied with its history. At the same time, this preoccupation has as much to do with maintaining and reclaiming traditions as with critiquing and transforming them. Some figures leave indelible marks on schools of thought, even while attributing credit to their forebears on whose shoulders they in turn innovate and critique. The legacy of these figures is instantiated through the generative role they play in inspiring new schools of thought. Such reception is by no means inherently positive. In fact, it is often disagreement rather than affirmation that sustains the lasting impact of an original thinker.

ABSTRACT Effective communication relies on the use of rhetorical devices and strategies to make ideas present in the minds of an audience. By employing the concept of cognitive environments, we can use the visual analogy of making an idea “present” to its fullest effect, empowering our rhetorical skills and helping influence audience reception. In this article, the author argues that while cognitive environments do indeed provide a significant and important conceptual tool for understanding and anticipating an audience’s experiences, beliefs, and knowledge, a more robust sense of agreement is necessary. The article proposes the concept of a topos that serves as a shared meeting place within cognitive environments within which both author and audience contribute their background assumptions to find common ground and commonalities in interpretations. It is in figuring the topos effectively that cognitive environments can be more accurately and effectively mapped onto each other, and breaches between such environments can be productively bridged.

In this paper, we re-evaluate Kierkegaard’s theory of life stages (or spheres) and suggest an alternative interpretation. This alternative approach to the stages will serve as a corrective to problems arising from interpretations promoting an ethical-religious stage, or which elide distinctions between stages entirely. To support this interpretation, we will examine the role polarity plays within the stages, the necessity of respecting the boundaries Kierkegaard draws between stages, and advocate for a greater recognition and appreciation of religiousness A within the broader theory. Our hope is to reveal new avenues for understanding Kierkegaard’s ethics, while also contextualizing the pseudonyms in a way that brings greater clarity and consistency between their respective contributions and his broader oeuvre.

Traditional approaches taken in analyzing Plato's aesthetics tend to privilege either the critical dialogues, or the dialogues which present poetry in a more positive light. Placing emphasis on one of these approaches leads to the exclusion, in varying degrees, of the opposing position. However, if poetry is reevaluated and given a tripartite structure a reconciliation of these positions can be arrived at. Tripartition is not uncommon in Plato's corpus, and by investigating Plato’s sense of poetry as though it possessed three components— a material component, an intellectual component, and a truthful component— a better understanding of Plato's broader aesthetics becomes possible. Each part of poetry roughly corresponds to, and affects a capacity of the soul, with the appetitive and material, spirited and intellectual, and reason-able and truthful creating pairs. Examining the relationship between poetry and the soul reveals subtle nuances in poetry, and allows for poetry to ascend higher than the critiques suggest. Along with the tripartition, there needs to be a greater focus on, and understanding of the ‘divine inspirer’ in Plato’s philosophical works. By elucidating the figure of the ‘divine inspirer’ the truth component of both poetry and philosophy can be drawn into a closer relationship. The historiographical nature of poetry, when traced to a divine source, can be viewed as possessing truth, which validates poetry. So, by deconstructing poetry into three distinct components, and recognizing the role of the divine inspirer in Plato’s conception, a constructive understanding of poetry that legitimizes both the critical and positive discussions of poetry presented in across the dialogues can be constructed.