Nancy J. Holland

“Nature (or Not) In Heidegger,” looks across the full scope of Heidegger’s work (starting with Towards a Definition of Philosophy from 1919 and ending with the Four Seminars from 1966–1973) to trace a continuing insistence in his thought on a parallel between the way technology distorts our relationship with beings (the natural world seen as nothing more than a collection of calculable masses in motion) and a similarly distorted understanding of ourselves (as “minds” in relation to, and potentially explainable in terms of, a subset of these calculable masses we call “human bodies”). For Heidegger, a more primordial relationship between Dasein and beings can be found in our everyday engagement with the things around us.This reading of Heidegger suggests two strong claims: if the critique of technology in his later work is intrinsically linked to his understanding of Dasein, the difference between the early and late Heidegger might be less extreme than has been thought; and, rather than “solve” the mind/body problem by redefining the mental to make it compatible with science, as most philosophy attempts to do, we might instead follow Spinoza, who responded to Descartes’ dualism by redefining Nature itself.

This paper attempts to show that Robert Cumming’s effort in a recent article to explain the work of Jacques Derrida to American philosophers fails to present an adequate account of Derrida’s position because Cumming does not take Derrida’s philosophical views (in this case, his critique of Heidegger) seriously enough. By returning to the Heideggerian and Derridian texts, three main points become clear: first, that Cumming fails to present an alternative interpretation of Heidegger on which to base his criticisms of Derrida’s reading; second, that Cumming’s specific criticisms of Derrida often fail because he engages the issues on a relatively superficial level; and, finally, that Cumming has not proven that Derrida’s work does not present a substantial challenge to Heidegger’s position. I conclude that the task of explaining Derrida’s work to American philosophers has yet to be accomplished.

This is certainly true for every translation, because every translation must necessarily accomplish the transition of the spirit of one language into that of another.We all know who and what Creon was. He was a tyrant—a proto-Nazi, according to French playwright Jean Anouilh. He was not even the same person in Sophocles's three Theban plays, according to translator H. D. F. Kitto.2 He was Antigone's uncle, her mother's brother. He was a symbol of the transition from a "rule of tradition" to a "rule of law" in ancient Greece, according to political scientist Catherine A. Holland.3 We also all know what those terms mean—tyrant, the same person, uncle, brother, rule of tradition, rule of law....

One undercurrent in contemporary philosophical thought is the suspicion that the traditional search for final and absolute answers is no longer possible. This dissertation, "A Theory of Meaning After the End of Philosophy", discusses some of the consequences of this view, specifically those which the French philosopher Jacques Derrida draws from it. The first is that any search for final and absolute answers will necessarily fall within what he calls the "metaphysics of presence". The second is that the role of the context in our understanding of language is much greater than is usually believed and, as a corollary, that the role of the individual Subject in "speech acts" is much less important. These views are compared to those of John Searle, because Searle and Derrida seem to share certain important premises and because Searle's work seems to provide a theory of meaning which Derrida himself does not provide, and which does not fall within Derrida's "metaphysics of presence". ;In this context, the dissertation analyzes Derrida and Searle's writings, as well as Searle's most recent thought as presented in his lectures. The first chapter presents an explanation of Derrida's position and his terminology. The analysis of terms such as 'metaphysics', 'difference', 'writing', 'trace', and 'presence' as they are used by Derrida yields something like necessary and sufficient conditions according to which a philosophical theory could be said to fall within the "metaphysics of presence". The use of these necessary and sufficient conditions is illustrated in two examples of how Derrida deconstructs texts to show their metaphysical nature. The chapter ends with a discussion of Derrida's account of the role of the context and of the Subject in language and in intentionality in general. ;Starting with intentionality, which Searle considers to be the basis for any complete account of language, the second chapter presents his theory of meaning. Following the logical, rather than chronological, progression of his thought a full account of his view on meaning is derived, with special emphasis on the role of individual intentionality and of the context, to show more clearly where Searle agrees and disagrees with Derrida. Then, Searle's theory of meaning is compared with the traditional theories against which Derrida argues, especially with regard to truth and what Searle calls the "background". ;Given the conclusions of these two chapters, the third chapter establishes that Searle's theory of meaning does fulfill the criteria for an account of meaning which is not only compatible with Derrida's requirements but also philosophically similar to Derrida's own position. The work of Martin Heidegger provides a basis for exploring the key premises common to Derrida and Searle. Then the important issues are isolated from the incidental ones in the direct confrontation of views drawn from the "debate" between Searle and Derrida carried on in Glyph. Given the premises they share, it follows that Searle's work does not necessarily fall within the "closure of the metaphysics of presence". Moreover, the residual differences between Searle and Derrida appear to be due, at least in part, to the different intellectual contexts within which they find themselves. More importantly, however, these remaining issues seem to be based on divergent responses to a question concerning the priority of public norms and individual intentionality which neither Searle nor Derrida can consistently ask or answer

This paper reconsiders Marcuse's Eros and Civilization from the perspective of Gayle Rubin's classic article “The Traffic in Women.” The primary goals of this comparison are to investigate the social and psychological mechanisms that perpetuate the archaic sex/gender system Rubin describes under current conditions of post-industrial capitalism; to open possible new avenues of analysis and liberatory praxis based on these authors’ applications of Marxist insights to cultural interpretations of Freud's writings; and to make clearer the role sexual repression continues to play in all forms of oppression, even in a public world seemingly saturated with sex.

Much contemporary feminist theory continues to see itself as freeing women from patriarchal oppression so that they may realize their own inner truth. To be told by postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida that the very possibility of such a truth must be submitted to the process of deconstruction thus seems to present a serious challenge to the feminist project. From a postmodern perspective, on the other hand, most feminist discourse remains deeply rooted, if not in essentialism, at least in the logocentrism of traditional philosophical and political thought. Stepping beyond the usual confines of this debate, the eleven thinkers whose ideas are represented in this volume take a deeper look at Derrida's work to consider its specific strengths and weaknesses as a model for feminist theory and practice. Despite this common focal point, this collection is extremely diverse. The problems addressed include the status of the female subject, civil disobedience, and the AIDS epidemic; the subjects include Husserl's theory of signs, jealousy in Shakespeare's _Othello_, and Irigaray's concept of the divine; disciplines include cultural studies, literature, philosophy, political theory, religion, and the law as represented by major scholars in each field; and the opinions expressed range from strong criticism of Derrida's work to careful explorations of the avenues it creates for rethinking sexual difference. Included are an analytic introduction by Nancy J. Holland; important new essays by Elizabeth Grosz, Peggy Kamuf, Peg Birmingham, Kate Mehuron, Ellen Armour, and Dorothea Olkowski; "Choreographies," Derrida's 1982 interview with Christie V. McDonald; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Displacement and the Discourse of Women," published in the same year; and recent articles by Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser.

This paper offers a reading of Heidegger''s 1931 lectures on Aristotle''s Metaphysics, Theta 1-3 that relates that discussion to Heidegger''s later work on The Question Concerning Technology and then, more briefly, to contemporary philosophical discussions of ecological issues. This reading is intended to open the possibility of using Heidegger''s re-interpretation of Aristotle as a source within the Western European tradition for understanding our relationship to the natural world in a way that could provide the philosophical tools for addressing ecological problems more adequately and effectively.

Taking Jean Giraudoux's play _The Madwoman of Chaillot _as its starting point, this book seeks a way out of the dilemma that confronts those who feel that any nonrelativistic moral theory requires some metaphysical foundation but cannot see how a foundations position can be persuasively defended. Nancy Holland draws on the work of Heidegger and Derrida to formulate a concept of appropriate action that can address both extraordinary ethical problems within a particular cultural tradition and moral conflict between different cultures. Her feminist reappropriations of the concept of the appropriate is then further developed by reference to Aristotle and Kant, whose ethical theories, she argues, are independent of their metaphysics, thus suggesting that moral evaluations can rely on a deep understanding of what it is to be human within a cultural tradition rather than on foundations premises. As an example of the application of her theory, Holland examines the problem of ordaining women women in the Roman Catholic Church and then goes on to compare her approach with that of other philosophers working in virtue theory, postmodern ethics, and feminism. We all want to be able to make valid moral judgments and to respect the ethical values of other cultural groups. By suggesting that a culture's sense of the human and a correlated sense of appropriate action, might provide a purely formal but still critical perspective on any community's current beliefs and practices without invoking any substantive external criteria, the concept of the appropriate is offered as one way in which we can satisfy both our moral wants and our intellectual needs.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 216-223 [Access article in PDF] Notes and Fragments Genre Fiction and "The Origin of the Work of Art" Nancy J. Holland I FIRST, A CONFESSION. Like, I suspect, many of my readers, I am an unpublished fiction writer. Unlike most of the closet fiction writers in academia, however, I write genre fiction. The question that immediately follows is how that writing is related to the intellectual work I do in philosophy.This question, of course, is open to a broad range of answers, from the possibility that the two aren't related at all, to potential Freudian answers it might take years of therapy to unearth. Teaching informs one's life, however, as much as the reverse, and in teaching Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" to my Metaphysics class last year, I began to understand at least one dimension of the appeal that writing genre fiction has for me as a philosopher.But first, let me explain what I mean by genre fiction. In what follows, I will be referring primarily to four forms of genre fiction that have clear roots in the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America: two gender-segregated genres, the western and the romance, and two gender-marked genres, science fiction and detective novels. I will be comparing these to two other forms of "popular culture" that also developed in the nineteenth century and have, I would argue, similar relationships to the older, more "legitimate," more elite art forms which they closely resemble: photography 1 and popular music, [End Page 216] especially those forms of popular music such as ragtime, blues, jazz, and rock that are informed by the African-American experience in the United States. 2These "low brow" art forms all appear to have arisen out of the growth of the middle class in developing parts of the world during the nineteenth century and the correlative confluence of greater leisure, greater aggregate prosperity, and higher levels of education across a broader spectrum of society. Further, these art forms all combine the surface appearance of their respective "high brow" correlate arts with the reassurance of repetition that is the cornerstone of the folk arts with which they are also correlated. Each of these forms of popular culture balances itself, then, between a demand for more and more "works of art" (and/or class aspirations based on the appearance of such) and a demand for the familiar in a rapidly changing, materially challenging world.Thus, photography gives us a frozen and thereby purified visual reality, an icon of memory to which we can return at will. The truth it reveals is most often starker than that of folk painting and portraiture, but also gives the appearance of being free from the subjectivity of the artist. Great iconic photographs such as the kiss on V-E day, I have heard it said, become more real than the reality they encapsulated.Popular music similarly combines often amazing musical complexity (which is not unknown, although rarer, in western folk music) with the reassurance of a form that not only repeats itself within a song, but also between songs of the same genre. Thus, blues can be recognized by both the minor chords in its melodies and the characteristic rhyme pattern of its lyrics. Moreover, most western popular music, even to some extent free-form jazz, has a familiar and reassuring beginning-middle-end structure, both melodically and dynamically, that locates a listener immediately within the song's "story-arc." 3This same beginning-middle-end structure is one clear hallmark of genre fiction. Another is repetition. We all immediately know the plot of a detective novel or science fiction adventure: where it will begin, what the key stages of the story will be, and how it will end—not just happily, but with a specific form of reassuring outcome, be it the victory of well-intentioned intelligence over cunning evil or humanity's ability to survive even the most alien (and so most familiar) of threats. At...

This paper takes a feminist look back at Derrida’s work roughly from “Plato’s Pharmacy” to Politics of Friendship, setting it in the context of three other sets of writings: Plato’s Lysis and Phaedrus; French philosophy in the mid-twentieth century, especially the ethical and political thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir; and contemporary re-visions of two Greek tragedies, Oedipus and Orestes/Electra. What brings these disparate themes together are Derrida’s thought, the work of Martin Heidegger, and my life in the wake of Derrida’s death.