Robert Metcalf

A careful reading of the Gorgias along with related dialogues, such as the Apology, the Theaetetus, and other texts, shows that agonism is indispensable to the critique of prevailing opinions, to the transformation of the interlocutor through shame-inducing elenchos, and to philosophy as an ongoing, lifelong ‘training’ (askêsis) of oneself in relation to others. In this way, following Plato’s texts in understanding philosophy as agôn involves rethinking philosophy as an engaged contestation of one’s peers and the received opinions that are part of our relatedness to one another, as well as rethinking agôn as involving not just verbal combativeness, but also—in line with its root-meaning—as a matter of being gathered together in community through discourse (logos).

This essay argues for a distinction between bioethics in the customary sense and the “bioethical”—where the latter involves exploration of disturbing literary and/or artistic material. The “bioethical” signifies an affective and imaginative sphere in which we experience the mattering-to-us-morally of other human beings and non-human animals. The essay further argues that Cormac McCarthy’s writings allow us to explore the bioethical, with certain philosophical implications of this discussed in detail.

Volume 18 of Martin Heidegger's collected works presents his important 1924 Marburg lectures which anticipate much of the revolutionary thinking that he subsequently articulated in Being and Time. Here are the seeds of the ideas that would become Heidegger's unique phenomenology. Heidegger interprets Aristotle's Rhetoric and looks closely at the Greek notion of pathos. These lectures offer special insight into the development of his concepts of care and concern, being-at-hand, being-in-the-world, and attunement, which were later elaborated in Being and Time. Available in English for the first time, they make a significant contribution to ancient philosophy, Aristotle studies, Continental philosophy, and phenomenology

While it may be controversial to categorize Plato’s Theatetetus as “epistemological,” given what is implied by this term, the dialogue does offer a discourse on knowledge, at least in the minimal sense of questioning knowledge. But more than that, the dialogue “situates” its questioning, and its critical examination of attempted definitions of knowledge, in two ways that are particularly illuminating: first, its dramatization of Socrates coming-to-know Theaetetus through philosophical dialogue; second, its taking for granted a whole array of epistemic practices and keeping them in view, peripherally, throughout the discussion. The most interesting example of the latter is found in the famous Digression of the Theaetetus, where the difference between philosophy and rhetoric is understood in terms of the knowledge/lack-of-knowledge belonging to each.

While many scholarly interpretations of Plato’s Symposium express skepticism toward the content of Alcibiades’ speech, this essay argues Alcibiades’ portrait of Socrates is credible on the whole, is consistent with the portrayal of Socrates elsewhere, and is of great significance for our understanding of philosophical eros as exemplified in Socrates’ philosophical activity. Furthermore, by putting Socrates on trial for hybris, Alcibiades’ speech raises important philosophical questions as to whether the contempt with which he treated Alcibiades is not part and parcel of the wholesale contemning of human particularity implicit in Diotima’s teaching about eros.

One will never be able to interrogate wonder philosophically except by way of a questioning that the operation of wonder will already have determined. It is a well-known teaching in the writings of both Plato and Aristotle that wonder (thauma) is the beginning of philosophy. But few philosophers have given wonder much thought—certainly, no philosopher that I am aware of has, like Professor Sallis, returned time and again to think through wonder. Sallis’s thinking through wonder is guided by his reading of ancient Greek philosophy, and furthermore, as I hope to show, it opens up a reengagement with Greek philosophers—in particular, with those early Greek thinkers who are known collectively as the ..

Abstract Although the concept of “groundedness/autochthony“ ( Bodenständigkeit ) in Heidegger's writings receives far less scholarly attention than, for example, that of “releasement“ ( Gelassenheit ), a careful examination of the famous “ Gelassenheit “ speech of 1955 demonstrates that, in fact, Bodenständigkeit is the core concept around which everything else turns. Moreover, in the “ Gelassenheit “ speech and the writings on Hebel that follow, Heidegger understands Bodenständigkeit to be, fundamentally, something made possible by language in its particularities of tradition and locale. Thus, there is an intriguing continuity of meaning between that concept and the concept as it was used phenomenologically in his writings from the summer 1924 course up to Sein und Zeit

This paper addresses the philosophical problems posed by shame-consciousness, specifically with respect to the question as to whether the feelings of shame signify an apprehension of truth. After reviewing several methodological problems posed by shame-consciousness, the paper takes up the theoretical treatment of shame in Freud, Scheler, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, in order to show how shame illuminates the constitution of subjectivity by power relations in society. This psychoanalytic and phenomenological account of shame is shown to be confirmed by material drawn from cultural studies of shame, and by contemporary feminist critique