Continental Philosophy

Review of Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Early Notebooks

This is the tenth volume by Nietzsche in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, giving him the most books in the series (followed by Kant with seven volumes). Like all the other Nietzsche volumes, Writings from the Early Notebooks contains an Introduction followed by suggestions for further reading, together with bibliographical notes on the texts and notes on the translation. The texts are presented in a new translation. Added to them is an impressive number of very informative footnotes that provide the biographical, historical and intellectual background without which a lot of the material would be barely comprehensible. All these features make this volume, like many others in the series, very helpful for both students and researchers.

via Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Geuss (ed.), Alexander Nehamas (ed.) – Writings from the Early Notebooks – Reviewed by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt Universität – Philosophical Reviews – University of Notre Dame.

A review of NDPR Negri, In Praise of the Common”>Cesare Casarino, Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics by Jason Read:

In Praise of the Common is a difficult book to categorize; neither a collection of interviews nor a collection of essays, it combines both formats, becoming in the end something unique. It is also a book that not only became something different than was initially intended, but which also explicitly states this difference. The book was conceived as a series of interviews that would address the historical background of Antonio Negri’s thought, the tumultuous period of political action and philosophical reflection of the Italian sixties and seventies that remains largely unknown in the Anglo-American world despite the popularity of Empire and Multitude. However, as these conversations developed they became less about the past, less a matter of one person interviewing another about his experiences, and more about the present and future. The interview became a conversation. Unlike an interview, a conversation is determined less by an asymmetry between the one who knows and the one who asks than by the production of some common understanding. In Casarino’s terms, “Conversation is the language of the common” (1).

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John D. Caputo reviews Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank’s The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?

Materialism just isn’t what it used to be. Nowadays everyone wants to be a materialist, even the theologians, while the materialists want to look like they lead a spiritual life. The battle that is joined today is no longer between materialism and idealism, or hard-nosed Newtonians and far out spirit-seers, but between “materialist materialism” and “theological materialism”, between crude soulless materialism and materialism with spirit, a materialism of the spirit, a religious materialism (93). “Materialist materialism is simply not as materialist as theological materialism”, says John Milbank, the leading Anglo-Catholic theologian of the day, in this published debate with Slavoj Žižek, a Lacanian neo-Marxist writer and something of a Slovenian philosophical sensation in the Anglophone world (206). Theological materialism goes back to Christology, the materialism of the Logos made matter, in which matter really matters. Žižek would agree, but he would stand this statement on its head in a resuscitated and refashioned neo-Hegelian death of God theology. The debate that unfolds is strikingly Christological, in which both parties agree that Christianity is the absolute truth (Hegel), where Milbank takes his Christology straight up (treating Žižek’s as a “counterfeit”) and Žižek takes his on the rocks (treating Milbank’s version as “imaginary” (153, 245). The book is a splendid condensation and cross section of a contemporary debate between writers who seek to position themselves beyond the postmodernism or poststructuralism that dominated the last few decades of European thought. Whatever one thinks of the views of Milbank or Žižek, we may be very grateful to editor Creston Davis for crafting such a first rate exchange.

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A review of Kant and the Role of Pleasure in Moral Action:

Kant eventually becomes convinced that a philosopher’s stone (the elusive substance sought by alchemists for converting base metals into gold) exists in ethics via the concept of respect (Achtung). But here is where the interpretive battle begins: given his frequent assertions that respect is what motivates us to act morally, what exactly is Kantian respect — a feeling or a reason? The safe bet here may be “both”, for in a famous footnote in the Groundwork Kant says that “though respect is a feeling [Gefühl], it is not one received by means of influence; it is, instead, a feeling self-wrought by means of a rational concept” (4: 401n.). However, most contemporary Anglophone interpreters of Kant defend one or another cognitive reading of respect. Granted, there is a feeling dimension to respect, but the heavy lifting (motivating humans to act morally) is done by reason.

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A review of Conversations

This book is a collection of ten interviews with Irigaray by scholars and readers of her work from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Norway. The interviews span the period from 1996 to the present. Some have been published before, but in scattered places, so it is helpful to have them assembled together.

Some interviews address specific topics: architecture, building and dwelling, with Andrea Wheeler; yoga, with Michael Stone; the later Merleau-Ponty, with Helen Fielding; education, with Michael Worton; and Irigaray’s re-interpretation of the Virgin Mary, with Laine Harrington and Margaret Miles. I found this a particularly interesting interview. Irigaray interprets Mary to have been a ‘virgin’ in the sense of having achieved integrity as a woman and autonomy with respect to her mother Anne; thus, she had a kind of spiritual perfection that enabled her to generate a divine child. Irigaray firmly rejects the interviewers’ reference to Mary as a symbol, insisting on the historical reality of her virginity and of the incarnation — although, evidently, her understanding of what these realities consist in departs considerably from theological tradition (pp. 87-88, 102).

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Review of Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality

For James Luchte, Heidegger’s early philosophy is the phenomenology of ecstatic, original temporality as it develops in the years 1924 to 1929. Basing his text on the three components of the phenomenological method — reduction, destruction, and construction — Luchte divides his study into three distinct yet overlapping parts — Heidegger would call them equiprimordial ‘parts’: the [original] Phenomenon, the Destruktion, and the Topos [= building site] of ecstatic temporality. By way of a contrast with Husserl’s phenomenology, Part 1 eventually pinpoints Heidegger’s ‘phenomenological’ reduction quite precisely in “moments of vision, truth events, radical breaks amid system, eruptions: revolution, poetry, art and events of questioning” (47, 59). These moments “breach” our everyday familiarity of being, suspend the normality of our matter-of-fact existence — what Husserl dubbed the “natural attitude” — and disclose our unique being-t/here in the full finitude of its original temporality. We thus come “to ‘know ourselves’ as an ‘event’ amid a world” into which we have been thrown (48).

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Charles Reagan reviews Paul Ricoeur’s last book, Living up to Death

This is a strange book requiring a strange review. It is the publication of some of Paul Ricoeur’s previously unpublished writing, which he himself did not intend to publish. The first part of the book comes from notes he made in 1995-96 on the topic of death. After they were written, they were left in a folder and he never returned to them again. In the second part of the book are some of the “fragments” he wrote during his last days, mostly brief reflections on topics which preoccupied him such as life and death, Christianity, his faith and his philosophy, the Bible, his friend Jacques Derrida and resurrection. There is a Preface by Olivier Abel, a long-time friend of Ricoeur’s and a Postface by Catherine Goldenstein, also a very close friend for his last ten years.

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A review of Kenneth Rogerson’s The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant’s Aesthetics

Kant claims that the experience of beauty rests on what he calls a “harmony,” or a “free play” of the faculties of imagination and understanding, punctuated by pleasure. Famously, this free play is supposed to be “without concept” (§9, 5:217-9; 102-4).[1] In his new book, Kenneth Rogerson argues that “only the doctrine of beauty as the expression of ideas gives Kant a plausible explanation of how we can see objects of beauty as free harmonies” (p. 3).[2] The novelty of Rogerson’s approach is twofold. First, he argues that aesthetic ideas can explain not only artistic, but also natural beauty. Second, he stresses the importance of expression: both nature and art talk to us, as it were, and thereby bring about the free play of our faculties. Rogerson bases his solution to the problem of the concept-less harmony on a sharp distinction between concepts and ideas. Since his solution involves ideas rather than concepts, it meets Kant’s “no-concept” requirement head on: “an artwork (or natural object) that can be interpreted as expressing an aesthetic idea will accomplish this expression via a mental state that is free of concepts and yet orderly due to the fact that it expresses an idea” (p. 3).

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A review of Bill Martin’s Ethical Marxism:

Bill Martin seeks to restore to Marxist discourse, characterized often by an economic reductivism and philosophical positivism traceable to Karl Marx himself, neglected or even rejected ethical dimensions that have found a high point of expression in the ethics of Immanuel Kant. This admirable project of restoration recaptures ethical dimensions at least implicit in the work of Marx and more explicit in the early work, insofar as Marx’s “fourth” formulation of the categorical imperative, namely to overthrow the conditions that degrade humanity, suggests how his project extends Kant’s insights to the political and economic realm. This recovery of ethics also will entail that Marxists must address issues of subjectivity, intentionality, and normativity, which Marx may have thought his systemic analyses rendered irrelevant. It further entails that they must examine what is ethically required beyond simply advancing class interests, particularly of those to be found only in advanced capitalist nations. An ethical Marxism will also oppose any teleology or strict laws for history, in which humanity’s goals could be achieved without any free, human effort and in which, as a result, such effort would seem no longer really to matter.

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A review of Narrative Identity and Moral Identity: A Practical Perspective

Narrative conceptions of agency have attracted considerable philosophical interest in recent years, and both of these books make significant contributions to the growing literature on this theme. Each treats a wide range of related concepts, including not just narrative agency itself but also personal and practical identity, temporality and the self, practical reasoning, and autonomy.

Kim Atkins’ Narrative Identity and Moral Identity is a book about the nature of human selfhood. Atkins uses the terms “selfhood” and “identity” interchangeably, and approaches her subject in part through a discussion of theories of personal identity. Her central interest, however, is in practical rather than metaphysical identity. A person, in the sense of interest to Atkins, is a practical unity of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives (more on this below), and questions about personal identity, in her sense, are questions about the continuity of this practical unity over time.

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Charles Guignon reviews S. J. McGrath, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction

S. J. McGrath’s trim little book offers us an overview of Heidegger’s life-work, with special emphasis on his political activities and his relationship to theology. The book is part of a religious series originating from the Centre of Theology and Philosophy, and McGrath is up front in announcing that he is a Christian humanist and a personalist. Though he is highly impressed by Heidegger (this is his second book on the subject), his religious commitments incline him to be “very” critical of Heidegger. The book is divided into five chapters. After a short introduction, there are chapters on phenomenology, ontology, axiology, and theology, with a brief conclusion on “Why I Am Not a Heideggerian.”

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A review of Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future by Fred Dallmayr:

The fate of reason today hangs in the balance. This is no small matter. Ever since its historical beginnings, reason or rationality has been the central focus and point of honor of Western modernity — a focus enshrined in Descartes’ cogito, Enlightenment rationalism, and Kantian (and neo-Kantian) critical philosophy. The result of this focus was an asymmetrical dichotomy: separated from the external world of “matter” (or nature), the cogito assumed the role of superior task master and overseer — a role fueling the enterprise of modern science and technology. During the past century, the edifice of Western modernity has registered a trembling, due to both internal and external contestations. Subverting the modern asymmetry, a host of thinkers – with views ranging from American pragmatism to European life philosophy and phenomenology — have endeavored to restore pre-cognitive “experience” (including sense perception and affect) to its rightful place. In the context of French “postmodernism,” a prominent battle cry has been to dislodge “logocentrism” (the latter term often equated with anthropocentrism). In the ambiance of recent German philosophy, the battle lines have been clearly marked: pitting champions of modern rationalism, represented by Jürgen Habermas, against defenders of experiential “world disclosure,” represented by Martin Heidegger. In his book, Nikolas Kompridis endeavors to shed new light on this controversy, with the aim not so much of bringing about a cease fire but of providing resources for arriving at better mutual understanding.

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A review of Derrida and Legal Philosophy

This book brings together fifteen essays on Jacques Derrida’s approach to justice, law, and politics. It succeeds in demonstrating that Derrida, who died from pancreatic cancer in October of 2004, was not a political nihilist. In fact, he spent much of the last two decades of his life writing about law and justice, and he was deeply concerned about persons who were disempowered and marginalized. This concern was evidenced in his theoretical writings and in his personal commitment to progressive causes. Derrida is not widely considered a major figure in the philosophy of law, but he has definitely impacted the field in two ways. First, during the 1980s, his “deconstructive” strategy for textual analysis was picked up by scholars associated with the critical legal studies movement. Second, a small but devoted group of scholars was profoundly influenced by his 1989 lecture at Cardozo Law School entitled “Force of Law,” as well as subsequent books on Marxism, forgiveness, friendship, gifts, and international politics. Therefore a compendium of essays on Derrida’s legal philosophy is a laudable project, and this book will be useful for those who are interested in, or already committed to, Derrida’s position.

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A review by Brian Leiter:

Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (hereafter NPS) is a serious, learned, and novel contribution to the literature on Nietzsche’s relevance to political theory. Against the two dominant strands in the secondary literature — one attributing to Nietzsche a kind of flat-footed commitment to aristocratic forms of social ordering, the other denying that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all — Shaw stakes out a new and surprising position: namely, that Nietzsche was very much concerned with the familiar question of the moral or normative legitimacy of state power, but was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve a practically effective normative consensus about such legitimacy that was untainted by the exercise of state power itself. Although, as I will argue below, there are reasons to be quite skeptical that Nietzsche was interested in anything like these questions, Shaw has laid down a clear and invigorating challenge to existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s politics, and it is one worth meeting.

Shaw’s project is animated by interest in the following issue about political authority in the modern era: namely, how can states in practice have legitimate normative or moral authority when religion is no longer available to secure a consensus on the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ normative criteria? The problem is compounded by the fact that states need to be perceived as legitimate, and thus will use their considerable powers to produce a perception of legitimacy. Against the power of the state to produce the appearance of legitimacy, the rational insight of philosophers into the genuine moral foundations of legitimacy is no match. That, I take it, is the structure of the problem that animates Shaw’s reading of Nietzsche. But is Nietzsche really worried about these issues?

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David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality

Reviewed by Peter Poellner, University of Warwick

The last decade has seen a flurry of publications on Nietzsche’s ethics and specifically on his critique of “morality” put forward in On the Genealogy of Morality. In addition to a host of journal articles and essay collections, there have been book-length studies of the subject by, among others, Aaron Ridley (Nietzsche’s Conscience, 1998), Simon May (Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on “Morality”, 1999), Brian Leiter (Nietzsche on Morality, 2002), and Chris Janaway (Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 2007). David Owen’s book is the latest addition to this growing literature. It is plausible to think that this surge of interest reflects a growing acknowledgement among philosophers in the English-speaking world that Nietzsche’s ideas on ethics and morality are of continuing relevance for contemporary thought. But while there has been increasing willingness to engage with Nietzsche among philosophers trained in the analytic tradition, there continues to be fierce disagreement on the merits and precise significance of his contribution, and indeed on its content. Much effort has been expended in recent years on clarifying or reconstructing Nietzsche’s challenge, and on excavating the argumentative structures beneath his polemics, while also making sense of the rhetorical idiosyncrasies of his distinctive philosophical style. As a result, we now have a much clearer and more detailed picture of the various interpretive options and are in a correspondingly better position than a few decades ago to assess the merits of the philosophical positions to which Nietzsche may plausibly be thought to be committed.

Owen’s valuable book offers a sustained, clear, crisply argued reconstruction of Nietzsche’s central arguments in On the Genealogy of Morality as well as some thoughtful explanatory ideas on Nietzsche’s incendiary style in this text, situating both in the context of the development of his thought on morality following his break with his early ethics of heroic love and self-sacrifice (inspired partly by Schopenhauer and Wagner) in Human, All-Too-Human. In Owen’s account of this development, Nietzsche’s point of departure since Daybreak is the “death of God”, the loss of belief in the Christian God among the cultured classes dramatized as the urbane atheism of the people in the marketplace in §125 of The Gay Science. The people in the marketplace consider the loss of authority of the metaphysical beliefs associated with Christianity to be a process that need have no implications for their practical orientation in life, an orientation that remains structured by a certain conception of morality continuous with “Christian” morality. For Nietzsche, by contrast, morality thus understood is rationally dependent on the truth of those now widely abandoned metaphysical beliefs: “When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality” (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”, §5). Nietzsche’s task, as he conceives of it from The Gay Science onwards, is therefore threefold: he needs to provide a broadly naturalistic explanation of the hold that “morality” continues to have — irrationally, by his lights — even on unbelievers; he needs to come up with an adequate evaluative framework permitting him to determine the “value of morality” as a self-standing practice deprived of its metaphysical trappings; and he needs to tell us something about the criteria for assessing evaluative commitments. The last requirement is particularly challenging for him as he is committed to “perspectivism”, a view which Owen interprets as the epistemological claim that justification is necessarily relative to practical perspectives constituted by specific, contingent interests and purposes — and that the idea of a practical justification valid for all rational beings merely qua rational beings is incoherent.

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Delving into the nuances and gradations of conceptual constructions while also recalling the far horizons of philosophical reflections — from Aristotle to Derrida and friends — Derrida on Time moves between intricate detailed readings and expansive historical overview. The text invokes the mutual readings that Hodge also identifies as the friendship of ‘Blanchot, Levinas, [and] Derrida and their continuing points of reference: Aristotle, Augustine, Nietzsche; Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger’ (92) not to mention Kant, Freud, Nancy, Marion, among many others. While explicating the transformations articulated across and between these various textual engagements, Hodge traces these theorists’ reflections on temporality and time. This book demands an oscillating reading that returns back and forth between chapters, paragraphs, concepts, and phrases creating a disrupted and repeated engagement. There is a clearly discernable trajectory but there is also a looping return such that later insights recall, re-signify and rearticulate earlier observations. This returning is not a restating but a retrospective materializing of that which had already emerged: what the reader might have overlooked earlier attains a new significance in the context of later explications. This encourages or demands a non-linear reading so that later sections invite, even require, a revisiting of the earlier.

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Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts could be called a brief “guide for the perplexed.” The perplexed include scholars in many disciplines who encounter Adorno’s ideas. They also include a larger public that confronts the issues he addressed: cultural segmentation, ecological destruction, democratic deficits, and paradoxes of globalization. Reading Adorno raises questions about the prospects for a world in which economic exploitation and political violence threaten to make life impossible.

Adorno experienced these threats in a visceral way. Driven from Germany during the Nazi regime and writing his first mature books in American exile, he returned to become a leading philosopher and social critic in post-war Germany. From there the influence of his ideas has spread to diverse fields around the world. Yet the center of his work lies in philosophy, and it is in philosophy that his most important contributions must be assessed.

The book under review reflects these patterns. It begins with surveys of Adorno’s thought and its genealogy written by the editor, Canadian philosopher Deborah Cook. The next four chapters, by British and Norwegian philosophers, are on Adorno’s reflections concerning logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy — arguably the canonical core of modern philosophy. The last five chapters, written by American, British, and Irish scholars in sociology, German studies, English literature, and philosophy, address Adorno’s social philosophy, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of culture, and philosophy of history.

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Adam Kirsch at the New Republic has a very vigorous review of Zizek’s Violence and In Defense of Lost Causes

What Zizek really believes about America and torture can be seen in his new book, Violence, when he discusses the notorious torture photos from Abu Ghraib: “Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people; in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture.” Torture, far from being a betrayal of American values actually offers “a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the U.S. way of life.” This, to Zizek’s many admirers, is more like it.

It also provides a fine illustration of the sort of dialectical reversal that is Zizek’s favorite intellectual stratagem, and which gives his writing its disorienting, counterintuitive dazzle.

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An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy) begins, as any text with that or any similar title should, with a discussion of the difficulties of firmly fixing an accurate conception of Africana philosophy. It is Gordon’s aim to introduce Africana philosophy as a modern philosophy, where the modern period is inaugurated by the discovery of the “new world” and the institution of the Atlantic Slave Trade and continues on to the present. Gordon presents the reader with a veritable Who’s Who of intellectuals who have made some contribution to Africana philosophy from antiquity to the present day. The result is a comprehensive, yet nuanced, account of how and by whom central themes in Africana philosophy have originated and been developed over time throughout the diaspora. For the most part, Gordon’s book gives a comprehensive account of the wide ranging field of Africana philosophy while also providing a close look at its instantiations in particular thinkers and select geographic regions. Gordon makes an effort to pay attention to the emergence and development of central themes in various parts of the diaspora though, on the whole, the book is heavily weighted in favor of discussions of African American and Afro-Caribbean philosophy over African philosophy.

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A review of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides)

Few texts in the history of thought are as difficult and yet as exciting as Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In the 201 years since its publication, the Phenomenology has had a broad influence on diverse fields of thought, including philosophy, sociology, theology, political science, and literary theory. It has been a source of philosophical inspiration for some and the frustratingly wrong-headed celebration of everything disastrous in modern thought for others. Yet what remains constant is that the Phenomenology demands and indeed has elicited thoughtful interlocutors who must combine Hegel’s own qualities — at once philosophically rigorous and focused, and also imaginative and comprehensive. The twelve contributors to Moyar and Quante’s excellent volume are readers of just this variety. They wrestle with small portions of Hegel’s challenging text and show how Hegel’s insights can help advance and even transform our thinking about traditional philosophical problems. This makes the Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide a belated but fitting bicentennial birthday present.

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