We are pleased to release the June 2008 Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy

The journal website: http://www.kritike.org
Current issue: http://www.kritike.org/Current_Issue.html
Call for papers: http://www.kritike.org/Call_for_Papers.html

KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2008)

1. Editorial: Marking the First Year of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy - The Editor

Articles:

2. Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality - Mark W. Westmoreland

3. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell: Tragedy, Love, and Religion - Kenneth Masong

4. ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die?’ - Saitya Brata Das

5. A Comparative Study on the Theme of Human Existence in the Novels of Albert Camus and F. Sionil Jose - F. P. A. Demeterio

6. The War on Concepts: The Thought of Jan Patocka and the War on Terror - Katy Scrogin

7. Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism - Saladdin Said Ahmed

8. The Causal Relevance and Heterogeneity of Program Explanations in the Face of Explanatory Exclusion - Wilson Cooper

9. A Freewheeling Defense of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy - Todd D. Janke

10. The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective - Michael James Braund

Book Reviews :

11. Powell, Jason, Jacques Derrida: A Biography - Marko Zlomislic

12. Evans, C. Stephen, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays - Robert C. Cheeks

13. Drake, David, Sartre and Bernasconi, Robert, How to Read Sartre - Marella Ada Mancenido

A review of Reading Merleau-Ponty: On the Phenomenology of Perception

This excellent volume contains most of the papers read at an Anglo-French colloquium on Merleau-Ponty held at the Collège de France in the summer of 2005, plus two additional essays (by Sean Kelly and Mark Wrathall) not presented there. The colloquium itself may have been Anglo-French, but the authors are overwhelmingly Anglo. The book is neither an introduction for beginners wholly unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty’s thought nor an academic exercise exclusively for specialists. Instead, the collection offers an engaging mixture of textual interpretation and critical argument to those who already have at least a rough sense of what Phenomenology of Perception is all about.

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A review of Allen Wood’s Kantian Ethics

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NYRB: By Mary Beard

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, by Jim Holt

Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 BC–AD 250, by John R. Clarke

Just over halfway up the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome is a memorable, and unsettling, scene. Although practically invisible from ground level, and almost crowded out by the images of violent conflict between Roman legions and German tribes which spiral up the shaft, it has often caught the attention of archaeologists. For it shows a young child being torn from the arms of his German mother by a Roman soldier–and still reaching out to her, as he is roughly hauled away.

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I have reviewed Tamara Chaplin’s Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television

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A review of Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy

Christopher Janaway proposes to “transmit something of the richness and reward to be found in reading Nietzsche’s texts themselves” (p. 2). In the hands of a scholar less skilled than Janaway, such a proclamation would be a red flag to the philosophical reader that a lot of bad paraphrase and mimicry of Nietzsche’s writing style was in the offing. There is, happily, none of the latter, and very little of the former, in this intelligent and illuminating book, which aims to defend two rather precise theses about reading Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: first, that Nietzsche’s method of writing is intended to engage the reader emotionally or affectively; and second, that such affective engagement is a necessary precondition for altering the reader’s views about evaluative questions — that “without the rhetorical provocations, without the revelation of what we find gruesome, shaming, embarrassing, comforting, and heart-warming we would neither comprehend nor be able to revalue our current values” (p. 4; cf. pp. 96-98).

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A review of Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge

Readers of Foucault’s texts have long been perplexed by the apparent shift his writings underwent in the late 1970s. Following the appearance of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (Le volunté de savoir, translated as The History of Sexuality: An Introduction) in 1976, Foucault’s investigations inexplicably change focus: from an investigation of the prison and the mechanisms of power that produce the modern individual in Discipline and Punish, the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality focus on practices of the self in ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, at the time of his death, Foucault was at work on a fourth volume examining the practices of the self in the Christian era.1 How does one account for the fact that the thinker who had written in 1966 that the one could “certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand and at the edge of the sea” was suddenly writing about the various practices of the self prevalent in the ancient world, practices that were meant to ensure individual freedom and autonomy?2 This, after all, was the thinker that had famously feuded with Jean-Paul Sartre and labeled him an outmoded thinker of systems, better suited for the nineteenth century than the twentieth, who was now writing about themes seemingly much more at home in Existentialist writings than his own anti-humanist ones.

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A review of Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their Time (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

A decade ago, Richard Beardsworth stated in his introduction to Derrida and the Political: “the twenty-first century approaches, and it is clear that our political concepts, and, therefore, the fields in which these concepts are discursively organized, acquire meaning and operate, need to be reinvented”.[1] A seism of unheard of proportions has shaken the space of the political, a field whose conceptual system has been elaborated throughout a long history as the effect of a complex and stratified legacy: Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian. Yet, ten years on, the reinvention of the category of the political still remains an imperative and unavoidable task. Today our political space appears overdetermined by a set of notions: the crisis of the nation-state, of the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, the omnipresence of globalization and empire, the dangerous appeal to a permanent state of exception, and finally, the pressing impact of biopolitics. However, instead of providing a useful map with which to orient and to intervene in an active transformation of the political space, this constellation of notions marks a limit, an impasse, and signals a difficulty of orientation for political theories or philosophies that still depend on the sovereign One.

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Review of Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Concept of Life and Value

Hegel famously declares that “Everything in my logic is indebted to Heraclitus” and “Everything is contradictory.” Songsuk Susan Hahn’s study is a thoughtful and unusual treatment of contradiction in Hegel. It illuminates crucial links between the logical, aesthetic and ethical aspects of Hegel’s system, and furthermore is a welcome departure from the prevailing approach to the dialectic as the public-communal constitution and recognition of rational norms, free of ontological claims, in a kind of historicized Kantianism. Hahn observes that Hegel’s concept of life is central to the Science of Logic and to the whole of the system, wherein it has undeniable ontological import. Her book, she tells the reader, began with wonder: “What does Hegel mean when he says we must regard concepts as ‘living’?” (195).

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A review of David Reisman'sSartre's Phenomenology (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

This difficult, flawed, thought-provoking book comprises five chapters: 1. Sartre and Strawson. 2. Pre-reflective consciousness and the perceptive field. 3. Impure reflection and the constitution of the psyche. 4. The Look and the constitution of persons. 5. Bad faith. It seems to me helpful to see it as consisting of two overlapping books: the first, spanning Chapters 1-4, outlines what David Reisman takes to be Sartre's answers to two linked post-Strawsonian questions: how a conscious subject comes to apprehend a genuinely objective world, and how such a subject constitutes itself as a person, i.e. a psycho-physical object. (Anglo-American post-Strawsonians should however be warned that little beyond Chapter 1 of this book will be readily accessible to them; even advanced students of Sartre will have to work hard.) The second, occupying roughly Chapters 2-5, is a contribution to the literature on bad faith that treats in more than usual detail the notions of impure reflection and psychic objects and which highlights the role of the Look in bad faith. Reisman uses Transcendence of the Ego, trs. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick, Noonday Press: New York, 1957 (hereafter TE), and Being and Nothingness, tr. H.E. Barnes, Washington Square Press: New York, 1966 (hereafter BN).

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