Becoming Human belongs to two emerging trends in the study of Kant and his early reception: an increasing focus on Kant’s anthropological writings for understanding his philosophy as a whole[1] and a resurgence of interest in German Romanticism.[2] Despite its subtitle – Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom – the bulk of Becoming Human (at least 150 of its 280 pages) focuses on Kant, so it belongs more squarely within the first trend than the second. Wellmon uses previously little-studied works of Kant’s — his Anthropology and writings on race and history — to provoke rereading Kant’s philosophy as concerned with empirically-rooted accounts of cultivating human freedom rather than merely with a priori articulations of fundamental norms.

Unlike other contemporary studies of Kant’s anthropology, however, Wellmon’s work aims to show how “Kant’s pragmatic anthropology failed because it was not dynamic enough” (276). Wellmon can then explain how German Romanticism, through an aesthetic sensitivity to concrete particulars, provides an “endlessly revisable” category of the human that claims the tensions and paradoxes in Kant’s works as bases for “different forms of knowledge” (17).[3] Unfortunately, the book’s critique of Kant is based on exaggerated and incomplete readings of Kant’s corpus, and the Romantic alternatives are developed through readings of texts that are too focused to justify Wellmon’s claims about the prospects for Romantic anthropology. But Wellmon’s book nonetheless helpfully moves contemporary debate forward by showing that the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reception of Kant included an important response to the empirically informed Kant that is gaining prominence today.

via Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

Trauma tears apart the context of everyday certainties that sustains us, as Robert Stolorow shows in his new World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge 2011). Stolorow, a founding member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles and former Professor of Psychology at Yeshiva University, since the 1970s, has consistently worked out an intersubjective version of psychoanalysis that has been immensely fruitful in helping many psychoanalytic therapists to find better ways of understanding and helping their patients.

Stolorow’s main objective in World, Affectivity, Trauma is to show how modern psychoanalysis can be enriched by integrating existential philosophy into its concepts. Stolorow, a scholar specializing in the work of the towering figure of existential philosophy, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), first introduces the reader to central concepts of Heidegger’s thought.

via Psychoanalysis Meets Existentialism: Robert Stolorow on Trauma and Authenticity | Psychology Today.

Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Reviewed by Tom Stern, University College London

Mellamphy’s book aims to draw together three strands of Nietzsche’s thought: his ‘great politics’, his philosopher of the future and the eternal recurrence. Her claim is that they are ‘always co-extensive and mutually implicated’ (x); hence, a reference by Nietzsche to one of these concepts necessarily invokes the others. The future philosopher is ‘undoubtedly a political figure’ (with artistic features) (15); and, for the future philosopher, the experience of the eternal recurrence is central to the ‘task of establishing ‘great politics” (41). It is the emphasis on Nietzsche’s ‘re-articulation of the ‘political” (121) which is most prominent, though, as stated, Mellamphy takes the three concepts together.

First, then, a word about Nietzsche and politics. There has been a great deal of discussion about whether Nietzsche can helpfully be considered a ‘political’ thinker. To a certain extent, predictably, this depends on one’s definition of ‘political’. Despite occasional, scattered remarks, Nietzsche wasn’t interested in theories of resource distribution, and he often suggests that getting too excited about ‘the state’ is a poor substitute for getting too excited about God. In that sense, he was not political. Then again, Nietzsche often takes pride of place in classes on the history of political thought: he is very interested in the social structures of large groups of humans, the ideas those groups develop and the interaction between the two. What could be more political than that? Finally, Nietzsche sometimes suggests that being unlike those around you is valuable per se. This has implications for any constructive political view one would take him to have. It’s one thing not to express a strong preference for any particular mode of government; it’s another to suggest, as at least Zarathustra does, that you’re just better off in the mountains than you are with the masses in the valley. It is this kind of thinking that earns Nietzsche the title of ‘anti-political’: it suggests not merely a lack of interest in politics, but something further — a disdain for all collective human activity.

via The Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

Reviewed by J. M. Fritzman, Lewis & Clark College

This is the first of eight volumes in the series The History of Continental Philosophy. In his introductory chapter, Thomas Nenon notes that, in contrast to analytic philosophy, continental philosophy developed through a deep and sustained dialogue with Kants philosophy and those thinkers influenced by it in France and Germany during the nineteenth century. He is correct; Kants philosophy begins its rehabilitation in analytic philosophy with the 1966 publications of Jonathan Bennetts Kants Analytic and Peter Strawsons Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kants Critique of Pure Reason. He also observes that, although Kants philosophy has now been appropriated by both analytic and continental philosophy, the other philosophers discussed in this book have generally been ignored in analytic philosophy.

Nenon writes that the French Revolution was taken by Kant to directly challenge two of the fundamental beliefs of the Enlightenment. The first belief was that enlightenment is compatible with order, stability, and the gradual reform of political and social institutions. The second was that progress in any one area of human endeavor would be mirrored by progress in other areas. Nenon suggests that there were two chief responses to this challenge. The “romantic view” of Fichte, the early Hegel, and Marx maintained that progress will result in the elimination of the state. The “realist position” of the later Hegel held that the rational state is not only required for progress but is itself an instance of that progress.

Following this introductory chapter, there are ten that discuss specific philosophers.

via Kant, Kantianism, and Idealism: The Origins of Continental Philosophy // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

By Brian Massumi

Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question. It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction.

Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented–variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention–which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Massumi argues that traditional art practices, including perspective painting, conventionally considered to be object-oriented freeze frames, also organize events of perception, and must be considered occurrent arts in their own way. Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork’s relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension. Massumi investigates occurrent art practices in order to examine, on the broadest level, how the aesthetic and the political are always intertwined in any creative activity.

via Amazon.com: Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (Technologies of Lived Abstraction) (9780262134910): Brian Massumi: Books.

In 1923, the British House of Commons had what was termed “a great debate”: “Socialism or Capitalism: Which?” Not so long ago, books were regularly published on this thorny topic; but now, even on the left, enthusiasm for raising the issue has waned. One could cite many causes for socialism’s submergence, but among academics a key moment was the publication, in 1983, of Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism.[1] Nove, a respected economic historian of the Soviet Union, reported the depressing details of failure after failure of communist economies, often able to function only because of extensive illegal black markets. The only hope he saw was for a form of market socialism. And that source of optimism became rather more muted, allowing for a mix of state, co-operative and private enterprise, by the time of Nove’s publication of a revised edition, entitled The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited, in 1991.[2]

From the 1990s on, most commentators on the left have accepted that we simply do not know how to organise large-scale economic systems without a very significant role for the market to convey information and, somewhat more controversially, to provide incentives for individuals to act on that information. The challenge has been to show how markets can be combined with non-capitalist forms of organisation. And little here has been found generally convincing.

Against this background it is immensely refreshing to receive a volume called Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate, by Ann Cudd (for) and Nancy Holmstrom (against), both of whom have written extensively on related topics. The immediate context is the global economic crisis that started in 2009 and as I write shows little sign of lifting. While the context may be new, the issues are not, and the lively and well-written contributions draw on and deploy many arguments and distinctions familiar within contemporary political philosophy, set out in a pleasingly non-technical fashion. Hence this book could serve as an introduction to a range of contemporary debates, not only concerning the definition and fortunes of capitalism, but also the analysis of freedom, the justification of private property, and the difficulties of collective rationality, among other key issues. The book follows the standard format for the Cambridge University Press ‘For and Against’ series in which it features: each author presents their argument independently, and then replies to the other’s contribution.

via Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist Debate // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

In the winter semester of 1944, Martin Heidegger began what would be his final lecture course at the University of Freiburg — indeed, his last official lectures as a professor. Translated here, Einleitung in die Philosophie — Denken und Dichten (Introduction to Philosophy — Thinking and Poetizing) asks after the inner relationship of philosophy and poetry, thinking and poetizing. Pursuing this question does not ‘introduce’ (einleiten) us to philosophy; by our essence, we are already ‘in’ philosophy. But we are not at home in our philosophizing essence, and so we need a guide (Anleitung) in this “unknown region” (p. 3). Our guides in this course are Nietzsche, the poetizing thinker of homelessness, and Hölderlin, the thoughtful poet of homecoming. An encounter with Nietzsche’s poetizing thinking and with Hölderlin’s thinking poetizing will guide us towards a dwelling in our essence. Heidegger had spent much of the previous decade in confrontation with both Nietzsche and Hölderlin; here, he finally promises to think them together. Unfortunately, this promise is not fulfilled.

via Introduction to Philosophy — Thinking and Poetizing // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

Reviewed by Jason M. Wirth, Seattle University 

This is a dense and compact reading of an important strand of ideas in Schelling’s thinking, spanning his early to mid period (1795-1810). Shaw takes up Schelling’s better known and appreciated works on freedom and Nature-philosophy and interlaces them with the lesser known but critically important work on the philosophy of art, which Shaw, rightly I think, argues “is central to his thought” (2).

The philosophy of art, according to Shaw, “plays a dual role” in Schelling’s thinking. Firstly, “artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy” (1). Secondly, it also “creates the possibility of a new mythology” (1) that can overcome social alienation. The latter has two conflicting tendencies.  First, there is the danger of an all-encompassing ideology that does not, as someone like Jacques Rancière would insist, address, as democratic politics should, the part of the whole that has no part. Or as Shaw articulates it: “one can participate through a public set of rituals and beliefs without participating in the structures of political empowerment” (137).  Second, there is a utopian promise at the heart of the production of a work of art, a promise whose salutary reverberations are still felt today.

via Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art // Reviews // Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame.

The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Kant, Kafka, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Arendt, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed “after Auschwitz.” The study’s various analyses—across a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of media—conspire to illuminate Lyotard’s apodictic statement that “after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the ‘after.’” As Richter’s intricate study demonstrates, much hinges on our interpretation of the “after.” After all, our most fundamental assumptions concerning modern aesthetic representation, conceptual discourse, community, subjectivity, and politics are at stake.

via Amazon.

John Arthos discovers and promotes an organic reciprocity between rhetoric as a humanist practice and hermeneutics as a theoretical comportment. Although these two traditions have a long and rewarding collaboration, it is only now that we begin to realize their potential for radically remaking the way we think and speak as social animals. Arthos marries the performative competencies of rhetorical practice with the circularity of hermeneutic understanding in a way that redefines the syntax of a humanist education in the twenty-first century. As a counter to the linear, technical rationalism that permeates common culture and educational praxis, Speaking Hermeneutically shows how a hermeneutically inflected rhetoric can lead to refashioning habits of thought and speech, the constitution of personal identity, the conventions of social engagement, and the deliberative practices that form the basis of public institutions. Arthos adapts the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur to a series of classic rhetorical texts and landmark political moments, modeling the revitalized interchange of traditions in a way that will be accessible to scholars and students in both fields of inquiry.

via Speaking Hermeneutically.