Continental Philosophy

Many of the philosophers commonly described as “existentialist” have made original and decisive contributions to aesthetic thinking. In most cases, a substantial involvement in artistic practice (as novelists, playwrights or musicians) nourished their thinking on aesthetic experience. This is true already of two of the major philosophers who inspired 20^th century existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. For reasons of space, however, this entry is restricted to 20^th century thinkers who at one point or another accepted the tag “existentialist” as an accurate characterisation of their thinking, and who have made the most significant contributions to aesthetics: Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The rest

TOC

The Pregnancy of the Real: A Phenomenological Defense of Experimental Realism, Pages 1 – 25
Author: Shannon Vallor

Knowledge, Freedom and Willing: Hegel on Subjective Spirit, Pages 26 – 52
Author: Damion Buterin

Between Internalism and Externalism: Husserl’s Account of Intentionality, Pages 53 – 78
Author: Lilian Alweiss

Mental Capacity and Decisional Autonomy: An Interdisciplinary Challenge, Pages 79 – 107
Authors: Gareth S. Owen; Fabian Freyenhagen; Genevra Richardson; Matthew Hotopf

Link

Just in case you missed this:

(h/t: Joe R)

A correspondence between Hannah Arendt and the theologian Hans-Jürgen Benedict (in German)

Foucault Live

What Schopenhauer taught Beckett

Special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy (2007)

Todd, Cain (2007) Aesthetic, Ethical, and Cognitive Value.

Schoeman, Marinus (2007) Generosity as a central virtue in Nietzsche’s ethics.

Olivier, Bert (2007) Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal recurrence.

Kotzee, Ben (2007) Our Vision and our Mission: Bullshit, Assertion and Belief.

Tännsjö, Torbjörn (2007) Social Psychology and the Paradox of Revolution.

Hurst, Andrea (2007) Supposing Truth is a Woman – What Then?

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

His birthday is June 21, so one day late is not too bad:

And Critique de la raison dialectique (both volumes)

Description of Rethinking Facticity, eds, Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson

The concept of facticity has undergone crucial transformations over the last century in hermeneutics and phenomenology, but it has not yet received the attention that it warrants. Following a suggestion by Merleau-Ponty that philosophy is not about essences but rather the facticity of existence, prominent philosophers examine the significance of facticity in its historical context and reflect on its contemporary relevance. Focusing on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, and Fanon, among others, they trace its significance from life-philosophy to contemporary European thought and explore its philosophical implications. The following questions are addressed: What thoughts of experience, of subjectivity, of finitude, of nature, of the body, of racial and sexual difference does facticity provoke? What thinking of language, of history, of birth and death, of our ethical being-in-the-world does it mobilize? Exploring these questions, the contributors offer new interpretations of facticity.

See the publisher’s site for more details, such as the table of contents and the pdf of the introduction.

An interview with a sociologist who blames Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty!

Hazel Barnes, the existentialist philosopher and the famous translator of many of Sartre’s works, passed away on the evening on March 18, 2008.

A few links to published obituaries. Here. Here. And here.

The previously mentioned book by Jonathan Judaken, Sartre and the Jewish Question, has been reviewed by Ron Aronson in the TLS. 

Click here for the review 

On a lighter note: the online Gateway Computer store just had a one-day sale on TV Tuners.Here is the reason why, according to the Gateway site, you should buy a TV Tuner (allowing you to watch tv on your computer):

Now you can use your computer to watch over-the-air TV—but also cable and satellite, too! (As long as you pay your monthly bills to your TV service provider, of course.) But having this StarTech TV Capture/Tuner does mean you can put those moneys to even greater use. Imagine how impressed your family and friends will be that you watch television even more than you do now. It's a sign of living an authentic life, in the Sartrean sense, we're sure! Okay, so maybe if this device had been around in the mid-1900s, Sartre and Camus and the rest of them philosophers would have been too busy using it to develop existentialism. But look at it this way: It already has been…so watch, watch, watch away!

I captured the whole page. (Link) 

MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND RUDOLF CARNAP: RADICAL PHENOMENOLOGY, LOGICAL POSITIVISM, AND THE ROOTS OF THE CONTINENTAL/ANALYTIC DIVIDE — James Luchte. Philosophy

REPRESENTATION AND POIESIS: THE IMAGINATION IN THE LATER HEIDEGGER — John W M Krummel
           
HEIDEGGER'S ETYMOLOGICAL METHOD: DISCOVERING BEING BY RECOVERING THE RICHNESS OF THE WORD — Matthew King

THOUGHTS IN POTENTIALITY: PROVISIONAL REFLECTIONS ON AGAMBEN'S UNDERSTANDING OF POTENTIALITY AND ITS RELEVANCE FOR THEOLOGY AND POLITICS — Alberto Bertozzi.       

A CRITIQUE OF SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR'S EXISTENTIAL ETHICS — Matthew Braddock

TWO NOTIONS OF OBJECTIFICATION — Iddo Landau.

COMMITTED PERCEPTION: MERLEAU-PONTY, CARROLL, AND IRANIAN CINEMA — Farhang Erfani

ON GIVING HEGEL HIS DUE: THE "END OF HISTORY" AND THE HEGELIAN ROOTS OF POSTMODERN THOUGHT — Jere O'Neill Surber

INNOCENCE, PERVERSION, AND ABU GHRAIB — Kelly Oliver

"OURS IS NOT A TERRIBLE SITUATION" — Alain Badiou, Simon Critchley

Audio book of Camus’ Stranger in French

Link

An essay by Ron Santoni, “Bush as the Stranger”:

As did so many others, I’m sure, I broke out in laughter when informed that George W. had included Camus’ The Stranger on his last summer’s reading list. Was this another Karl Rove production, specifically designed to impress an academic population totally disenchanted with our misguided, deceptive, and double-speaking president?

Surely, I quickly concluded, even a distressingly conniving political strategist like Rove would recognize that such a pretense would be transparent and soon become another episode of the tragic make-believe of the Bush administration. Or maybe, I continued, George the Lesser wanted to extend a small conciliatory gesture to the French, on whom—after they dared to disagree with his murderous and counterproductive incursion into Iraq—he had poured scorn and ridicule, going so far as to encourage the imposition of new freedom-loving labels on some of France’s gustatory delights (“freedom fries,” anyone?). So perhaps the inclusion of a work by Camus was intended as a “salute” to France by way of honoring one of its Noble laureates in literature? Noblesse oblige!

Here is the rest

(And the video from The Daily Show on the President and Camus)

Simply Audiobooks has a selection of free audio-books for download. Of possible interest: Kafka's Metamorphosis.

 Link

From the Chronicle: 

Pessimism is back. That will not surprise anyone who has been keeping track of the nation's pulse over the past several months — or perhaps the last several years. Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech, which may have cost him a second term, would not be at all inappropriate today. Our famous American optimism faces a mortal threat in the combination of an unwinnable war, a collapsing dollar, a sagging economy for most people, trouble on the job front for graduating students, and lowered expectations generally. And that's aside from the recent scandals among our religious, corporate, and political leaders, and the pervasive suspicion that results.

 

So opined Adam Cohen recently in the International Herald Tribune, and so, too, according to a recent book by Joshua Foa Dienstag, a political scientist at the University of California at Los Angeles, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton University Press, 2006). In his defense of pessimism as an appropriate and realistic philosophy, Dienstag points to the usual suspects: Arthur Schopenhauer, of course, the great 19th-century pessimist; but also Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert Camus and the modern movement called existentialism.

 

I do not disagree with the diagnosis, but I am disturbed by the continued reference to existentialism as a pessimistic, negative philosophy.

The rest

(via Arts and Letters Daily)

With great sadness, I post this news via Prof. Leiter's blog: