Continental Philosophy

Phenomenology did not begin as a religious philosophy, but recently several prominent European phenomenologists have asked whether a coherent phenomenology of human experience must find its fulfillment in religion.

Christian phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Jean-Louis Chrétien have all pressed an incisive and provocative question to modern secular philosophy: do our lived human experiences of self, other and world finally make sense only when we see them as founded on God’s creative act? By answering this question affirmatively, these thinkers have asserted that a rigorous philosophical account of human experience must also involve a philosophy of God. Human experience, precisely in order to be true to itself, must include practices of religious gratitude and praise. As a corollary, philosophy must include theological analysis.

The Silverman Center’s 2009 Symposium on phenomenology and the theological turn will therefore investigate sympathetically and critically this radical turn to religion in phenomenology. We hope you will join us for what is sure to be a spirited conversation about a matter that is of far more than just theoretical interest.
Speakers

Jean-Luc Marion, University of Chicago and University of Paris-Sorbonne
“On the Foundation of the Distinction Between Theology and Philosophy”

Richard Kearney, Boston College
“Returning to God After God: Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur”

Edith Wyschogrod, Rice University
“Confessional Memoirs: The Phenomenology of Telling It All”

Jay Lampert, University of Guelph
“Do the Arguments for Saturated Phenomena Prove That They Are Necessary or That They Are Possible? Time to Decide”

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Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Responsibility: Darwall and Levinas on the Second Person, Michael D. Barber

Locke, Kierkegaard and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity, Patrick Stokes

Belief and Self-consciousness, David Hunter

Postmetaphysical Thinking or Refusal of Thought? Max Horkheimer’s Materialism as Philosophical Stance, J. C. Berendzen

Seebohm’s Hermeneutics and Gadamer, Robert Dostal

Schutz, Seebohm, and Cultural Science, Lester Embree

Seebohm, Husserl, and Dilthey, Thomas Nenon

Three Responses, Thomas M. Seebohm

Smashing the Neighbor’s Face
On Emmanuel Levinas’ Judaism

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Nick Smith
University of New Hampshire

Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 275-306, 2007

Abstract:
Although Adorno and Levinas share many arguments, I attempt to sharpen and evaluate their disagreements. Both held extreme and seemingly opposite views of art, with Adorno arguing that art presents modernity’s highest order of truth and Levinas denouncing it as shameful idolatry. Considering this striking difference brings to light fundamental substantive and methodological incompatibilities between them. Levinas’ assertion of the transcendence of the face should be understood as the most telling point of departure between his and Adorno’s critiques of instrumental reason. I attempt to explain why Levinas believed this move was justifiable and how Adorno would understand Levinas’ notion of illeity as a cultural byproduct and a form of dogmatism. Adorno’s historical and sociological account of the disenchantment of the world and the destruction of aura within a culture fully administered by scientific rationality and economic reductionism sharply contrasts to Levinas’ transcendental phenomenology, and I argue that Adorno’s thoroughgoing refusal to constrain dialectical reflection is ultimately more compelling.

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Table of Contents:

Editors’ Introduction

“We are all torturers now”: Accountability After Abu Ghraib — Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn

Necessary Interruption: Traces of the Political in Levinas — Erica Weitzman

Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian Moment — Michael Dillon

Event or Exception?: Disentangling Badiou from Schmitt, or, Towards a Politics of the Void — Colin Wright

Imagining Extraordinary Renditions: Terror, Torture and the Possibility of an Excessive Ethics in Literature — Nathan Gorelick

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The time of hybridity — Simone Drichel

Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity — Rosalyn Diprose

Levinas, Habermas and modernity — Nicholas H. Smith

Antinomies of transcritique and virtue ethics: An Adornian critique — Giuseppe Tassone

A law’s tale: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Gertrud Koch

From avenging to revolutionary force: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Hauke Brunkhorst

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The being-with of being-there — Jean-Luc Nancy

Heidegger on overcoming rationalism through transcendental philosophy — Chad Engelland

Between the face and the voice: Bakhtin meets Levinas — Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan 

Being, aevum, and nothingness: Edith Stein on death and dying — Antonio Calcagno
 
At the same time — Robin Durie

Foucault’s turn from literature — Timothy O’Leary
 
Alan D. Schrift, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers — Ann V. Murphy

Adam Thurschwell’s review of Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

This is a brief review of Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. In it, he argues that the overriding political-philosophical problem of late modernity is the problem of political motivation. Critchley’s book is both an analysis and critique of how that problem has been resolved by ethical and political philosophers since Kant and a defense of his own solution, which he derives primarily from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and which issues in a call for a form of ethical anarchism. In this review I summarize his arguments and raise some critical questions about his solution, while agreeing with him about the essential nature of the problem of motivation that his book highlights.

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Hume’s History of England (6 volumes) at avax-forum. Also at the same forum, the Heidegger Dictionary.

See also the Fark Yaralari blog, which has many etexts such as Cambridge companion to Levinas and

Via cross-x forum

Adieu — Jacques Derrida; Pascale-Anne Brault; Michael Naas
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 1-10.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=009…3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

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Being Jewish– Emmanuel Levinas

The welcome wound: emerging from the il y a otherwise — Merold Westphal

The neighbor and the infinite: Marion and Levinas on the encounter between self, human other, and God — Christina M. Gschwandtner

The drama of being: Levinas and the history of philosophy — John Caruana

Adorno vs. Levinas: Evaluating points of contention — Nick Smith

Gestures of work: Levinas and Hegel — Silvia Benso

Ethical alterity and asymmetrical reciprocity: A Levinasian reading of Works of Love — Michael R. Paradiso-Michau

Matisse with Dewey and Deleuze: ERIC ALLIEZ AND JEAN-CLAUDE BONNE

Between Geophilosophy and Political Physiology: JOHN PROTEVI

Facticity and Contingency in Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism: MAX HENNINGER

Immanent Description and Writing From…: STUART GRANT

Lights in the Dark: The Radical Empiricism of Emmanuel Levinas and William James: MEGAN CRAIG

Empiricism, Facticity, and the Immanence of Life in Dilthey: ERIC SEAN NELSON

Duns Scotus’ Concept of the Univocity of Being: Another Look: PHILIP TONNER

Schelling’s Positive Empiricism: RASMUS UGILT

Spinoza’s Third Kind of Knowledge as a Resource for Schelling’s Empiricism: CHRIS LAUER

What is Transcendental Empiricism? Deleuze and Sartre on Bergson: GIOVANNA GIOLI

A Superior Empiricism: The Subject and Experimentation: SIMONE BIGNALL

KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy | www.kritike.org ISSN 1908-7330

CALL FOR PAPERS | December 2007 Issue

KRITIKE is a Filipino independent, open access, peer-reviewed, and interdisciplinary journal of philosophy founded by a group of University of Santo Tomas alumni. The journal seeks to publish articles and book reviews by local and international authors across the whole range of philosophical topics and schools of thought. The journal primarily caters to works by academic philosophers and graduate students, but contributions by undergraduate students are also welcomed.

KRITIKE is interested in publishing original articles across the whole range of philosophical topics and schools of thought. Publishing in the journal is not limited to academic philosophers and philosophy majors; we do encourage contributors from disciplines other than Philosophy (Political Science, Literature, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Communication, History, Linguistics, Law, Economics, Natural Sciences, etc). The basic condition is that the paper should have a strong philosophical bent to it.

KRITIKE is also accepting book reviews of books published within the years 2004-2007 (2000 words maximum).

Please send your submissions to editors@kritike.org

Please visit of our CFP page for the guidelines for submission

Read the rest of this entry »

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Articles are available in pdf

Editorial Introduction: The Inaugural Open Issue, by Paul Gyllenhammer
L’Étranger and the Messianic Myth, or Meursault Unmasked, by Benedict O’Donohoe
Barrage sur la ligne de fuite. Considérations sur Nietzsche et la prudence philosophique, by Dalie Giroux
Something New Under the Sun: Levinas and the Ethics of Political Imagination, by Farhang Erfani
The Limits of Transcendence, by Richard Matthews
The Unity and Difference of the Speculative and the Historical in Hegel’s Concept of Geist, by David A. Duquette
Spinoza, Schopenhauer and the Standpoint of Affirmation, by Bela Egyed

A review of Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation

Strauss and Levinas? What do these well known, yet hitherto unrelated thinkers have in common to warrant a monograph dedicated to their juxtaposition? Both are mid-20th century Jewish thinkers whose popularity has increased in recent years; both are somehow associated with the phenomenological movement represented by Husserl and Heidegger; both of them sided with Heidegger rather than Cassirer at Davos, although only one of them repented having done so. What drives this study is none of these trivial, or not so trivial, commonalities (and differences). Rather, what ties them together is the author's interest in establishing a path toward a novel constructive Jewish theology of Jewish revelation as law, or Jewish law as revelation.

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Adorno’s aesthetic concept of aura — Yvonne Sherratt

Critique of teleology in Kant and Dworkin: The law without organs — Alexandre Lefebvre

Towards a critical theory of whiteness — David S. Owen

The ethical residue of language in Levinas and early Wittgenstein — Søren Overgaard

Questioning and the materiality of crisis: Freud and Heidegger — Jeffrey M. Jackson

From SEP, a new entry on Levinas 

Levinas's philosophy has been called ethics. If ethics means rationalist self-legislation and freedom (deontology), the calculation of happiness (utilitarianism), or the cultivation of virtues (virtue ethics), then Levinas's philosophy is not an ethics. Levinas claimed, in 1961, that he was developing a “first philosophy.” This first philosophy is neither traditional logic nor metaphysics, however.[1] It is an interpretive, phenomenological description of the rise and repetition of the face-to-face encounter, or the intersubjective relation at its precognitive core; viz., being called by another and responding to that other. If precognitive experience, that is, human sensibility, can be characterized conceptually, then it must be described in what is most characteristic to it: a continuum of sensibility and affectivity, in other words, sentience and emotion in their interconnection.[2]

This entry will focus on Levinas's philosophy, rather than his Talmudic lessons (see the bibliography) and his essays on Judaism (notably, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 1963). Levinas's philosophical project can be called constructivist. He proposes phenomenological description and a hermeneutics of lived experience in the world. He lays bare levels of experience described neither by Husserl nor by Heidegger. These layers of experience concern the encounter with the world, with the human other, and a reconstruction of a layered interiority characterized by sensibility and affectivity.

By Zahi Anbra Zalloua

L'Esprit Créateur 46.1 (2006) 86-95

In his review blurb of Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Richard Rorty attests to Montaigne's focal role in Stephen Toulmin's thought-provoking call to reconfigure the origins of Modernity: "By showing how different the last three centuries would have been if Montaigne, rather than Descartes, had been taken as a starting point, Toulmin helps destroy the illusion that the Cartesian quest for certainty is intrinsic to the nature of science or philosophy."¹ Although Toulmin's concern with certainty is more or less an epistemological one, reflecting the author's 'postmodern' aversion to the hegemony of Cartesian thought, I wish to explore what Montaigne's alternative modernity, his pre- or early modern sensibility might mean for today's continental ethics, an ethics that is notably marked by the works of Emmanuel Levinas. While remaining keenly aware of the differences between the two figures, I will proceed by first highlighting some of Levinas' central ideas, before turning to the nature of Montaigne's own relation to alterity.

The rest…

Ultrapolitics: Biopower, Sovereignty and Total Mobilisation

Biological Sovereignty: EUGENE THACKER

The Task of Thinking in the State of Exception- Agamben, Benjamin and the Question of Messianism: CHRISTIAN NILSSON

The Obscene Voice: Terrorism, Politics and the End of Representation in the Works of Baudrillard, Žižek and Sloterdijk: SJOERD VAN TUINEN

“The Sovereign Disappears in the Election Box”: Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger on Sovereignty and (Perhaps) Governmentality: THOMAS CROMBEZ

Freedom Ablaze: Ernst Jünger and Michel Foucault's Concept of Force: LEON NIEMOCZYNSKI AND KEVIN SÖDERGREN

Deleuze, Leibniz and the Jurisprudence of Being: SEAN BOWDEN

Levinas, 'Illeity' and the Persistence of Skepticism: DARREN AMBROSE

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