Inquiry Without Names in Plato’s Cratylus — Christine J. Thomas

An Intensional Interpretation of Ockham’s Theory of Supposition — Catarina Dutilh Novaes

The Young Marx and German Idealism: Revisiting the Doctoral Dissertation — Martin McIvor

Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After Heidegger and Cassirer — Vida Pavesich

The Effects of the Agrégation de Philosophie on Twentieth-Century French Philosophy — Alan D. Schrift

A Short History of the Shadow: An Interview With Victor I. Stoichita

Victor I. Stoichita, Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, is the author of A Short History of the Shadow (Reaktion, 1997). In exploring the writings of Plato, Pliny, Leonardo, and Piaget, Stoichita explains how the shadow has always been integral to theories of art and knowledge, and investigates the complex psychological meanings we project into shadows. Christopher Turner spoke to him by phone.

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Naomi Reshotko'sSocratic Virtueexamines the ethical theory espoused by the character Socrates in Plato's early dialogues. The book argues (9-14) that this ethical theory is attributable to the historical Socrates. (I suspect that no one who is skeptical of this conclusion will be convinced of the contrary on the basis of the evidence presented here.) In any event, Reshotko's overarching aim is to demystify Socrates' ethical theory by transcending the tendency "of contemporary readers to place an unwarranted overlay of post-Kantian morality back onto Plato's text." (6) She maintains that the early dialogues don't advance a moral and prescriptive theory, but merely a descriptive theory. "Human happiness is an objective goal. It can be approached using one's appreciation of what the world is like and how one can work within the constraints that nature places upon us . . . in order to change it." (14)

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Jacob Howland's study is an essentially modest and exegetical work that, in large part, delivers what it sets out to do. It does so in a clear and unabashedly enthusiastic manner, mostly making good its claim not to presuppose that the reader has 'more than a general knowledge of the vocabulary of philosophy' (p. 2). Howland opens his Introduction by telling us how he first came to read Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and of the impact its 'brilliance', 'ardor', and 'mystery' made on him. He acknowledges that this present book was conceived in that first passionate response, however much it may also have been subsequently informed by and be addressed to the discourse of contemporary academic philosophy — all of which is very much in line with the role that Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard's Socrates gives to passion in the quest for truth, philosophical or religious. For it is central to Howland's argument that passion — or, to use the Socratic-Platonic term, eros — is, as he puts it, capable of becoming 'a ladder by which one could climb up to an understanding of faith' (p. 137).

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This book calls for "a close, painstaking, and open-minded reading of each of Plato's dialogues" (182), and offers just such a reading of the Gorgias. It also presents, as the title promises, a unifying account of the dialogue: on Stauffer's view, the central theme is Socrates' subtle, indirect appeal to Gorgias to join him in the construction of "true rhetoric," a new and noble form of rhetoric that will aid Socrates' own practice of philosophy by protecting philosophy from its hostile critics.

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Jacques Taminiaux: The Platonic Roots of Heidegger's Political Thought

Franco Volpi: In Whose Name?: Heidegger and ‘Practical Philosophy’
 
Ontological Difference and the Question of Politics: A Dialogue between Fabio Ciaramelli and David Webb

Douglas Burnham : Heidegger, Kant and ‘Dirty’ Politics

Miguel de Beistegui: Questioning Politics, or Beyond Power

Eliane Escoubas: L'ombre de cette pensée: Heidegger et la question politique/ The Shadow of That Thought

Niall Keane: Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks

Niall Keane: Heidegger: Decisionism and Quietism

The formal topic of the Cratylus is ‘correctness of names’, a hot topic in the late fifth century BC when the dialogue has its dramatic setting. Sophists like Prodicus offered training courses in this subject, sometimes perhaps meaning by it little more than lessons in correct diction. But that practical issue spawned the theoretical question, what criteria determine the correct choice of name for any given object? And in the Cratylus Socrates' two primary interlocutors, Hermogenes and Cratylus (the latter of whom is reported by Aristotle to have been an early philosophical influence on Plato), represent two diametrically opposed answers to that question.