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

CFP and details at the North American Sartre Societysite

Standing outside a restaurant at lunch time, the black-clad members of Electric Touch look like a rock band. And onstage the Austin-based band’s members move around like classic rockers, spindly limbs kicking and flailing around their instruments.

But the rock act sort of ends there. The expectation that bleary, red eyes are hidden behind sunglasses is quickly dashed. The four guys are chipper, chatty, clear-headed and in love with their jobs…

Leigh and Lawlor met in Austin through a mutual friend. “It wasn’t long before guitars came out and we started writing,” Lawlor says. “We had a blank canvas; we could make the band whatever we wanted. We decided it shouldn’t be too complicated and should include some positive messages about love and such. … We might read Sartre, but it’s not what we’re going to sing about.”

Link

It has taken a few days to realize what has been nagging at me about Plaxico Burress’ tragic situation. … That was it! High school ninth grade English class, when we spent a couple of months knitting our brows being forced to read the sparse, depressing tomes of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre — in translation, of course. (You can imagine how long ago I went to high school.)

I can see him now, our English teacher, Mr. Berman, a diminutive, bow-tied, bespectacled fellow, writing and underlining this long, foreign, unfamiliar word on the blackboard: “EXISTENTIALISM.” We dutifully scribbled into our looseleaf notebooks.

“It’s a post-World War II French philosophy, boys” he explained quite solemnly. “An existentialist is the author of his future. You, and you alone,” and he pointed to us, “determine the course of your fate.You are responsible for the decisions you make, and the path you take. Indeed, you construct your life.”

Sounds like the plot of one of those arcane but impressive books I read all those years ago, like The Stranger, or The Plague or No Exit: A young, multimillionaire football star with the all the promise of a glorious professional future ahead of him leaves the remote safety of his gated country mansion, and crosses the broad river, into the sinful city for a night on the town. He brings a handgun into a crowded nightclub. It accidentally discharges and he is wounded. He is bleeding, panicked. A calm friend drives him to a hospital where he signs in under an alias which, in the end, will not protect him.

Say What??

Edited by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew, French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception

From the publisher’s site:

French Interpretations of Heidegger undertakes a philosophical engagement with the work of the most significant and creative figures involved in the reception of Heidegger in France. The essays address those thinkers who have been influenced by Heidegger’s thought and have interpreted it in remarkable ways, including Levinas, Beaufret, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Irigaray, Zarader, Greisch, and Dastur. The volume explores the extraordinary impact that Heidegger’s thought has had on contemporary French philosophy, including such movements as existentialism, deconstruction, feminist theory, post-structuralism, and hermeneutics, and illustrates its impact on the American continental scene as well.

Click here for Table of Contents

Dan Zahavi, the known phenomenologist, has many of his artciles and book chapters as pdf on his own site.

Link

The International Journal of Philosophical Studies (IJPS) is pleased to announce free access to the 5 most read articles from volume 15 (2007).

Phenomenology of ‘Authentic Time’ in Husserl and Heidegger — Klaus Held

Biolinguistic Explorations: Design, Development, Evolution — Noam Chomsky

Sartre and Bergson: A Disagreement about Nothingness — Sarah Richmond

Perception, Judgment and Individuation: Towards a Metaphysics of Particularity — Andrew Benjamin

Perception of Duration Presupposes Duration of Perception – or Does it? Husserl and Dainton on time — Dan Zahavi

Maria Baghramian
School of Philosophy
UCD Dublin
http://www.ucd.ie/philosophy/staff/baghramian_maria.htm
Editor: International Journal of Philosophical Studies Taylor and Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/09672559.html

The Existentialist : Tamsyn Lewis is Australia’s best hope in the 800 meters. But it’s as if she’s been reading too much Sartre recently; she doesn’t see the point in competing, not with all the runners “to the left and right of me” doping. Australian Olympic officials have told her to snap out of it, keep her opinions to herself, and bring home something shiny from Beijing. But the funny (or absurdist point, as Camus would have it) is that they agree with Lewis.

Link

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)

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

Link

“What is the opposite of bullshit?” Possibilities of intellectual engagement, since Sartre: An interview with Bill Martin / Joseph G. Ramsey

Link

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.

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).

The rest of the review

The 2008 NASS program is now available.

Link

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 

I had posted these before but those videos are no longer available. Here they are again, from a different site:

1 – Nietzsche http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4856584283711679549 2 – Heidegger http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5183028207388717405 3 – Sartre http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6934766864914832195

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) 

Two things about the North American Sartre Society:

1 – It has a new website: sartresociety.org

2 – The submission deadline for the upcoming conference has been extended to November 15th. Here is the original CFP