CAN A BAD PERSON BE A GREAT PHILOSOPHER?

Think ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 13 (37) ◽  
pp. 95-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Clarke

In so far as philosophers can agree about anything, a majority would agree that the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century were Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. Both possessed unmatched philosophical profundity, both challenged and overturned fundamental areas of philosophical discourse and both changed philosophy forever. Both were charismatic teachers who generated and inspired a legion of followers and both spawned trajectories of philosophical research which remain vital to this day. And one of them – Martin Heidegger – supported the most evil regime in history.

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.


Author(s):  
Jean Wahl

Featuring replies and letters by Raymond Aron, Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, and many others, Wahl’s 1937 “Subjectivity and Transcendence” should be included among the most important debates in twentieth-century European philosophy. It is essential for understanding the secularization of Kierkegaard, and it provided a crucial forum in which to discuss and shape the future of existentialism. While revealing Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s debt to Kierkegaard, Wahl at the same time worries that any attempt to provide a philosophy of the insights that stem from Kierkegaard’s life would threaten either to fall into abstraction or to harbor implicit theological presuppositions. He also sets the stage for dialogue about the nature of transcendence by developing the concepts of “transascendence” and “transdescendence.” This chapter concludes with a previously unpublished letter Wahl wrote to Heidegger in which he provides a more detailed response to Heidegger’s contribution to the debate than the one given in “Subjectivity and Transcendence.”


Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones

The Introduction sets synthetic realism in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture and aesthetics to show why literary realism needs to be grasped in metaphysical terms. Ranging across contemporary periodical culture and works of literature, philosophy, and science, it examines the ways in which realist theory and practice grapples with the recalcitrance of ‘reality’ as a shifting referential cipher. The Introduction also considers previous critical approaches and suggests that the effects of these encounters between realist aesthetics and philosophical discourse were more various, ambiguous, and complex than we might have thought. It concludes with brief overviews of the book’s five main chapters and elucidates the overarching arguments that are developed within them.


Author(s):  
Natalja Chestopalova

French philosopher, writer, artist and translator Pierre Klossowski was born in Paris and raised in Switzerland, Germany and France. His education was influenced by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) and André Gide (1869–1951). A friend of Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Pierre-Jean Jouve (1887–1976), Klossowski produced French translations of works by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) from German, and of the works of Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine and Tertullian from Latin.


Author(s):  
Michael Beaney

The so-called ‘linguistic turn’ that took place in philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century is most strongly associated with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). If there is a single text that might be identified as the source of the linguistic turn, then it is Wittgenstein's first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in German in 1921 and in an English translation in 1922. Throughout his work, Wittgenstein was concerned with the foundations of language; the crucial shift lay from the appeal to simples to the appeal to samples, and a corresponding shift from assumptions about what lies hidden to an appreciation of what is visible to all in our linguistic practices. This article first outlines the main elements of Wittgenstein's early conception of language, before considering his critique of that conception and his later views.


2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-407 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. M. Krummel

AbstractIn this paper, I explore a possible convergence between two great twentieth century thinkers, Nishida Kitarō of Japan and Martin Heidegger of Germany. The focus is on the quasi-religious language they employ in discussing the grounding of human existence in terms of an encompassing Wherein for our being. Heidegger speaks of “the sacred” and “the passing of the last god” that mark an empty clearing wherein all metaphysical absolutes or gods have withdrawn but are simultaneously indicative of an opening wherein beings are given. Nishida speaks of “the religious” dimension in the depths of one’s being, that he calls “place,” and that somehow envelops the world through its kenotic self-negation. In both we find reference to a kind of originary space—the open or place—associated with quasireligious themes. I also point to their distinct approaches to metaphysical language in their attempts to give voice to that abysmal thought.


Slavic Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 873-892 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petre Petrov

Most existing accounts of socialist realism rely, implicitly or explicitly, on a commonsense notion of truth as correspondence between representation and its object (the state of affairs being represented). In this view, socialist realism is commonly denounced as an epistemological fraud, while quasi-dialectical formulas such as "reality in its revolutionary development" are viewed condescendingly as the fraud's fanciful garnish. Such an approach fails to see in Stalinist culture a radical shift in the understanding of truth—a shift that has less to do with Marxist orthodoxy than it does with the intellectual reflexes of early twentieth-century modernity. In this article, Petre Petrov sets out to describe this shift and, in doing so, to propose a novel theoretical framework for understanding Stalinist socialist realism. The work of Martin Heidegger from the late 1920s through the 1930s serves as an all-important reference point in the discussion insofar as it articulates in philosophical idiom a turn from an epistemological to an ontological conception of truth.


Author(s):  
Dorota Leszcyna

RESUMENEl intento del presente artículo es investigar el lugar de Ortega en el panorama del pensamiento europeo, especialmente alemán, de la primera mitad del siglo XX, utilizando uno de los conceptos fundamentales de su filosofía, es decir, el concepto de la «generación». Por tanto se defiende la tesis de que Ortega puede ser considerado como uno de los representantes de la generación post-neokantiana llamada por él mismo la generación de 1911 y que el pensamiento orteguiano se inscriba en el programa intelectual de filósofos como: Nicolai Hartmann, Heinz Heimsoeth, Karl Jaspers o Martin Heidegger. Todos estos filósofos brotan de la tradición neokantiana y la superan creando una nueva actitud filosófica centrándose en la reflexión ontológica y en el proyecto de superar el idealismo moderno.PALABRAS CLAVESORTEGA, GENERACIÓN, NEOKANTISMO, POST-NEOKANTISMO, ONTOLOGÍA, IDEALISMO ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to investigate the site of Ortega in the panorama of European, especially German thought, in the first half of the twentieth century, using one of the fundamental concepts of his philosophy, that is, the concept of «generation». Therefore I will defend the thesis that Ortega can be considered as one of the representatives of the post-neo-Kantian generation, called by himself the «generation of 1911» and that Ortega’s thought participates in the intellectual program of philosophers such as: Nicolai Hartmann, Heinz Heimsoeth, Karl Jaspers or Martin Heidegger. All these philosophers emerge from the neo-Kantian tradition but it overcomes, creating a new philosophical attitude, focusing on ontological reflection and on the project to overcome modern idealism.KEYWORDSORTEGA, GENERATION, NEO-KANTIANISM, POST-NEO-KANTIANISM, ONTOLOGY, IDEALISM


Sincronía ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol XXV (79) ◽  
pp. 71-95
Author(s):  
Carlos Alberto Navarro Fuentes ◽  

The objective of the essay is to follow the tracks of silence philosophically, as multiplicity not reducible to unity; there are instances of silence, not silence, neither objectively nor subjectively considered; it is not an 'object' or a 'subjective experience'. Recognize the relevance of silence based on its apparent irrelevance, and, nevertheless, point out the importance that it can have in the attempt to lead to philosophical reflection and to philosophize in general what is essential in it: THINKING. The proposed path requires LISTENING to language, rather than taking for granted the immediate disposition and transparency with which the world appears to us. To do this, we will reflect on excerpts from works written by three thinkers who lived 'war' up close: Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929). This work proceeds peripathetically, alone, reflections emerge in the middle of a world that crumbles between the complexity and destruction that technique and modernity have brought. It is undertaken by welcoming resonances, sensations, representations, images, verses and musings, reflecting in the midst of daily daze. Is there a logical-grammatical silence or an ethicalmystical-liturgical silence? Is silence equivalent to an impossibility of saying or is it the result of an impossibility of saying itself, which does not say when what it most wants to say? Silence of existence or silence in the face of events that threaten to overwhelm us? Is silence silent or is being silent?


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