Heidegger on the Semblance of the Beautiful

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-365
Author(s):  
Joe Balay
Keyword(s):  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Western Tradition

Abstract In his Nietzsche lectures, Heidegger states that there is a concealed discordance between beauty, semblance, and truth in Platonism. This paper explores this claim in detail to show how such a discordance haunts not only Platonism, but the beginnings and ends of Western philosophy. This commences with Plato’s claim that beauty’s radiance is both the reminder of the non-sensible εἴδη and a semblance belonging to the sensible world. This discordance is not overcome in the ensuing Western tradition, however, but made more dreadful. This is because in Nietzsche’s anti-platonic retrieval of sensible beauty over non-sensible truth, the platonic reminder of the εἴδη is transformed into the dangerous production of new forms of power. In both cases, however, Heidegger proposes that this metaphysical thinking of Being-as-form conceals the early Greek insight that beauty’s tragic radiance lets Being appear as both truth and semblance.

Introductory Note

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 175
Author(s):  
Paul Ricoeur
Keyword(s):  
Paul Ricoeur ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Introductory Note ◽  
Paul Ricœur ◽  
First Arrival ◽  
Prophetic Tradition

Abstract The brevity of this note by Paul Ricoeur belies its impact, as a version of the famous challenge he delivered to Heidegger upon his first arrival in France at the Cerisy-la-Salle conference in 1955. Why has Heidegger passed over the Judaic tradition? He pays such close attention to the Greeks and their questioning of being, and yet what about the prophetic tradition and the ethical dimensions it inspires? Are these not an essential part of the Western tradition? Heidegger dismissed Ricoeur’s challenge at the time and never arrived at any answers in his later career. And yet this step is absolutely necessary, claims Ricoeur, if one hopes to rethink the Christian tradition, and indeed, Western philosophy.

The Madhyamaka Contribution to Skepticism

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-26
Author(s):  
Georges Dreyfus ◽  
Jay L. Garfield
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Buddhist Philosophy ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Tibetan Buddhist ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Two Truths ◽  
Conventional Practice

Abstract This paper examines the work of Nāgārjuna as interpreted by later Madhyamaka tradition, including the Tibetan Buddhist Tsongkhapa (1357–1419). It situates Madhyamaka skepticism in the context of Buddhist philosophy, Indian philosophy more generally, and Western equivalents. Find it broadly akin to Pyrrhonism, it argues that Madhyamaka skepticism still differs from its Greek equivalents in fundamental methodologies. Focusing on key hermeneutical principles like the two truths and those motivating the Svātantrika/Prāsaṅgika schism (i.e., whether followers of Nāgārjuna should offer positive arguments or should proceed on a purely “negative” basis), it argues that the Svātantrika commitment to mere conventional practice is robust and allows for a skepticism consistent with the scientific practices we must take seriously in the modern world. These findings are put forth as an illustration of what the Western tradition might gain by better understanding of non-Western philosophy.

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Immanuel Kant

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Brophy
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
Moral Feeling ◽  
Transcendental Idealist

Agamben’s complicated engagement with Immanuel Kant celebrates the brilliance of the German idealist’s thought by disclosing its condemnatory weight in Western philosophy. Kant was writing in the midst of burgeoning industrial capitalism, when each new scientific discovery seemed to push back the fog of religion in favour of science and reason; meanwhile Agamben’s work develops in concert with the crises of advanced capitalism and borrows significantly from those philosophers who endured the most demoralising upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Whatever lanugo Kant was eager for us to shed in the name of individual freedom,1 Agamben sees in this crusade for civic maturity a surprising prescience: ‘[I]t is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the heading of a sublime “moral feeling,” was able to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (HS 52). To a remarkable extent, Agamben finds that Kant’s transcendental idealist frame of thought lays the philosophical foundation for the state of exception.

Narrative, Intertext and Allusion in the Qur'anic Presentation of Job

1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. H. Johns
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Complex Network ◽  
Key Words And Phrases ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Way

Job (Ayyūb) is a byword for patience in the Islamic tradition, notwithstanding only six Qur'anic verses are devoted to him, four in Ṣād (vv.41-4), and two in al-Anbiyā' (vv.83-4), and he is mentioned on only two other occasions, in al-Ancām (v.84) and al-Nisā' (v.163). In relation to the space devoted to him, he could be accounted a ‘lesser’ prophet, nevertheless his significance in the Qur'an is unambiguous. The impact he makes is achieved in a number of ways. One is through the elaborate intertext transmitted from the Companions and Followers, and recorded in the exegetic tradition. Another is the way in which his role and charisma are highlighted by the prophets in whose company he is presented, and the shifting emphases of each of the sūras in which he appears. Yet another is the wider context created by these sūras in which key words and phrases actualize a complex network of echoes and resonances that elicit internal and transsūra associations focusing attention on him from various perspectives. The effectiveness of this presentation of him derives from the linguistic genius of the Qur'an which by this means triggers a vivid encounter with aspects of the rhythm of divine revelation no less direct than that of visual iconography in the Western Tradition.

At the Heart of the Death Penalty

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 241-251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peggy Kamuf
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western Tradition

Derrida's seminar The Death Penalty is to an important extent taken up with unpacking the significance of the fact (a ‘stupefying fact’, he calls it) that there is in our Western tradition no philosophy as such against the death penalty. This essay follows the seminar into the heart of its engagement with that legacy, where it traces out the condition of its own interested abolitionist stand. This condition is named ‘the heart of the other in me’, which is the pulse of every finitude, every ‘my’ life. It also gives the impulse in this essay to follow the thread of the ‘heart’ across the seminar's readings of Rousseau, Genet, Hugo and Camus.

Loving the Other Beyond Death

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-155
Author(s):  
Kas Saghafi
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Limit Case ◽  
Western Tradition

Turning to an example provided by Aristotle and taken up by Derrida in Politics of Friendship, which functions as a limit case—loving the other beyond death—I argue that Derrida's short-lived term, aimance, gently and lovingly contests the primacy given either to love or to friendship in the Western tradition, but also to the living act of loving and the figure of the lover, putting pressure on the very conceptual differences between these terms.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

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