Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Rae
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Cornelius Castoriadis ◽  
The Problem Of Evil ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theological Thought

While Western moral, philosophical, and theological thought has historically privileged the good, this has been accompanied by profound, if subterranean, interest in evil. This book charts a history of evil as it has been thought within this tradition. Showing that the problem of evil, as a conceptual problem—that is, as a problem to be dealt with through rational means—came to the fore with the rise of monotheism, this book initially outlines the dynamics that led to it becoming the problem of Christianity, before tracing how subsequent thought, first within an explicitly theological framework, and subsequently from secular foundations, developed from this problematic. With chapters on figures in early and Medieval Christian philosophy, modern philosophy, German Idealism, Nietzsche, Arendt, post-structuralism, and contemporary analytical philosophy, it demonstrates the breadth and depth of thinking on evil within this tradition and includes discussions on thinkers not normally included in analyses of the topic, such as Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis. These reveal that, far from being something clear and obvious as common-sense, everyday intuition tends to hold, the meaning and nature of evil has been remarkably complex, differentiated, and contested.

Anthropocentrism without a centre?

1997 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Being And Time ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Unusual Structure ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unique Relationship ◽  
Made In ◽  
Number Of Authors ◽  
The Way

I am grateful to Håkan Karlsson for his thoughtful commentary on some of the issues concerning Heidegger and archaeology which were raised in a previous issue of this journal, and find myself fascinated by his project of a ‘contemplative archaeology’. However, one or two points of clarification could be made in relation to Karlsson's contribution. Firstly, as a number of authors have pointed out (e.g. Anderson 1966, 20; Olafson 1993), the gulf between Heidegger's early work and that which followed the Kehre may have been more apparent than real. While his focus may have shifted from the Being of one particular kind of being (Dasein) to a history of Being (Dreyfus 1992), the continuities in his thought are more striking. Throughout his career, Heidegger was concerned with the category of Being, and the way in which it had been passed over by the western philosophical tradition. It is important to note that in Being and time the analysis of Dasein essentially serves as an heuristic: the intention is to move from an understanding of the Being of one kind of being to that of Being in general. What complicates the issue is the very unusual structure of this specific kind of being, for Heidegger did not choose to begin his analysis with the Being of shoes or stones, but with a kind of creature which has a unique relationship with all other worldly entities. ‘Dasein’ serves as a kind of code for ‘human being’ which enables Heidegger to talk about the way in which human beings exist on earth, rather than becoming entangled in biological or psychological definitions of humanity. In this formulations, what is distinctive about human beings is that their own existence is an issue for them; Dasein cares, and this caring is fundamentally temporal.

scholarly journals Ideology and Truth

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-39
Author(s):  
Krešimir Petković
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Science ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Third ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

The author argues that any discourse analysis, as well as other approaches in social sciences and humanities, cannot ultimately avoid the truth and ideology distinction. The first part of the article provides several glimpses at the Western philosophical tradition that preserves the value of truth. In the second part, an idea for political science, grounded in such a history of ideas, is sketched. After a brief discussion of what is ideology as opposed to truth, the author proposes a thesis about ideology, identity and power, and several heuristic ideas how to develop it. In the third part, he briefly provides examples from political and policy analysis that correspond to such a project. In the final part, he explains the importance of preserving the distinction between ideology and truth in the discursively postulated “post-truth” era. This combination of epistemology, science, analysis and teleology is reflected together in one political area of utmost importance for political science operating in the public sphere: the politics of naming.

scholarly journals Philosophy's Folds: Seneca, Cavarero, and the History of Rectitude

Hypatia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-783
Author(s):  
Victoria Rimell
Keyword(s):  
General Principle ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Bodily Integrity ◽  
Multiple Points ◽  
New Model ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Antiquity

This article takes as its stimulus Adriana Cavarero's recent investigation of the postures of rectitude and inclination in the Western philosophical tradition (Cavarero 2013). To showcase how this book might catalyze productive interactions between feminist critics in different areas of the humanities, I will bring Cavarero into dialogue with a thinker she mentions in passing who extensively develops “rectitude as a general principle” (Veyne 2003): Seneca. I argue that a gendered ontology of rectitude is increasingly put under pressure and transformed in Seneca'sEpistles, and propose that the letters are a laboratory for developing a new model of inclination that arises from an urgent need to confront the consequences of political impotence and threats to bodily integrity for Roman aristocratic manhood in the 60sce. The playful, densely literaryEpistlesoffer multiple points of contact with Cavarero's own philosophical strategies, and emerge as a highly stimulating text for feminist thinkers interested in the ethical and political implications of acknowledging vulnerability. Reading Seneca alongside Cavarero reminds us that such investigations have a (tortuous, buried) history in Roman antiquity whose recovery is itself politically significant.

South Africa, philosophy in

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Duvenage
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
African Philosophy ◽  
The South ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
British Idealism

Although it is incorrect to refer to an independent South African philosophical tradition, South Africa is nevertheless the location of an interesting history of philosophical institutionalization. This institutionalization is closely intertwined with the colonial and postcolonial history of Western expansion (Dutch and English) and the reactions it unleashed within the South African context. It is especially interesting to trace the influence and the application of Anglo-American and continental origins in South Africa. Even in contemporary South Africa, philosophers who are working in fields such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, feminism and analytical philosophy do so mostly under the influence of contexts beyond South Africa’s borders. After the early Dutch influence in South Africa (1652–1806) a British colonial educational system emerged during the nineteenth century. From the first institutions of higher education (the South African College in Cape Town, and the University of the Cape of Good Hope) the first tertiary institutions emerged in the early part of the twentieth century at Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Witwatersrand (Johannesburg) and Pretoria. Although other universities were subsequently instituted, these four can be considered the four founding residential universities in South Africa. It is also at these universities (and at Colleges in Grahamstown, Bloemfontein, Durban and Pietermaritzburg) that British idealism had a major influence on the early stages of South African philosophy (1873–1940). Against this background figures such as Fremantle (Cape Town), Walker (Stellenbosch), Hoernlé (Johannesburg), Lord (Grahamstown) and Macfadyen (Pretoria) were instrumental. From the 1930s the hegemony of British idealism was challenged by analytical philosophy (mainly at English-speaking South African universities) and continental traditions (mainly at Afrikaans-speaking universities). Since the political transformation of South Africa (1994) African philosophy has also emerged as a major philosophical tradition. The challenge for philosophy in contemporary South Africa is to explore those intellectual traditions that have shaped philosophy in South Africa, to know where they are coming from and to understand how they were transformed under (post)colonial conditions. Such a (genealogical) perspective provides a historical and material corrective to arguments that might otherwise strive to reconcile cultural values and ideas in an apolitical and ahistorical manner.

The Naivety of Philosophy

2008 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 5-13
Author(s):  
William McNeill ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Being And Time ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Resource ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Shed Light

The present paper remains modest in its scope: It seeks only to undertake some exploratory and preparatory investigations with a view to addressing a more difficult and far-reaching question. The issue, in brief, is the following: In the 1920s, Heidegger engages in an incisive and comprehensive critique of techn!, which I shall render here as “production” or “productive comportment,” arguing that it furnishes the foundation and horizon for Greek ontology, and by extension for the entire Western philosophical tradition, a horizon that is problematically reductive because the ontology it gives rise to understands the Being of beings in general in terms of independent presence-at-hand, the appropriate mode of access to which is theoretical apprehension. Not only philosophy and ontology, but science and its outgrowth, modern technicity—itself a monstrous transformation of techn!—would be an almost inexorable consequence of this fateful Greek beginning. The project of a “destructuring of the history of ontology” announced in Being and Time would seek to retrieve and to open up an entirely other dimension of Being, a dimension foreclosed by the Greek beginning and yet awaiting us precisely as the unthought of that beginning and the tradition to which it gave rise. The destructuring would take as its guiding thread an understanding of the Being of Dasein—designating the being that we ourselves in each case are—as radically temporal, never simply present-at-hand, and essentially inaccessible to theoretical apprehension. Yet the critical resource for this analytic of the Being of Dasein was, for the early Heidegger, itself provided by Greek philosophy: It was Aristotle’s insight into the Being of the human being as praxis, and its authentic mode of self-disclosure, phron!sis, that led Heidegger to see the radically different kind of temporality pertaining to human existence, by contrast with the theoretically ascertained time of nature as something present-at-hand, and provided a key insight into the essence of “truth” (aletheia) as unconcealment. Aristotle’s insight into this more primordial sense of aletheia or “truth” as the knowing self-disclosure of our radically temporal Being-in-the-world as praxis, as opposed to truth conceived as a property of logos, judgment, or theoretical knowledge, was a forgotten thread of Greek philosophy that could shed light upon the limits and foundations of the theoretical tradition that dominates the subsequent history of ontology.

Meaning, the History of Philosophy, and Analytical Philosophy

2020 ◽  
pp. 182-196
Author(s):  
Michael Della Rocca
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Method Of Intuition

Chapter 7 considers the consequences of the Parmenidean Ascent with regard to meaning for the alleged distinction between philosophy and the study of its history. The argument that any such distinction is unintelligible focuses on the disregard of the history of philosophy in certain quarters of analytical philosophy. The argument identifies three pillars or struts of analytical philosophy: realism, the method of intuition or common sense, and discreteness in metaphysics. The chapter then shows how each of these three struts is implicated in the disdain for or ignoring of the history of philosophy. Rejecting an isolationist response to this analytical forgetfulness—a response that separates the study of the history of philosophy from philosophy itself—the chapter goes on to challenge the struts of analytical philosophy and to make a Parmenidean Ascent with regard to the distinction between philosophy and the study of its history.

scholarly journals CHRISTOPH SIGWART (1830–1904) AND HIS LOGIC IN THE WORKS OF ISIDOR PRODAN (1854–1919/1920)

2020 ◽  
pp. 80-88
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
History Of Logic ◽  
Ernst Cassirer ◽  
Important Place ◽  
History Of ◽  
Franz Brentano ◽  
Critical Interpretation ◽  
The University ◽  
Hermann Cohen

In this article, a little-studied problem of the critical analysis of the philosophical and logical position of the representative of German philosophical tradition Christoph Sigwart (1830–1904) in the university philosophy, especially in the work of a Kharkiv private-docent Isidor Prodan (1854–1919/1920) is presented. At first, the main periods of the scientific and creative career of Isidor Prodan, including his studying at the Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) Gymnasium (1864–1872) and the philosophical faculty at the University of Vienna (1872–1875) are considered. His teacher in Vienna was a very famous German and Austrian professor Franz Brentano (1838–1917), the author of the work “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint” (1874) and the founder of “descriptive psychology” and intentionalism. Then his teaching of logic and philosophy at the Gymnasiums of Kishinev (Moldova), Izmail (Ukraine), Riga (Latvia), Tartu (Estonia), and Moscow (Russia) from 1876 till 1900 is emphasized. Then the features of the teaching and the publications of Isidor Prodan in his “Kharkiv period” (1906–1916) are pointed out, during which he was a private-docent at the department of philosophy. Isidor Prodan’s works at this time comprise three areas: 1) History of logic (Aristotle, Leibniz, Spencer, Sigwart), 2) philosophy of common sense (Thomas Reid and the Scottish School of Common Sense), 3) critique of Kant and Neo-Kantianism (Hermann Cohen, Wilhelm Windelband, Hans Vaihinger, Heinrich Rickert, Ernst Cassirer e. a.). In the last group, his work “The Truth about Kant (A Secret of his Success)” (1914) was of great importance. His very important work was the monograph “The Cognition and its Object (Justification of Common Sense)” (Kharkiv, 1913). The positions of well-known philosophers (Plato, Descartes, Berkley, Leibniz, and Hume) and less-known authors (Lodge, Preyer, and Schneider) were here analyzed. Isidor Prodan’s critical interpretation of the logical viewpoint of Christoph Sigwart in his two-volume work “Logic” (1873, 3rd ed., 1904) occupies an important place in this analysis. In turn, Isidor Prodan’s important achievement was the popularization of the ideas of this German logician and philosopher, in particular, because of his translation of extracts from the work “Logic”.

Of What is History of Psychology a History?

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Richards
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Psychology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
British Psychological Society ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

The British Psychological Society having established a ‘Philosophy and History’ section, a fresh look at the nature of the History of Psychology is called for. In this paper, I would like to make a contribution to this by raising some conundrums which have yet to be adequately addressed. First, though, what has happened in the History of Psychology so far? Psychologists have been writing histories of their discipline since the turn of the century; Baldwin's History of Psychology appeared in 1913, for example, and the first volume of G. S. Brett's trilogy of the same title in 1912, a year which also saw Dessoir's Outlines of the History of Psychology translated into English. This early work was clearly aimed at providing a respectable genealogy for the nascent discipline; only about a fifth of Baldwin's work actually deals with experimental or empirical Psychology dating from later than the mid-nineteenth century, while Brett treats scientific approaches virtually as a coda to a survey of the history of the philosophy of mind. Psychology is presented as the legitimate heir to the main western philosophical tradition, sired on it, so to speak, by physiologists such as Helmholtz, Muller and Broca. In 1929, E. G. Boring published the first edition of his A History of Experimental Psychology, which dominated the field for decades along with Gardner Murphy's Historical Introduction of Modern Psychology of 1928, a lighter weight work but with a somewhat broader range, which served as an introductory text. Both went into subsequent editions, the latter as recently as 1972 (much enlarged). The series The History of Psychology in Autobiography, begun in 1930 and now in its seventh volume (1980), contains professional autobiographies by the ageing eminent of varying levels of self-disclosure, wit and informative value. It is not, however, until the 1960s that a self-conscious sub-discipline calling itself ‘History of Psychology’ emerges within Psychology, being pioneered by the late R. I. Watson in the United States. New histories begin appearing, including Kantor's very positivistic The Scientific Evolution of Psychology Vol. 1 of 1963 and Hearnshaw's A Short History of British Psychology of 1964. In 1965, the Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences was started, formally signalling the arrival of the new sub-discipline on the scene. Subsequent events warrant a more critical appraisal.

scholarly journals Organisms and Objectifications: A Historical-Materialist Inquiry into the “Human and Animal”

Konturen ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Joseph Fracchia
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
The Body ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Historical Materialist ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Do So

In order to respond to the problem addressed by this volume, I must reformulate its title, “Defining the Human and Animal”, by replacing the conjunctive 'and' with 'as'. Because this essay is based on the not too far-fetched assumption that Homo sapiens is an animal species, it addresses the question of defining the human as animal. To do so, it takes its cue from an offhand, never systematically elaborated statement by Karl Marx that, by taking the body seriously, situates human beings in the animal world, namely: “The first fact to be established for historical theory is human corporeal organization” (and fully in keeping with Marx’s—and Darwin’s—logic, that the same is true for the history of all species). The way in which any organism, humans included, negotiates, inhabits, and transforms its world is inextricably linked to its corporeal organization. Accordingly, rather than attempt to define the human and animal, my concern is with the question of the relation between an organism’s corporeal organization and the history of its ‘objectifications’, that is, how each organism, Homo sapiens included, makes worlds in its own bodily image. This historical-materialist inquiry into the ‘Human as Animal’ will therefore be developed in two parts. This essay will first outline historical materialism as a corporeal turn by situating it in relation to the mainstream of the Western philosophical tradition and to Darwin’s materialist conception of natural history. Then, through an elaboration of the concept of Vergegenständlichung/objectification, it will consider history as world-making – a labor common to all organisms, but certainly unique in Homo sapiens.

Kyoto School

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.W. Heisig
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Kyoto School ◽  
Western Philosophical Tradition ◽  
European Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Kyoto School Of Philosophy ◽  
Nishitani Keiji ◽  
The One ◽  
Nishida Kitaro

The Kyoto school of philosophy pivots around three twentieth-century Japanese thinkers who held chairs of philosophy or religion at Kyoto University: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–91). Its principal living representatives, who also held chairs at Kyoto until their retirement, are Takeuchi Yoshinori (1913–) and Ueda Shizuteru (1926–). The keynote of the school was struck by Nishida in his attempt, on the one hand, to offer a distinctively Eastern contribution to the Western philosophical tradition by bringing key Buddhist concepts to bear on traditional philosophical questions, and on the other, to enrich Buddhist self-understanding by submitting it to the rigours of European philosophy. The name ‘Kyoto school’ was coined in 1932 by the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–45) to denounce what he saw as a bourgeois ideology – which he characterized as ‘hermeneutical, transhistorical, formalistic, romantic, and phenomenological’ – that had grown up around Nishida, Tanabe and their immediate disciples at the time. These latter included Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945), Kosaka Masaaki (1900–69) and Koyama Iwao (1905–93) as well as the young Nishitani. At the time the Japanese state had taken its first definitive steps in the direction of a militaristic nationalism that would involve it in the ‘fifteen-year war’ with Asia and finally the West over the period 1930–45. As the leading philosophical movement in Japan, the Kyoto school was caught up in this history, although there was little unanimity among the responses of the principal figures. Postwar criticisms and purges of the Japanese intelligentsia attached a certain stigma to the school’s name, but later and more studied examination of those events, as well as the enthusiastic reception of translations of their works into Western languages, has done much to ensure a more balanced appraisal. Today, the philosophy of the Kyoto-school thinkers is recognized as an important contribution to the history of world philosophy whose ‘nationalistic’ elements are best recognized as secondary, or at least as an unnecessary trivialization of its fundamental inspirations. As a school of thought, the common defining characteristics of the Kyoto school may be seen in an overlap of four nodal concerns: self-awareness, the logic of affirmation-in-negation, absolute nothingness and historicity.

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