Peter Munz and Historical Thought

Few philosophers of history ever recognized the profundity of Peter Munz’s The Shapes of Time that came out in 1977. In this book Munz upheld the view that no part or aspect of the past itself provides us with the solid fundament of all historical knowledge. For him, the historian’s most fundamental logical entity is what he calls the Sinngebild. The Sinngebild consists of two events defined and held together by a covering law. These CL’s can be anything from simple truisms, the regularities we know from daily life to truly scientific laws. But ‘underneath’ these Sinngebilde there is nothing. Hence, Munz’s bold assertation: ‘the truth of the matter is that there is no ascertainable face behind the various masks every story-teller is creating’ and his claim that his philosophy of history is ‘an idealism writ small’. Next, Munz distinguishes between ‘explanation’ and ‘interpretation’. We ‘explain’ the past by taking seriously the historical agent’s self-description and ‘interpret’ it by stating what it looks like from our present perspective. ‘Explanation’ and ‘interpretation’ may ‘typologically’ be more or less similar. Relying on a number of very well-chosen examples from his own field (Munz was a medievalist), this enables Munz to argue why one historical interpretation may be superior to another. In his later life Munz developed a speculative philosophy of history inspired by Popper’s fallibilism.

From ontology to poetry: the essence of Martin Heidegger's thought

How does the concept of being come to our mind? Where does the verb “to be” originate from the origins of speculative philosophy? Such questions raise problems about the conditions for the emergence of ontology in the history of the speculative sciences. It is historically known that the return to fundamental ontology as a science or primary philosophy in contemporary times, with Martin Heidegger, takes place under the banner of poetry. The objective of this article is to show that with Heidegger, it is certainly the being that is at the center of ontology, but this being is essentially linked to verbal and nominal poetry. From modernity, it is a question of understanding with Heidegger, that the essence of thought, beyond the representation given to it by the Moderns, is inscribed in the collecting donation of being. Hence the need to welcome the being in a thought that becomes poetry.

Scriptural Exegesis or Speculative Philosophy

Summary Dogmatic debates in early Christianity shaped philosophical discourse just as Greek philosophy offered the conceptual tools to engage and, accordingly to crystalize early Christian practice, into a formal system of belief. Thus, in the recently-published The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics, Johannes Zachhuber notes that “Patristic thought as a whole can be identified as a Christian philosophy.” Following suit – though not without nuance – this paper suggests treating Patristic scriptural exegesis as an exercise of speculative philosophy, as evidenced in Augustine’s interpretation of the figure of the cross at Eph 3.18, where the cross progressively becomes a simple yet compelling paradigm of divine manifestation. This paradigm can be framed according to Augustine’s mature articulation of the ‘ontological principle’ of manifestation in s. 165: “From the depth which you cannot see rises everything that you can see.” By engaging in scriptural exegesis, within a gestalt where Wisdom, sacred and profane alike, merge in the incarnate God manifest in Christ, Augustine articulates unprecedented philosophical principles.

Advaita: Oneness as a Lived Reality—Examining Aspects of Profound and a Radical Psychology

It is all good to say, that the world is one! Are these idealistic/poetic ideas or could there be psychological pathways to experience oneness as a continuous realisation? This is not a question of philosophy or intellectual argumentation, but a question of living and being. There has been now interest in non-dual awareness in research as well ( Josipovic, 2014 ). The objective of this article is to introduce a radical worldview—advaita vedānta that leads to profound cognitive, affective and behavioural implications of well-being beyond the surface level ideas of happiness. Advaita—which means ‘not-two’ is the most profound and radical of psychological theories Indic civilization has experienced and accepted as the epitome—the crown jewel. The Vedāntic worldview and practice with the background throb of all Indic values—of inclusion, love and truth vests in Advaita—oneness. In popular imagination, it has been both esoteric-cised and yet has remained un-commodified. Contrary to popular ideas that look at advaita as a speculative philosophy, advaita is understood as a rich psychological theory with a basis in cognition, knowing, as well as a living in oneness. The students of modern psychology, especially, in India are left poorer, if they are unable to review advaita and yet study consciousness, which is a booming area of research in modern psychology. Advaita is a continuous living realisation—termed as Jīvanmukti, the Vedāntic ideal of being free, while living. Examining the primary Saṃskrit text—Jīvanmukti-viveka, I describe Jīvanmukti—of living in continuous realisation of oneness, till the body drops down, as stated by the great muni, whose above-mentioned abhyāsa grantha—the application manual, is used across Hindu spiritual frameworks and monastic orders, till today.

Hegel's Concept of the Familiar: Toward a Philosophical Study

One of the most memorable lines of Hegel's oeuvre is from the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘Quite generally, the familiar, just because it is familiar, is not cognitively understood.’ Surprisingly, relatively little philosophical attention has been paid to the notion of ‘the familiar’ in Hegel scholarship. This essay aims to rectify this lack by offering a preliminary inquiry in what the notion means across Hegel's work. It does so by focusing on three underexplored moments in Hegel's work: (1) the exposition of the logic of appearance in the description and diagnosis of seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch painting in the lecture notes from the 1823 Berlin lectures on the philosophy of fine art; (2) the function of institutionalized practice in Hegel's Tübingen essay of 1793; and (3) the conjunctural relation of the familiar with philosophical terminology in an entry from the ‘Aphorisms from the Wastebook.’ Through a careful reading of these three moments, I will show that the familiar is a point that constellates multiple processes, mechanisms and apparatuses that, when grasped in their complex totality, functions as the ‘prius’ (priority/prioritization/first moment) of Hegel's speculative philosophy.

Francis Bacon’s “Perceptive” Instruments

This paper claims that one way to bridge the gap between Francis Bacon’s speculative philosophy and his natural historical and experimental investigations is by looking at his peculiar top-down strategy of measuring Nature. Key to this strategy is the construction of perceptive instruments, i.e., devices “subtle enough” to detect and map natural limits, powers and virtues. In this paper, I discuss some of Bacon’s ideas for the development of perceptive instruments, and I show how his particular investigative strategy leads to the construction of an interesting and insufficiently investigated operational vocabulary. I focus on two particular terms of this vocabulary, “orbs of virtue” and “perception.” I show that, although originating in a natural-philosophical context, both terms acquire new, operational meanings in Bacon’s late natural histories. They vindicate the use of instruments and provide the necessary tools for a complex and interesting top-down approach to measuring Nature.