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1. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Walter Brogan Letter from the Editor
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2. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Joe McCoy The Argument of the Philebus
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This essay explores Socrates’ argumentative strategy in the Philebus, which is a response to the view that pleasure is the good. Socrates leads his interlocutorsthrough a series of steps in order to demonstrate to them the “conditions and dispositions of soul” upon which hedonism rests. Socrates’ aim is not to refute the claim that pleasure is a good, but rather to show the dependence of the experience of pleasure on intellect and the other elements of the life of mind. In this manner, Socrates is able to show the superiority of the life of mind, or philosophy, in terms that are intelligible to the pleasure-seeker.
3. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Jacob Howland Plato’s Dionysian Music?: A Reading of the Symposium
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Like Aristophanes’ Frogs, Plato’s Symposium stages a contest between literary genres. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes constitutes the primary axis of this contest, and the speech of Alcibiades echoes and extends that of Aristophanes. Alcibiades’ comparison of Socrates with a satyr, however, contains the key to understanding Socrates’ implication, at the very end of the dialogue, that philosophy alone understands the inner connectedness, and hence the proper nature, of both tragedy and comedy. I argue that Plato reflects in the character of Socrates the primordial wisdom embodied in satyric drama. I conclude with a brief consideration of Nietzsche’s challenge to Plato’s Dionysian wisdom.
4. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Sean D. Kirkland On Anti-Parmenidean Temporality in Aristotle’s Physics
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Taking very seriously its anti-Parmenidean character, this essay locates a radically temporalized ontology at the heart of Aristotle’s Physics. We first concentrateon Aristotle’s discussion of kinêsis or ‘change’ as always between opposites, drawing the conclusion that the archai that govern and constitute a change, as opposites, cannot be present in the change itself. Thus, change is what it is by virtue of what is necessarily not present. We then draw the implications of this discussion for chronos or ‘time,’ defined in Book IV of the Physics as “the number of change.” Here, we uncover the ecstatic present moment of natural, changing things, a present constituted by its past and future, which is to say by what is emphatically not present.
5. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
María del Rosario Acosta López Beauty as an Encounter between Freedom and Nature: A Romantic Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment
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This essay presents a possible interpretation of the concept of beauty in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, which was itself suggested by Kant in the two introductionsto the text and gained force among the Early German Romantics and Idealists, introducing an alternative point of view into the concept of beauty and the role it plays in the relationship between reason and sensibility, man and world. Through the analysis of the four moments of the Analytic of the Beautiful, beauty will manifest itself as the realm in which a special encounter between human freedom and nature takes place. Therefore, and as an alternative to some traditional interpretations of Kant’s aesthetic investigation, which understand Kant’s judgment of taste exclusively on the basis of its subjective conditions, the judgment of beauty will present itself also in the relationship it establishes with the objects of nature.
6. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Michael Marder Given the Right—of Giving (in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
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This essay approaches the Hegelian problem of giving and givenness through the marginal figures of the animal, the child, and “superstitious humanity,”representing, in one way or another, the unperturbed relationship with immediacy. I argue that, for Hegel, the process of subjectivization supersedes these figures by learning to reject the immediately given and to accept only what is self-given. Yet, interspersed throughout this process are various imbalances and asymmetries, whereby the subject gives itself more than it takes, undialectically suppressing the particular and displacing the marginal.
7. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Christian Lotz Existential Idealism?: Fichte and Heidegger
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In this essay, I shall attempt to shed light on central practical concepts, such as action and decision, in Heidegger’s existentialism and in Fichte’s idealism. BothFichte and Heidegger, though from different philosophical frameworks and with different results, address the practical moment by developing [1] a non-epistemic concept of certainty, in connection with [2] a temporal analysis of the conditions of action, which leads to the primacy of future in their analyses. Both [1] and [2] shed light on their concept of the self, and on the concept of freedom. In addition, my paper offers a further clarification of what was called before Fichte’s “proto-existentialism” (G. Zöller, D. Henrich). The ontological framework of both philosophies and their concept of the practical self, finally, leads to the proposal to merge both perspectives into what I would like to call “existential idealism.” Fichte’s and Heidegger’s practical philosophies can be taken as two sides of the same coin.
8. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Kevin Aho Gender and Time: Revisiting the Question of Dasein’s Neutrality
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Many critics have attempted to give an account of a gendered incarnation of Dasein in response to Heidegger’s “neutral” or “asexual” interpretation. In this paper,I suggest gendered readings of Dasein are potentially misleading. I argue Dasein is gendered only to the extent that “the Anyone” (das Man)—understood as relational background of social practices, institutions, and languages—constitutes the space or “clearing” (Lichtung) of intelligibility. However, this reading misrepresents the core motivation of Heidegger’s early project, namely to arrive at “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) as the original source of any intelligibility whatsoever. For Heidegger, Dasein is to be understood in terms of the twofold movement of being “thrown” into the Past (Vergangenheit) and “projecting” into the Future (Zukunft). It is only the basis of the neutral temporal structures of “thrown projection” that beings can emerge-into-presence as such, enabling us to make sense of our Present (Gegenwart) gendered practices in the first place.
9. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Dennis E. Skocz Aristotle and Heidegger on the “Worldliness” of Emotion: A Hermeneutical Auseinandersetzung
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The reflection undertaken here aspires to understand human emotion by joining Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s descriptions of emotion in a thoughtful confrontation(Auseinandersetzung). In his 1924 Aristotle lectures, Heidegger carries out a phenomenology of being-in-the world which illuminates the “structures” of emotion.Aristotle’s descriptions of emotions in the Rhetoric serve to enrich the structures delineated by Heidegger. Although millennia separate the two thinkers and their civilizations, what they say together about emotion is meaningful today. Their philosophical projects may seem to subordinate consideration of emotion to rhetorical or ontological purposes, but they actually serve to enrich our understanding by recognizing the intertwining of speech, world, and emotion.
10. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
David LaRocca Changing the Subject: The Auto/biographical as the Philosophical in Wittgenstein
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In this essay, I investigate our understanding of what counts as philosophical. Using the life and work of Wittgenstein as a test case, I take a close look at how various Wittgenstein scholars relate to work other than the principal and accepted philosophical texts (such as the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations), and suggest that there is an inconsistency in the criteria of what we can and should be taking seriously for philosophical purposes; sometimes there is inconsistency of use (one thing is said, another is done), and sometimes there is inconsistency in the form of occlusion (the scholar simply avoids the chance (or responsibility) to define terms). Guarding against advocacy for essentialism, I argue that philosophers might benefit from a more direct and explicit engagement with the criteria they use when writing about the philosophical significance of material other than dominant texts. That engagement, however, reveals that the pursuit of criteria is at odds with the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. As a result, we stand in need of an alternative method of discerning what counts. I suggestthat, in the context of Wittgenstein’s work, such a method is a matter of approach, not criteria. Perhaps this method can extend beyond Wittgenstein’s work to a general view of what counts as philosophical.
11. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 12 > Issue: 1
Christopher Fox The Apotheosis of Apotheosis: Levinas’s On Escape, Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness, and Us
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The recent translation of Emmanuel Levinas’s essay On Escape complicates our view of his relationship to Hegel, and reopens the ontological question of escape. The impetus for Levinas’s essay was National Socialism’s effort to reduce subjectivity to being qua biologistic. To resist this, Levinas enlists idealism as an ally. He affirms the idealist subject’s effort to escape being, but denies that it makes good its escape. I challenge this denial by comparing Levinas’s phenomenology of escape with Hegel’s phenomenology of unhappy consciousness, paying special attention to the themes of shame and the will to escape. The similarity between treatments leads me to suggest that the urge to escape emerges at least as early as medieval Christianity, thus predating the historical predicament of mid-1930s European Jewry. I conclude by interpreting space travel and the posthuman figure of the cyborg as signs that escape continues asan object of human aspiration.