This paper investigates the new form of writing—the fragmentary project—that Friedrich Schlegel developed in response to Kant’s systematic philosophy.The fragments, I argue, are not anti-systematic; rather, they elucidate the idea that philosophy, like the modern work of art, no longer represents the unity of a closed system but a unity beyond the system. The fragmentary project is an ambitious attempt to find a form of philosophical coherence beyond the compulsion of a system. In contrast to the traditional view which regards the fragment as expressing relativistic, skeptic, and at bottom, anarchic sentiments, this account views the fragment as a figure of writing that does not represent but itself enacts the movement toward greater coherence and communication.

In this paper I provide a compelling argument against the thesis that Aristotle’s understanding of the relation between the soul and the body can be construed asfunctionalist, despite some passages that would seem to support such an interpretation. Toward this end, in section I of the essay I offer an interpretation of Aristotle’s account of the soul-body relation that emphasizes the non-contingent nature of the connection between the soul and a specific kind of body, arguing that Aristotle’s account of the soul as the “form” and “actuality” of the living thing, and of the organic body as its “matter” and “potentiality,” shows their necessary relation with one another. In section II, I present the functionalist account of mind, placing especial emphasis on its post-Cartesian genesis, which takes seriously the “problematic” status of the relation between mind and body. I then attempt to show, in section III, how because functionalism holds that psychic capacities can be realized within a number of different material bases, including physical and artificial systems, it is incompatible with Aristotle’s conception of the necessary soul-body relation, and thus that Aristotle’s account of psuche is not best construed as functionalist.

His Paulskirche speech on October 14, 2001, marked Habermas’s turn to public criticism of the unilateral politics of global hegemony as he promoted a globaldomestic and human rights policy. Two years later he joined ranks with Jacques Derrida against the eight “new” Europeans who lent signatures to the second Gulf War. Lest we misjudge the joint letter by Habermas and Derrida as peculiarly Eurocentric and even oblivious to the worldwide nature of the antiwar protest on February 15, 2003, we must read their new alliance in the context of its emergence: Derrida and Habermas introduce a corrective that neither invokes the geographical heart of Europe nor the cosmopolitan westernization of the world. In this essay, first, I revisit the imaginary conversation between Habermas and Derrida from 1995. Second, I highlight the persisting differences in their post-2001 thinking, pairing up key political concepts that illustrate how each thinker hopes for that which is to come after the death of God. Third, I press ahead to a new critical theory that articulates postsecular hope after the death of God.

In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies of history in terms of the persistence of forgetting within (non-subjective) memory. In section I, I shall outline the totalizing production of history understood as an unsuccessful attempt to erase the indifference of animality and the difference of madness. The following two sections are concerned with the particular kinds of non-subjective memories—memorials—that arise in the aftermath of this erasure and include writing and the archive (section II), as well as the ghostly and genealogical confusions (section III). Throughout these sections I shall argue that each of the externalizations of memory in non-subjective memorials is contaminated by forgetting, both shaping and shaking up the foundations of history. Finally, section IV revisits the memorials and states of forgetting discussed in the previous sections in light of the (im)possibility of justice.

This paper intends to explain key differences between Aristotle’s understanding of the relationships between nous, epistêmê, and the art of syllogistic reasoning(both analytic and dialectical) and the corresponding modern conceptions of intuition, knowledge, and reason. By uncovering paradoxa that Aristotle’s understanding of syllogistic reasoning presents in relation to modern philosophical conceptions of logic and science, I highlight problems of a shift in modern philosophy—a shift that occurs most dramatically in the seventeenth century—toward a project of construction, a pervasive desire for rational certainty, and a general insistence on the reducibility of the sciences. The major motivation of this analysis is my intention to show that modern attempts to reduce science/epistêmê to a single science/method of inquiry occlude dialectical and ethico-political dimensions of “reason” and, hence, also impoverish philosophy’s critical capacities.

This article discusses Heidegger’s lecture course Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, which focuses on Aristotle’s conception of the relationbetween the essence of man, logos, and the being of the world, kinesis. It is argued that the overall aim of Heidegger’s interpretation is to show that, on the one hand, it is Aristotle’s insight into the nature of logos that has made possible the great achievement of the Physics: the explication of being in terms of kinesis or movement; but that, on the other hand, the concept of kinesis in its turn leads Aristotle to a notion of being as perfect presence, entelecheia, which proves to have problematic consequences for his concept of logos. Heidegger’s own project is then presented as a critical retrieval of Aristotle’s understanding of the relation between logos and kinesis.

Heraclitus has often been read through Aristotelian and Stoic paradigms that do not contextualize his text in the poetic tradition with which his fragments engage. This paper is a close study of Heraclitus’s DK 1 as a demonstration of his poetic methods, and argues that Heraclitus’s text is an example of what Marcel Detienne calls magico-religious speech. Heraclitus’s logos is a living thing, not only words but ‘works,’ as Heraclitus refers to his logos in DK 1, using the Homeric formula “words and works.” Heraclitus’s teaching is experiential, and depends on memory as the antidote to oblivion and forgetting, often associated with sleeping and death. In reading DK 1 and following the paths that it traces to other fragments, Heraclitus’s teaching as a method of escaping the private world (idion kosmos) is revealed.

In a world of expanding epistemological horizons, the Early Greek thinkers known as the Presocratics wrestled with questions concerning the nature (φύσις) of things. But this idea of φύσις as a way to say what things really are was a relatively new one and meant that these thinkers often articulated very different ideas about how to properly under this philosophical concept. In this paper I sketch Heraclitus’s understanding of φύσις as a riddle that demands a particular method of inquiry. Linking many of his fragments, I show that φύσις is a paradoxical harmonia, or “fitting-together,” of opposites that serves as the pattern which underlies all things. Understood in this way, Heraclitus’s frequently mysterious fragments serve as a training ground for building wisdom by testing the listener’s ability to navigate ambiguity and complexity to find hidden meaning. Ultimately for Heraclitus, successfully navigating the riddle of φύσις moves us beyond simply saying “what things are” and unlocks our access to λόγος, or the principle according to which all things are steered or guided.

While Plato and Aristotle both recognize the importance of friendship and love, Aristotle seems to be as much the philosopher of philia as Plato is of eros. Aristotle’s extensive discussion of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics includes only a few scattered remarks about eros. Following the thread of those remarks, however, uncovers a movement from the disparagement of eros, contrasted with friendship of the virtuous, to its elevation as the shared experience of philosophic friendship. In the quite different context of Metaphysics Lambda, eros serves as the model for Aristotle’s famous account of the unmoved mover, where the activity of thought thinking itself provides, as an object of love, the ultimate source of motion in the universe. This paper explores what connection or common ground there may be between the presumably cosmological role of eros directed to the completed activity of mind and its place in Aristotle’s discussion of friendship.

As the differently ordered title indicates, and through a careful examination of Books IV and VIII of Plato’s Republic, I seek to destabilize the common view that there is a specific number of regimes and a necessary order of decline in the Book VIII account of the decline of regimes, one consequence of which would be that Plato is a straightforwardly harsh critic of democracy. The upshot of my study is to argue that in fact, the account offers a qualified defense, a proto-Kantian “critique” of democracy. I attempt to sustain this argument with references to several of the Letters of Plato.

I consider Sophocles’s tragedy the Ajax against the backdrop of Pericles’s invocation of silence about and from women, Pericles’s citizenship law of 451BCE and Aristotle’s understanding of the human being as a political animal possessing logos. I argue that in the actions and speeches of the play there is a questioning of the exclusion of women and bastards from political deliberation. A study of the language of the play reveals that Tecmessa, Ajax’s concubine, and Teucer, his bastard half-brother, exercise logos while the Homeric hero Ajax consistently resorts to the sort of sounds used by animals that give voice (phonê) to pain. The dismissal of the speech of women and those from the lower ranks of society proves detrimental to the lives of those who choose to silence them.

In the spirit of Pierre Hadot’s analysis of the value of the present moment in Hellenistic philosophies on happiness, the following argues that the Neoplatonic tradition heralded a similar view about the soul’s well-being. Primarily, the value of the present moment in Plotinus focuses on his arguments regarding the immortal soul’s desire for eternity that is lived in the ‘actuality of life’ right now. In contrast, the following analyzes the later Platonists and argues that Proclus offers a more practical and thick understanding of human happiness in relation to the present. Overall, for Proclus the good is revealed in the connective nature of the present moment, a good discovered in the soul’s temporal activities.

I argue that Plato’s deployment of the resumptive phrase πάλιν ἐξ ἀρχῆς illuminates the philosophical significance of his art of transition in Socratic dialogues. These explicit calls for a new beginning often appear when a conversation fails to account for two particular elements of ordinary experience: assumptions about whole-part relations and about the interlocutor’s self-conception as a being responsive to basic rational and normative distinctions. Returning to the archē is a form of ἀνάμνησις, reminding us that these assumptions constitute true, but inarticulate, opinions of a fundamental kind. They are the preconditions for discourse that philosophical διαλέγεσθαι must preserve and ground.

The academic debate on institutional slavery in Plato’s has been limited so far to the question of whether or not it is present in his paradigmatic just cities. The answer is clearly affirmative for the city of Magnesia in the Laws, but things are not so clear with respect to the Kallipolis of the Republic: some believe that it contains slaves, while others deny it or at least report that it cannot be assessed with certainty. As legitimate as it may be, this debate remains very limited. My claim is that a close scrutiny of a specific passage from the Laws reveals that slavery is not present in Plato’s political thought (at least in the Laws) as a mere cultural element of economic origin: it rather fulfills the function of what I call an “inner political border” on which the civic space must be built if it is to have a true theoretical and practical autonomy, that the citizens embody and enforce.

A common reading of the Cyrenaics is that they are a school of extreme hedonist presentists, recognising only the pleasure of the present moment, and advising against turning our attention to past or future pleasure or pain. Yet they have some strange advice which tells followers to anticipate future harms in order to lessen the unexpectedness of them when they occur. It’s a puzzle, then, how they can consistently hold the attitude they do to our concern with our present selves, and yet endorse the practise of dwelling on possible future painful scenarios. To establish that this is a puzzle, though, we must first be convinced that the report is true. Cicero is our only clear source for the Cyrenaic advice, and scholars have noted reasons to be suspicious of the reliability of his report. I discuss these doubts, and why they ultimately fail to undermine Cicero’s testimony as a source. Defending Cicero as a source for Cyrenaic thought removes a barrier to taking seriously an aspect of Cyrenaic psychology which could radically alter our understanding of their views.

Despite Aristotle’s claim in Topics I that all dialectical argument is either syllogism or epagoge, modern scholars have largely neglected to assess the role of epagoge in Platonic dialectic. Though epagoge has no technical use in Plato, I argue that the method of collection (which, along with division [diairesis], is central to many of the dialogues’ accounts of dialectic) functions as the Platonic predecessor to Aristotelian epagoge. An analysis of passages from the Sophist and Statesman suggests that collection is a purificatory practice. I argue that collection is not only Plato’s account of generalization from a sensible many to an intelligible many, as suggested by the Phaedrus, but also functions as a method of diacritical selection that allows inquiry to move from the intelligible many produced by division to the intelligible unity of a definition. This reading contributes a deeper understanding of the mutual relationship of division and collection within Platonic dialectic as well as a way of unifying the accounts of dialectic in the Sophist and Statesman with the otherwise idiosyncratic account of dialectic in the Republic. Finally, this analysis of Platonic epagoge sheds light on the connection between inquiry and argument present in Aristotle’s use of epagoge.

In this paper I take up the question about the unity of justice in Aristotle and advocate for a robust relationship between lawfulness and equality, the two senses of justice that Aristotle distinguishes in Nicomachean Ethics (EN) V. My strategy is to focus on Aristotle’s indication in NE V 2 that “other-relatedness” is the common element shared by the two justices and turn to Aristotle’s discussion of the notion of self-love (philautia) in EN IX 8 to explain what that means. I argue that the other-relatedness of justice can be characterized in terms of proper self-love. Concretely, the discussion of self-love makes clear that those who are concerned with the well-being of others in their community over their own material gain—i.e., those who are lawful and not grasping or pleonectic—are able to see that their own self-interest is in harmony with (and promoted by) acting in benefit of their community. This shows that there is an intimate link between lacking pleonectic inclinations and being able to act for the sake of the common good—and in general, between lacking pleonectic inclinations (i.e., being equal) and being virtuous in relation to others (i.e., being lawful).