In June 1914, Franz Kafka found himself overwhelmed by his life. Struggling personally, professionally, and artistically he sat one night to compose a story in his diary of a man confronted by the Divine, In this story, never published outside of his diary, Kafka sought to measure the distance between God and the individual in a post-traditional world. The result was the story of an aborted mystical experence in which Kafka defined the post-traditional existential experience in terms of failure. In so doing, Kafka also defined the post-modern existential condition in terms of the overwhelming distance the individual feels from God.

Luce Irigaray's concept of the "sensible transcendental" is a term that paradoxically fuses mind with body while, at the same time, maintaining the tension of adjacent but separate concepts, thereby providing a fruitful locus for changes to the symbolic order. It provides this locus by challenging the monolithic philosophical discourses of the "Same" which, according to Irigaray, have dominated western civilization since Plato. As such, the sensible transcendental refuses the logic that demands the opposed hierarchal dichotomies between time and space, form and matter, mind and body, self and other, and man and woman, which currently organize western civilization's discursive foundations. Instead, it provides a useful means for helping women to feel at home in their bodies, and it signifies the implementation of an ethical praxis based on the acknowledgment of sexual difference. Such a praxis demands philosophical, theological, juridical, and scientific accountability for systemic sexism and, in its acknowledgment and validation of the alterity of sexual difference, it respects life in its various forms and its vital relationship with biological and physical environments.

Is there a significant difference between Plato's texts and what is known as 'Platonism', that is, the philosophical tradition that claims Plato as its progenitor? Focusing on the Symposium, an attempt is made here to show that, far from merely fitting neatly into the categories of Platonism—with its neat distinction between the super-sensible and the sensible—Plato's own text is a complex, tension-filled terrain of countervailing forces. In the Symposium this tension obtains between the perceptive insights, on the one hand, into the nature of love and beauty, as well as the bond between them, and the metaphysical leap, on the other hand, from the experiential world to a supposedly accessible, but by definition super-sensible, experience-transcending realm. It is argued that, instead of being content with the philosophical illumination of the ambivalent human condition—something consummately achieved by mytho-poetic and quasi-phenomenohgical means—Plato turns to a putatively attainable, transcendent source of metaphysical reassurance which, moreover, displays all the trappings of an ideological construct. This is demonstrated by mapping Plato's lover's vision of 'absolute beauty' on to what Jacques Lacan has characterized as the unconscious structural quasi-condition of all religious and ideological illusion.

Contemporary Analytic Philosophy finds itself within a historical context, answering questions that have been handed to it by earlier philosophers. Specifically contemporary Analytic Philosophy finds itself responding to the Idealists of the nineteenth century in the hope of justifying the "new science" that seems to give us so many practical benefits. In doing this, questions arise as to how contemporary Analytic Philosophy will answer the problems that Idealists struggled with. In thefollowing, a brief overview of the Idealist enterprise will be contrasted with two contemporary Analytic Philosophers, namely Rudolf Carnap and W.V. Quine, in order to understand how the latter two deal with the philosophical problems handed to them by their tradition. Specifically, the question of universals and their relation to the absolute, and the assumption behind this concerning intuition are going to be investigated. This article will argue that the Idealist tradition raised important questions that Carnap and Quine were not able to answer. It will critique Carnap and Quine as failing to find the universal required for thought and propose an alternative pathway to finding the solution.

This article demonstrates that Hegel and Rushdie are contemporaries, and that the Phenomenology of Spirit and Midnight's Children are each others counterpart—philosophical and literary, respectively. It shows that the narrative structures of the Phenomenology of Spirit and Midnight's Children are identical, and both texts culminate in the remembrance of their narrative journeys. It argues that authenticity is constituted by the inauthentic. Recognizing that both texts remain open to the future, this article concludes by urging that India is now the land of the future and that Midnight's Children is the continuation of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Ernesto Grassts rhetorical theory proves helpful in illuminating William Faulkner's conception of humanity's dependence upon language. For both Grassi and Faulkner, language—the fundamental human art—serves metonymically, pointing toward humanity's need for other forms of artifice. Through the use of artificial means, the species is able not merely to survive, but to flourish, to prevail Characters in Faulkner's novels, such as Quentin Compson and Darl Bundren, who seek to transcend human verbalityI conventionality manifest forms of psychic disintegration. Like Faulkner, Grassi considers the attempt to escape artiflce as an act of insanity. Contrariwise, Grassi uses the term folly to refer to the willing recognition of the need to accept theforms of human artifice that allow the species to thrive.

This paper examines Walter Benjamin's argument that the matter—the materials —of materialist historiography are the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture. Just as Benjamin saw in child's play and children's playthings a potential 'playing out' and 'recollecting' of that which has been dropped, left behind, forgotten and forsaken, he likewise saw the historical endeavor as one which engaged the discarded materials of bourgeois culture and cut through progressivist, universalist history—revealing in so doing a materialist and indeed messianic history The consequences of this redemptive relation (these redemptive relations) are drawn out in the essay and culminate in the figure of the revolutionary custodian and the 'New Janitocracy'.