In this paper I examine important texts by Jacques Derrida in which, either implicitly or explicitly, the Shoah, the catastrophe of the Holocaust is signified, interrupting, disrupting, even disfiguring the texture of the text. The question is how appropriately to remember and mourn the dead within philosophical discourse, how to remember what happened and how to understand it as a question not only of ethical and political responsibility but also as an evil deeply and pervasively reflected in the ontology and epistemology of the philosophical tradition—an evil circulating within the very substance of philosophical thought, and in such a way that Derrida will make this philosophical complicity in the violence and evil of the Holocaust register its painfully oppressive guilt in textual configurations haunted by the presence of the victims, remembered in traces of their absence. Thus we see how Derrida lets the question of an appropriate form of historical memory, a fitting way to remember the Shoah, invade his texts—how he lets the texts of his thought be exposed to its radical evil and exposed to the pain of an impossible mourning. We also see how the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence implies a contestation of historicism, a writing of history that betrays the past in the very process of making it present.

In this paper I will compare the concept of explication à la Carnap and the concept of explication à la Kant. This essay should primarily be seen as a comparison of two different philosophical styles, but it is also intended as a vindication of what Kant wrote and what Carnap forgot to read.

“Herr Phister as Captain Scipio” is a succinct and concentrated study by Kierkegaard on the art of acting. In spite of its brevity and by virtue of its conceptual parsimony, the work deserves closer attention, if only because it also exhibits some of the pesky problems involved in the practice of interpreting oneself. I argue that “Herr Phister as Captain Scipio” forms part of the habitual context of Kierkegaard’s thought about selfhood. To be more specific, I attempt to show not only that this essay (attributed to the pseudonym Procul) is about the theory of the three stages of existence but also that the aesthetic is represented by Scipio, the ethical by Phister, and the religious by Procul himself.

For Descartes, the passions are the key to the good life. But he is also wary of the extent to which they may lead us astray. As I argue, there is reason to be skeptical that Descartes himself provides a satisfying resolution of this tension in the Passions of the Soul. The problem concerns our ability to interpret and work through intra-subjective passional conflicts. Descartes seems almost obsessed with the problem of such conflicts in this text. What he needs to provide, however, is a kind of moral therapy by which we can adjudicatethem. This is tantamount to providing a theory of representation for the passions, and it would be similar to the belief therapy that he provides for determining the representational content of other perception types, notably sensations and appetites. But I argue that he does not discharge this philosophical obligation, and indeed he cannot do so given his own understanding of the uniquely ambiguous representational character of the passions.

In a small portion of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Walter Benjamin engages in a critique of Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy. He argues that Nietzsche’s account divests individuals of significance in the tragic worldview. The corrective to Nietzsche’s view, according to Benjamin, is a reflective, historical approach to the Greek social and literary phenomenon of tragic poetry. I argue that Benjamin’s approach to tragedy and to The Birth of Tragedy is inherently flawed. The paper has threesections: (1) a presentation of Benjamin’s critique of Nietzsche in The Origin of German Tragic Drama; (2) a refutation of that critique on the basis of a reading of The Birth of Tragedy; and (3) a rejection of Benjamin’s theory of tragedy on the basis of Nietzsche’sinsights into the relation to human significance of both tragedy and the science of history.

All too often in applied ethics debates, there is a danger that a lack of analytical clarity and precision in the use of key terms serves to cloud and confuse the real nature of the debate being undertaken. A particular area of concern in my analysis of the bioethics literature has been the uses to which the key terms “suicide,” “assisted suicide,” and “euthanasia” are put. The modest aim of this article is to render a contribution to the applied ethics debate on these topics by seeking to delimit the scope and meaning of these terms. The criteria of specificity, non-arbitrariness, consistency (between various terms), and the avoidance of strong pejorative presuppositions, supply the main standards guiding my adoption of usages.