>> Go to Current Issue

Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volume 9, Issue 1, Fall 2004
Across the Tradition of Philosophy

Table of Contents

Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-10 of 10 documents


1. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Walter Brogan Letter from the Editor
view |  rights & permissions | cited by
2. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Martin Beck Matuštík Between Hope and Terror: Habermas and Derrida Plead for the Im/Possible. To Jacques Derrida in memoriam (1930–2004)
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
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.
3. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Daniela Vallega-Neu Driven Spirit: On the Body in Max Scheler’s Phenomenology
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
This essay proposes a reading of Scheler’s work that puts into question the separation of principles he claims for life and spirit, or body and thought. After considering how Scheler opens possibilities to think the body non-objectively when he conceives it as an analyzer that determines if and how one perceives something, the essay moves to a discussion of his late work Man’s Place in Nature. Here Scheler thinks the mutual penetration of life and spirit while still maintaining their distinction by claiming that they have separate principles. By focusing on the performativity of Scheler’s thought, the essay aims at uncovering a dimension of his thought that undermines this distinction and allows for new possibilities of understanding the lived body.
4. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Roy Brand Schlegel’s Fragmentary Project
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
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.
5. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Corinne Painter Aristotle and Functionalism: A Re-Examination of their “Natural” Disagreement
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
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.
6. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Jason Aleksander Modern Paradoxes of Aristotle’s Logic
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
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.
7. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Charlotta Weigelt Logos as Kinesis: Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Physics in Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
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.
8. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Tracy Colony Telling Silence: The Question of Divinity in Heidegger’s Early Nietzsche Lectures
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this article, I argue that the question of divinity provides an important context for reading Heidegger’s initial two Nietzsche lecture courses (1936–37). First,I demonstrate how this often overlooked background can shed light upon the way in which Heidegger understood the meanings of will to power and eternal recurrence in this period. Second, I argue that the related themes of need (Not) and necessity (Notwendigkeit) in these lectures can be seen as an important framework for understanding the relation between Heidegger’s early Nietzsche engagement and his Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38).
9. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Michael Marder History, Memory, and Forgetting in Nietzsche and Derrida
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
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.
10. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 9 > Issue: 1
Andrew Fiala Linguistic Nationalism and Linguistic Diversity in German Idealism: Locating Hegel between Fichte and Humboldt
abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Hegel did not have an adequate appreciation of linguistic diversity. This lapse is linked to Hegel’s Eurocentric view of history and culture. Hegel’s view of language is considered within the context of Leibniz’s hope for a universal philosophical language, the metacritique of Kant, and Fichte’s linguistic nationalism. Hegel overcomes the sort of nationalism found in Fichte. And Hegel aspires toward the universal while recognizing the importance of concrete historical language. However, he does not achieve the sort of appreciation of linguistic diversity we find in Humboldt. The paper concludes that Humboldt can thus be used to critique Hegel’s Eurocentrism without anachronism.