While Melissus argues for a numerical monism, Parmenides and Zeno undermine claims to unconditional or transcendental knowledge. Yet the work of Parmenides and Zeno is not merely critical or eristic, and does not imply that philosophical inquiry is futile. Instead it shows the importance of reflection on the way the requisites of inquiry are represented in its results, and entrains an axiological investigation to every ontological one.

In the “Postscript” to his Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger suggests that one important aim of his investigation into the relation between truth and art is to subject to scrutiny Hegel’s famous thesis on the end of art. The purpose of my essay is to contribute to this project by reexamining aspects of Hegel’s discussion of art in the Phenomenology of Spirit that appear to subvert his own thesis. Hegel’s treatment of ancient Greek drama and, specifically, some of his remarks on comedy, not only bring Hegel’s claim about the end of art into question, but also lend new insights into the possibilities for the relationship between truth and art in our age.

To establish a tripartite division of the parts of the soul, Socrates in Plato’s Republic introduces a Principle of Opposites. The principle entails that only distinct parts of a soul can be simultaneously engaged in opposed actions directed toward the same intended object. Appealing to the principle, Socrates proposes to distinguish between rational, spirited, and appetitive parts of the soul. He describes two situations of opposed actions in a soul that both desires to drink but chooses not to drink, and desires to indulge in morbid voyeurism but is angry about doing so. Without a sound basis for dividing the parts of the soul in precisely this way, Socrates cannot adequately defend the dialogue’s main conclusion that justice in both city and soul is the proper harmonious hierarchical order of their respective parts. I argue that Socrates’ efforts to prove the division of the soul into three parts are inconclusive because it is possible to interpret his illustrations as involving unopposed psychological acts directed toward different rather than identical intended objects.

This essay attempts to reflect on Bergson’s contribution to the reversal of Platonism. Heidegger, of course, had set the standard for reversing Platonism. Thus the question posed in this essay, following Heidegger, is: does Bergson manage not only to reverse Platonism but also to twist free of it. The answer presented here is that Bergson does twist free, which explains Deleuze’s persistent appropriations of Bergsonian thought. Memory in Bergson turns out to be not a memory of an idea, or even of the good, which is one, but a memory of multiplicity. Therefore Bergson’s memory is really, from a Platonistic standpoint, forgetfulness or, even, a counter-memory.

Roger Bacon’s On the Multiplication of Species is an attempt to analyze efficient causality in terms of forces that are multiplied from agent to patient. This essay argues that this has significant implications for the traditional distinction between appearance and reality in that Bacon refuses to think efficient cause in terms of some other reality that does not appear and yet is the ground of appearance.

This article suggests that Aristotle’s Metaphysics culminates not in the purity of God’s self-thinking, but rather in the contingent principles found in the Nicomachean Ethics. Drawing on such contemporary thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno, and Emmanuel Levinas, the article rethinks the relationship between ethics and ontology by reinvestigating the relationship between Aristotle’s Metaphysics and Nicomachean Ethics. It is argued that the ontological conception of praxis developed in the middle books of the Metaphysics points already to the Nicomachean Ethics where a conception of knowledge—phronêsis—is developed that is capable of addressing the lacuna in the account of ontological knowledge offered in the Metaphysics.

Throughout all of Deleuze’s work one finds an extended encounter with the Event of Difference. Deleuze’s extraordinary work on Leibniz is no exception. In the ‘later’ work, and regarding Leibniz, Deleuze remarks, “no philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmations of one and the same world, and of an infinite difference and variety in this world”. This positive identification with Leibniz is not found in the ‘earlier’ wave of Deleuzian texts from the sixties where Leibniz is captured hesitating over the possible and the virtual. Any such hesitation over the possible and the virtual is “disastrous” for a philosophy of the event and difference since it abolishes the reality of the virtual and subordinates it to the identical, replacing pure immanence with a ‘theological model’ of creation. Is the Leibniz of Deleuze’s early texts compossible with the later? What is the significance of the event of difference or fold that joins and separates Deleuze’s continuing encounter with Leibniz? We will examine what is at stake in these differing understandings of Leibniz to Deleuze’s philosophy of events of difference.

By tracing the discourse employed by Critical philosophy back to a pre-predicative level of language, this paper adds a dimension to Heidegger’s retrieval of Kant. By making explicit the role that language plays in the first Critique—both in the development of the transcendental schema of knowledge in the Transendental Analytic and the determination of the boundaries of pure reason in the Transcendental Dialectic—a bridge is formed between Heidegger’s hermeneutics and Kant’s critical enterprise. Heidegger’s destructive-retrieval of Kant’s thought is then seen to hinge as much on exploring the issue of language, as it is on the issue of temporality.