In this paper we explore the complex relationship between the philosophies of Sir William Hamilton and Henri Bergson. We then place these philosophies in a critical relation to French phenomenological philosophy, particularly, Merleau-Ponty's. By so doing we examine a historical and theoretical 'ark' that rises in 19th Century Scotland and falls in 20th Century France, an ark that has received little attention hitherto by historians of philosophy. Our aim is to open up a new dimension of these philosophies and provoke a fresh debate over their relationships and the philosophical tensions that exist between them.

Batailles hook Lascaux has not received much scholarly attention. This essay attempts to fill in a gap in the literature by explicating Bataille's scholarship on Lascaux to his body of writing as a whole—an exercise that, arguably, demonstrates the significance of the book and, consequently, the shortsightedness of its neglect by critics who have not traditionally grasped the relevance of the text for illuminating Bataille's theory of art and transgression

In contemporary art, the term "relational aesthetics" emerged a decade ago as a label for emerging art practices that defied conventional categories. Coined by critic Nicholas Bourriaud, the term describes projects by artists such as Pierre Huyghe, which involve examinations and representations of social systems and contexts, and in which audience participation is a critical component The roots of this approach can be traced to the Minimalism of the 1960s and the phenomenological basis of sculpture by Robert Morris and Richard Serra, which opened up possibilities for later artists to construct more extended situations involving memory, time, experience, and the contingency of context. This paper proposes to examine artfrom the 1960s to the present and trace the developing theory and primacy of audience situations in contemporary art.

This essay interprets the work of the German choreographer Pina Bausch with the help of phenomenological examinations by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Heidegger. Pina Bauschs choreography not only shares basic themes like the everyday, the body, and moods with phenomenology, but they also yield similar results in overcoming traditional dualist frameworks. Rather than being an instrument for expressing ideas, the body is in constant exchange with the natural elements, exhibiting vulnerability and passivity. Moods, in turn, are neither subjective nor objective; this also holds for longing, an essential constituent of Pina Bausch's work. Dance theater and phenomenology, each in their unique ways, are capable of acknowledging and accommodating the ambiguity of our human existence.

Scholars have traditionally taken the Marquis de Sade to he a straightforward advocate of immoral hedonism. Without rejecting outright this view, I argue that Sade also presents a theory of the psychology of pleasure, placing him amongst the more insightful psychological thinkers of the late 18th century. This paper outlines Sades description of the immoral will, in particular his account of how an agent can come to enjoy the humiliation, torture and murder of others. I argue for thefollowing claims: firstly, that Sade, perhaps despite himself, suggests that the sadistic will is pathological; secondly, that Sade's work gives a far less flattering view of the sadistic will than is commonly supposed.

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.