This essay explores the intersection of the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas and theistic existentialism, by exploring the metaphor of being confronted by the blank face of God in times of great stress. Levinas criticizes the history of metaphysics for focusing exclusively on the analysis of objects. He aims to redirect philosophy towards the study of relationships, and focuses on the experience of being confronted by another human face. Jean-Paul Sartre’s proof of the nonexistence of God illustrates Levinas’s critique. Sartre treats God as an object with determinate properties, and concludes that all who believe in God are seeking a false sense of security. Many theisticexistentialists, however, speak of God as a partner in relationship, rather than as a thing, and do not expect to be freed from uncertainty or responsibility through a relationship with God.

This paper criticizes the understanding of philosophy as entirely made up of argument. It gives some characterization of argument as a rhetorical form and conversation as a motivating attitude. It explicates the understanding of this distinction in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic, and emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the distinction by appeal to the work of Richard Rorty. While respectful of Rorty’s insights, it sides more with the Platonic understanding of philosophical conersation, which does not abandon the pursuit of truth.

This essay argues that the thinker whose teaching played a key role in the formation of the Russian political and legal paradigm was not Marx but Hegel. It analyzes the impact of the Hegelian philosophy on the development of the Russian constitutional tradition, and examines its political implications.

I describe three major areas in which I argue that Christians’ belief that abortion is morally wrong is inconsistent with other important abortion-related main-stream Christian beliefs or actions based on those beliefs. The three areas are: (1) abortion and soul-saving; (2) abortion prevention and violence; and (3) abortion and the fate of frozen fertilized human eggs. I make no direct argument about the moral status of abortion itself.

This essay introduces the work of Andre Comte-Sponville to an English audience by explaining his ethical position. Comte-Sponville calls this position “cynicism,” and intends it as a correction of the excesses of both relativism and dogmatism. The distinction critical for understanding cynicism is that between value and truth, which are here used to explain all three: cynicism, dogmatism, and relativism.

Political philosophy is a paradoxical attempt to bring reason to bear upon a subject matter that is irrational. This problem has been side-stepped by many contemporary political thinkers. Political theorists like Iris Young, Michael Sandel, Jean Elshtain, Robert Bork, and Richard Peterson acknowledge that contemporary political life, with its lack of democratic participation and its undemocratic, bureaucratic institutions, is undergoing a legitimation crisis. These theorists offer philosophical analyses of this crisis in order to arrive at its rational resolution. This approach forgets, however, that there can be no rational resolutions within the political realm. Politicalphilosophy alone cannot resolve the legitimation crisis. This is especially so because the contemporary legitimation crisis arises, in part, from a lack of rationality on the part of both agents and institutions. Yet, we cannot fully give up on the enterprise of political philosophy. To do so would be to acquiesce to irrationality and the lack of legitimation found in contemporary political life. This paper argues that political philosophers, at their best, must adopt a deliberately ironic disposition: while demanding rational analyses of political life, they must acknowledge that rational analysis may itself be ineffectual in political life.

The “modest realism” described by Joe Frank Jones, III offers a sound methodological model for developing both self-understanding and philosophical theories. Claire Chafee’s play Why We Have a Body illustrates the pitfalls of living both a thoroughgoing realism and a thoroughgoing idealism and argues for the conception of a life story as a project in which discovery and invention play side by side.Stanley Cavell argues that the shape of a philosophy mirrors the shape of a philosopher’s life. Thereby he suggests that Ludwig Wittgenstein saw his own revolutionary philosophical work as a species of modest realism, i. e., continuing to turn in fruitful directions,rather than as a species of anti-idealism, i. e., rejecting an entire tradition of philosophical theorizing.

In this response I argue (a) that Jones’ minimalist realism is, also, a minimalist constructionism. And (b) that the silent sphere ofevidence that Jones’ uses to ground his realism, may not be able to supply even a minimalist, strictly negative ground for epistemic endeavors.

My hypothesis is that human personhood has ancient biological roots which make it possible for social reinforcers to contribute to the gradual construction of real persons who are always deeper than the stories about them. Multiple persons do sometimes emerge from one human organism. Rather than try to prove they are real, I explore the consequences of assuming them to be genuine emergentsthat become social environment to one another. I suggest that the multiple-persons phenomenon has profoundly influenced the development of human ethics and the attainment of personhood through the pursuit of ideals.

Barnhardt, in “Dissociation: An Evolutionary Interpretation,” makes a case for understanding multiple personality as a “natural”phenomenon resulting from human biological evolution. He also argues that the reason that “multiple personalities” are not encountered more frequently is a result of a social construction encouraging “single” personalities. He concludes that it is from the interaction between the two that ethics derive. In this response I offer an alternative hermeneutic, using memory as the interpretive key, and by introducing Ricoeur’s work on narrative. highlight how Barnhardt’s argument limits us to a “scientific” understanding of MultiplePersonality and thus limits our ability to understand and enact a viable “ethic” of care.

Revisiting Heidegger’s interpretation of “world” in Being and Time can help us come to grips with the conflict between the naturalistic and hermeneutical points of view which post-modernism has aggravated rather than resolved. After discussing Heidegger’s account of the “hermeneutical circle,” and his rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, I argue that, to “save” truth from hermeneuticalrelativism, Heidegger smuggles naturalism inside the hermeneutical circle. I suggest that, in order to abandon naturalism without abandoning truth, it is necessary to radically rethink the nature of judgment and recognize that it alone completes our ontological access to the world.

The traditional philosophical metaphors of epistemology, which speak of grounds or foundations, produce a conception of knowledge as fixed and absolute. This paper is not an effort to revive traditional epistemological view of foundations and origins. After a preliminary and cursory discussion of how the metaphors of foundation and ground are employed, principally by Descartes and Heidegger, and what is suggested by such an employment, I sketch the postmodern rejection of these metaphors. However, I further indicate how, as valuable as it is, postmodern criticism leaves us with an inadequate account of how we understand ourselves and how it is that weunderstand in general. I criticize postmodern thinking for ignoring the human elements of feeling and imagination and endorse the more satisfying model suggested by Paul Ricoeur. By understanding the role of feeling and imagination, we can escape the strict sterility of the grapheme. I end with my own suggestion that we gain a better sense of our attachment to and understanding of the world if we change the metaphors of foundations, grounds, and origins and instead employ metaphors of gathering, coalescence, or coagulation.

This essay provides a pastpostmodem phenomenological account of a good idea. It is a short experiment in what Foucault calls, “the unchanging pedagogical origins of dialectics.” The ‘ostensible’ question considered is: What follows in the wake of nihilism? Scribbling in the margins, a metaphor for the classical task of the public intellectual, is one way of nudging the reader into the periphery of writing.

This essay argues that essentialism and epistemological foundationalism can be separated, and that a “humble” realism-foundationalism can be described which explains common cultural practices like counseling. A necessary constructionist component survives in this still legitimately ‘realist’ position, but it is shown not to lead to any crippling skepticism or relativism, as does pure constructionism.

The ‘embodied self’ is the purposeful dimension of any organism capable of acting toward a unified motivation to maintain a self-organizing structure by appropriating, replacing, and reproducing material components to serve as substrata. We reflect on the ‘self’ in this sense when we direct attention away from the objects of experience and toward the way our bodies motivate our experiences in terms of emotional purposes of the organism, by looking, searching, shifting the focus of attention, etc.---actions rather than reactions of our bodies and nervous systems. The ‘transcendental self,’ by contrast, cannot be identified with any particular embodied state of consciousness, because it is that which unifies all the particular stages and gives them direction. It is argued here that affect and motivation are the keys to understanding and unifying the transcendental and embodied selves, because both reflect the organism’s self-organizing tendency; and that we can know ourselves by understanding the way affect and motivation shape the pattern and direction of our stream of consciousness.

This paper examines Aristotle’s treatment of friendship and self-love in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. The purpose is to explore what Aristotle means by self, and his understanding of why selves become, engaged in benevolent relationships with others. Some discussion of Aristotle’s influence on Kierkegaard helps to bring out the significance of Aristotle’s insights about the self. Aristotle explains how the self’s movement toward actuality grounds friendship and benevolence. True friendship and all endeavors to “produce” good, derive from love for one’s own being as mediated by one’s intelligence or nous. All such authentic endeavors constitute an effortto actualize one’s self, to act nobly, to be in one’s achievement and to panicipate in the community of being.

Sartre’s Degrees of Consciousness Theory is developed in order to ascertain what this existential conception implies for an account of human intersubjectivity. Once active involvement in instrumental concerns---first degree consciousness---and reflection, whether of an impure kind characterizing second degree consciousness or a pure consciousness---that of a third degree---are distinguished, attention is focused upon the kinds of social relations typifying each kind of consciousness. A model for social relations is suggested to distinguish it from either the conflict model, with which it is often confused, or the ‘we-subject’ model necessary for world exploitation so as to offer a way of grounding a morality as promised at the end of Being and Nothingness.

This essay argues that, in the first Critique, the need for unity leads Kant to re-inscribe the subject in a situation of multiplicity and undecidability. The result, however, is not a relativization that negates the meaning of the subject’s existence, but rather a contextualization that makes meaning possible. This reading clarifies some of the connections between Kant and contemporary postmodernism, especially the work of Jacques Derrida.