This article is organized by issues of cruelty and mercy in connection with freedom and oppression in the formation of an exceptional North American cultural diversity. The two leading questions are: How might we address such issues as we live together in our profound and frequently mis-attuned differences with other people? Are there ways to mitigate the multiple cruelties of oppression in the amalgamation and clash of cultures in a country of borderlands? There are four major sections: “How Might We Think of Cultural Boarders and Questions of Freedom and Oppression?,” “How Should We Respond to Practices and Values that Are Abhorrent to Us?,” “How Might We Evaluate the Choices Like Those I Have Highlighted?,” and “Borderland Experiences.”

This essay engages Scott’s Living with Indifference by inquiring how we may understand experiences of indifference as occurring in our bodily being. It brings together Heidegger’s notion of being-there (Da-sein) and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of world and body as flesh. With respect to Merleau-Ponty, the discussion highlights his thought of a “dehiscence” of body and world, which opens the idea of a hollow in the flesh that “echoes” indifferent dimensions accompanying the happening of things and events. The essay concludes with the insight that we can be attuned to indifference because we carry indifference with us in our bodies.

The purpose of this paper is to raise the question of ethical life independently of the framework of metaphysical assumptions, above all, independently of the language and idiom of conceptual reason. In order to carry out this project, which is akin to what Heidegger described as the project of formulating an “original ethics,” I take up several works by Charles Scott that I find offering especially productive openings for that project.

Charles Scott’s relation to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is complex because he is sometimes highly critical, rejecting many of the words Levinas employed, while nevertheless at other times being faithful to some of Levinas’s most original insights. Employing a word often used by Scott himself, I understand his reading of Levinas as an “interruption.” It is a word that also comes to mind when I think of our own discussions about the meaning of ethics from 1981 to 1990, discussions which seem to have brought us to a point of proximity. The essay is intended as a description and celebration of the experience of thinking in the company of a powerful thinker such as Charles Scott is.

This essay explores four questions: Is there an indifferent dimension to our lives?; what is the relation of indifference to our everyday differentiated meanings, interpretations, preferences, and values?; is it possible to develop an attunement to an indifferent dimension of life and, if so, how?; and, is a life marked by or attuned to indifference better than a life without it? In response, through a concrete example and analysis of a novel and a poem, I characterize indifference as both negation and as a kind of power, engaging the views developed by Charles Scott. I conclude by linking indifference to a project of description, and show the limits to this project, whether it is labeled phenomenological or pragmatic.

The work of Charles Scott bears a lightness that enlivens his thinking and writing. In the spirit of such lightness, I argue for gappiness and dimensionality as ways of thinking indifference and liveliness in Scott’s accounts of things. Through a close reading of Starlight in the Face of the Other, I show that gappiness happens with indifference in senses of galactic space and exceeds the philosophical and historical lineages of alterity. Through the functions of recoil and the subjunctive mood in Scott’s work, I show that dimensionality characterizes the liveliness of thinking in attunement to indifference. I conclude with an indifferent and dimensional account of the space of disclosure in thinking.

This paper examines Heidegger’s concept of “facticity” in his writings from the 1920s. Heidegger’s focus on this concept, the author suggests, is keyed to Heidegger’s own rethinking of existence in terms of Luther’s and Paul’s interpretations of early Christianity. In this context, then, we gain new insight into Heidegger’s notions of temporality, of Jeweiligkeit, and also his critical appropriation of Aristotle.

In this article I argue that Aristotle’s discussion of chance in the Physics gives an important contribution to the theory of action put forward in the Nicomachean Ethics, in particular as regards its notion that man is himself the origin or ground (archê) of his actions. Whereas the ethical works show a tendency to explain this notion in objective and causal terms, the account of chance as the happening of the unexpected not only points to the essential finitude of all human conduct, but also indicates that the concept of ground in connection with human agency must be understood in subjective terms, or in the direction of sense-giving and responsibility.

The problems involved in understanding the Aristotelian notion of an ἀρχή arise from the widely accepted view that Aristotle’s theory of knowledge is torn between irreconcilable empiricist and rationalist tendencies. I argue that several puzzling features of the Aristotelian ἀρχή are clarified when it is understood as akin to the Urphänomen, which plays a central role in the scientific thought of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. More broadly, I argue that the apparent conflict in Aristotle’s theory of knowledge is resolved by seeing that Aristotle is neither an empiricist, nor a rationalist, but a “rational empiricist” akin to Goethe.

This article presents Schelling’s doctrine of creation, primarily as outlined in his lectures on mythology and revelation. Schelling there presents not a will to power, but a power to will or not to will—the decisiveness of freedom rather than blind willing. Accordingly, Schelling is able to surpass the tradition of the metaphysics of presence through freedom as an unprecognoscible act prior to potency/power. Schelling’s will is not natural but preternatural, capable of bringing forth something original, i.e., that which first becomes possible only once it has already become actual.

While the relationship between Nietzsche and naturalism has been surveyed, why Nietzsche sets himself apart from nineteenth-century naturalists has not been adequately explained. I argue that it is a new method, necessary for the task of deciphering the text of homo natura, which distinguishes Nietzsche. A capacity to endure a greater degree of solitude is required in order to cultivate a new skepticism, allow sufficient attention to our drives, and enable the incorporation of truths that undermine herd morality. Thus, the translation of man back into nature involves both understanding man in natural terms and a re-naturalization of man.

In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida not only makes repeated references to anamnēsis in Plato’s texts, but writes the text in a way that follows from the discussions found in Plato’s Meno. Focusing on the account of recollection given in Plato’s Meno reveals a passive structure that is also found in Plato and Derrida’s use of hypothesis. Following Derrida, these insights are applied to self-representation, which is revealed to have a similar structure to the structure found in the logic of hypothesis and recollection. These texts provide an argument for the hypothetical nature of self-representation and the limited knowledge one can claim to have of the self.

Unlike most readings of Plato’s Theaetetus, which concentrate on gnoseology, this paper places it in the debate on commensurable and incommensurable magnitudes that distinguished Greek philosophical and mathematical thought at the beginning of the 4th century BC and in which Theaetetus played a leading role. The argumentation of the dialogue shows clearly how this debate was important for Plato, to the point that the entire dialogue can be considered as an attempt to consider seriously how incommensurability, and its ontological correlate, the concept of dynamis, could elaborate a new form of logos.

Alain Badiou’s relationship to the work of Baruch Spinoza is a complex one. Though Badiou admires Spinoza’s courageous pursuit of the more geometrico, he is ardently critical of Spinoza on a number of fundamental ontological issues. Because of this, Spinoza often has had to bear the brunt of Badiou’s theoretical attacks. But how successful is Badiou’s attack on Spinoza? In this paper, I aim to show that this attack fails by examining the critique of Spinoza that Badiou provides in his “Spinoza’s Closed Ontology,” which can be found in his Theoretical Writings. Badiou’s essential claim is that the ontology of Spinoza’s Ethics employs structures or procedures that are heterogeneous to that ontology. I rely on Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, as found in his Expressionism in Philosophy, to pinpoint precisely where Badiou’s reading of Spinoza goes wrong. I show not only that Badiou’s critique of Spinoza fails to recognize a central structural feature of Spinoza’s ontology, namely the two powers of God—the power to exist and act, and the power to think and know—but also that this misrecognition is the condition for the possibility of Badiou’s mistaken critique. The paper then discusses how it is that these issues relate, more broadly, to the relationship between Deleuze and Badiou.

Kazimir Malevich’s style of Suprematist painting represents the inauguration of nothing less than a new form of culture premised upon a demolition of the Western tradition’s reifying habits of objective thought. In ridding his canvases of all objects and mimetic conventions, Malevich sought to reconfigure human perception in such a way as to open consciousness to alternative modes of organization and signification. In this paper, I argue that Malevich’s revolutionary aesthetic strategy can be illuminated by a return to the very basis of this tradition, namely by a reconsideration of Aristotle’s account in De Anima III.2 of the initial possibility of objective perception as such.

While Heidegger has long been cast as hostile to or neglectful of life-philosophy, his work on Aristotle in the 1920s demonstrates a struggle to articulate an ontology of life. I argue that this is no peripheral concern in his work and should be seen in the broader context of the development of his philosophy of nature. I submit that we can triangulate Heidegger’s position on the ontological status of life by tracing the tension between the Kantian and Aristotelian strains in his work. His early forays into life-philosophy and philosophical biology, while incomplete and inconclusive, challenge our picture of him as espousing a view of human existence dissociated from living and natural being.

In this article, I argue that in his “reversal of Platonism” in The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze does not adequately consider in what sense Plotinus identifies The One as “unparticipated.” I further claim that when The One is understood in the sense I consider Plotinus to have presented it, it shows itself to have attributes similar to Deleuze’s “dark precursor,” insofar as both The One and the dark precursor are ineffable, are inexhaustible, and contain absolute generative power. I propose that examining conceptual similarities between the works of such figures—about whose concepts similarity is undoubtedly counter-intuitive—sheds interesting light on important characteristics of Platonism, and in particular about the underappreciated sense in which the concept of difference is richly developed in the Platonic tradition.

In contrast to the legal, metaphysically laden, and epistemological paradigms, the ontological interpretation of respect concerns not only the relation between the “subject” and the “object” (or, better, the provider and the recipient, of this attitude) but also the being of the respected and the respecting. This paper develops an ontology of respect with regard to the human treatment of plants and teases out the meanings of vegetal life that germinate in this relation. What is at stake, I claim, is not so much an objective ontology as the phenomenological disclosure of the meanings of human and vegetal lives, construed “from within,” i.e., both in the context of the interactions between them and from the unique standpoint proper to each kind of being. Far from an ethical supplement to a theoretical description of vegetal beings, respect is the prism through which we may first gain access to plant ontology.

This paper addresses the debate concerning the nature of Aristotelian phronêsis and the objects to which it is directed. After a preparatory distinction from other intellectual virtues, I elucidate phronêsis’s connection to character-virtue and deliberation, highlighting the crucial role of perception. Focusing on moral sensibility serves to underscore the particular nature of the objects of phronêsis, and introduces its aspect of self-knowledge. This determination, finally, helps characterize the project of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as an indirect education in phronêsis.

The essay investigates the philosophical infancy of the idea that some actions are morally praiseworthy while not being morally obligatory. It focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between commandments and counsels, the early Christian idea that some acts go beyond nature, and the Stoic notion of circumstantially appropriate actions. I discuss the Christian and Stoic justification of acts of self-denial, such as celibacy, poverty, and martyrdom, and attempt to find a unitary source of goodness and moral obligation that allows for such supererogatory acts. Nature provides such a unitary source in the early Christian theologian Athanasius and the Stoics. I discuss how nature determines one’s duties while also allowing for praiseworthy acts outside the scope of these duties, and in seeming contrast with them.