This paper argues that the creation of Kallipolis and the educational pro­gamme designed therein should be read in the context of one branch of Plato’s critique of Athenian democracy; namely, its employment of the Laconizing trope prominent in Politeia literature in order to identify and radicalize the desires innervated by an idealized vision of Spartan unity. In particular, it aims to show that the discussion of sexual difference in the famous first wave of Book 5, as well as the peculiar concep­tion of phusis on which the foundation of Kallipolis rests and the account of familial discord so decisive for the distinct moments of its demise, should be read in light of the service they perform to Plato’s reframing of ownership.

In this paper I argue that Plato’s Alcibiades is the embodiment of what I call the epithumetic comportment, a way of life made possible by the naïve ontological assumption that appearance is all that is. In the first part of the paper, I read select portions of the Alcibiades I and establish a distinction between the epithumetic comportment, which desires gratification in exchange for flattery, and the erotic comportment, which desires care of the soul. In the second half of the paper I turn to the Symposium and argue that Alcibiades fails in his seduction of Socrates because his inability to abandon the epithumetic comportment makes it impossible for him to be a Socratic interlocutor and subsequently know philosophical Forms. Through an interrogation of Alcibiades’s character we see that his failure is to be blamed neither on ‘Platonic love’ nor on Socrates himself but should be understood as a consequence of his inability to truly care for himself. I conclude by analyzing the consequences of my argument for typical interpretations of Alcibiades’s encomium to Socrates.

Throughout the tradition of Aristotelian commentary, there is a common tendency to present a static conception of substance according to the persistence of form imposed upon matter. In this essay, I present a dynamic conception of substance beginning with an account of the striving movement of the soul in De Anima. I argue that the paradigm for Aristotle’s definition of substance as actuality (entelecheia) is necessarily determined by his account of desire (orexis) as an efficient cause of the soul. The striving movement of desire as an efficient cause fulfills a holistic function by providing a teleological unity to the various capacities of the soul.

Aristotle’s political theory is often dismissed as undemocratic due to his treatment of natural slavery and women and to his conception of political rule as rule by turns. The second reason presents no less serious challenges than the first for finding democracy in Aristotle’s political theory. This article argues that Aristotle’s account of ruling in turns hinges on a critique of master rule and an affirmation of political rule, which involves both the rulers and the ruled in the project of ruling. Ruling in turns makes the rule shared, not merely an exchange of opportunities to rule as a despot.

Cicero’s De Finibus contains a debate about whether practical knowledge should be compared to theoretical knowledge (theôreia/sapientia), or to technical knowledge (technê/ars). The way in which practical knowledge is conceived by the Stoics on the one hand, and Peripatetics on the other, lies behind and explains, for Cicero, the tendency of Peripatetics to place greater priority upon harmony with the external world, and that of the Stoics to seek inner harmony at the cost of harmony with that external world. The dialogue ends in aporia because, for Cicero, practical knowledge either comes to bear an excessive resemblance to technê, as in the case of the Peripatetics, or to theoretical knowledge, as in the case of the Stoics; for him, it must fall neither to one nor the other extreme.

Dennis Schmidt is developing a way of thinking that has at its core his understanding of "idiom," especially in what he calls "original ethics" and "idiomatic truth." This paper engages that understanding, distinguishes linguistic idioms and "event idioms," shows the transformative effects in both his thought and his life that his focus on idioms has had and is having in the present direction of his constructive philosophy, and further shows that this direction has the potential to change considerably major aspects of contemporary continental philosophy.

This paper attempts to define Dennis J. Schmidt’s distinctive contribution to philosophy and to contemporary hermeneutics in particular under the heading of an ethical hermeneutics. The idea of an ethical hermeneutics is considered in relation to four aspects: 1) the element of practice as the constitutive element of ethical hermeneutics; 2) the force of practice: finitude; 3) the idiom as the place of finitude; 4) ethical hermeneutics and the domain of the common. The fourth aspect constitutes the critical engagement with the idea of an ethical hermeneutics, arguing that the notion of the common, which is underdeveloped in Schmidt’s writings, serves as a practical “concept” that takes the place of the theoretical concept in an ethical hermeneutics.

In this essay, I attempt to explore Dennis Schmidt’s pervasive claim throughout his work of a deep affinity between aesthetic experience and ethical life. In a discussion of what Schmidt calls the intensification of life, the essay shows how for Schmidt birth and death are moments that have a peculiar capacity to reveal what he calls the idiom of the ethical. At the end of the essay, I turn to Schmidt’s discussion of Greek tragedy as an exemplary site for his unique sense of original ethics.

This essay traces an astonishing shift in Denny Schmidt’s work, from his emphasis on tragedy and death in 2005’s Lyrical and Ethical Subjects, to an emphasis on the comic possibilities of life in Between Word and Image (2012). Simply put, his earlier book pivots most decisively on language and, as he writes, the ways that language “bears witness to finitude” (2). Between Word and Image, on the other hand, pivots decisively on the image and reveals for us the possibility that “painting is at its heart the presentation of the movement of life” (96). The essay ends with some questions about the specifically political upshot of Schmidt’s work on the relations among aesthetic experience and “life.”

In this article I address the question of writing and philosophical style as it is reflected on, and staged, by Dennis Schmidt’s work. I emphasize the relationship between Schmidt’s insistence on preserving a conception of beauty as productive for our current philosophical insights, and the way in which this is related to the call for, and implementation of, a “beautiful” style of philosophizing. In order to exemplify what I mean by this, I support some of my arguments with Friedrich Schiller’s reflections on philosophical style and his controversy around this issue with J. Gottlieb Fichte.

This essay is a response to Dennis Schmidt’s call for a reanimating of the philosophical imagination and for the inception of an original ethics. In this connection it undertakes an extended examination of the various meanings that the word ἦèïò has in a number of ancient texts. Passages are cited at length (and in translations as close as possible to the Greek) from Homer’s Odyssey, Hesiod’s Works and Days, a fragment by Empedocles, a tragic drama by Aeschylus, Xenophon’s Symposium, and Plato’s Republic, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Laws. Each passage is discussed in detail with specific focus on the meaning that the passage accords to ἦèïò.

The purpose of this essay is to take up the question of how an ethical con­sciousness emerges, that is where ethics might begin, and to ask about some of the consequences one might draw from this beginning. The essay argues that one site for thinking through such a beginning is the consciousness of mortality. To unpack such a claim, the essay takes up Heidegger’s discussion of this point in Being and Time as well as Derrida’s discussion of this consciousness in his seminar on Beast and Sovereign and his essay “Béliers.” The final stage of the argument concerns the sameness of birth and death for an understanding of ethical sense: both speak to the vulnerability and the absoluteness that expose the questions of ethical life, and both intensify a sense of what is at stake in such a life.

This paper explores a dimension of the contemporary western understanding of nature as it has been shaped by the thought of Hegel. Emblematic of a tradition that struggles to think nature on its own terms but which, more often than not, formulates it as the ground upon which human progress is built, Hegel’s philosophy sacrifices nature to spiritual progress. Orienting this study through Dennis J. Schmidt’s work on death and sacrifice in the dialectic, I trace Hegel’s formulation of the natural to show how the denigration of nature plays into a larger pattern evident in the western tradition, one that that positions the natural as somehow “outside” the political and spiritual, thereby subjecting it to mischaracterization and misuse. I conclude with a call for a post-sacrificial understanding of the natural world in an effort to help challenge the destructive force inherited by this tradition.

In this essay, the author argues that Dennis Schmidt’s considerations of ethical life, when taken together, comprise a prescient and distinctive response to Heidegger’s call to pursue an ‘original ethics.’ In this, Schmidt disavows discourses within the discipline of ethics that seek to establish an ethical theory or position, arguing instead that the demands of ethical life require us to focus on the incalculable singularity of the factical situations in which we find ourselves. The author suggests that Schmidt’s contributions to such an original ethical turns on Schmidt’s claims that the context of ethical life is fraught because bound up with radical finitude—though, for that very reason, also tender because marked by the need to care for one another in our vulnerability and fragileness.

This presentation is something of a performative response to the thrust and promise of Dennis Schmidt’s work in Between Word and Image, especially his reference to art as an ethopoetic event. My own art practice has led me to ask when art happens, about the event of art. Rilke was right: “you must change your life.” This means a break with the dominance of representation, calculation and Machenschaft. The idea that this means a renewal of dwelling, and that art can help, is for Denny the ethical promise of art. We here take up questions he sets aside—that of Nature and that of the possibility/efficacy of art today (Hegel/Adorno). I claim that earth art has distinctive ways of recalibrating our understanding of and engagement with space and time, which feed into what we mean by dwelling, our bearing in the world. This transforms how we think of questions of control with respect to Nature.

Of the many elements within Schmidt’s work that warrant discussion the attempt to differentiate the ethical from the conceptual is one of the most significant. That it is in part grounded in a reading of Kant makes it even more important. The aim of this essay is to question the way this differentiation is established and then justified. Part of the argument is to show the limits within Schmidt’s way of addressing what is central to any philosophical anthropology namely a concern with the being of being human.

This essay explores Dennis Schmidt’s notion of an “original ethics,” asking how language, freedom and history are at work in this original ethics. The essay first examines Schmidt’s claim that philosophy has traditionally understood ethical and political life as rooted in a subject ruled entirely by what he calls “the law of the common.” The essay specifically looks at how Plato and Hobbes embrace the law of the common, expelling thereby the law of the idiom from their respective ethical and political thought. The essay then turns to an examination of Schmidt’s “original ethics” which he claims offers a way out from the law of the common and the logic of Machenschaft that animates this law. In conclusion, the essay expresses a concern on whether Schmidt can move as seamlessly as he seems to claim from an original ethics to political being in common, asking of the role of judgment in Schmidt’s original ethics.