The rehabilitation of aesthetics that is undertaken by Jacques Rancière for a thinking of both art and politics is as stylistically refreshing as it is philosophically appealing. The combination of vast scholarship and lively polemic that underpins all his analyses also lends his celebration of democracy, equality and humanity a persuasiveness that is difficult to resist. This paper examines how Rancière’s understanding of “the aesthetics of politics” differs from that of Walter Benjamin, especially in terms of Benjamin’s elaboration of the change sustained by “experience” in modernity. It considers how reading a prose poem by Baudelairethrows into relief what is at stake in this difference.

In this paper, I argue that Jacques Rancière does not propose a purely sensible conception of the aesthetic in his recent writings on art. Unlike many contemporary philosophies of art, Rancière’s aesthetics retains an important cognitive dimension. Here, I bring this aspect of Rancière’s aesthetics into view by comparing the conception of intelligence found in his earlier works with his more recent writings on art, showing that intelligence and sense are distributed in the same ways. The distinction between them is, moreover, governed by the same politics. Rancière’s analysis of the sensible and the intellectual breaks down thedistinction between them and establishes their equality.

The essay explores the development of sociobiology, its basic tenets, and its contributions to the study of human nature as well as ethics. It insists that Darwinism is more than a biological theory and presents a possibility of interpreting sociobiology as manifesting not the triumph of the selfish gene but, on the contrary, the only way in which the expansion of altruism was possible.

I argue that Sartre's understanding of needs is not inconsistent with his conception of the human condition. I will demonstrate that his use of the term "needs" signals a change of focus, not a rejection of his earlier views. Sartre's Iater "dialectical" account of human needs should he read, in light of his phenomenological account in Being and Nothingness, as aspects of our facticity and situation. Satisfying needs is compatible with a range of choices about how to satisfy those needs and what they mean for us. I contend that Sartre remains true to the phenomenological roots of his work and avoids a commitment to a human nature or essence. Finally, I will address some of the questions that arise from Sartre's focus on needs in his dialectical ethics. I will begin by examining Sartre's early account of the human condition, and then consider his focus on needs in relation to this account.

In this essay, I will outline the positive content of George Grant's conception of "particularity" and clarify it by comparing it to Reiner Schürmann's similar concept of "singularity" as a starting point for an engagement with the positive good to which it refers. In conclusion, a five-step existential logic will he presented, which, I will suggest, can resolve the important aspects of the difference between them.

Only in being pleased at what is done can I judge it as right. Kant is correct, nevertheless, then my motive is not the object of my judgment's concern. In working to make a good judgment, it is not pleasure but die right result that one seeks. In taking the jury's decision to be right, one is pleased at it—one takes pleasure in it. At the same time, it would shift attention from judgment's proper object to find the point of die justice of the decision in one's having been pleased.

In this essay, I offer thoughts on the constitution of images in art, especially as they are constituted in painting and in photography. Utilizing ideas from Gadamer, Derrida and Adorno, I shall argue that representation should be conceived as a performative concept and as an act of formation; i.e., as a process rather thanas something "fixed." My reflections will be carried out in connection with a careful analysis of Gerhard Richter's painting Reader (1994), which is a painting of a photograph that depicts a female who is reading. I demonstrate how a close analysis of this fascinating painting leads us deeper into the problem of painted images, insofar as it enacts what it is about, namely, the constitution of itself as an innige by means of a complex and enigmatic relationship between seeing, reading, memory, inner, outer, gaze and blindness.