Beginning with attention to the double shadow of death that hovers over the Theaetetus, I discuss the pervasive presence in that dialogue of finitude and the effect that recognition has on Socratic/Platonic philosophy, which, even in this supposedly “later” dialogue, remains deeply and in a sustained way aporetic, interrogative. But such aporia, and the interrogative stance that follows from it, is also, I argue, a fundamental mode of knowing.

In Plato’s later dialogues, and particularly in the Sophist, there is a general reinterpretation and rehabilitation of the name (onoma) in philosophy. No longer understood rather vaguely as one of potentially dangerous and deceptive elements of everyday language or of poetic language, the word onoma is recast in the Sophist and related dialogues into one of the essential elements of a philosophical language that aims to make claims or propositions about the way thingsare. Onoma, now understood as name, is thus coupled with rhema, or verb, to form the two essential elements of any logos, that is, any claim, statement, orproposition. This paper follows Plato’s gradual rehabilitation and reinscription of the name from early dialogues through late ones in order to demonstrate thenew role Plato fashions for language in these later works.

In book IV of the Republic, Socrates offers an analysis of the tripartite structure of the soul as a perfect match-up to the class structure of the city. But the deeds that produce those speeches reveal the fixed relation among three independent parts to be the result of a dynamic process of self-division. This self-division is the work, more specifically, of thumos or spiritedness, which first cuts reason from desire, then separates itself from each in turn. By following this “plot,” one uncovers the roots of the devotion to justice that animates the construction of the best city in speech. The psychology of Republic IV proves to be a striking model in miniature of what Seth Benardete called “the argument of the action.”

By reference to the Aristotelian meditation, this essay undertakes to articulate an understanding of phronesis and sophia, praxis and theoria, in their belonging together. In so doing, it strives to overcome the traditional opposition of these terms, an opposition preserved even by those thinkers, such as Gadamer and Arendt, who have emphasized the practical over against the theoretical simply by inverting the order of the hierarchy.What is at stake, ultimately, is thinking ethics as first philosophy, i.e., seeing the philosophical articulation of scientific knowledge, even of ontology, as resting on (belonging in) living-in-action, as phenomenologically, phenomenally, sensibly grounded. Of course, “ethics as first philosophy” here can mean neither a normative-prescriptive compilation nor a self-founding, autonomous discourse. Rather, the phrase names the comprehensiveness of ethics vis-à-vis all mannerof human endeavor and the openness of ethics vis-à-vis that which exceeds it, that which is irreducible to discourse and in which the ethical discourse belongs.

This paper seeks to steer a way between a dogmatic and a skeptical reading of the Meno by taking up the performative dimension of Socrates’ responseto Meno. How does the philosophical inquiry into the definition of virtue promise to radicalize Meno’s alleged concern with the genesis of virtue? The paper shows that Socrates is acting, in a way, as an educator, in the sense that he attempts to awaken Meno to the task of self-knowledge as it bears upon the possibility of virtue in his own life. Thus, a dogmatic response to Meno’s question could not succeed in interrupting his tendentious memorizing approach to philosophical questions. But the paper also develops this reading by retracing the way in which nature undergoes a transformation, or a doubling, during the course of the dialogue. It becomes evident that the apparently inconclusive answer at the end of the dialogue, which states that the origin of virtue is to be found in “divine dispensation” and “correct opinion,” is only understandable in light of this transformation or doubling of nature that is made manifest dialogically andmythically in Socrates’ interaction with the young and handsome Meno. Socrates thus appears as a kind of “Teiresias in Athens,” but his clear failure inimpacting Meno in any lasting way only demonstrates that the possibility of political health is irreducible to any and all technical production.

The three sorts of soul in Aristotle’s On Soul (nutritive, animal, and cognitive) may be understood as one insofar as each must go out of itself in order to confirm itself as itself. This feature of soul, without which there would be no distinction between inside and outside at all, proves to be the underlying theme of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is at the core of both moral virtue and intellectual virtue and points as well to the principle of their union. Rationality, whether in the form of morality or of thought, is necessarily incomplete rationality, for its perfection could become manifest only in a completed structure in which neither choice nor longing to know would have any place and in which rationality would be indistinguishable from mechanical structure. It is thus not accidental that although the moral argument of the Nicomachean Ethics seems to require that the human soul be double—with a rational part that governs and an animal part that is capable of being governed by this rational part—strictly speaking the rational part, which Aristotle likens to a father, is never really present in the argument. Its absence points to the character of reason as necessarily hidden and only showing itself as a striving for rationality. Further, it is a sign of the impossibility of ever achieving an adequate structural account of the soul.

The Symposium is one of Plato’s most literary and poetic dialogues. How might one reconcile this evidence of Plato’s predilection for poetry in light of his severe critique of poetry in the Republic? Though his critique is modified and refined in other dialogues, the power of his critique is nowhere significantly undermined. I argue in this paper that Plato’s poetic writing is not inconsistent with his critique, and that in fact there is an affinity between his practice of poetry and his critique. Plato’s critique of poetry is not aimed against poetry itself, but just against its problematic claims and false promises. In turn, Plato’s use of the poetic image, especially in relationship to eros, delimits philosophy, and places it in relation to that which is not attainable for it. The battle between poetry and philosophy is seen to involve a reciprocal benefit for both, and a hidden affinity. In this sense, the poetic image has its philosophical sense precisely because it falls outside of the philosophical perspective.

Benardete reads Aristotle as Socratic dialectician writing in treatise form. The sciences of various subject matters appear at first separate (like Platonic eide) but they contain diverging accounts of being, nature, and the soul, which demand to be put together by the reader. De Anima abstracts from the soul as such in order to treat the soul “precisely.” This places limits on the unfolding of problems in phantasia and the heterogeneity of mind and being. As prelude to first philosophy, De Anima raises but does not answer the question: how are the being of thinking and the being of beings related?

In the Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates distinguishes himself from the natural scientists of his day and indicates that the true philosophical attitude, the love of realhuman wisdom, shares something essential with the mythical attitude. In the following essay, I argue that Socrates criticizes science here for its failure to attend to aporia, to recognize an essentially questionworthy aspect of the world of human experience, an aspect I will refer to as distance. Furthermore, I argue that Socrates aligns his own philosophical activity with myth in its maintenance of this distance.

Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism is usually considered to be either (1) an early Fichtean-influenced work that gives little insight into Schelling’s philosophy or (2) a text focusing on self-consciousness and aesthetics. I argue that Schelling’s System develops a subtle conception of history which originates in a dialogue with Kant and Hegel (concerning the question of teleology) and concludes in proximity to an Idealist version of Spinoza. In this way, Schelling develops a philosophy of history which is, simultaneously, a dialectical engagement with the history of philosophy.

This paper is about the relevance of the ineffable and the singular to hermeneutics. I respond to standard criticisms of Friedrich Schleiermacher by Karl Barth and Hans-Georg Gadamer in order to clarify his understanding of language, interpretation, and religion. Schleiermacher’s “indicative hermeneutics” is developed in the context of the ethical significance of communication and the ineffable. The notion of trace is employed in order to interpret the paradox of speaking about that which cannot be spoken. The trace is not a brute singularity but bears a fundamental relationship to the word—and ultimately the word of God—for Schleiermacher.

This essay seeks to explicate the ethical dimension of Schelling’s project. Schelling complicates the theory/praxis distinction by arguing that these two modalities are different sides of the same movement in thinking. I attempt to establish this by first examining Schelling’s early essay, Neue Deduktion des Naturrechts, and then by turning to his celebrated Freedom essay. Although I chiefl y examine an early work and then a work from his middle period, I contend that the ethical dimension governs all of Schelling’s thinking. I examine closely Schelling’s description of Mitwissenschaft (the conscience). I further develop my argument by contrasting Nietzsche’s understanding of this notion with Heidegger’s treatment of it in Being and Time. I then turn to Hannah Arendt and her discussion of “radical evil” and the “conscience” in order to deepen our appreciation of Schelling’s watershed contribution.

This essay seeks to accomplish three things: First, to examine Nietzsche’s critique of the “subject” in modern philosophy, with particular reference to Descartes.Second, to present an interpretation of Nietzsche’s alternative conception of “the subject as multiplicity.” And third, to argue that, for Nietzsche, this account of the “subject” as multiplicity does not lead to a kind of atomistic or anarchic view of the “subject,” contrary to what is often supposed. The essay focuses in particular on a number of aphorisms from The Will to Power that articulate most forcefully Nietzsche’s critique of Cartesian subjectivity and its aftermath. Thinking, as interpretation, Nietzsche suggests, is an activity undertaken not by a unitary “subject” that is conscious of itself, but by a much more subtle, largely concealed, and complex interplay of drives as forces of domination that together constitute the phenomenon of the living body.

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax).” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation (“finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation.

Kant’s avowed commitment to the basic principles of Leibniz’s metaphysics is evident throughout the critical project and stated explicitly in the Prize Essay. However, it is not until the Critique of Judgment, wherein Kant recognizes that Judgment operating in its reflective mood can engender synthetic a priori claims, that Kant is fully capable of appropriating the basic tenets of Leibniz’s metaphysics. This paper examines Kant’s treatment of Leibniz from the perspective of the Critique of Judgment. It is argued that from this vantage point the metaphysics of Leibniz is viewed as fundamental for Kant’s critical project. Moreover, it is argued that it is not until the retrieval of Leibniz’s metaphysics that Kant has a basis for seeking the unity of pure and practical reason.