In the following essay I explore the hermeneutical significance of Gadamer’s writings on the relational, and thus ethical, components of understanding. First, I look at his discussion in Truth and Method of the significance of the “I-Thou” relation for interpretation. I then turn to his 1985 essay on Aristotle’s notion of friendship, “Friendship and Self-Knowledge: Reflections on the Role of Friendship in Greek Ethics.” My interest is to think about the implications of these writings for his theory of hermeneutics in general. I conclude that both motifs indicate the importance of openness to the other that leads to a deeper realization of our solidarity with the other.

Even if historiography had the aim to be more elevated than history, it never really succeeded in finding more order in the historical events than the order which the point of view of common sense could see in them. In a certain sense historical writing remained obvious, that is, common sense, just like the flowing of the events it narrated. On the contrary, philosophy always claimed to give an account of human reality which was intended to be superior to human reality. That’s the reason why philosophy never holds history in high esteem.

The conception of time presented in Aristotle’s Physics IV has been supremely influential in the philosophical tradition. However, I shall argue that it proves to be inadequate to resolve a question arising from Aristotle’s own ethics; namely, the relation of ethical action to eudaimonia. As one explores this issue, a sense of time begins to emerge that calls for a reconsideration of the concepts of magnitude or dimension (megethos) and continuity (suneches) that determine the account of time found in Physics IV. This paper sets out the case for such a reconsideration and outlines the impact that it may have on the way we understand the temporal characteristics of eudaimonia.

Prevailing philosophical genealogies of modernity trace its origin to Descartes’s metaphysics of representation. This is true of both Hegel and Heidegger. By contrast, Reiner Schürmann’s Broken Hegemonies links modernity to the theological thinking of MartinLuther. I ask what is at stake philosophically in this difference. What Schürmann’s reading shows is that, under the figure of a passive transcendentalism, Luther inaugurates the epoch in which self-consciousness reigns as an ultimate principle. The broader importanceof Schürmann’s reading is to identify a “recessed” and “obedient” side of modernity—a side tragically and covertly linked to its more familiar self-assertive side. Schürmann’s resituating of modernity allows a crucial corrective to many contemporary efforts at a critiqueof the modern. In particular, it suggests that to restrict one’s critique of modernity to the critique of representational or egological consciousness (as happens for example in Heidegger, Levinas and Marion) is to run the risk of a repetition of its obedient, recessed side.

When summarizing the findings of his 1896 Matter and Memory, Bergson claims: “That every reality has . . . a relation with consciousness—this is what we concede to idealism.” Yet Bergson’s 1896 text presents the theory of “pure perception,” which, since it accounts for perception according to the brain’s mechanical transmissions, apparently leaves no room for subjective consciousness. Bergson’s theory of pure perception would appear to render his idealistic concession absurd. In this paper, I attempt to defend Bergson’s idealistic concession. I argue that Bergson’s account of cerebral transmissions at the level of pure perception necessarily entails a theory of temporality, an appeal to a theory of time-consciousness that justifies his idealistic concession.

There are two antithetical classes of Paradoxes, The Runner and the Stadium, impregnated with infinite divisibility, which show that motion conflicts with the world, and which I call Static. And the Arrow, impregnated with nothing, which shows that motion conflicts with itself, and which I call Dynamic. The Arrow is stationary, because it cannot move at a point; or move, and be at more points than one at the same time, so being where it is not. Despite their contrast, however, both groups can be evaded, if motion is conducted over discrete points: (a) If no two points touch, there will be a step ahead, for there will now be nextness. And (b) if they do not touch, “here” and “there” (=not–here) will no longer be sufficiently proximal to have the body be where it is not. They will be separate. So the body is only where it is. Hence, both groups, despite their contrast, presuppose, each in its own way, the infinite proximity of any point with anynext. But the Dynamic group cannot survive what it needs. Suppose that “here” and “not–here” (i.e., “there”), are not discrete but infinitely proximal. Then Rest also would be self-contradictory. And it gets worse. For it takes two to make a contradiction, in this case, “here,” “not–here,” and their proximity. But, with regard to conditions of infinite proximity, “in the end there can be only one” (point), and hence no contradiction in the first place. The Dynamic paradoxes rest on a premise with which they are inconsistent. They need two of this, of which, in a different but just as equally vital connection, there can be only one. On the force of this remark, the Dynamic paradoxes, initially the stronger of the lot, actually turn out to be the weaker.

A gradual intertwinement of beauty and concept can be seen to determine, in no small measure, the direction of the first half of the Critique of Judgment. This paper considers the decisive influence of this intertwinement on the work of Hölderlin. Links are forged between the productive indeterminacy of the “aesthetic ideas” and the development of Hölderlin’s poetics, particularly in regard to his understanding of the relation between the natural world and its naming. The focus of attention will be on certain passages of the novel Hyperion, and later, too, on the emergence of the figure of Empedocles.

The analytic method by which Descartes discovered the first principle of his philosophy—cogito, ergo sum—is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and nonlogical inference. It differs markedly from inductive as well as deductive procedures, but also from older models of the direct noetic apprehension of first principles, notably those of Plato and Aristotle. However, a critical examination of Descartes’s argument for the innateness of the idea of God shows that there are serious obstacles in the way of his employment of the analytic method of discovery to reach this or any other conclusion about ideas that do not fall within the scope of ordinary human experience.

Herbert Marcuse is a thinker associated with one of the most radical and totalising critiques of modernity ever produced. Marcuse maintains that contemporary capitalist society is a one-dimensional prison that is capable of perpetuating itself by incorporating any criticism into its logic. Despite this totalisation, Marcuse insists that the realm of aesthetics is capable of escaping the logic of modern capitalism and establishing an alternative society that is grounded in an alternative non-repressive logic. However, it is argued that not only does Marcuse ground this transformation in a specific economic formation thereby ensuring that it is economics not aestheticsthat grounds this social transformation, but his argument is based on a simplistic understanding of the relation between the aesthetic as a means of affecting individual transformation and the aesthetic affecting social transformation.

In this paper I explore the connections between shame and embodiment in Euripides’s play Helen. The paper focuses on the play’s underlying theme of sexual violence and rape, and on the descriptions of metamorphoses that the mythological female victims often undergo in the face of rape. In my analysis on shame and embodiment I apply two insights from Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the phenomenon of victim shame in The Remnants of Auschwitz. These are, first, the definition according to which shame is “to be consigned to what cannot be assumed”—that is, to be consigned to one’s self, being and physical body—and second, the claim that in shame one is affected by one’s own (bodily) passivity. Building on these definitions, I explore the intimate connection between shame and embodiment at work in Helen. As a result we can see how the female metamorphoses before or after sexual violence—in Euripides’s play and in Greek mythology in general—can be read in terms of victim shame. Furthermore, I suggest that this shame of the victims of sexual violence originates from the very nature of the crime itself: from being forced to experience the body’s abject passivity.

This essay seeks to understand Gorgias’ reflections upon language and perception in the Encomium of Helen through the threefold vocabularies of medicine, enchantment, and oratory that were often taken together in the fifth century. I demonstrate that the two modes of sorcery to which Gorgias refers have to do with language and its effect on opinion, on the one hand, and perception and its effect upon one’s affective bearing, on the other. Both effects, I claim, are grasped through their forceful means of physically impressing and deforming the soul such that its reliance upon memory and habitual forms of dwelling in the world are subject to oblivion. Further, such conceptual and practical unmooring can be understood as forms of disease that rob an individual of her agency, either temporarily or permanently, and therefore reflect the problematic status of language in early democratic Greece.

Double speak refers to two parallel devices that are often deployed together: simple repetition, which is frequently used as both emphasis and as an indicator of double speak, and ambiguous syntax such that the phrase uttered may have multiple meanings at once. This paper explores the use of double speak in early Ancient Greek poetic texts, beginning with Homer and tracing its use through the texts of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles. Double speak seems to be employed in order to mediate between mortal and divine, creating a double audience: a god or goddess is capable of speaking in two registers at once, so a mortal listening will infer one meaning, while from the perspective of the god or goddess speaking, the statement will have another meaning supplemental to the first. This paper demonstrates the manner in which these Presocratic thinkers employ double speak as a means of disrupting human binary habits of thinking and creating a “quantum awareness” where the subject is able to perceive the relationships and paradoxes that exist between the knower and the seeming objects of knowledge, as well as the habits of thinking and perceiving that nourish the repetition and growth of those patterns.

Through a study of nature and paternal power, this paper sheds light on the neglected theme of the relation between language and justice in Plato’s Cratylus. The dialogue inquires after the correctness of names, and it turns out that no lineage leads us back to a natural ground of names. Every lineage breaks; nature is always disrupted by the monstrous. It does not follow, however, that names are mere conventions without significance: on the contrary, naming is best understood as a prayer to and for the just. The Cratylus reveals the insufficiency of language not to lead us to despair but to call us to the humility and the hope in which we must pray for justice.

In this essay, I argue that Socrates adopts a philosophical stance of indifference that is particularly unique to the Protagoras. The peculiarity stems from Socrates’s (or perhaps Plato’s) significant interest in dealing with Protagoras as a certain kind of thinker rather than merely a sophist in general. The stance of indifference is shown to be a dramatic reaction to the attitude sophists like Protagoras take toward philosophical problems, specifically, thinkers who understand solutions to philosophical problems as commodities. The stance is shown to anticipate certain Academic skeptical methods, to embolden Socratic ignorance, and shore up defenses against the sophistic insecurity of needing to succeed for the sake of success. This stance is elaborated upon in three specific aspects of Socrates’s dramatic portrayal culminating in a re-reading of the poem of Simonides and the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus. I resist readings that try to see the Protagoras as a simple takedown of sophistry or as a catalog of platonic doctrine, and instead treat Protagoras as a “philosopher in decline,” a significantly dangerous type of thinker who is savvy enough to repurpose genuine insight for the sake of easy answers to immensely difficult problems.

The Protagoras exhibits several traits of metatheatrical comedy. Through the use of role-playing and intertextual reference, I argue that the Protagoras exhibits metatheatrical comedy which Socrates uses to expose the pretension at the heart of philosophical dialogue itself. In this way, Socrates pulls back the curtain of philosophical dialogue to expose the theatricality of such dialogue and, in doing so, offers the audience a unique opportunity to laugh at ourselves.

Readings of Plato’s Ion are usually guided by one of two broad assumptions about the nature of the text. The Romantic school sees the dialogue as making explicit the idea of Genius, and of the artist as a privileged seer of hidden truths. The Rationalist tendency sees the dialogue as a Socratic attack on poetry, of a piece with other dialogues—most notably, the Republic—that also critique the art. In this paper, I claim that applying a phenomenological method to the dialogue uncovers a way beyond the impasse between these two schools. Specifically, I argue that we must turn our attention away from the question of whether poetry is a human art or divinely inspired, and toward the phenomenon at the heart of the dialogue, which is poetry itself, or better put, the creative act that generates poetic language. Moreover, the Ion itself calls for such a reading.

Scholars often take purification (κάθαρσις) to be a concept that persists the same throughout Plato’s dialogues. Generally, they take it to mean the separation of the soul from the body, picking up on Socrates’s account at Phaedo 67c–d. I do not find that this account of purification endures throughout the dialogues. In this paper, I argue that in Symposium Diotima describes purification differently. I argue that her account of purification emphasizes preparedness for encountering the forms, not the eradication of the corporeal. I present this account in three steps. First, I discuss Diotima’s lower and higher mysteries, focusing on the lower mysteries. Next, I examine Diotima’s use of the Eleusinian mysteries as an analogy for her own mysteries. Here, I overview the historical rites at Agrai and the Eleusinian Mysteria. I argue that, mirroring the Agrai rites, Diotima’s lower mysteries are purificatory, and therefore provide an account of purification. Finally, I explain the account of purification Diotima presents in the lower mysteries as the desire to possess the deathless deathlessly. Diotima’s account of purification is importantly distinct from the Phaedo account. In the former, the separation of the soul from the body is in no way important for purification. We must confront the discrepancies between these accounts and recognize that purification is not a doctrine that persists throughout the dialogues.

This paper begins with a brief examination of the contemporary American political landscape.  I describe three recent events that illustrate how attempts to control the narrative about events that transpired threaten to undermine our shared reality.  I then turn to Book I  of Plato’s Republic to explore the potentially tyrannizing effect of  Socrates’s narrative voice.  I focus on his descriptions of Glaucon, Polemarchus and his slave, and Thrasymachus to show how Plato presents Socrates’s narrative activity as a process that controls how the auditor  understands the events that follow.  I then turn to an alternate understanding of  Socratic narrative which extols its philosophically and politically liberatory possibilities.  I use  my own previous work on  Socratic narrative,  Jill Frank’s  Poetic Justice,  and Rebecca’s LeMoine’s Plato’s Cave  as three examples that emphasize the more positive dimensions of  Socratic narrative. Finally, I  end with a brief exploration of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters, and bell hooks’ works on pedagogy to argue for the possibility a Socratically-informed public space for political discourse.