This article explores the question of the cognitivity of the arts. It begins from Kundera’s argument that the novel, originating from Cervantes, offers a response toGalileo and solution to Husserl’s diagnosis of a “crisis of European sciences.” Expanding to the full range of literary arts, we next undertake a re-reading of Aristotle’s Poetics to assess Aristotle’s views of the origins of tragedy and press for a cognitive interpretation of the meaning of catharsis and emotions. Finally, turning to the abstract expressionism of Barnett Newman, we develop a cognitive interpretation of visual arts and the non-figurative aesthetic of the sublime.

This paper poses the question of how to understand Heidegger’s notion of the holy in its relevance to a phenomenology of religion. I show that the holy is connected with Heidegger’s notion of the “whole” as it is analysed in anxiety, boredom, and wonder. Insofar as there is no experience of the whole in our time, there is also no experience of the holy. The notion of the whole and the holy are linked with Heidegger’s analysis of the contemporary era, which is a time in which the gods have fled. Religions have a history because the way that the holy appears (hierophany) is connected with the openness of the situation in which it appears. The notion of the holy is therefore historical because it is taken up into the destiny and historicity of being. As long as there is no hierophany, there is no understanding of the gods in a religion.

Sunaisthesis is a generally overlooked or misconstrued concept central to Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship, and therefore to his entire ethical and politicalproject. As opposed to Stoic uses that presuppose ethical self-relation, in Aristotle’s coinage, sunaisthesis indicates the genesis of a self-relation mediated through the friend. Both the “merged selves” and the “mirrored selves” approaches to Aristotelian friendship distort this peculiar mediation. Through a close reading of relevant texts, I show that sunaisthesis provides the missing link between the De Anima’s non-reflexive perceiving self and Aristotle’s requirement of a robustly reflexive yet socially inculcated ethical self. Sunaisthesis accounts for ethical responsibility while reinforcing rather than denying our embodied and socially embedded nature.

In protreptic passages in three Aristotelian texts (Nicomachean Ethics I.7, Parts of Animals I.5 and Metaphysics A.1–2), there is a close relationship betweenthe use of the language of thaumaston (marvelous or admirable) and that of timion (honorable). These texts exhibit a progressive opening of Aristotle’s students to further horizons of philosophical awareness, within which is embedded a global transformation of the meanings of thaumaston. They mark the itinerary of a spiritual formation in which a new relationship through language to phenomena and to others liberates the student from a psychology of emulation into a discipline of radically free inquiry.

For most readers of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s example of “Ethical Action” is taken from Sophocles’ Antigone. In fact, however, Hegel provides us with a trilogy of tragic examples. The first is Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos; the second, Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes; Antigone is but the third. Further, just as a dramatic trilogy was followed by a satyr play among the ancients, ethical action’s final moment is taken from Aristophanes’ Ekklesiazousai. These four examples do not form a simple series where each equally expresses the truth of ethical action. Rather, they are increasingly adequate to that truth.

This paper examines Bataille’s role in the formation of the question of community, as developed by Nancy and Blanchot. The paper aims to situate the problematic status of Bataille’s influence—as both formative but ultimately insufficient—in his relation to Nietzsche and what Bataille understands as the experience of an irrecoverable loss. What it would mean to share such loss, what is at stake in bringing that experience to articulation, and what happens to those who endeavor to do so constitute the recalcitrant elements in Bataille’s thought, which solicit but cannot sustain a renewal of the question of community.

Is Dasein primordially—that is, at the very core of its being—“at home” or “not at home” in Being? One of the more overlooked or understated issues in Heideggerstudies is how Heidegger, over the course of a lifetime of thinking, transformed his answer to such a question about Dasein’s fundamental relation to Being. In several important texts of the 1920s and 1930s, The History of the Concept of Time, Being andTime, and Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger maintained the position that Dasein is primordially unheimlich, “unsettled,” and thus also unheimisch, “unhomely,” at the core of its being. Yet, we discover a significant turning in his thinking toward home, especially in the early 1940s. The 1942 commentary on Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister” stands out as a bridge text between the early and later Heidegger on this issue; in particular, we find a striking and significant difference in his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone compared with the more well-known reading in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. In the “Ister” commentary, Heidegger engaged both Sophocles and Hölderlin to work out the motif—so prominent in his later work—that human beings are primordially “at home” in Being, the sheltering source and origin of all beings. We also find a further development in his thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. In all, I propose that the “middle” Heidegger of the early 1940s offers the most satisfying phenomenological account of being human.

Focusing on the account of synthesis in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction allows us to see a greater degree of compatibility between the two editions of theCritique of Pure Reason than is sometimes thought. The first Deduction shows that while it emphasizes an account of empirical synthesis it also includes a more properly transcendental account of the synthetic unity required for cognition. The second edition simply focuses on this feature of synthesis to the exclusion of the empirical. The result: a complete account of synthesis with the A-edition starting “bottom up” from sense and the B-edition working “top-down” from thought.

This essay is devoted to an examination of the relationship between truth and laughter in the works of Nietzsche. My central text shall be the much malignedbook four of Zarathustra, with special attention paid to the braying of the ass. Laughter has been traditionally considered irrelevent to serious philosophical content and, at best, a stylistic quirk. I argue that this stems from a basic predjudice that is constitutive of a large part of the Western tradition, namely, the confusion of working hard (a sine qua non for philosophy) with taking oneself seriously. I then analyze laughter in Nietzsche’s works as the voice of truth itself. Laughter is the affirmation of a register of truth as the other beginning that has been lost in every thing that begins. Such an analysis involves a discussion of the nature of both truth and laughter. In so doing, I also distinguish Nietzschean laughter from three representative and seminal accounts of laughter provided by Hobbes, Bergson, and Kant.

This essay takes up the phrase “not now” as a way of trying to explore various aspects of Derrida’s work especially in the contexts of temporality, apocalypse, mourning and spectrality. It focuses on a range of Derrida’s texts, including Of Grammatology, “Ousia and Grammē,” the “Envois” in The Post Card, “No Apocalypse, Not Now,” “The Time is Out of Joint,” and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Attention is also given to the strange workings of “not now” in children’s literature (in particular David McKee’s Not Now, Bernard) and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Unlike all the major thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, but contemporary French philosophers as well, who are indebted to this tradition, Jacques Derrida, it seems, has never explicitly taken up the venerable question of philosophy’s origin in wonder. Is one to conclude from this that Derrida’s philosophy is a philosophy without wonder? Yet, what would it mean to philosophize without wonder? Or, by contrast, is Derrida’s philosophical thought engaged in multiplying wonder with the result that there is in his thought more wonder than one thinks?

Blindness has been a pervasive theme throughout Derrida’s career. But Derrida uses the word “blindness” only once in the title of one his works. This text is, ofcourse, Memoirs of the Blind, Mémoires d’aveugle, an essay he wrote for the catalogue for an exhibition he organized at the Louvre in 1990. I argue that Memoirs of the Blind is more than just a phase in Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Instead, it opens a larger, more ambitious project that we can call “the deconstruction of Christianity.” The article ends with a consideration of a new form of vitalism.

What’s in a name after Derrida? What’s in a name after all? What is a name such that it always already remains, after all is said and done? And who or what is itthat one calls name, names, or by name? Is it possible (for anyone or anything) not to have a name of one’s own? Or to have another? The same as another? Is it possible to call and recall, in the name of memory and remembrance, indifference or convention, one name for another, one name for the other? Can the name be, as it were, avoided? Could anyone respond responsibly yet decline or resist, not so much that (or because) names wound, nor to protect oneself from being called names, but instead neither to call nor respond to the name, as it were, to the very same name one is called? To protest against the name, to refuse the name to the point of abandoning this and that name? To invent oneself beyond the name, beyond all names, in the name of the name? “For in order to live oneself truly,” Derrida writes, “it is necessary to elude the law of the name, the familial law made for survival and constantly recalling me to death.” What is called naming? One could say that the name is, to life, at once insult and injury. Or that calling names—mourning.

Reflecting on the fall or failure of sovereignty, this essay considers Derrida’s recent work under the heading of auto-immunity, and develops some consequences of that work, first of all in the political sphere (especially around democracy), but also some more general consequences around conceptuality itself.

The epigraph from Adieu. À Emmanuel Levinas for this issue is here throughout the linchpin, the Triebfeder or the spring, the feather of impulse, of drive or of desire, out of which this paper attempts to formulate the relation, “in Derrida,” of desire and obligation, sexual pleasure and moral law, Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant, the letters b + l (and thus the words and things called éblouissement [dazzlement], obligation, oblivion, obliquity, bells and cloches, Mallarmean alarms), mourning and melancholy, but and butt, rams (béliers) and rebellion, rebellion and oblivion, good conscience and good unconsciousness, and, ultimately, non-reading and reading.

In this paper, I address the issue of Derrida’s influence on philosophy by focusing on the nature of deconstructive reading as double reading, and tracing thisto the specific reception of Heidegger’s thesis on the history of being. After reviewing some of the dubious and mistaken polemics against Derrida, I go on to describe what I see as the ethical and political richness of Derrida’s work, focusing in particular on the theme of democracy to come.

In the wake of Derrida’s disappearance, this essay asks the question of how to take responsibility, now, for the world one is left to bear. It retraces the path Derrida followed in thinking the event of a coming world and isolates a number of concepts that assumed prominence in his late work: sovereignty, unconditionality, possibility, ipseity. Drawing on the essay “The Reason of the Strongest” in Rogues, it discerns an important distinction made between sovereignty and unconditionality, and situates Derrida’s work as an explicit rethinking of the concept of possibility. It argues that this work offers significant leverage, conceptually and practically, on the legacy of sovereignty as the right of the strongest.