Posing the question of beauty anew, Gadamer pursues a hermeneutic remembrance of the original relation of beauty and truth forgotten by modern aesthetics. For Gadamer, the essential relation of kalos and aletheia is preserved, above all, in Plato. This essay elaborates his retrieval of Plato, re-thinking the splendor of beauty and the illumination of truth from being as an event of coming-to-presence. After discussing his engagement with Heidegger the essay reconstructs Gadamer’s interpretative argument, showing how he interprets the transcendence, radiance, and measure that characterize Plato’s idea of the beautiful as structural features of being as an event of truth.

In the Platonic dialogues, the enigmatic concept of the good tends to retreat at those very moments when it is supposed to show itself. This paper examines the relation between the beautiful and the good as the good takes refuge in the beautiful. Hans-Georg Gadamer holds a particular interest in these retreats since they show that there is actually an emphasis on appearances and the human good in Plato. In contrast, Emmanuel Levinas is critical of the primacy of vision and the beautiful from an ethical perspective. The relevant passages in the dialogues will be interpreted with respect to this divergence.

Is Heidegger’s theory of the era of technology a sufficent hermeneutics of contemporary globalization? It remains invaluable because it understands technology in terms of transcendence, and transcencence in terms of being-in-the-world. But should it nevertheless be revised in the context of contemporary social and technological environment? This article shows firstly how Heidegger’s general idea of being-in-the-world is specified in his theory of technology, and how technology reduces man and nature into “natural resources” and being into elemental techno-nature. Secondly, the article presents two types of critique to Heidegger’s idea: on the one hand, Ihde, Latour and Stiegler question Heidegger’s understanding of technology as a total system; on the other hand, Foucault and Eldred question Heidegger’s understanding of technology independently of social and economical structures. The article suggests that re-interpreted through these critiques, the theory of technology gives a good basis for an ontology of contemporary “uprooted” existence.

Hobbes rejects the Aristotelian political animal, a move that enables a malleable psychology in which we are driven by our passions and responses to external objects. Our psychology is accordingly overdetermined by our socio-cultural environment, and managing that environment becomes a central task of the state. A particular problem is what I call the “ontological illusion,” the constitutive human tendency to ontologize products of the imagination. I argue that Hobbes’s strategies for managing the ontological illusion govern part four of Leviathan. Those chapters are intended to convince elites that crediting ontological illusions in policy is disastrous, as his discussion of demonology and its thinly veiled references to witchcraft persecutions readily illustrates.

Throughout the sources that have come down to us from the Roman period of the Stoic school, we find an important number of therapeutical practices that can be clearly linked to other schools (such as Pythagoreanism, Platonism, Cynicism or Epicureanism) and can be consequently seen to constitute (part of) the common ground that enables the idea that there is a general Hellenistic approach to the problem of philosophy as therapy. I will argue that a subset of those strategies, which I will refer to as repetition, ascetic and visualization practices, can be better understood as part of an approach to the problem of comprehension, a new approach which, contrary to what may seem at first glance, is fully consistent with the intellectualist conception of human agency defended by both Early and Roman Stoics. I will further suggest that this new approach to the notion of comprehension may be interpreted as an expression of dissatisfaction with the Early Stoic excessively abstract approach to the problem of knowledge.

In this essay, I will explore the much neglected relationship between Heidegger and Spinoza—and thus of Heidegger and the modern sense of freedom. The free man, for Spinoza, is one who has not only cultivated the stronger active emotion of acquiescence to the univocal chorus of necessity, but has also learned to disengage external factors which are coincident with such passive emotions—to organise an ‘order of encounters’ as Deleuze describes in his Expressionism. Heidegger, on the contrary, who undertakes a meditation upon ‘Spinozism’ in the context of his 1936 lecture course, Schelling’s Treatise on Freedom, would seem to take issue with Spinoza in his own contention that the one who faces his or her ownmost possibility of death without evasion, is the one who is most free—or, who will have found him or herself in a moment that discloses the necessity of one’s own singular freedom. It will be in the context of this divergence between substance and event that I will argue that Spinoza’s notion of freedom as it consists in the acquiescence to substance is a falsification of human existence for the sake of a hedonistic escapism.

I argue in this paper that some of the most basic commitments of Kantian ethics can be understood as grounded in the dynamic of sense that Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes in his Phenomenology of Perception. Specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account supports the importance of universalizability as a test for the moral permissibility of particular acts as well as the idea that the binding character of the moral law is given as something like a fact of reason. But I also argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account of reversibility suggests an important dimension of moral experience that is given in the experience of contact and that is underthematized in moral philosophies like Kant’s that emphasize the role of universalizability.

The article examines the role of the Last Judgment in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. It argues that the central ontological structure of Agamben’s early thought is that of the perpetually occurring origin. The figure of the perpetual final judgment captures precisely this ontological structure. In order to explicate this figure, the article examines Agamben’s relation to the Heideggerian project of the “destruction of judgment” in two steps. First, it examines the way Agamben turns the methodology of “destruction” into the project of “decreation.” Second, it examines the Agambenian critique of judgment in terms of the perpetually occurring Last Judgment. The essay concludes with a brief examination of the Homo Sacer project and argues that “bare life” should be understood as life lived under this perpetual final judgment.

This paper is an elaboration of Paul de Man’s critique, in “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin,” of Martin Heidegger’s commentary on Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem, “As when on a holiday…” I show that de Man’s critique can be expanded into a critique of a type of testimony that Heidegger ascribes to Hölderlin’s poem. Heidegger ascribes to Hölderlin’s poem what I call “infinite testimony,” but, thereby, suppresses in the poem another type of testimony—what I call “finite testimony. This suppression is most in evidence in Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s reference to the myth of Semele, as well as in Heidegger’s excision, in the version of the poem that he printed in the commentary, of the concluding lines of the poem. Additionally, I discuss the political implications of Heidegger’s suppression of the finite testimony depicted in “As when on a holiday . . .”

This essay examines the concept of criticism in the early works of Walter Benjamin. Critique is for Benjamin an attitude toward objectivity that treats it as a medium of reflection, and embodies a politics of ‘sobriety.’ This critical posture provides the early Benjamin with an original method of critiquing capitalism as a form of religion. Capitalist religion is characterized by the proliferation of ‘debt’ that robs the subject of the capacity for critical experience. Art critique and the critique of capitalism are two valences of the concept of critique: positive (or immanent) critique, and negative (or redemptive) critique.

This article explores a new reading of an important section of Part II of Spinoza’s Ethics. It recognizes that Spinoza actually differentiates between the human mind conceived from the viewpoint of its cause and the human mind conceived from the viewpoint of its nature. It shows, most importantly, that Spinoza assigns different objects to those ‘minds’. Consequently they represent different knowledge of the body. It will appear that the human mind in respect of its cause represents non-conscious knowledge of the human body and that the human mind in respect of its nature represents conscious knowledge of the human body. It will be shown that knowledge of the inner processes of the human body and of the body per se belongs to the domain of non-conscious knowledge. The same conclusion will be obtained in an analysis that starts from the distinction between the formal and the objective being of the human mind.

At Discorsi II.20, Machiavelli defines auxiliary arms as those, “whom a prince or a republic send captained and already paid for, for your aid.” My contention is that Machiavelli’s treatment of auxiliary arms is much more nuanced than it may seem at first glance. Throughout his works, Machiavelli articulates this type of force from the standpoint of the prince but also, surprisingly, from the standpoint of the people. In their princely employment, auxiliary arms act instrumentally as means for the projection of power. However, analyzed from the standpoint of the people, auxiliary force exposes the projects of the state to the radically aleatory. Acknowledging the aspectival function played by the definition of auxiliaries in Machiavelli’s texts offers a new vantage point for re-reading Machiavelli on the nature of authority, power and the conflict of the umori.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy proved more palpable to artists of the nineteenth century than to philosophers as such (with the exception of Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein). Ironically, Schopenhauer’s aesthetical theory is particularly paradoxical on a variety of fronts. One troubling paradox is how Schopenhauer subscribes both to the elitist nature of the genius artist and a naturalist metaphysics. How can a singular being have radically distinct abilities if s/he cannot principally differ from the rest of existence? I address this paradox in this essay and provide a solution by focusing on a certain evolution in Schopenhauer’s philosophical development.

In this article I analyze the themes of temporality and alterity as they were developed over the first three of Descartes’s Meditations. I discuss the temporality of the evil deceiver, as well as the implicit theory of time and time-consciousness in the Second Meditation. I show that this theory of time is purely subjective, continuous, pre-numerical, and independent of local motion and the body, thus making it independent of Aristotle’s theory of time. I then explain God’s continuous creation of time and the discontinuous theory of time Descartes develops in the Third Meditation. Moreover, I show that there is an ontological and temporal priority of the Other over the self, and that temporal self-consciousness is necessarily also consciousness of God, his continuous creation of time, time itself, and other finite substances.

This paper formulates Schopenhauer’s account of the development of the individual, with emphasis on the drive towards discerning truth about the essence of the world, be it through philosophy, religion, or the natural sciences, and the concomitant search for consolation in the face of the pessimistic truths about human existence. In this regard, the paper analyses the often largely ignored passages ‘On Man’s Need for Metaphysics’ and ‘On the Different Periods of Life,’ in order to reflect upon how he views the cognitive and therapeutic needs that all individuals feel throughout their lives, and how these can evolve through the different stages of life, from childhood, through maturity, to old age. Such an account can help fill out our understanding not only of various parts of Schopenhauer’s system, but also of the wider therapeutic aims of his philosophy.

This essay draws on texts previously untranslated into English, and in particular Heidegger’s brilliant 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus, to show how Heidegger understood kosmos as an early Greek name for Being itself (Sein selbst). The contemporary scholarship has altogether missed the significant role that this Greek Ur-word plays in his later thinking. The “gleaming,” “adorning” kosmos—which the later Heidegger understood to be “world” (Welt) in the fullest and richest sense—is not in the first place any kind of transcendental-phenomenological “projection” of the human being; rather, it is the resplendence of the “ever-living” Being-unfolding-way itself from out of which both the gods and human beings come to pass and pass away. The independence of kosmos/Being itself in relation to the human being is highlighted. An Ode by Pindar and a painting by Andrew Wyeth are also considered.

Throughout his career, Immanuel Kant objects that Leibniz and Wolff make the distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition into a “merely logical” distinction. Although it is not clear that anyone in the Leibnizian-Wolffian tradition actually holds this view, Kant’s objection helps to define the “real” distinction between sensible and intellectual cognition that he defends in his inaugural dissertation in 1770. Kant raises the same objection against Leibniz and Wolff in the Critique of Pure Reason, but replaces the “real” distinction he defends in his inaugural dissertation with a new “transcendental” distinction between intuitions and concepts. This paper examines Kant’s objection to Leibniz and Wolff and the different alternatives he proposes, in order to highlight an important element in the development of his critical philosophy.

Spinoza recognizes that in a democracy, ideals of freedom and equality shape our thoughts about ourselves as human beings. This paper examines Spinoza’s concept of equality in the Theological-Political Treatise, and considers its complexi­ties and ambiguities in light of his theories of freedom and democracy there and in the Ethics. Because Spinoza takes human beings to have unequal power, he does not believe we are naturally or intrinsically equal. Nor does he think equality is good in itself. Equality is good to the extent that it promotes human flourishing. The kind of equality Spinoza endorses is economic equality, which encourages human beings to become more powerful, virtuous, and free. I demonstrate this with reference to Spinoza’s discussion of the state of nature, democracy, and the Hebrew state in the Theological-Political Treatise and his remarks on charity, economic exchange, and their associated affects in the Ethics.