Edith Stein and Simone Weil both trained as Red Cross nurses for wartime service. For both philosophers, the activity of a nurse demands an empathic attention to the afflicted. Stein envisions herself as an attendant nurse in her memoirs; Weil similarly casts herself in a nurse’s role in her proposal for an elite, sacrificial nurses’ corps. This essay examines the practice of wartime nursing as a school for, and an expression of, their complimentary philosophies of human beings seen in their physical, epistemological, and spiritual interrelatedness.

Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of the place of aging and menopause in The Second Sex offers only brief glimmers of older women’s agency tucked in among descriptions of the female elderly frantically, but futilely, searching for meaningful roles. Aging is particularly difficult to think through from an existentialist perspective that emphasizes agency and control over one’s world. Beauvoir’s later work in The Coming of Age offers more carefully detailed perspective for considering aging and the meaning of the sacrifice of life’s projects. The difficulty of maintaining a sense of identity and meaning increases as agency becomes limited and the weight of one’s past life and decisions becomes greater. Moving from The Second Sex to The Coming of Age in dialogue with Beauvoir clarifies when loss of control and agency destroys life’s value, but also when a deliberate choice to sacrifice agency may be meaningful and value-laden.

In this 2017 conversation, Gianni Vattimo discusses with Paolo Diego Bubbio the core themes of his own philosophical journey. Vattimo first comments on the legacy of his mentor Luigi Pareyson and on the differences between Pareyson’s conception of the relation between truth and interpretation and his own. Vattimo and Bubbio then elaborate on the return to Hegel and the possibility of a “hermeneuticized” Hegelianism. The participants also discuss Vattimo’s view of religion and the role that the Christian notion of caritas plays in his “weak hermeneutics.” Finally, Vattimo comments on his recent political writings and on his view of a “hermeneutic communism,” arguing that revolution is possible only as a collective inner transformation. Vattimo concludes by mentioning his recent essays, collected under the title Being and Its Surroundings, in which he presents the radical thesis of Heidegger’s philosophy as a new form of theology.

In this 1996 interview, published here in English translation for the first time, René Girard retraces some of the main aspects of his mimetic theory, such as the mimetic nature of desire and sacrificial scapegoating. In particular, Girard focuses on the similarities and differences between the role of sacrifice in primitive societies and in our contemporary Western society. Girard argues that fashion is essentially mimetic and that nowadays fashions incline towards forms of negative escalation, and finds evidence of such “minimalism” both in art and literature. In Girard’s view, all forms of scapegoating are founded on the crisis of differences, and the victimage mechanism is a fundamental structure of society. Girard concludes by advocating for a renunciation of rivalry, which he argues is one of the fundamental messages of the Christian Gospels.

In this review, Hegel responds to criticisms leveled against his philosophy by the anonymous author of Ueber die Hegelsche Lehre, oder: absolutes Wissen und moderner Pantheismus (1829). Frustrated by his interlocutor’s apparent inability to coherently interpret his work, Hegel scathingly attempts to discredit the character of the text in focus and its author’s critical capacity. He does so by showcasing examples of misrepresentation and misunderstanding in the author’s writing. Hegel contests the increasingly common charge of “pantheism” being leveled against him at that time, wielded here by the anonymous author in a fairly unoriginal comparison between Hegel’s “doctrine” and Spinoza’s system. This review gives insight into the character of early theological responses to Hegel, and highlights Hegel’s polemical tendencies.

Didi-Huberman conceptualizes images as unstable and incongruent events in disagreement with the art historiographic discourses that reduce visuality to the contents of representation. I analyze the link between Freud’s dream-theory and Didi-Huberman’s philosophy of images, focusing on the notion of dreams and images as instance of (up)rising against repression and erasure. Didi-Huberman does not simply “apply” psychoanalysis to disrupt the dominant art historiography; his interpretation of the dream book speaks to his originality as a reader of Freud who brings to the fore the importance of visual categories in psychoanalysis. Viewing images as disunified and “rent” has also political implications. The name of this power in Didi-Huberman’s project is anadyomene (“she that rises”); the imaginal rhythm of pendular dialectical movement between appearance and disappearance. I discuss Didi-Huberman’s analyses of photographs of camps and ghettos, and of uprisings, which highlight the link between the imaginal unconscious and aesthetics of anadyomene, and political subjectivization and resistance.