Karen Vintages: Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir

Continental Philosophy Review -     

分析哲学的兴趣:在哲学与生活之间--从批判理论和生活世界的视角对罗素和维特根斯坦的一个批评解读

分析哲学是有其人文和社会的兴趣与关怀的。本文试图从批判理论的视角．运用哲学与生活世界相关联的解释学方法,分别解读了分析哲学创始人之一的罗素的逻辑分析哲学与他作为一个哲学家的社会批判兴趣之间的关系,以及前期维特根斯坦的逻辑语言分析哲学和后期的日常语言分析哲学与维特根斯坦所属的生活世界的关系。指出分析哲学由于没有建立在对现代性的科学一形而上学思维方式和生活方式的足够反思基础上,所以它对形而上学的批判兴趣最终仍然导致了一种非批判的形而上学。     

Philosophy and Porous Imagination: Between Coral Reefs

abstract

Diving into the life of the Ropical coral reefs and Amadou Hampâté Ba’s reflections on the person conjoin in this work, which is at once philosophical and poetic. The permeable parameters of philosophy, which enable thought to hover between unstable contours rather than to prioritize secure foundations, open to a porous imagination, Racing and reRacing panoramic geographies and contemporary tensions of globalization and development.

Porous imagination slips, glides, between archipelagos of clay rooftops and refuge dotting the Sudan and the smallest of creatures, source of half the earth’s oxygen and base of the global food chain, the plankton. Concomitantly, ideational codes of nation, continent, humanity, nature, land and water interactively sRetch and unwind, shaping a polymeRics of sites and an aesthetics of nourishment.

In an epoch beset by the Reacherous fractals of overpowering domination and luminous liberation, the morphosis of philosophy through Ransdisciplinary and Ranscultural interpretation offers new ways of listening to and retuning songs of sorrow and lament.     

Beauvoir,the Scandal of Science,and Skepticism as Method

In The Ethics of Ambiguity (herein the Ethics), Simone de Beauvoir declares that science condemns itself to failure if it takes as its task the total disclosure of being (Beauvoir 1948/1976, 130). I suggest that the Ethics actually parallels the spirit of some scientific programs, specifically those that utilize positive skepticism as method. I draw out connections among the Ethics, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau‐Ponty 1945/1962) to which Beauvoir's works show much likeness, and Francis Bacon's The New Organon (Bacon 1620/2000), the latter being at once a scientific and a positive skeptical program. Underscoring the ways in which Beauvoir's method of interrogating the being of beings and reality is compatible with some scientific pictures is important. It complicates the usual thought that existentialism is antiscience, problematizes Beauvoir's overly simplistic depiction of science, and nuances her analysis of the existent's experience of itself.     

Between Pragmatism and Critical Theory: Social Philosophy Today

This paper aims at renovating the prospects for social philosophy through a confrontation between pragmatism and critical theory. In particular, it contends that the resources of pragmatism for advancing a project of emancipatory social philosophy have so far been neglected. After contrasting the two major traditions in social philosophy—the analytical and the critical—I proceed to outline the main traits of a pragmatist social philosophy. By inscribing pragmatism within the tradition of social philosophy, my aim is to promote a new understanding of pragmatism as one of the central Euro-American traditions in social and political philosophy, deserving to be on an equal footing with critical theory and political liberalism. And, furthermore, one whose critical and radical force may be of great help in the wake of the dismissal of the metaphysical certainties upon which the critical program of social philosophy had once set its hopes of social emancipation.     

作为实践哲学的解释学——论伽达默尔的实践哲学

伽达默尔的解释学思想和实践哲学具有密切的联系。他受古代实践哲学传统的影响,强调实践哲学和实践的互动关系,这决定了实践哲学不同于理论哲学和制作哲学的特点。这种关系启发了他对解释学特征的看法,以参与理想取代科学的客观性理想。他力图将实践哲学和解释学融合起来,形成解释学的实践哲学。这种实践哲学立足于当代历史处境,反思不同于科学技术理性的实践合理性,批判技术理性、工具理性的统治给人类造成的危机。他的解释学的对话理想对于当代实践问题,如不同文明如何共存,如何对待与传统的关系等,也有重要借鉴意义。     

The Political Philosophy of Intersubjectivity and the Logic of Discourse

This paper is concerned with the competing and complimentary relationships between intersubjectivity and discursive logic. It contends that the ultimate failure of Husserlian phenomenology is a testament to the dilemma of subjectivist philosophy. Indeed, political philosophy requires a paradigm-shift from subjectivity to intersubjectivity. With this in mind, this paper examines the classical encounter between morality and ethical life in connection with discursive ethics. While it argues that Habermas still retains a strong residue of subjectivist philosophy, it attempts to clarify the discursive analysis of Foucault and probes into its applicability to practical philosophy.     

Convergence and Its Limits: Relations Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy

Abstract

In this article, it is argued that a convergence between the (post-)analytic and continental traditions in philosophy is unlikely. Both traditions have fundamentally different approaches to questions concerning consciousness and subjectivity. They also differ in their conception of the role of philosophy, if we are to become autonomous and reflective humans beings.To illustrate this, a comparison is made between the work of the continental philosopher Dieter Henrich and the ‘post-analytic’ philosopher Thomas Nagel, who is often seen as a typical ‘converger‘.     

Palestinian Educational Philosophy Between Past and Present

The article discuses the education issue as a central and decisive factor inshaping, reproducing and representing individual and collective identity.I present the Palestinian case study because the Palestinian people are atthe present in a very critical period of constructing their national identityand education is part of the nation-building project. I have chosen to studytwo periods in the life of Palestinians, 1972 during the revolution and thepresent 1999 the start of the establishment of an independent Palestinianentity and to examine how the economic, social, political conditions etc.affect the formation of the educational philosophy of those periods; aneducational philosophy that will affect the formation of education and theformation of private and collective consciousness.     

Immoral Bodies: The Implicit Association Between Moral Discourse and the Body

Three studies examined the ways in which cognitive appraisals of health and the condition of the body use moral discourse derived from Christianity. Study 1 indicated that people explicitly rated health-related behaviors such as exercising and dieting as more pious and less sinful than their negative counterparts. Studies 2 and 3 elaborated upon these results using the Implicit Association Test, a cognitive procedure for examining automatic (or implicit) associations that may exist outside of conscious awareness. Results indicated that people have a strong implicit association between morality and the condition of the body. Furthermore, this implicit association remained significant once potential overlap with standard evaluative terminology was statistically controlled. These results suggest that people implicitly evaluate the condition of the body using moral discourse, and that the use of such rhetoric reflects the cognitive appraisal of obesity as immoral, rather than as simply negative in a standard sense.     

Open Letter To the Editors and Advisors of Hypatia

A response to the exchange between Esther Frances and Helen Bequaert Holmes on the contents of Hypatia.     

Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction

Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives learning, practising, and performing a wide range of skills. Many of us also have a great amount of control over which skills we learn and develop. From choices as significant as career pursuits to those as minor as how we spend our weeknight leisure time, we exercise a great amount of agency over what we know and what we can do. In this paper we argue, using a framework first developed by Carbonell [2013], that in many real-world circumstances we have moral obligations to develop some skills rather than others.     

A Christian Martyr in Reverse Hypatia: 370 - 415 A. D. A vivid portrait of the life and death of Hypatia as seen through the eyes of a feminist poet and novelist.

The torture killing of the noted phibsopher Hypatia by a mob of Christians in Alexandria in 415 AD marks the end of a time when women were still appreciated for the brain under their hair.     

Love and Entitlement: Sartre and Beauvoir on the Nature of Jealousy

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self‐value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self‐perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love.     

Transversal-Universals in Discourse Ethics: Towards a Reconcilable Ethics Between Universalism and Communitarianism

This paper discusses the possibility of an ethics of difference. It begins with an introduction to current poststructural and critical theories in order to show their significance for transcultural politics and ethics. Its theme is formulated in terms of the debate between the affirmation of ethical cognitivism cast in the form of universalism and the advocacy of moral skepticism in the mode of communitarianism. Distancing itself from the idea of universal morality, this paper attempts to respond to the challenge of both communitarians and deconstructionists in contemporary French poststructuralism. In the end, it argues for transversality in place of universality.