A critique of Confucius’ philosophy

Throughout the millennia since the composition of the Analects, orthodox scholars have maintained that Confucius faithfully passed down the thought of early eras, particularly those of Yao and Shun: ‘I transmit but do not create ideas.’ This paper shows that Confucius actually subverted the essence of orthodox thought represented mainly by Yao and Shun. His subversion of orthodox thought compels perforce the idea of ‘ren (humanity),’ which concerns itself with the human world, to stand out with the near exclusion of otherworldliness in his teaching. As a result of the misunderstanding of Confucius’ heritage, scholars in the past tended to equate Confucius’ idea of ‘ren’ with specific moral attributes. Again taking exception to the interpretations of bygone eras, this essay demonstrates that humanity in Confucius’ theory signifies a dynamic process rather than a specific attribute or a static rule, changing constantly with different people, different places, and different times.     

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism

Throughout his career, Husserl identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to both the sciences and philosophy. In this paper, I explicate Husserl’s overall diagnosis and critique of naturalism and then examine the specific transcendental aspect of his critique. Husserl agreed with the Neo-Kantians in rejecting naturalism. He has three major critiques of naturalism: First, it (like psychologism and for the same reasons) is ‘countersensical’ in that it denies the very ideal laws that it needs for its own justification. Second, naturalism essentially misconstrues consciousness by treating it as a part of the world. Third, naturalism is the inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the ‘natural attitude’ into what Husserl calls the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This naturalistic attitude ‘reifies’ and it ‘absolutizes’ the world such that it is treated as taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis, however, discloses that the natural attitude is, despite its omnipresence in everyday life, not primary, but in fact is relative to the ‘absolute’ transcendental attitude. The mature Husserl’s critique of naturalism is therefore based on his acceptance of the absolute priority of the transcendental attitude. The paradox remains that we must start from and, in a sense, return to the natural attitude, while, at the same time, restricting this attitude through the on-going transcendental vigilance of the universal epoché.

Literature,Ethics, and Richard Rorty’s Pragmatist Theory of Interpretation

This article considers the validity and strength of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist theory of interpretation in the light of two ethical issues related to literature and interpretation. Rorty’s theory is rejected on two grounds. First, it is argued that his unrestrained account of interpretation is incompatible with the distinctive moral concerns that have been seen to restrict the scope and nature of valid approaches to artworks. The second part of the paper claims that there is no indispensable relationship between supporting Rorty’s pragmatist theory of interpretation and the important place that is attached to literature in the liberal society outlined by him. A reading of Donald Davidson’s texts on literary language and interpretation implies that an intentionalist theory of interpretation can accommodate those features that Rorty values in literature as well.

Hegel’s political philosophy and the social imaginary of early Russian realism

This article considers aspects of the social imaginary underlying early Russian realist thought and narrative by exploring two canonical novels from the 1840s, Ivan Gon?arov’s Obyknovennaja istorija and Aleksandr Gercen’s Kto vinovat?, in light of Vissarion Belinskij’s activist reception of Hegel’s political philosophy. The Russian texts are read symptomatically against their western counterparts as illustrating the intriguing transformations that dominant European models of narrative and sociality undergo as they migrate to Russia.     

The invisibility of richness: A critique of Vice’s ‘strange place’

Abstract

This article builds on Samantha Vice’s argument on the problem of whiteness in contemporary South Africa. I will explore the thesis of invisibility regarding whiteness and argue for its relevance to the rich per se. This thesis demonstrates how white privilege and affluence, despite being glaringly visible in a concrete sense, is rendered invisible together with the mostly black poverty by which it is contrasted. The invisibility of whiteness translates and flows into the so-called ‘invisibility of richness’, which involves anyone who is economically affluent in this country and has the same effect of rendering poverty invisible. The massive and ever-growing divide between rich and poor means that both have fundamentally incommensurate experiences of life in this country, which is why post-apartheid South Africa is such a strange place to live in for all of its inhabitants. In the latter part of the article, a suggestion will be made about what the appropriate response to the injustices of this strange place might look like for whites.     

Frege’s philosophy of geometry

Synthese - In this paper, I critically discuss Frege’s philosophy of geometry with special emphasis on his position in The Foundations of Arithmetic of 1884. In Sect. 2, I argue that...     

Zhuangzi’s philosophy of thing

It is usually believed that the concept of ‘qiwu 齊物’ in the Zhuangzi means ‘equalizing things’. This reading of the Zhuangzi, however, presupposes that things are originally separated and exist independently. The equality of things is just a mental construct in a specific state of mind. In this paper, we will argue that this reading does not stand; what Zhuangzi does in the ‘Qiwulun 齊物論’is to examine how myriad things are created from the original oneness. According to Zhuangzi’s philosophy of thing, things are created by objectification through fact and value imposing. Oneness is therefore not a mere perspective but the condition for things being objectified. This understanding of the things’ being is comparable to Heidegger’s classification of thing and equipment, but it differs from Heidegger by its special implication on the Daoist liberation.     

Cassirer’s critique of culture

My purpose in this paper is to look at Cassirer’s relation to critical philosophy from a new perspective. Most discussions concerning Cassirer’s Kantianism have so far centered on his relation to neo-Kantianism and the Marburg school. My focus will not be on neo-Kantianism but on Cassirer’s notion of a “critique of culture.” In an often cited paragraph from the introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer says that his aim is to broaden Kant’s critical approach to all various forms of culture, to language as well as myth and art, and thus to transform the “critique of reason” into the “critique of culture.” I will explore Cassirer’s concept of the “critique of culture” and suggest that it can best be understood by placing it in the context of early twentieth century German philosophy. More precisely, I will aim to show that Cassirer’s critique can be seen as an effort to find a middle path between Lebensphilosophie and the positivism of the Vienna Circle.     

The limits of definition: Gadamer’s critique of Aristotle’s ethics

ABSTRACT

There is a recent scholarly trend drawing similarities between Aristotle’s conceptions of ethics and demonstrative science. One such similarity has become widely and rightly recognized: for Aristotle both ethics and demonstrative science seek essential definitions of phenomena. The task of the paper is to show that German philosopher and classicist Hans-Georg Gadamer not only prefigured this interpretative trend, he also identified a problematic feature of Aristotle’s method so construed. The problematic feature is semantic. For Aristotle essential definitions must consist of univocal terms, but such univocity cannot be maintained if the definienda and definientes are concepts to be usefully employed in everyday ethical judgements. Gadamer therefore points out a problematic tension in Aristotle’s ethics. On the one hand, ethical inquiry should have practical application, but, on the other hand, the semantic assumptions underlying inquiry imply that it cannot.     

On Simmel’s conception of philosophy

Over the past few decades, the work of Georg Simmel (1858–1918) has again become of interest. Its reception, however, has been fairly one-sided and selective, mostly because Simmel’s philosophy has been bypassed in favor of his sociological contributions. This article examines Simmel’s explicit reflections on the nature of philosophy. Simmel defines philosophy through three aspects which, according to him, are common to all philosophical schools. First, philosophical reasoning implies the effort to think without preconditions. Second, Simmel maintains that in contrast to other sciences, only philosophy is oriented toward constructing a general view of the world. Third, Simmel claims that philosophical work worthy of the name creates a sphere of a typical way of being in relation to world, a third sphere that is between the personal and the objective. According to Simmel, what has made philosophy’s eminent figures great is that they have advanced a type of thinking and developed it into a particularly interesting form, and this type can still correspond with the way we experience the world. It is significant that these three aspects through which Simmel defines philosophical activity emphasize the forms of questioning, not the contents or objects of thought. Still, he thinks that an interaction with concrete examples is always required in order to make philosophy a meaningful activity. This stance is reflected in the wide variety of topics studied by Simmel himself. In his last works Simmel began to emphasize another aspect of philosophy, its nature as a living movement of thought related to fundamental human limitedness: just as life itself ceaselessly reaches beyond its present form, so philosophy constantly strives to overcome the preconditions of thinking.

A critique of Thad Metz’s African theory of moral status

Thad Metz defends what he considers to be a novel theory of moral status, i.e. an account about what beings are owed direct duties in virtue of their moral significance. Metz claims that his account is African, it is plausible and that it is worth taking seriously like other competing accounts in the Western philosophical tradition. In this article, I give four reasons why we should doubt, if not reject, these claims of plausibility. Firstly, I show how a theory that accounts for moral status by relying solely on some facet of human nature ultimately fails to grant intrinsic value to non-human components, and as such it will always prefer human interests over those of nonhuman components, and further it won’t have a moral-theoretical basis to assign intrinsic value to non-human components. Secondly, I hope to demonstrate that this theory will not be able to account for the moral status of Martians and in turn show that it does not secure the standing of animals from such beings. I also argue that his account does not give credible evidence for the intuition that severely injured human persons have greater moral status than animals with similar internal properties. Finally, I briefly indicate that this theory does not have the corpus to explain our duties to people who have died, or at least, their bodies.     

Technology, knowledge, governance: The political relevance of Husserl’s critique of the epistemic effects of formalization

This paper explores the political import of Husserl’s critical discussion of the epistemic effects of the formalization of rational thinking. More specifically, it argues that this discussion is of direct relevance to make sense of the pervasive processes of ‘technization’, that is, of a mechanistic and superficial generation and use of knowledge, to be observed in current contexts of governance. Building upon Husserl’s understanding of formalization as a symbolic technique for abstraction in the thinking with and about numbers, I argue that processes of technization, while being necessary and legitimate procedures for the reduction of complexities, also may give rise to politically unresponsive and ultimately dysfunctional ‘economies of thinking.’ This paper is structured in three parts. In the first part I outline Husserl’s account of the formalization and technization of thought and knowledge. In the second part I make my case for the political import of this account, departing in this context from positions that (a) regard Husserl’s discussions of formalization and its effects as merely epistemological, or that (b) try to mobilize Husserl for a one-sided critique of instrumental reason. In the final part I address a major shortcoming of Husserl’s account, namely its neglect of the concrete and historically evolving technological infrastructures of processes of formalization/technization.     

On morality of speech: Cavell’s critique of Derrida

This article tries to bring out the implication of Cavell’s critical comments on Derrida, clustered around Cavell’s charge that deconstruction entails a flight from the ordinary. Cavell’s and Derrida’s different readings of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy provide a common ground for elaborating their respective positions. Their writings are at once the closest but also the most divergent when addressing the moral implication of speech, or more precisely, when addressing their understanding of responsibility and voice. Employing Derrida’s so-called ‘double reading’ as a leitmotif will not only shed light on the moral dimension of deconstruction, but also bring the central target of Cavell’s critique into the open.     

Wittgenstein’s influence on Austin’s philosophy of language

Many philosophers have assumed, without argument, that Wittgenstein influenced Austin. More often, however, this is vehemently denied, especially by those who knew Austin personally. We compile and assess the currently available evidence for Wittgenstein’s influence on Austin’s philosophy of language. Surprisingly, this has not been done before in any detail. On the basis of both textual and circumstantial evidence we show that Austin’s work demonstrates substantial engagement with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. In particular, Austin’s 1940 paper, ‘The Meaning of a Word’, should be construed as a direct response to and development of ideas he encountered in Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. Moreover, we argue that Austin’s mature speech-act theory in How to Do Things with Words was also significantly influenced by Wittgenstein.     

Everything is under control: Buber’s critique of Heidegger’s magic

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion - As part of a religiously-oriented analysis, Martin Buber associates Martin Heidegger’s later philosophy with magic. The present article is...     

A Book Review of Richard Easterlin’s An Economist’s Lessons on Happiness

Journal of Happiness Studies -