The disclosure of a metaphysical horizon,or how to escape dialectics

Abstract

In a footnote to The Inoperative Community French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy wonders how to escape Hegelian dialectics. Because Nancy in his later work often returns to this attempt of a ‘disclosure of our metaphysical horizon’, we not only consider this note as a crucial one in his attempt to ‘disclose’ our metaphysical horizon; on top of that, we think this note is really worthwhile considering for our philosophical era in general: how to think after the so called ‘end of metaphysics’? Nancy’s work is an explicit confrontation with this horizon. Therefore, in this paper we prefer to reconstruct his line of thought in this, from the influence of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, over Friedrich Hegel up to Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. We focus on the way attempts for the disclosure of our metaphysical horizon out from the problem of community, one of the central topics in his work. We conclude with a discussion why Nancy’s ontological framework has the potential to break up the metaphysical horizon of our philosophical era.     

Marx,Engels, and dialectics

Studies in East European Thought -     

Psychoanalysis and theology: Two dialectics

In the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, health means something roughly correlative to salvation in the vocabulary of theology. Both health and salvation assume some manner of change from a previous pathological or doomed state. Against this background this paper seeks to delineate two different possible models of change: One in which realityper se is changed as opposed to one in which theperception of reality is changed. In theology, the former can be represented by Paul and the latter by John. In psychoanalysis, Freud represented each point of view in his structural and topographical paradigms respectively. In contemporary psychoanalytical therapy, Otto Kernberg represents the former and Jacques Lacan the latter.He maintains a private practice of psychotherapy at the Parkwood mental Health Center. This paper is based on a presentation to the Faculty Reseacrh Forum of Candler School of Theology. For their editorial assistance, the author is grateful to jean E. Levenson, M.Div., and David M. Moss, Ph.D.     

Minding the gap between positivism and hermeneutics in psychoanalytic research

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Modern dialectics in social psychology: A reappraisal

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Darwinism and positivism as methodological influences on the development of psychology

The methodological significance of evolutionary theory for psychology may be distinguished from its substantive or theoretical significance. The methodological significance was that evolutionary theory broadened the current conceptions of scientific method and rendered them relatively independent of physics. It thereby made the application of the “scientific method” to psychology much more feasible than it had been previously, and thus established the possibility of a wide-ranging scientific psychology for the first time. The methodological eclecticism that made scientific psychology possible did not, however, remain a feature of psychology for very long. Psychology's methodology rapidly became restricted and codified through the influence of, and in imitation of, the rigorously positivistic orientation of physics around the turn of the twentieth century.     

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