EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

In the first two sections of the following remarks, I will establish a working definition of Cassirer's concept of a symbolic form. Symbolic forms are primarily forms of expression (1). Furthermore, they must be conceived as forms of world-disclosure and forms of mind and spirit (2). Finally, I will highlight the key elements of Cassirer's analysis of the practical dimension of symbolic forms (3). I argue that a reconsideration of the concept of a symbolic form will naturally let the philosophy of symbolic forms adopt the shape of a critical theory of society.

This paper aims at focusing on Cassirer's relationship with Hegel during the crucial period when Cassirer is outlining and completing the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in the early 1920s. The main thesis is that Cassirer has never abandoned his original Neo-Kantian approach, despite the fact that it has been enriched within the perspective of a philosophy of culture indebted to some extent also to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. However, Cassirer maintains that Kant's critical idealism must be contrasted with Hegel's absolute idealism, keeping thereby open the process of the spirit that cannot close itself in a definitive logical structure. This critical stance is shared by some contemporaries of Cassirer such as Dilthey, Windelband, und above all Natorp. We have thus to read Cassirer's project against the historical backdrop of the ‘Hegel-Renaissance’ in Germany, a circumstance that, according to the author, can contribute to a more adequate understanding of Cassirer's opus magnum.

This article is aimed at those interested in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the sciences—and this includes philosophers of science working out of the analytic tradition. Deleuze's writings are riddled with references to science and mathematics. And yet, the relation between these references and his philosophical thought is not well understood. In this essay, I investigate the nature of this relation—and I do so by asking whether it is naturalistic. Importantly, I draw on insights from contemporary philosophy of science to contribute to a proper understanding of this issue. I show that and how commentators are hamstrung by their lack of engagement with the philosophy of science; I present an interpretation of Deleuze's philosophical project as attempting to articulate an immanent and primitive form of objective modality; I draw together parts of Deleuze's corpus that are relevant to his treatment of the sciences but are nonetheless rarely studied in conjunction (including his and Guattari's distinction between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ science and his under-scrutinized statement of interest in ‘the metaphysics science needs’); and I propose a naturalistic interpretation of his engagements with science.

Although Husserlian phenomenology appears to require that practitioners bracket all metaphysical questions and claims, this requirement runs against the evidence of experience in which objects themselves are presented as constituents of experience. Moreover, to completely bracket metaphysical considerations would suggest that phenomenology is compatible with metaphysical views it should in principle deny. Nonetheless, permitting metaphysical claims threatens to contravene the critical limits of phenomenology, to invite claims that would require a perspective different in kind than our own to verify. These tensions raise an important question, namely, what are the metaphysical implications of the phenomenologically intuitive claim that objects themselves are constituents of experience? To answer this question, I draw on a broad swath of thought on transcendental idealism and phenomenology. I argue that a modest metaphysics of appearance is warranted within the critical limits of Husserlian phenomenology. Through discussing and addressing the problems that typically plague transcendental arguments, I show that Husserlian phenomenology permits stronger claims about objects of experience than deflationary accounts allow but does not permit claims about intrinsic properties allowed by some forms of transcendental idealism.

Foucault's historical studies were motivated by problems he identified in the present and there is no reason to think that History of Sexuality is different in this regard.¹ But that raises a question no reader of The Confessions of the Flesh can escape: How is a scholarly 426-page treatise on the Church Fathers relevant to the contemporary world, or, at least, to concerns that emerged from Foucault's own historical present?² The question is only highlighted by the absence of explicit links between the past and the present in Foucault's text, which was published posthumously, in 2018, as the fourth and final volume of History of Sexuality. This book had been advertised as forthcoming already in 1984, when volumes 2 and 3 were published weeks before Foucault's death.³ Therefore, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that only now, in light of the perspective the long-awaited final volume offers, are we in a position to assess Foucault's History of Sexuality project as a whole. At the same time, this broader context is vital for understanding the philosophical significance of volume 4, which remains, no doubt due to its unfinished state, strikingly silent about the philosophical aim of the meticulous historical work, as Foucault himself understood it. Therefore, the question of contemporary significance needs to be examined both with respect to the project overall and, specifically, by asking what role the analyses of baptism, repentance, libido, virginity, and marriage, which fill out volume 4, might play in it.

Foucault's History of Sexuality is critical history in Nietzsche's (1997: 75-77) sense of using history to liberate us from elements of the past that continue to define the present. It is well known that, according to Foucault, the genealogical aim of critical work is to enlarge the scope of discursive possibility that sets limits to the work of freedom subjects can undertake. Such critique might be characterized as “the critique of constitution,” because it undertakes to investigate how the given limits of intelligibility have been constituted in order to destabilize their apparent inevitability (Säynäjoki & Tiisala, 2023). It is not difficult to recognize this orientation in Foucault's History of Sexuality, which studies how sexual relations have been constituted as a topic of ethical significance, not always and everywhere, but in the history of Western culture, through a series of different problematizations. In short, Foucault asks, how is sex constituted as a topic of ethics for us? And, relatedly, how is the subject constituted as an ethical subject of sexual desire?

Foucault identifies three historically successive problematizations that constitute different ethical experiences of sexual relations, including the self's relation to itself: (1) the problem of the use of pleasures (sexual and other

How does the publication of Confessions of the Flesh impact feminist critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality project? The paper addresses this question in two ways: by asking how reflection on continuities and ruptures has, and can, be productive for feminist critique; and by revisiting the role of women in all four volumes. The terms of their inclusion have been considered an omission, particularly because the project omits same-sex eros between women. Where women appear, they are framed as spouses, or as subordinated to some form of authority. And yet, insofar as the project contains more than one genealogical dimension, Foucault's “marriages” also belong to proximate plurigenealogies. In Confession's focus on the conditions for a juridical and divided self's subjectivation by will and desire, even the limited parameters within which women appear in the project incite the following question. What are the implications of Confessions of the Flesh's juridical self for genealogies of female subjectivation?

Many persons find it intuitive that being friends with someone with immoral beliefs is wrong as such. I contest this claim, instead I argue that there is nothing necessarily wrong with such friendships. In coming to this conclusion I examine a number of arguments, including two of the most notable contributions put forward by Mason (2021) and Isserow (2018), that attempt to elucidate the wrongness involved in such friendships and find they do not successfully do so. I conclude by offering some arguments as to why such friendships are not necessarily wrong.