Simone de Beauvoir: Problems of (self‐)definition

Beauvoir, S. de, Letters to Sartre, translated by Hoare, Q. (Radius, 1991), 531pp., £20, ISBN 0 09 174774 0

Moi, T., Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Blackwell, 1994), 324pp., £12.95, ISBN 9 631 19181 X     

Between Fantasy and Philosophy: Saʿdi,Translator of Voltaire’s Zadig

Zadig ou la Destinée opens on a preface supposedly written by Sadi (sic), who seems to suggest he is the translator of the story which is to follow. The article will investigate the role played by Voltaire’s reference to Sa?di in Zadig as an Oriental prop for the narrative’s exotic setting, but also, more importantly, as participating in its philosophical content. Travelers’ accounts had brought growing interest in Persia, and Sa?di would not have been unfamiliar to an educated public; the Orient more generally became an experimental space for Enlightenment thought. Playing on the notion of the translator as cultural bridge, the article examines the uses Voltaire makes of Sa?di in Zadig and whether these correlate to the eighteenth-century French reader’s perceptions of the Iranian poet.     

Matters of Sex and Gender in F. J. Gall’s Organology: A Primary Approach

The originator of phrenology, F. J. Gall (1758–1828), saw himself as a natural scientist and physiologist. His approach consisted of brain anatomy but also of palpating skulls and inferring mental faculties. Unlike some of the philosophical principles underlying Gall’s work, his conception of sex/gender has not yet been examined in detail. In this article, I will focus on Gall’s treatment of men and women, his idea of sex differences, and how far an assumed existence of dichotomous sexes influenced his work. In examining his primary writings, I will argue that Gall held some contradictory views concerning the origin and manifestation of sex/gender characteristics, which were caused by the collision of his naturalistic ideas and internalized gender stereotypes. I will conclude that Gall did not aim at deducing or legitimizing sex/gender relations scientifically, but that he tried to express metaphysical reasons for a given social order in terms of functional brain mechanisms.     

Hegel’s Philosophy and Common Sense

Although, as many scholars have noted, Hegel appears to dismiss common sense, I argue that his claim that speculative philosophy can provide the rational ground for what is implicit in ordinary consciousness amounts to a critical vindication of common sense. Hegel’s attitude to common sense/ordinary consciousness is thus more complex and intriguing than either the longstanding consensus on his dismissal of and disdain for common sense, or the McDowellian attempt to ally Hegel’s position with later-Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy. Hegel’s critique of ordinary consciousness, I conclude, should be read as a nuanced philosophical vindication of common sense.     

Beyond Nussbaum’s Ethics of Reading: Camus,Arendt, and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination

The article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals.     

Hegel,Analytic Philosophy’s Pharmakon

In this article I argue that Hegel has become analytic philosophy’s “pharmakon”—both its “poison” and its “cure.” Traditionally, Hegel’s philosophy has been attacked by Anglo-American analytical philosophers for its alleged charlatanism and irrelevance. Yet starting from the 1970s there has been a revival of interest in Hegel’s philosophical work, which, I suggest, may be explained by three developments: (1) the revival of interest in Aristotelianism following Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s work on natural kinds, and Elizabeth Anscombe’s, Philippa Foot’s, and Putnam’s opposition to the fact-value distinction; (2) the rehabilitation of Hegel’s theories by various philosophers, including Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Fred Beiser, Robert Stern, and Stephen Houlgate; and (3) the Sellars-inspired philosophy of mind of John McDowell and of Robert Brandom. The first and third of these reasons, I argue, have led several analytic theorists to cast Hegel in a more positive light as the “cure” for analytic philosophy. The combined outcome of these changes, both ironic and fitting, is that the Hegelian principle of internal critique has played a significant role not only in analytic philosophy’s rapprochement with Hegel’s philosophy but also in overcoming the Analytic-Continental philosophical divide.     

Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultradeterminism to the Philosophy of Freedom

Abstract

This article examines the rift in Leibniz’s conception of determinism after being rebuffed by the Parisian theologian Antoine Arnauld in their correspondence of 1686. As, in addition, his study of surds infracted his confidence in the “complete concept,” Leibniz embarked on a new, dynamic doctrine of substance or “law of the series.” In the literature, this strategy has been widely (mis)understood as “tweaking” the system to allow some self-assertion of free will. But as this article will show, it amounts to a revolutionary conception that culminates in the unmasking of determinism as an insupportable, indeed incoherent doctrine. As all forms of determinism are profoundly entangled with human self-perception, the Leibnizian Kehre invites us to a new engagement with human freedom and autonomy and the disentanglement from a philosophical position for which neither a metaphysical nor an empirical proof can be given.     

‘Our Sense of Beauty’: Visuality,Space and Gender on Victoria’s Aboriginal Reserves,South‐Eastern Australia

European colonisation of Australia depended upon a culturally specific imagined geography comprising a visualised and spatialised conception of the land and its peoples. In establishing a system of Aboriginal reserves in the south‐eastern colony of Victoria around 1860, these principles were fundamental to the goal of transforming indigenous people, through creating idealised landscapes intended to teach through example, performance and the creation of an individual subject – with its success measurable through observation and documentation, especially photography. Central to the administration’s conception of these settlements, and to its vision for the Aboriginal people of Victoria, was a reformed gender and class order that would appropriately locate the indigenous population within modern settler society. But this regime overlooked or denied disjunctions with the residents’ profoundly different cultural orientation, in which vision was subordinated to aurality, and in which collective forms of personhood took precedence over the individual, allowing for the persistence of tradition.