Aeque mit dem ablativ

Before Marx the atomic swerve was little regarded by champions of Epicureanism: since Guyau it has been central, though attempts to explain the mechanism of free will by it have failed. This is because they assume the occurrence of swerves inside the soul. But the swerve is only attested for the downward‐falling atoms ‐and as an instantaneous side‐step not as a change of direction. Swerves are the pluralist counterpart to Aristotle's unmoved mover, a cosmological principle and not the cause of particular happenings. On this view good sense can be made of Epicurus’ hitherto puzzling statements on predestination, nouthesia, and luck.     

The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

This article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating on the reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some critics focused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution against essentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance, however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful to investigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in Johan Jakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.     

Rousseau’s reception as an Epicurean: from atheism to aesthetics

ABSTRACT

What did Rousseau's readers mean when they called him an ‘Epicurean’? A seemingly simple question with complex implications. This article attempts to answer it by reconstructing Rousseau's contemporary reception as an Epicurean thinker. First, it surveys the earliest and most widely read critics of the second Discourse: Prussian Astronomer Royal Jean de Castillon, Jesuit priest Louis Bertrand Castel, and Hanoverian biblical scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus. These readers branded Rousseau an Epicurean primarily to highlight his atheism, his anti-providential and materialist natural philosophy. Then, it discusses Genevan pastor Jacob Vernet's positive assessment of Rousseau as a critic of ‘fashionable’ Epicureanism, before reconstructing Rousseau's critique of the reception of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man as an Epicurean text. These sources elucidate Rousseau's engagement with a range of ideas and argumentative positions that would inform his later self-identification as a ‘refined’ Epicurean. In particular, they highlight his interest in how a sentimental awareness of beauty might mitigate the potentially vicious effects of hedonism. The article concludes with novelist Mme. de Genlis’ critique of Rousseau's Wise Materialism, using his thoughts on the imagination to suggest some of the ways the neglected aesthetic dimensions of Rousseau's reception of Epicureanism might be developed.     

There is Something of One (God): Lacan and Political Theology

Abstract

For both Lacan and Badiou, Plato's Parmenides is a primary locus for the question of the One. Moreover, for both Lacan and Badiou, the One ultimately takes on political valence, as key to the problematics of representation and the discursive conditions of collectivity. However, unlike Badiou, Lacan's exploration of the question of One also passes through theology— through what I am calling "something of One God"— and I want to argue that it is only by bringing the One into explicit relationship with those monotheistic issues that we can fully understand its implications for analytic discourse and political life. Lacan's thinking on the "something of One" takes a necessary swerve back through a theological problematic, and in the process articulates the terms of a political theology, an essential conjunction of political and religious understandings of sovereignty, subjectivity and collectivity.     

Western women and imperialism: Complicity and resistance

The eighteenth-century moral philosopher Archibald Campbell is now largely forgotten, even to specialists in the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet his work is worth recovering both as part of the immediate reception of Bernard Mandeville and Francis Hutcheson's rival moral philosophies, and for better understanding the state of Scottish moral philosophy a decade before David Hume published his Treatise of Human Nature. This paper offers a reading of Campbell as deploying a specifically Epicurean philosophy that resists both the Augustinianism of Mandeville, and the Stoicism of Hutcheson. This leads him onto ground later claimed more conclusively by Hume, whilst helping us to better conceptualise the deployment and recovery of Hellenistic thought in the early modern period.     

“不折腾”需要坚持的基本原则

胡锦涛在纪念党的十一届三中全会召开30周年大会上的重要讲话中指出,只要我们不动摇、不懈怠、不折腾。坚定不移地推进改革开放,坚定不移地走中国特色社会主义道路,全面小康和现代化就一定能够胜利实现。做到不折腾,就要坚持走自己的路,坚持科学决策,坚持求真务实,坚持以人为本,坚持正确的用人导向。     

WHAT,AT LONG LAST,IS HISTORICAL THEORY FOR? REFLECTIONS ON HISTORICAL THEORY IN A POST-TRUTH WORLD

The term “post-truth” is a capacious trope that collects threats to the stability of shared knowledge on many fronts—digitally spread disinformation, ignorance and resistance to science, unabashed lies in the public sphere, mythologizing by resurgent nationalist forces, and so on. History is particularly vulnerable to this array. Post-truth threats to serious history produced to professional standards for research and reasoning by historians free of coercion, intimidation, or pressures for co-optation are too blatant to need explanation. Avenues of response to the politicizing of history have been protests by public intellectuals and academics and a growing scholarly literature recording the imposition of memory laws by the police powers of numerous states. Attacks on empirical history, and the academic freedom required to sustain it, provoke clear responses, but the situation of historical theory is more problematic. Historical theory is a superstructure of analysis that presupposes the free production of history that invites and justifies the cultural work of theorizing. Reading Karen S. Feldman's Arts of Connection: Poetry, History, Epochality, an erudite, philosophical contribution to historical theory advancing a severe critique of history's fundamental powers of representation against a widening background of nationalist state-sponsored policing of history, produced an acute cognitive dissonance in this reviewer. In this essay, I frankly acknowledge this dissonant experience and lay out some of the most egregious causes of it in history distorted and undermined to nationalist ends in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and beyond. I pose the question of whether the intellectual work of theorizing history can continue with any confidence when the ground on which theory stands is being eroded and distorted.     

3. CARL SCHMITT'S CONTRIBUTION TO A THEORY OF POLITICAL MYTH

My goal in this essay is to show that myths have played a larger role than we might think in politics and in political theory and that myths are essential to politics. For this purpose I will use Schmitt's theory of myth, since he elaborated his theory with strong interpretations of two different myths: Hobbes's Leviathan and Shakespeare's Hamlet. I will compare Schmitt's interpretations of Hamlet with my own, as doing so will provide a critical view of Schmitt's conclusions, and it will enable me to develop my own conception of myth and its relations to political theory and history.     

Tragedy and Science

Tragic theater is a phenomenon both extremely rare and sadly ephemeral. Perusal of Nietzsche will lead to the proposal that tragic theater developed in periods marked by scientific revolutions, related here to sweeping and far-ranging changes in the social fabric and the myths — or world theories (condensed images of the world) — underlying it. Tragic theater expresses an insoluble conflict between a mythology (or world theory) in decline and a new form of culture, epitomized by a new world theory. True tragic theater therefore exhibits the same conditions that give rise to scientific revolutions. This “Tragedy — the Swan Song of Myth” thesis, outlined in Nietzsche's early studies of Greek tragedy, will be generalized and extended to the case of 17th century English tragedy and science, and the origins of the modern myth of Progress and Enlightenment.     

Finite Community: Reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Jean-Luc Nancy

Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Rousseau as the first to conceive community as a lost state of immediacy and transparency. Rousseau’s conception has allegedly shaped the western ideal of an immanent community. Nancy deconstructs that ideal, arguing that immanence would suppress community; its oneness would block the being-with which enables our ontological being-in-common. This article argues that Rousseau never posits a lost community but actually explores, like Nancy, the political closure of immanence. Man’s distinguishing trait of perfectibility, which renders him finite, always open to change for better or worse, rejects the self-enclosure of immanence as does the constant willing of the general will which defines a community’s political life. If citizens could form an immanent whole, they would have nothing left to will, reaching an inhuman situation without liberty, reflection and responsibility. A community’s vitality, as Rousseau’s discussion of Poland suggests, does not come from closure to the outside but from openness to what potentially disrupts it. That openness, by raising the question of communal legitimacy, underlies the shared responsibility of citizens to ensure their free and equal coexistence. Rousseau’s theory, I conclude, thus supplements Nancy’s ontological reflection by considering the antagonism and struggles endured by ontic communities as they confront the chances and risks arising from their finitude.     

Der griechische qualitätsgenetiv der nachklassischen zeit

The paper has three parts. The first examines texts that sketch the model Roman life, i.e. that of a member of the senatorial aristocracy. With its concentration on political and military achievement this life is by general consensus a (objectively) “good” life, the idea of (subjective) “happiness” remaining outside consideration. The second part of the paper looks at texts that favour alternative life choices, ones that give weight to the idea of “happiness”: the Epicurean life (Lucretius), the individualistic life (Lucilius and Horace), and the amatory life (Tibullus and Propertius). The analysis shows that these texts contrast the lives advocated with the model elite life and engage at the same time in a discourse with each other. The third part of the paper reflects on the philosophical significance and the social setting of the texts examined.     

One‐dimensional criticism: a Marcusean reflection on Habermas's critical theory1

This paper explores the metaphysical foundations of critical theory in Marcuse and Habermas's postmetaphysical alternative. It argues that Habermas's attempt to free critical theory from a normative conception of life‐activity deprives it of the conceptual tools required to accurately diagnose the fundamental structure of social problems today. It thus concludes that Marcuse's efforts towards specifying a life‐grounded foundation to critical theory must be renewed if the project of human freedom is to be advanced today.     

AGAINST PERIODIZATION: KOSELLECK'S THEORY OF MULTIPLE TEMPORALITIES

In this essay I intend to flesh out and discuss what I consider to be the groundbreaking contribution by the German historian and theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck to postwar historiography: his theory of historical times. I begin by discussing the view, so prominent in the Anglophone context, that Koselleck's idea of the plurality of historical times can be grasped only in terms of a plurality of historical periods in chronological succession, and hence, that Koselleck's theory of historical times is in reality a theory of periodization. Against this interpretation, to be found in works by Kathleen Davis, Peter Osborne, and Lynn Hunt, among others, I will argue that not only is Koselleck's theory of historical times, or, with a more phenomenlogical turn of phrase, his theory of multiple temporalities, not a theory of periodization, it is, furthermore, a theory developed to defy periodization. Hence, at the core of Koselleck's work is the attempt to replace the idea of linear, homogeneous time with a more complex, heterogeneous, and multilayered notion of temporality. In this essay I will demonstrate how this shift is achieved by means of three dichotomies: between natural and historical, extralinguistic and intralinguistic, and diachronic and synchronic time.     

A Theological Response to ‘The Case for a Pre-emptive Strike’

Abstract

After the enlargement of the European Union at the beginning of 2007, Western Europe has seen an enormous migration of East European Roma people begging in the streets. In this article, I will focus on some juridical as well as moral dilemmas these street beggars, mostly Romanian Roma, have raised in the EU territory and especially in the Nordic countries. I will also reflect on the historical facts and on past legislation where it is necessary to provide the background for the current situation. I shall argue that to hinder the right to free movement of Roma beggars in the European Union territory by criminalizing their begging and camping violates their fundamental rights. Moreover, such treatment in this case is tantamount to ethnic discrimination.     

The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation, and the Fusion of Horizons

In this article I will challenge a received orthodoxy in the philosophy of social science by showing that Collingwood was right in insisting that reenactment is epistemically central for historical explanations of individual agency. Situating Collingwood within the context of the debate between simulation theory and what has come to be called "theory theory" in contemporary philosophy of mind and psychology, I will develop two systematic arguments that attempt to show the essential importance of reenactment for our understanding of rational agency. I will furthermore show that Gadamer's influential critique of the reenactment model distinguishes insufficiently between the interpretation of certain types of texts and the explanation of individual actions. In providing an account of individual agency, we are committed to a realistic understanding of our ordinary scheme of action-explanations and have thus to recognize the centrality of reenactment. Nevertheless, Collingwood's emphasis on reenactment is certainly one-sided. I will demonstrate its limitations even for accounting for individual agency, and show how it has to be supplemented by various theoretical considerations, by analyzing the different explanatory strategies that Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen use to explain the behavior of the ordinary men in Reserve Battalion 101 during World War II.     

The Heroic Presidency in the Era of Divided Government

Abstract

Contemporary democratic theorists focus on democratic processes to the exclusion of the substantive goods which motivated their predecessors. This undermines the legitimacy of democracy, especially in an era of emerging democracies. This article critiques underlying deficiencies in contemporary theory and prescribes revisiting early modern, natural-law-based democratic theory exemplified by John Locke. Locke argued that the ultimate legitimacy of democratic processes depends on their serving the good of the people, as distinct from the will of the people. The authors argue that this conclusion is unavoidable, because it is impossible for democratic legitimacy to rest ultimately on any kind of process at all, even a democratic process. Legitimacy must rest on a substantive norm used to govern (create or repair) processes. Contemporary democratic theory seems unwilling to revisit this important problem.     

Liberation from the Weberian Iron Cage: Pierre Manent on Max Weber

Abstract

In this article I contend that conventional social contract theory is self-referentially incoherent. Conventional contractarianism therefore fails to provide an adequate foundation for the authority of the state and for the obligation of citizens to obey. The insistence on consent for legitimate political authority has usually been rendered in contractarian terms. Thus, the fall of conventional social contract theory seemingly entails that we should reject the principle of consent as well. Yet, the necessity of consent for the authority of the state and, concomitantly, for the obligation of citizens to obey seems to be an entailment of human equality. Thus, insofar as human persons are equal, the legitimacy of the state seems to require a foundation logically precluded to it. We are therefore confronted with a theoretical crisis. Even so, I will argue that we need not reject the principle of consent. The self-referential incoherency of conventional contractarianism results from its conventionalism. We can begin the work of salvaging the principle of consent from the demise of conventional social contract theory by erecting it upon the foundation of moral and ontological realism.