Robbins Library Notes

Good morning, readers!

Here are the September reviews from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Are any of these items which we should add to the Robbins collection?

Aesthetics

• Kendall L. Walton, Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts, Reviewed by Scott Walden, Nassau Community College
• David Davies, Aesthetics and Literature, Reviewed by Eileen John, University of Warwick

Epistemology

• Jens Harbecke, Mental Causation: Investigating the Mind’s Powers in a Natural World, Reviewed by David Robb, Davidson College

History of Philosophy

• Paul Guyer, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume, Reviewed by Richard N. Manning, University of South Florida
• Delbert Reed. The Origins of Analytic Philosophy: Kant and Frege, Reviewed by Jeremy Heis, University of California, Irvine
• François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Reviewed by Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University

Individual Philosophers

• Richard Creath, Michael Friedman (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, Reviewed by Gregory Lavers, Concordia University, Montreal
• Novalis, David Wood (ed., tr.), Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, Reviewed by Jane Kneller, Colorado State University
• Emmanuel Bermon, La Signification et l’enseignement: Texte latin, traduction française et commentaire du De Magistro de saint Augustin, Reviewed by Roland J. Teske, S.J., Marquette University
• Marina McCoy, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists, Reviewed by Eugene Garver, Saint John’s University
• Oskari Kuusela, The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy, Reviewed by Marie McGinn, University of York
• Dorothea Olkowski, Gail Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Reviewed by Gayle Salamon, Princeton University

Metaphysics

• Fred Wilson, Body, Mind and Self in Hume’s Critical Realism, Reviewed by Wade Robison, Rochester Institute of Technology
• Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World, Reviewed by Peter B. M. Vranas, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Moral & Political Philosophy

• John Kleinig, Ethics and Criminal Justice: An Introduction, Reviewed by Douglas Husak, Rutgers University
• Claudia Card, Armen T. Marsoobian (eds.), Genocide’s Aftermath: Responsibility and Repair, Reviewed by John K. Roth, Claremont McKenna College
• Tobias Hoffmann (ed.), Weakness of Will from Plato to the Present, Reviewed by Byron Williston, Wilfrid Laurier University
• Jean Hampton, The Intrinsic Worth of Persons: Contractarianism in Moral and Political Philosophy, Reviewed by Matt Matravers, University of York
• A. W. Price, Contextuality in Practical Reason, Reviewed by Tim Henning, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Philosophy of Mathematics

• Michael Roubach, Being and Number in Heidegger’s Thought, Reviewed by Stephan Käufer, Franklin & Marshall College

Philosophy of Physics

• Robert DiSalle, Understanding Space-Time: The Philosophical Development of Physics from Newton to Einstein, Reviewed by Carl Hoefer, ICREA/Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Good morning, readers, and welcome back after the Labor Day holiday weekend!

A short administrative update: I will be in tomorrow, as my plans have changed.

Now, for our main attraction: here are the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews from August 2008.  Should any of these be added to the Robbins collection?

Epistemology

• Jeffrey Blustein, The Moral Demands of Memory, Reviewed by Sue Campbell, Dalhousie University
• Yujin Nagasawa, God and Phenomenal Consciousness: A Novel Approach to Knowledge Arguments, Reviewed by Uwe Meixner, University of Regensburg
• Sanford C. Goldberg (ed.), Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology, Reviewed by Hanseung Kim, University of Seoul
• Simone Gozzano, Francesco Orilia (eds.), Tropes, Universals and the Philosophy of Mind: Essays at the Boundary of Ontology and Philosophical Psychology, Reviewed by Keith Campbell, University of Sydney

History of Philosophy

• Christian Lotz, From Affectivity to Subjectivity: Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited, Reviewed by A. D. Smith, University of Warwick
• Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics, Reviewed by Stewart Duncan, University of Florida
• Johann Georg Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, Reviewed by Ted Kinnaman, George Mason University
• Douglas Hedley, Sarah Hutton (eds.), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, Reviewed by Eric Schliesser, Leiden University
• William F. Bristow, Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique, Reviewed by Paul Franks, University of Toronto
• Allen Speight, The Philosophy of Hegel, Reviewed by Mark Alznauer, Sweet Briar College
• James Hankins (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, Reviewed by E. Jennifer Ashworth, University of Waterloo
• Keith Green, Bertrand Russell, Language and Linguistic Theory, Reviewed by Bernard Linsky, University of Alberta
• Santiago Zabala, The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat, Reviewed by Robert Sokolowski, The Catholic University of America
• Francis J. Ambrosio, Dante and Derrida: Face to Face, Reviewed by Donald G. Marshall, Pepperdine University

Philosophy of Law

• Douglas Husak, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law, Reviewed by John Gardner, University College, Oxford
• Douglas E. Edlin (ed.), Common Law Theory, Reviewed by W.J. Waluchow, McMaster University

Philosophy of Science

• Steve Fuller, Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution, Reviewed by Sahotra Sarkar, University of Texas at Austin
• Michael Ruse, Charles Darwin, Reviewed by Bruce Weber, California State University, Fullerton/Bennington College

Philosophy of Religion

• Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Reviewed by Michael L. Morgan, Indiana University

Metaphysics

• Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman (eds.), Persons: Human and Divine, Reviewed by William R. Carter, North Carolina State University
• Laird Addis, Ontology and Explanation: Collected Papers, Reviewed by Katalin Farkas, Central European University, Budapest

Historiography

• Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice, Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of California, Santa Cruz

Moral & Political Philosophy

• Robert B. Talisse, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy, Reviewed by David Hildebrand, University of Colorado Denver
• Larry May, Aggression and Crimes Against Peace, Reviewed by Douglas Lackey, Baruch College/Graduate Center, CUNY

Good morning, readers!

Over the summer, I’ve been reading some fascinating histories of philosophy in the 20th century.  Two of them address American philosophy during the Cold War, and the third looks at philosophy at a pivotal moment in the first part of the century, before the notorious split between analytic and Continental philosophy.

What emerges from these three books is the degree of influence that the political and historical context in which philosophy is lived and practiced can have. While it’s too simplistic to claim that understanding philosophy can be reduced to merely studying its historical, social, and cultural contexts, I would argue that it’s important to see that philosophy does not exist in a vacuum, and that historical, social, and cultural forces can have a great influence on philosophy, though these need to be interpreted and assessed with care.*

This holds true, I will claim, for American philosophy, especially during the 20th century.  After reading the first two histories, it’s frightening to see how figures like, e.g., Rudolph Carnap, were kept under surveillance for their supposed political activities, or threatened in subtle and not-so-subtle ways to get in line.  It’s scary to read how lives and careers could be ruined or altered by people settling personal scores or demanding ideological conformity under the cloak of national security.  And it’s also sad to consider what might have been, had philosophy not been forced into (and chosen to remain) in a defensive position for so many decades such that it limited the scope of its inquiries and interests.

Without further ado, here are the books, along with a brief review of each:

Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era, John McCumber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001)

McCumber’s book explores how the McCarthy era had a devastating effect on American philosophy during the late 1940s and 1950s, and beyond.  McCumber analyzes how philosophy and philosophers were targeted by the FBI, HUAC, and others during the Cold War, and how this had a chilling and limiting effect on how philosophy was studied and practiced.  McCumber offers evidence to show that the defensive position and apolitical stance that American philosophy was forced to take has never been abandoned, and that these have limited and driven the discipline to focus on a narrow range of topics and questions, to the exclusion of others.

It’s a fascinating, if not frightening, read, especially in contemporary times when conservative forces are again trying to silence dissent and questioning by claiming these to be “unpatriotic” and “treasonous.”  In these interesting times, and in light of McCumber’s (and Reisch’s — see below) claims, the quote from Santayana that I posted last week rings true.

However, if there is one failing with the book, it’s that I find that McCumber has an ax to grind, especially towards the end of the book, when he discusses how Continental philosophy and philosophers have been excluded from the American philosophical discourse.  While he does have a point, at times I found that McCumber quickly became strident in his criticism, and found this to be off-putting.

How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic, George A. Reisch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Similar to McCumber’s book, but from more of an analytic perspective, Reisch’s book also examines how the Cold War, and the shift in political climate from the progressive 1930s to the conservative 1950s wrought a number of changes on the practice and understanding of American philosophy (and especially philosophy of science).

This is an decent book, overall, especially if you are looking to get a good grounding in the basis of some of context around and concepts of philosophy of science during the early and middle parts of the 20th century.

Nonetheless, I do have a complaint about the book.  I’m bothered by the fact that relatively little attention is given to the conservative critics of philosophy of science, in comparison with the left-wing critics.  Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins get a few dismissive paragraphs and mentions throughout the book, but no chapter in their own right — unlike the left-wing critics, who get two chapters of their own.  And there were certainly more critics of philosophy of science than just these two men.

Furthermore, there was (and is still) a battle over where philosophy belongs: is it merely a part of science?  Or is it part of the humanities?  What sort of questions should philosophy address?  Should it be apolitical, or be used in the service of political agendas?  Do the empirical sciences supplant the social sciences and humanities, or do the latter have their own contributions to make and value to add?  These and other questions remain relevant, and were given serious consideration by people like Adler and Hutchins, and perhaps deserve more attention than they are given in this book.

I’m also a bit uncomfortable with Reisch’s attempt at engaging Continental philosophy at the end of the book, wherein he attempts a Foucauldian-style power analysis.  In short, he makes the claim that the American academy during the Cold War and beyond, was akin to a concentration camp.  The conservative power structure, in an attempt to silence and render impotent their progressive adversaries, shunted the latter off into the irrelevance of the ivory tower, where they would have little to no effect.  While the claim is intriguing, prima facie, I’m not sure that it stands on deeper inspection.  For one thing, the analogy strikes me as being inapt — being a tenured intellectual in an academic setting is nothing like the dehumanizing brutality of the camps.  For another, it strikes me as being somewhat offensive, for the same reasons.  Finally, in light of my own reading of several of Foucault’s works, I’m not sure that this analysis is something with which Foucault would himself agree, though I may be wrong on this account.

In spite of these criticisms, don’t discount the book entirely on these grounds.  It’s still worth reading, if you keep these flaws in mind.

A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Michael Friedman (Chicago: Open Court, 2000)

Of the three histories that I read over the summer, this one was by far the best.  Friedman discusses the 1929 Davos Conference, at which Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger debated, and Rudolph Carnap attended.  In examining the thought projects of these three men, Friedman provides a clear and lucid outline, not only of Heidegger’s, Carnap’s and Cassirer’s thought, but also of Kantian epistemology, neo-Kantianism, and phenomenology. Moreover, Friedman shows how these three interact and critique each other, and where they will ultimately split, because of political and historical circumstances, into the two-fold division of 20th century Western philosophy.  Finally, Friedman shows the importance and continuing relevance of Cassirer, who is often overlooked in the history of 20th century thought, other than as an historian of thought.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and have recommended it to several others who are working in this field and on these topics.

Do any readers have opinions on these books? Are there other histories that I should look at and review, e.g., Glock’s What is Analytic Philosophy?

——————————————————————————————

*Peter Gordon offers some relevant discussion on historical context and the history of ideas in Gordon, P.E. (2004).  Continental Divide: Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger at Davos, 1929 — An Allegory of Intellectual History. Modern Intellectual History (1)2, 219-248.  (You’ll need a Harvard PIN and ID to access this article.) This article is especially relevant in light of the third book that I review, Thomas Friedman’s A Parting of the Ways.

Good morning, readers!

I realized yesterday that I haven’t posted any new podcasts from Philosophy Bites since late May. Here’s a list of the podcasts added since then:

Enjoy!

At left: Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Coming from a Continental philosophy background, Edmund Husserl loomed large in my training, especially at the graduate level.  And even in the analytic tradition, there is a great deal of interest in Husserl, mainly in his phenomenological and mathematical writings.

Husserl’s work is not always easy to understand, and many worthy philosophers have struggled to comprehend him.*   Thus, readers might find this very interesting article outlining Edmund Husserl’s project — Caitlin Smith’s “Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Europe” — to be of interest.

A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this link.

*One of the interesting items in the Robbins collection is Josiah Royce’s copy of Husserl’s first phenomenological work, Logical Investigations.  In the interleaved note pages, Royce’s comments indicate a growing confusion with Husserl’s arguments, until, about halfway through the first volume, he writes that he cannot understand the book and is putting it aside.

Good morning, all!

Today’s post highlights the latest issue of The Review of Metaphysics – Review of Metaphysics 61(4) June 2008.  The table of contents for this issues includes:

• David Roochnik, “Aristotle’s Defense of the Theoretical Life: Comments on Politics 7″
• John K. O’Connor, “Precedents in Aristotle and Brentano for Husserl’s Concern with Metabasis“
• Matthew J. Kisner, “Spinoza’s Virtuous Passions”
• Ronald E. Santoni, “Camus on Sartre’s Freedom — Another ‘Misunderstanding’”
• Alexander S. Jensen, “The Influence of Schleiermacher’s Second Speech on Religion on Heidegger’s Concept of Ereignis“

The journal is available electronically, but only up to volume 59 (2006).  If you are interested in looking at any of these articles, please let me know, as I will be sending this issue off to be bound in the next week or so.

Good morning, readers!

Here is the list of the June 2008 reviews from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  Do you think any of these should be in the Robbins collection?

Stephen H. Daniel (ed.)
New Interpretations of Berkeley’s Thought
Reviewed by Marc A. Hight, Hampden-Sydney College

Rachel Cooper
Psychiatry and Philosophy of Science
Reviewed by Grant Gillett, University of Otago

Christopher Janaway
Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy
Reviewed by Brian Leiter, University of Texas, Austin

Brian J. Braman
Meaning and Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor on the Drama of Authentic Human Existence
Reviewed by David Burrell, C.S.C., University of Notre Dame/Uganda Martyrs University, Nkozi

Peter Hylton
Quine
Reviewed by Guido Bonino, Università di Torino

James W. Felt
Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today
Reviewed by Oliva Blanchette, Boston College

Cécile Laborde, John Maynor (eds.)
Republicanism and Political Theory
Reviewed by Hans Oberdiek, Swarthmore College

Lambert Zuidervaart
Social Philosophy after Adorno
Reviewed by Hauke Brunkhorst, Universität Flensburg

Theodore Scaltsas, Andrew S. Mason (eds.)
The Philosophy of Epictetus
Reviewed by Brad Inwood, University of Toronto

Julie K. Ward
Aristotle on Homonymy: Dialectic and Science
Reviewed by David Evans, Queen’s University Belfast

Jay F. Rosenberg
Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images
Reviewed by Willem A. deVries, University of New Hampshire

A. C. Grayling
Truth, Meaning and Realism: Essays in the Philosophy of Thought
Reviewed by Alexander Miller, University of Birmingham

Eric Christian Barnes
The Paradox of Predictivism
Reviewed by Clark Glymour, Carnegie Mellon

Thomas Baldwin (ed.)
Reading Merleau-Ponty: On Phenomenology of Perception
Reviewed by Taylor Carman, Barnard College

James R. Hamilton
The Art of Theater
Reviewed by Brian Soucek, University of Chicago

Andrew Bowie
Music, Philosophy, and Modernity
Reviewed by James Currie, University at Buffalo

Theodore Sider, John Hawthorne, Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.)
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics
Reviewed by Alan Sidelle, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Alexander Bird
Nature’s Metaphysics: Laws and Properties
Reviewed by John W. Carroll, North Carolina State University

Charles L. Griswold
Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration
Reviewed by Ernesto V. Garcia, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Robert Young
Medically Assisted Death
Reviewed by John Keown, Georgetown University

Raimo Tuomela
The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View
Reviewed by Kenneth Shockley, University at Buffalo, SUNY

Bernd Prien, David P. Schweikard (eds.)
Robert Brandom: Analytic Pragmatist
Reviewed by Bernhard Weiss, University of Cape Town

Terence Cuneo,
The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism
Reviewed by James Lenman, University of Sheffield

Sarah Broadie
Aristotle and Beyond: Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics
Reviewed by Jacob Rosen, New York University

Vincent F. Hendricks, Duncan Pritchard (eds.)
New Waves in Epistemology
Reviewed by Dennis Whitcomb, Western Washington University

Christian Beyer, and Alex Burri (eds.)
Philosophical Knowledge: Its Possibility and Scope
Reviewed by Duncan Pritchard, University of Edinburgh

David L. Hull, Michael Ruse (eds.)
The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology
Reviewed by David Depew, University of Iowa

David Lay Williams
Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment
Reviewed by Neven Leddy, Magdalen College, Oxford

Jesse Prinz
The Emotional Construction of Morals
Reviewed by Ronald de Sousa, University of Toronto

Immanuel Kant, Günter Zöller (ed.), Robert Louden (ed.)
Anthropology, History and Education
Reviewed by Amelie Rorty, Boston University

Katherine J. Morris
Sartre
Reviewed by William L. McBride, Purdue University

Timothy O’Connor
Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency
Reviewed by Graham Oppy, Monash University

David Luban
Legal Ethics and Human Dignity
Reviewed by Charles Silver, University of Texas at Austin

Igor Primoratz (ed.)
Civilian Immunity in War
Reviewed by Steven P. Lee, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Giorgio Agamben
Profanations
Reviewed by Jeffery Geller, University of North Carolina, Pembroke

Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.)
John Searle’s Philosophy of Language: Force, Meaning and Mind
Reviewed by Jesse R. Steinberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Martin Carrier, Don Howard, Janet Kourany (eds.)
The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice: Science and Values Revisited
Reviewed by Miriam Solomon, Temple University

Ginia Schönbaumsfeld
A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion
Reviewed by Wayne Proudfoot, Columbia University

C. A. J. Coady
Morality and Political Violence
Reviewed by Christine Chwaszcza, European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole, Florence

Megan Laverty
Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: A Consideration of her Romantic Vision
Reviewed by Christopher Cordner, University of Melbourne

P.M.S. Hacker
Human Nature: The Categorial Framework
Reviewed by Michael Quante, Universität zu Köln

Allen W. Wood
Kantian Ethics
Reviewed by Noell Birondo, Pomona College

April has been a busy month at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. I’ve listed some of the more relevant and interesting books below, sorted out into my own categories. (Obviously, a few books can be placed in more than category.)

Do any strike you as needing to be in the Robbins collection?

Historical Figures & Periods

Gregory Landini
Wittgenstein’s Apprenticeship with Russell
Reviewed by Nicholas Griffin, McMaster University

Judith Chelius Stark (ed.)
Feminist Interpretations of Augustine
Reviewed by Colleen McCluskey, Saint Louis University

Mark Dooley, Liam Kavanagh
The Philosophy of Derrida
Reviewed by Matthew C. Halteman, Calvin College

Robert B. Louden
The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the Enlightenment Still Elude Us
Reviewed by Beatrix Himmelmann, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bret W. Davis
Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit
Reviewed by Frank Schalow, University of New Orleans

Aaron Preston
Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion
Reviewed by William Larkin, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Paul Redding
Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought
Reviewed by Willem A. deVries, University of New Hampshire

Brad Inwood
Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters
Reviewed by Katja Maria Vogt, Columbia University

Songsuk Susan Hahn
Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Conception of Life and Value
Reviewed by Richard Velkley, Tulane University

Epistemology & Perception

Mary Margaret McCabe, Mark Textor (eds.)
Perspectives on Perception
Reviewed by José Luis Bermúdez, Washington University in St. Louis

Jaakko Hintikka
Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-Seeking by Questioning
Reviewed by Vincent F. Hendricks, Roskilde University, Denmark

David Reisman
Sartre’s Phenomenology
Reviewed by Katherine Morris, Mansfield College, University of Oxford

Russell T. Hurlburt, Eric Schwitzgebel
Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic
Reviewed by Gualtiero Piccinini, University of Missouri, St. Louis

Metaphysics

Christian Kanzian, Muhammad Legenhausen (eds.)
Substance and Attribute: Western and Islamic Traditions in Dialogue
Reviewed by Sajjad Rizvi, University of Exeter

Christian Kanzian (ed.)
Persistence
Reviewed by Thomas Sattig, Washington University

Moral & Political Philosophy, Ethics

Jens Timmermann
Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: A Commentary
Reviewed by Sean P. Walsh, University of Minnesota, Duluth

David Copp
Morality in a Natural World: Selected Essays in Metaethics
Reviewed by Eric Gampel, California State University, Chico

Christopher J. Finlay
Hume’s Social Philosophy: Human Nature and Commercial Sociability in A Treatise of Human Nature
Reviewed by Lorraine Besser-Jones, University of Waterloo

Michael W. Austin
Conceptions of Parenthood: Ethics and the Family
Reviewed by Joseph Millum, National Institutes of Health

Pedro Alexis Tabensky
Judging and Understanding: Essays on Free Will, Narrative, Meaning and the Ethical Limits of Condemnation
Reviewed by Meghan Griffith, Davidson College

Simon Keller
The Limits of Loyalty
Reviewed by John Kleinig, John Jay College, CUNY; and Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, CSU

Philosophy of Science

Steven Horst
Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science
Reviewed by D. Gene Witmer, University of Florida

Aesthetics

Paul Crowther
Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt
Reviewed by Ingvild Torsen, Florida International University

Philosophy of Religion

Sandra Menssen, Thomas D. Sullivan
The Agnostic Inquirer: Revelation from a Philosophical Standpoint
Reviewed by Keith M. Parsons, University of Houston, Clear Lake

Miscellaneous

Barry C. Smith (ed.), Fritz Allhoff (ed.)
Questions of Taste: The Philosophy of Wine; and, Wine and Philosophy: A Symposium on Thinking and Drinking
Reviewed by Peter Machamer, University of Pittsburgh

Those of my readers from an analytic background are likely to be unfamiliar with the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek. Žižek is something of a philosopher-rock n’ roll star, drawing large crowds wherever he lectures. (He also has a dance party in Buenos Aires, Argentina, named after him.) His work, while broadly covering political philosophy, crosses a number of subjects areas, mixing philosophy, psychoanalysis (of a Lacanian strain), Marxism/Leninism, and popular culture in novel and unexpected ways.

In the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for Žižek, Matthew Sharpe writes:

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by Terry Eagleton as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. Žižek’s work is infamously idiosyncratic. It features striking dialectical reversals of received common sense; a ubiquitous sense of humour; a patented disrespect towards the modern distinction between high and low culture; and the examination of examples taken from the most diverse cultural and political fields. Yet Žižek’s work, as he warns us, has a very serious philosophical content and intention. Žižek challenges many of the founding assumptions of today’s left-liberal academy, including the elevation of difference or otherness to ends in themselves, the reading of the Western Enlightenment as implicitly totalitarian, and the pervasive skepticism towards any context-transcendent notions of truth or the good. One feature of Žižek’s work is its singular philosophical and political reconsideration of German idealist philosophy (Kant, Schelling and Hegel). Žižek has also reinvigorated Jacques Lacan’s challenging psychoanalytic theory, controversially reading him as a thinker who carries forward founding modernist commitments to the Cartesian subject and the liberating potential of self-reflective agency, if not self-transparency. Žižek’s works since 1997 have become more and more explicitly political, contesting the widespread consensus that we live in a post-ideological or post-political world, and defending the possibility of lasting changes to the new world order of globalization, the end of history, or the war on terror.

Why should you care about Žižek? Because he’s enormously popular right now, for one thing — though Sharpe correctly notes in his conclusion that the lasting impact of Žižek’s work has yet to be determined. For another, it does an intellectual good to break out of familiar thinkers and thought patterns, and be challenged to see the world in different ways. Finally, he may actually have something to say to analytically-oriented philosophers — especially those interested in political philosophy and the Enlightenment project.

My own views on Žižek? Having read some of his work, I can attest to its breadth and audacity. There are times when he can write brilliantly, as in, for example, his essay, “The Matrix: Or, The Two Sides of Perversion,” in The Matrix and Philosophy. Nonetheless, I do find his work to be shallow sometimes– the treatment of a topic under discussion never gets beyond a cursory or pop cultural level, without diving deeper into the matter, or giving a more nuanced view. Ultimately, I agree with Sharpe that it’s too soon to determine the lasting place of Žižek in the history of philosophy, but — I would argue — the only way to make that determination is to engage with his thought project for the time being.

If you are interested in reading Žižek’s work, a good place to begin is a recent article from the Times Literary Supplement. Here Terry Eagleton discusses Žižek’s oeuvre and reviews Žižek’s new book, In Defense of Lost Causes. (A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.) Another good place is the journal, Lacanian Ink — the essays which he publishes here are often a good place to get a feel for his thought project and how he writes. Finally, the blog, An und für sich, usually has some great commentary on Žižek and his work.

Good morning, readers!

We recently purchased The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, and I’m writing to let you know about the book. Given the recent interest in Continental philosophy among those from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, and some of the interesting work that combines analytic and Continental philosophy being done by people such as Sean D. Kelly and John Haldane, it seems appropriate for Robbins to acquire the book.

The Handbook contains essays by Brian Leiter, Frederick Beiser, Taylor Carman, Sebastian Gardner, Garry Gutting, Michael Rosen, and many others. The essays are divided out into three broad themes:

• Part I: Problems of Method
• Part II: Reason and Consciousness
• Part III: Human Being

As the introduction by Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen notes:

This volume aims to give a representative sample of these important developments in philosophical scholarship, and, more importantly, to give a broad and inclusive thematic treatment of Continental philosophy, treating its subject matter philosophically and not simply as a series of museum pieces from the history of ideas. Each of the essays takes up a topic from within the field in such a way as to bring key ideas into focus and capture their distinctiveness as well as providing a critical assessment of their value (pp. 1-2).

My only hesitation is that this book is written largely from an analytic perspective. Even the three themes into which the essays are sorted reflect more an analytic than a Continental model. Thus, readers should know ahead of time that they may be getting an “outsider’s” perspective, as it were, on Continental philosophy. And, as Leiter and Rosen note in their introduction (pp. 3-5), there are aspects of Continental Philosophy, such as hermeneutics and structuralism, which do not map easily into the framework that they lay out in the introduction to the Handbook. Interested readers may want to peruse, e.g., Richard Kearney’s Modern Movements in European Philosophy, for balance.

Nonetheless, from what I’ve seen in my flipping through the Handbook, I think that it will become a valuable reference tool for those interested in Continental philosophy.

NB: This item has not yet been cataloged, and will not likely be so until early summer.