Philosophy Archives - Page 7 of 23

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Challenging Plato’s Prejudice Against Imitative Art

An excerpt from ‘Plato and the Moving Image’

August 16, 2019 • by Shai Biderman and Michael Weinman

For all that remains contested concerning the relationship of philosophy and film, and the status of the term "theory" in that regard, one principal result of this is the wide acceptance of a way of thinking about cinematic experience and philosophical practice as much more related than previous thought, such ...

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On the Death of My Dear Friend, Agnes Heller

“Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas”

August 9, 2019 • by Andrew Arato

Such was Agnes’ principle: she valued her friends and of course her loved ones, but truth was always her highest value. For me, friends have always come first. Hers was the principle of the philosopher, mine that of the political. In philosophy, truth is everything. But in politics nothing is ...

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The Sovereigntist of Reality Television

The Tangles of Diego Fusaro

August 2, 2019 • by Donatella di Cesare

Have they invited a member of CasaPound, the infamous neofascist party, onto television? That sort of thing tends to happen these days. Instead, peeking out on screen is the well sought after tan of Diego Fusaro, with the camera lingering over his shaggy hair and his glaucous eye-catching look. The ...

Anthropocene and Negative Anthropology

Return of Man

July 29, 2019 • by Hannes Bajohr

In contrast to the natural sciences, the question of official adoption plays virtually no role in the humanities, which have taken up the concept of the Anthropocene with relish. Its attraction lies in its omnicompetent radiance: Not only a geochronological coinage, it implies an ontology, a theory of history, and ...

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A Republic of Discussion

Habermas at ninety

July 23, 2019 • by Raymond Geuss

Is “discussion” really so wonderful? Does “communication” actually exist? What if I were to deny that it does? The public discussion of exit from the European Union has already caused incalculable, probably irreversible and completely superfluous damage to Britain. Obviously, the “conditions of discussion” before the vote were not in any ...

Make Rome Great Again

Populism in the Late Roman Republic

July 23, 2019 • by Conor Morrissey

Nearly every Roman leader revered the wisdom and the virtue of their forefathers. They were traditionalists, primarily interested in maintaining the status quo of the Roman state. If we understand the term “conservatism” to mean a school of thought that is heavily interested in preserving traditional values and is typically ...

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“The Liberal Idea Has Become Obsolete”

Putin, Geuss and Habermas

July 11, 2019 • by Martin Jay

I was first alerted to Raymond Geuss’s sour anti-commemoration of Jürgen Habermas’s ninetieth birthday, “A Republic of Discussion,” coincidentally on the same day that Vladimir Putin declared the obsolescence of liberalism in a meeting with Donald Trump. Trump, with the exquisite cluelessness that has made him so easy to mock, ...

Democracy

Why I Believe in Communicative Action: A Response to Geuss

Discursive democracy is a culture and a praxis rather than a matter of theory

July 8, 2019 • by Laura Nelson

Raymond Geuss begins his insightful yet occasionally misleading essay, “A Republic of Discussion,” with the following three questions, each an entry point into his critical account of Jürgen Habermas’s treatment of deliberative discourse in his Theory of Communicative Action and elsewhere. Here’s my gloss on them: “Is ‘discussion’ really so wonderful?” Occasionally yes, equally occasionally no. ...

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Transgender Psychoanalysis

Lacan, sex, and sinthomes

June 26, 2019 • by Sheila L. Cavanagh

--- On April 20, 2016, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek described “transgenderism” as an attempt to undermine sexual difference. In other words, he contended that transpeople are reducing what is, for Lacanian psychoanalysis, an unavoidable sexual impasse to an identity-based human rights discourse (that fits nicely into the neo-liberal capitalist order).[i] He suggested that ...

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Networking and Human Nature

A Lesson in Socializing Under the Rules of 21st Century Capitalism

June 22, 2019 • by Patrick Sheehan

A Lesson in Socializing Under the Rules of 21st Century Capitalism...

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Civil War by Other Means

Or: Somewhere, Carl Schmitt is Smiling

May 21, 2019 • by Laura Nelson

In a piece I wrote for Public Seminar in September 2015, I argued that Donald Trump’s campaign augured a turn to the kind of “Friends/Enemies” political imaginary cooked up by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was unimpressed by the niceties of liberal democratic practice, and saw politics as a Kampf between irreconcilable parties, where ...

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How to Bring Emotion back into Psychoanalysis

An excerpt from “Minding Emotions”

May 15, 2019 • by Elliot Jurist

In memory of Lew Aron, psychoanalyst, scholar, teacher and friend. Mentalization -- the effort to make sense of our own and others' actions, behavior, and internal states -- is something we all do. And it is a capacity that all psychotherapies aim to improve: the better we are at mentalizing, the more ...