Abstract: In the first part of the paper the author offers a frank reassessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He dismisses the Tractatus as philosophically irrelevant but points to the unshaken validity of the main tenents of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially the idea of speech acts being inevitably interwoven with extralinguistic, bodily practices. In the second […]
Abstract: The article contains a review of the main arguments proposed by the philosophers of late structuralism (including the so-called post-structuralism) against Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly, his theses on semantics. Polemics against the Husserlian conception of semantics are grounded in the structuralists’ opposition to the various theses of Husserl’s phenomenologies (both the transcendental constitutive and
Abstract: Transcendental Phenomenology of language wrestles with the relationship of language to mind’s manifestation of being. Of special interest is the sense in which language is, like one’s embodiment, a medium of manifestation. Not only does it permit sharing the world because words as worldly things embody meanings that can be the same for everyone;
Preview: What is language? This question seems to be as fundamental and inescapable for philosophical reflection as it is paradoxical, if not abysmal. It is fundamental since philosophy cannot and should not escape questions concerning its own basic medium, the element of its self-realization or the means of expression of its conceptualized claims and propositions.
Preview: In several conversations over the last months, people have independently raised a troubling sign of the times. Since the mid-2010s, it seems, “Alt-Right” bloggers have begun to populate Facebook and other online venues of the “Modern Stoicism” movement, claiming that the ancient philosophy vindicates their misogynistic and nativist views, complete with sometimes-erroneous “quotations” from
Preview: /Review of Randall Auxier’s, Metaphysical Graffiti: Deep Cuts in the Philosophy of Rock (Chicago: Open Court, 2017), 396 pages./ “There’s a certain type of song that only the virtuoso poet-songwriter can pull off,” observes Randall Auxier. It may even seem to be a genre in itself. Some examples everyone knows are Don McLean’s “American
Preview: A recent item from the science news website of Physics Today describes in readily accessible detail the plans to update the International System of Units of measurement (abbreviated “SI”) so as to base those units on what are currently understood to be “universal constants” of nature. This is viewed as a very exciting development
Abstract: This essay notes the relationship between meaning and the felt passage of time. The concrete experience of fluctuations in the rapidity of passage seems to be universal to the human condition. We often associate the rapid passage of time with pleasure. This article shows that this commonly held view of passage is mistaken and
Abstract: In the first part of the paper the author focuses on the way the great historian and thinker Gershom Scholem understood the Lurianic idea of tsimtsum (i.e. divine contraction as the first act of creation) as the key category of Jewish theology. Next, he combines the conceptual structure emerging from the Scholemian understanding of
Abstract: John Dewey, as Sidney Hook characterized him, was the philosopher of science and freedom. Dewey, as Larry Hickman has demonstrated, was also a philosopher of technology. And, as most people familiar with Dewey know, he was a philosopher of education and democracy. The complex of technology, science, freedom, education and democracy requires re-examination, not
