The article deals with the relationship of philosophy to science in the work of Martin Heidegger, Dominique Lecourt, & Alain Badiou. It concentrates on Badiou's & Lecourt's attempt to reject Heidegger's thesis "Science does not think" -- for Heidegger science is namely grounded in philosophy. Following the basic presentation of Lecourt's analysis of science & Baidou's analysis of mathematics, the internal problems of their conceptions are thoroughly investigated. Adapted from the source document.
Does science think or does it not think, this traditionally philosophical dilemma has today become, according to the central thesis of this essay, inherent to science itself. The author argues that it is in the interest of contemporary science itself to affirm itself as thought. It is precisely this perspective of science as thought which implies the ethical dimension of science. This is not to be understood in the sense of the necessity of some prohibitive instance such as an ethical demand, but rather in the sense that science, for its own internal reasons, should not give up regarding its desire: to be, both, an experiment of thought & a condition for thought. Only by being useful for thought can science be useful for something else. Adapted from the source document.
We live in an era where the university system is undergoing great changes owing to developments in financing policies and research priorities, as well as changes in the society in which this system is embedded. This change toward a more market-oriented university, which also has immediate effects in academic peripheries such as the Balkans, the Middle East, or South-East Asia, is of great influence for the pedagogical practice of "less profitable" academic areas such as the Humanities: philosophy, languages, sociology, anthropology, history. Because of the absence of a historically grounded establishment of the Humanities, academic peripheries, usually accompanied by a weak civil society infrastructure, seem to offer the most fertile ground for rethinking the Humanities, their pedagogical practice, and their politics, as well as the greatest threats, such as the ongoing capitalization of research, and profitability as the norm of educational achievement. The sprawling presence of for-profit universities and in academic peripheries such as Albania and Kosovo is indicative of this problematic, as are consistent underfunding of universities and the relentless budget cuts in American and English, and to a lesser extent European, universities. Motivations for this ongoing attack on the university are often driven by a political system or a politics with an aggressive stance to critical thought.
Standing on the threshold of the third millennium, it seems clear that the buzzword "globalization" can describe the direction of studies in several different fields, including aesthetics. As several forces -- technological, economic, & political -- continue to intertwine people, as never before, the need for research that is global in range becomes an absolute necessity. Globalization does not concern just economy & politics; especially important is the role of culture in this process, as well as the possibility that we can give some philosophical determination of globalization. Adapted from the source document.
In this essay I attempt to defend Badiou's conception of inaesthetics, drawn from the Handbook of Inaesthetics, from the pertinent criticisms of Rancière. In doing so, it is possible to delimit the intra-philosophical effects (truth effects) of artistic events (this combination being the domain of inaesthetics). Badiou can be defended from all of Rancière's objections, save the objection that inaesthetics asserts a 'propriety of art.' However, in granting this objection, it is possible to open a different question regarding Badiou's work: what is the status of Badiou's comments on art outside of the Handbook of Inaesthetics? Through a reading of Le siècle, I show that, for Badiou, the importance of art extends beyond inaesthetics to other domains of thought. Yet Badiou has yet to answer the question of how art and truth relate outside of the domain of inaesthetics. ; Peer reviewed ; Final article published
In this paper, the author gives a detailed critical discussion of the conditions of possibility of the politics &/or ethics of enjoyment such as that conceived by Sade. She begins by discussing the hypothesis advanced by a set of eminent interpretations of Sade's work according to which there is an irreducible antagonism between disruptive passions & social bonds. The central theme of this essay -- that society is rooted in the imperative of enjoyment -- is elaborated on. As a consequence of this discussion, the author turns to the question of the evil inherent to enjoyment. She concludes that the entire project of the politics & ethics of enjoyment is centered on the deculpabilization of passions & enjoyment since, in Sade, the evilness of enjoyment is imputed to Nature. It could thus be said, argues the author, that Nature is Sade's "symptom," denouncing in this way that Sade, the theorist of enjoyment, is unable &/or unwilling to assume the evilness of enjoyment. Adapted from the source document.
The author poses the question of whether it is possible to say, contrary to common agreement, that Hegel's political thought contains the elements of liberal political thought. She shows, through examination of The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, that Hegel's definition of an individual as a being of reason & as a free being at the same time points in the direction of liberalism & its preoccupation with the freedom & autonomy of the individual. Hegel's key emphasis, however, is that freedom of free choice already presupposes a choice already made, a forced choice of the frame of the free choice itself, which an individual has to take upon himself/herself. Adapted from the source document.
A review of Thomas S. Kuhn's arguments against the unification of the philosophy & history of science focuses on his definition & defense of the interdisciplinary dialogue between the two sciences. While they can explain a given problem for their particular points of view, their perspectives cannot be synthesized. Kuhn's work on the scientific revolutions gives rise to a new science of the development of sciences that could unify the historical analysis of scientific development with the rational reconstruction of scientific developments. 7 References. Adapted from the source document.
Agamben's paradoxical treatments of potentiality seem to leave little room for any robust theory of the subject, political or otherwise. His Aristotelian conception of potentiality entails, in the highest instance, "that potentiality constitutively is the potentiality not to (do or be)," which suggests that even if potential is realized, it is realized only by its lack of activity. Agamben's Aristotelianism is a thread that runs throughout his work, and by looking back to The Man Without Content, particularly his discussion of Marx, it is clear that the framework of potentiality means that it is impossible for him to see in Marx anything other than an odd combination of a "metaphysics of will", and man simply as a kind of natural, living being. This in turn shapes his later discussion in Homo Sacer of the entry of zoe into the polis, which founds Agamben's entire claim vis-a-vis bare life. His wager, namely that the question "In what way does the living being have language?" corresponds exactly to the question "In what way does bare life dwell in the polis?", equates the living being with its political, linguistic, and natural potentialities so completely that there seems to be no room for any kind of historically anomalous or collectively unprecedented subject, one that would break with history or disrupt everyday order. Agamben's work could easily be criticized from the standpoint of a Marxism that would stress the constructed nature of human potential and the necessity to think through forms of organization from within shifts in the nature of work. However, in order to stay closer to Agamben's Aristotelianism, it is far more productive to compare him to a thinker for whom questions of linguistic capacity and politics are also central, and also stem from a certain complex relation to naturalism, namely Paolo Virno. This paper will thus, via a careful reading of Agamben's Aristotelian conception of praxis and potentiality alongside Virno's work on the relation between language and labor, demonstrate the constitutive reasons why Agamben cannot consider any kind of substantial notion of the subject, and why Virno's more nuanced conception of capacity, which draws upon both rationalist and naturalist theories of the subject might constitute a more relevant alternative. Adapted from the source document.
