Suchergebnisse

Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Preface; Introduction: A Philosophical Physiognomy; Chapter 1. Starting Out with Kierkegaard; An Unlikely Cathexis; The Kierkegaard Reception in Germany; Adorn's Kierkegaard Book; Reading Kierkegaard against the Grain; Aesthetics and Interiority; Wahl's Études kierkegaardiennes; Kierkegaard on Love; Chapter 2. Ontology and Phenomenology; Reading Philosophy in the 1930s; Philosophy and Actuality; Heidegger's Crypto-Idealism; Historicizing Nature; Anticipations of the Hegel Studies; Lukács and Benjamin; The Metacritique of Phenomenology.

Anyone who works at the interstices of intellectual history and philosophy and the history and philosophy of science will be quick to rank Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions amongst the most influential works of the last half-century. But its influence extends well beyond these disciplines as well. First published in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, over the last fifty years it has enjoyed a rich afterlife, leaving in its wake an immense if contested inventory of ideas whose significance has transcended the well-policed boundaries that often separate the natural sciences from the social sciences and the humanities. Even more surprising for a book of its academic character, it has enjoyed a reception in popular discourse that exceeds its disciplinary bailiwick. Its trademark terms—not only the celebrated ideas of a paradigm and a paradigm shift but also more technical themes such as normal science, incommensurability, and anomaly—have been naturalized into mundane English with a degree of success that puts to shame just about any other work of recent scholarship. Paraphrasing one of its characteristic claims, one may be temped to observe that, since the publication of Kuhn's Structure, we all live in a different world.

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the wordreal? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marksthemselvessupposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is "scare-quotes," a pun on the word "scarecrow." Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one putsrealityin quotation marks (thus: "reality") we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté?