Fielding and the Moralists

3 The Object of Morality, p.17 4 Cf. Erich Framm: Man For Himself, ch.IV section 1. Despite its limitations, Fromm’s discussion, and the book as a whole, are a useful application of psychological ideas to philosophical ethics, and far more valuable than most recent moral philosophY,in the analytical tradition. S I have in mind such […]

‘Affectivity’, British Society for Phenomenology Conference,British Society for Phenomenology Conference, 3–5 April 1998, Oxford; John Macmurray 6–9 April 1998, Aberdeen;

News Affectivity British Society for Phenomenology Conference, 3–5 April 1998, OxfordWebbʼs critical questioning focused on the issue of whether Heidegger is able to think radically enough the differentiation – which occurs in and through the saying of language – between a thing and its horizon of givenness, which is thereby the dimension of the thingʼs […]

Contingent ontologies: Sex, gender and ‘woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler

Contingent ontologies Sex, gender and ‘woman’ in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler Stella sandford a concerted critique of the sex/gender distinction has not mitigated this sense of historical importance, or even historical necessity. But developments in feminist theory – in particular the claims being made on behalf of various feminisms of difference – and […]

Primordial Being: Enlightenment, Schopenhauer and the Indian subject of postcolonial theory

Primordial Being Enlightenment, Schopenhauer and the Indian subject of postcolonial theory Chetan bhatt century Enlightenment philosophers – others could have been chosen – considered the place of ʻIndiaʼ and some of its religions and philosophies in their grand civilizational, cultural and philosophical chronographies. This is a difficult area whose complexities can be elided by the […]

Signs of the Times, Critical Politics Conference, 30 October 1999, London School of Economics, UK Kant Society Annual Conference, University of Reading, 17–19 September 1999

In his History of the World in 10½ Chapters Julian Barnes remarks that to say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, makes it sound too grand and considered a process. History just burps, he says, and we taste the rawonion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago. The opening […]

No Man’s Land: Reading Kant historically

In 1784 Kant published an essay for a journal that represented the public face of an Enlightenment secret society of senior officials in the administration of Frederick II. In the forty-fourth year of Frederickʼs reign it was necessary to plan for the succession and to ensure as far as possible the irreversibility of the achievements […]

Systems theory and legal theory: Luhmann, Heidegger and the false ends of metaphysics

The political reception of Niklas Luhmann in the English-speaking world is still localized. His death in 1998 triggered a wider general interest in his work, and its susceptibility to reception in cultural theory has been clearly registered. [1] However, political debate on his writings is still largely confined to the theoretically tuned regions of legal […]

Quartering the millennium

Despite recent reassurances that ʻwe have never been modernʼ, owing to a conception of the modern based on the separation of nature from the order of society that has never functioned strictly according to the rules of its ʻconstitutionʼ, it is, nevertheless, this capacity to think the modern as temporally different from its antecedents that […]

The aesthetics of appearing

If for a moment we were to imagine aesthetics as an expansive building that has been worked upon continuously for centuries, that has undergone many redecorations and acquired numerous extensions – letʼs say, as a museum that has become somewhat labyrinthine in the course of time – then we could consider which of its many […]

Hegel’s racism?: A response to Bernasconi

Robert Bernasconi’s article in RP 117 has harsh and important things to say about some philosophical heroes of the Enlightenment, especially Kant, and it deserves serious critical attention. [1] This response is not directly concerned with the central claims of the article but with a marginal, though still significant, aspect: its treatment of Hegel. It […]