What place discourse, what role rigorous argumentation? Against the standard image of Hadot's conception of philosophy as a way of life

After an introduction situating the piece in light of debates surrounding Hadot et al's work on the history of philosophy, Part I of what follows lays out, as briefly as possible, the 'standard view' of Hadot promoted by the texts that have been translated hitherto, and which has attracted Cooper, Nussbaum et al’s criticisms about misrepresenting--or dismissing-the place of rational argument in philosophy 'comme manière de vivre'. In Part II, will we see how several of Hadot’s as-yet-untranslated pieces, led by 'La Philosophie Antique: Une Éthique ou une Pratique?', indicate his own much more qualified perspectives about the place of discourse in ancient philosophy conceived as a way of life. To argue that philosophy included the paranoetic prescription of imaginative, mnemic, and even somatic exercises to rehape subjects' beliefs, habits, and desires is not to deny that these exercises were justified rationally, or based in rigorous theoretical accounts of the human being and its place in the cosmos.

Ranah minang: the changing conception of a traditional minangkabau homeland

The Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, Indonesia, view the physical world as having two distinct components, Ranah Minang (which is itself further divided) and the rantau. Ranah Minang is the traditional, ancient homeland of the group, while the rantau is everything beyond the boundaries of their ancestral lands. This distinction is institutionalised in the folklore of the group and serves as a characterizing dichotomy in their worldview. Even today, when the outlines of the ancestral home are indistinct and the region has been overlaid with the modern administrative structure of modern Indonesia, the distinction between Ranah Minang and the rantau remains strong in societal perceptions and occurs repeatedly, not just in traditional folklore, but in modern expressions of traditional culture. This paper will describe the spatial division of territory in Minangkabau culture as it exists in the folklore of the group and will discuss the ways in which this traditional perception is manifested in modern society. Further, it will discuss the changing nature of the conception of Ranah Minang with respect to the physical landscape as well as to the institutions and structures of society.

Children's conception of police authority when responding to requests for assistance

Children (five to six and seven to eight years old) were presented with scenarios in which various adults (a police officer, a teacher, and an unspecified adult) requested assistance from a child. Six scenarios were presented (two per adult) with half involving a reasonable request (requiring little effort from the child) and the others unreasonable. For each scenario, the participants stated: (i) whether the child in the story should comply with the adult's request, (ii) the reason for the compliance decision, (iii) the consequences of non-compliance, and (iv) the legitimacy of the adult's request. Compliance and perceived legitimacy of the request was highest for the police officer compared to the teacher, with both figures commanding greater compliance than the unspecified adult. Children's justifications suggested that the positive relationship between obedience and social status was due (albeit in part) to fear of punishment for non-compliance, particularly in the younger age group.

Gregory Palamas on the relationship between philosophy and theology

The relationship between philosophy and theology has rarely been a harmonious and fruitful one. The two disciplines are often segmented into mutually exclusive compartments. On the one hand, philosophers, particularly contemporary philosophers working within the Anglo-American analytic tradition, widely agree that the claims made by theologians – such as the claim that there is a God and that God is a trinity of persons – are meaningless, or false, or irrational, or unsupported by evidence, or in some other way epistemically below par. On the other hand, it is not unusual to find theologians following in the footsteps of writers such as Tertullian, Kierkegaard and Barth in arguing that, when it comes to theology, faith suffices and reason merely perverts.

The philosophy-theology dispute was no stranger to fourteenth-century Byzantium, particularly in the writings of the most prominent spiritual and intellectual figure of this period, viz., Gregory Palamas (c.1296-1359). In his debates with Barlaam of Calabria (c.1290-1348), Gregory Akindynos (c.1300-1348) and Nikephoros Gregoras (c.1290-c.1358), the issue of the appropriateness of employing philosophical terms and modes of reasoning in theology occupied a central place.[1] But before looking at how Palamas tackled this issue, it will be helpful, firstly, to briefly outline how the Christian world (especially in the East) prior to Palamas tended to see the relationship between secular learning (including philosophy) and theology; and secondly, to ascertain what exactly was Palamas’ conception of philosophy.

Ethics, aesthetics and the transformation of the self : Foucault's practice of philosophy

Drawing in part on research carried out in the Foucault archives in Paris, the thesis both undertakes a critical assessment of Foucault's late work and attempts to reconstruct the ethical attitude which was emerging in that work. It situates Foucault's project in the context of its Nietzschean inspiration and offers a Foucauldian model of ethics as an aesthetic, transformative work carried out upon the self - as a 'spiritual exercise' in which the critical practice of philosophy takes a central role.

Spinoza/space/speed/sublime: Problems of philosophy and politics in the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane

This article takes account of the ‘spontaneity’ of the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane within the ‘dominating space’ of the philosophy of Spinoza. My use of Paul Carter’s terms here is strategic. The compact of fiction and philosophy in Murnane corresponds with the relationship of spontaneity to the dominating organization of desire in Carter’s rendering of an Aboriginal hunter. Carter’s phrase “‘a figure at once spontaneous and wholly dominated by the space of his desire’” worries Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, who suggest that it subjugates the formation of Aboriginal desire (incorporating spontaneity) to impulses of imperialism. The captivating immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy in Murnane’s fiction, which I will demonstrate with various examples, puts pressure on the fiction to occupy the same space as the space of the philosophy. Here is a clue to why Murnane’s post-colonial thematics have been little explored by critics with an interest in post-colonial politics. The desire of Spinoza’s philosophy creates a spatial textuality within which the spontaneity of Murnane’s fiction, to the degree that it maximizes or fills the philosophy, is minimized in its political effects. That is to say, the fiction shifts politics into an external space of what Roland Barthes calls “resistance or condemnation”. However, the different speeds (or timings) of Murnane and Spinoza, within the one space, mitigate this resistance of the outside, at least in respect of certain circumstances of post-coloniality. It is especially productive, I suggest, to engage Carter’s representation of an Aboriginal hunter through the compact of coincidental spaces and differential speeds created by Murnane’s fiction in Spinoza’s philosophy. This produces a ceaseless activation of desire and domination, evidenced in Murnane’s short story ‘Land Deal’, and indexed by a post-Romantic sublime. What limits the value of Murnane’s fiction in most contexts of post-colonial politics, is precisely what makes it useful in the matter of Carter’s Aboriginal hunter.

The poetic presentation of philosophy:Leo Strauss on Plato’s “symposium”

This essay undertakes a close analysis of Leo Strauss’s remarkable but undertreated Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium,” reading it as opening a privileged purview of his own (and his students’) wider understandings of philosophy, poetry, and politics. The essay begins by drawing out Strauss’s three framing justifications for his manner of reading the Symposium as a document in the “ancient quarrel” of philosophy and poetry concerning which of the two should rightly shape the culture and ethical ideals of the Greeks (part 1). Then, following the course of Plato’s Symposium, the essay ascends through Strauss’s readings of the first five speeches in Plato’s dialogue (part 2) toward the highlight of Strauss’s reading, namely, his three remarkable sessions on Socrates’s speech. Part 3 analyses Strauss’s reading of this speech up to its climax, which Strauss argues involves the philosophical “demotion of poetry”: a criticism of poets as motivated by the Eros of fame and of tragic poetry as at its best creating captivating images of gods and heroes which reflect their creators’ self-love and patriotic love of “one’s own,”as against any transpolitical truth. Part 4 then looks at Strauss’s unusual reading of the culmination of Socrates’s great speech (Diotima on the “higher mysteries”) alongside Alkibiades’s speech in the Symposium as representing Plato’s “poetic presentation of philosophy.” The essay becomes more critical as it proceeds. Strauss’s reading of the Symposium, like his reading of the Republic, is remarkable for its own “demotion of metaphysics” in Plato, and in my concluding remarks, I will question this status, or disappearance, of metaphysics in Strauss’s Platonism and whether this disappearance compromises Strauss' ability to differentiate philosophy as he sees it from poetry.

Killing the father, Parmenides: on Lacan’s anti-philosophy

This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in Seminars XVII and XX in ways earlier contributions of this subject have not systematically done. In part iii, focusing upon Lacan’s remarkable reading of Descartes’ break with premodern philosophy—but touching on Lacan’s readings of Hegel and (in a remarkable confirmation of Lacan’s “Parmenidean” conception of philosophy) the early Wittgenstein—we examine Lacan’s positioning of psychoanalysis as a legatee of the Cartesian moment in the history of western ideas, nearly-contemporary with Galileo’s mathematization of physics and carried forwards by Kant’s critical philosophy and account of the substanceless subject of apperception. In different terms than Slavoj Žižek, we propose that it is Lacan’s famous avowal that the subject of the psychoanalysis is the subject first essayed by Descartes in The Meditations on First Philosophy as confronting an other capable of deceit (as against mere illusion or falsity) that decisively measures the distance between Lacan’s unique “antiphilosophy” and the forms of later modern linguistic and cultural relativism whose hegemony Alain Badiou has decried, at the same time as it sets Lacan’s antiphilosophy apart from the Parmenidean legacy for which thinking and being could be the same.

Contemplation as philosophical practice : "reason in the sphere of understanding"

This essay seeks to explore the practice of contemplation as a method to cultivate insight into some of the key concerns of philosophy. In our discussion, philosophical contemplation is understood as a phenomenological method that instigates dynamic patterns of understanding(s) of an issue or object. Seen in this light, contemplation involves the cultivation of certain introspective qualities that are central to widening the parameters of attention. It is the contention of this paper that a contemplative approach to philosophical inquiry generates a basis for multi-dimensional understandings that can facilitate the possibility of “doing conceptual justice to the world in all its variety” (Sanders 207). In line with the idea of philosophy as a way of life, contemplation as philosophical practice envisions philosophy not simply as a system of propositions but also as an existential practice that both offers ways of gathering knowledge and that can provide epistemic justification for multiplicity, diversity, and seemingly contradictory modes of thought. From the beginning it is important to note that we are not positing a philosophy of contemplation but, following Russell (1912) and Sherman (2014), we are exploring a contemplative conception of philosophy that is predicated on the classical understanding of philosophy as a way of life with an integral practice component that instigates a mutually enriching union of theory and praxis.