ABSTRACT While post-Kantian philosophy has long grappled with how language relates to its non-discursive ground, Hölderlin’s translational practice offers an overlooked pathway through this impasse. This article argues that Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’s Antigone recalibrates Kant’s noumenon through linguistic materiality. By employing syntactic rupture and lexical estrangement, Hölderlin simulates the affective profile of intellectual intuition without collapsing the phenomenon-noumenon divide, thereby externalizing reflective judgment through linguistic form, enacting symbolic hypotyposis in the materiality of the text. Through close readings of the First Stasimon and opening dialogue, the article demonstrates ways in which Hölderlin’s intervention renders the transcendent palpable within immanent textual texture. This translational turn establishes a crucial but underexamined lineage for Walter Benjamin’s pure language and Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, positioning language as an irreducible locus of ontological disclosure. The analysis thus reveals how Hölderlin’s practice prefigures twentieth-century theories of linguistic ontology.
ABSTRACT What does democracy entail, especially in pluralistic and divided modern communities? How might religion be summoned as a motivation for democracies commands? This article engages the work of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch in a rumination on democracy and its religious aspects. Simkhovitch is an under-studied voice in the pragmatist tradition, and her unpublished speeches on religion, love, and care for others gives us the materials with which to construct a notion of democracy that proffers attention to the local community that surrounds us, and that makes up larger senses of community beyond us. Simkhovitch’s Christian-inspired sense of loving one’s neighbor—and living actively among them—helps us see that democracy has a very local sense. It also shows a way that a pragmatic approach to religion can provide a pro-social path of melioration and activism.
ABSTRACT The prevailing interpretation of the relationship between Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger frames it in terms of an opposition between theism and atheism, according to which Rosenzweig’s purported interpersonal ethics rooted in divine revelation exposes Heidegger’s deficient grasp of the interpersonal and the ethical. This article argues for a different framing, one that reveals Rosenzweig’s more radical contribution to philosophy as well as a more significant convergence with Heidegger. By examining Rosenzweig’s and Heidegger’s respective reappropriations of Paul, the article offers a reading of eternity in both thinkers not as supratemporality but as the sudden temporalization in the Augenblick or kairos. This reading sheds new light on an ethical dimension emphasized in both thinkers, one that concerns less the anticipation and realization of the good than openness to what arrives in its event-character.
ABSTRACT The notion of solidarity is a polysemic concept that encompasses various meanings. These range from compassion to mutual obligation and include personal sacrifice, collective action, or simple inter-dependence. However, in all cases, this concept confronts us with a relational dimension of existence: solidarity indicates, above all, the act of reaching out to others in a spirit of cooperation. This article examines, from a phenomenological perspective, the meaning of this bond. To do so, the article will seek to show, on the one hand, the need to think about this notion within the framework of institutive phenomenology (rather than constitutive phenomenology). On the other hand, the article will present the hypothesis that solidarity, understood as being-with-another in the mode of cooperative association, designates a structuring medium of experience rather than an affective, moral, or legal disposition (of which it is nevertheless the condition of its possibility), whose semantic model is found in the notion of the medium of experience.
Much of the second part of Cornford's Principium Sapientiae is a review of cosmological myths throughout the world. Cornford did not live to write up the grander conclusions toward which he was working. This article argues that Cornford's narrative was intended to culminate in an account of the origins and significance of two general metaphysical approaches, which came to dominate Greek philosophy and the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Cosmological myth according to which differentiation arises from an undifferentiated origin (as found in Hesiod's Theogony, the first account of Genesis [minus the theism!], and in many other sources) offers one way of thinking of reality. Multiplicity arises organically and freely from a primal source where the multiple elements do not yet exist as such. Top-down creation myths, such as that of Hesiod and the second account of creation in Genesis, are, according to Cornford, oflater origin, reflective of the emergence of an authoritative patriarchy in the societies in which they arose. Metaphysical accounts of reality can, generally speaking, be grouped into those for which emergence is central and those for which stability is central. Cornford isolated the roots of both in pre-philosophical Greek thought, and its Asian antecedents.
The centuries-old reality of human-human violence is a violence in which one human sees and treats another human as "the Other." Antagonism toward strangers is a biological disposition. Human violence is furthermore apparent in the human decimation of non-human animals, hence of biodiversity, and the decimation of planet earth through deforestation and climate change. Wars of territory exacerbate the destructive pursuits of humans. Wars are the cultural elaboration of what is evolutionarily given, namely, male-male competition and the elevation of "alpha males." Human beneficence is a counter to human violence and is strikingly exemplified in a Palestinian doctor's treating all humans as "human beings." The second sapiens in the evolutionary categorization of humans as Homo sapiens sapiens specifies a more mature intelligence hence a being basically capable of self-knowledge as specified in Socrates's observation "To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom." A being capable of "true wisdom" thus acknowledges its own strengths and weaknesses and the ever-present uncertainties of a future that lies ahead.
This article offers a genealogy of contemporary digital power through exploring the lineage that connects it to modern marketing and the Catholic Church's Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. This article argues that nineteenth-century corporations, facing the instability of the Long Depression and the limits of classical liberal economics, drew on the relationships of government pioneered by the church to create apparatuses-marketing, public relations, and advertising-to govern markets and their users. Rather than focusing solely on belief, these corporate efforts reshaped environments, habits, and social relations to stabilize demand and manage competition. Building on Foucault, Dean, and Lemke, the article examines how strategies of government migrated from religious missions into the commercial sphere, eventually culminating in contemporary marketing theories such as Service-Dominant Logic. By situating corporate power in the age of digital surveillance, behavioral prediction, and algorithmic control within marketing and a broader history of government, the article provides a new map for their understanding.
This interpretive and genealogical essay argues that B. R. Ambedkar deploys Dewey's concept of "associated life" in two distinct senses: the sociological and the political. In the former, Ambedkar uses "associated life" to diagnose how caste's graded hierarchy destroys fraternity, community, and the very conditions for meaningful participation in the public sphere, and suggests ways to transform it. In the latter, Ambedkar transforms associated life into a contractual and power-sharing framework for negotiating coexistence among unequal groups structured by caste and religious cleavages. He employs consociational means, that is, power-sharing self-determination mechanisms for communities as rights-protecting strategies to secure disadvantaged communities the capacity to co-determine the "terms of association." I show how Ambedkar builds on these two senses to advance a realist, group-protective, and anti-majoritarian democratic theory, what may be called a normative consociationalism, in the service of Deweyan associated life. Through a close analysis of Ambedkar's writings on franchise, the Communal Award, and the Poona Pact, the paper reconstructs his democratic thought as a historically grounded model for achieving associated life through consociational means. Ambedkar's vision emerges as a "realism of hope": an attempt to build the preconditions of democratic fraternity by institutionalizing power-sharing in deeply divided and unequal societies.
What does democracy entail, especially in pluralistic and divided modern communities? How might religion be summoned as a motivation for democracies commands? This article engages the work of Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch in a rumination on democracy and its religious aspects. Simkhovitch is an under-studied voice in the pragmatist tradition, and her unpublished speeches on religion, love, and care for others gives us the materials with which to construct a notion of democracy that proffers attention to the local community that surrounds us, and that makes up larger senses of community beyond us. Simkhovitch's Christian-inspired sense of loving one's neighbor-and living actively among them-helps us see that democracy has a very local sense. It also shows a way that a pragmatic approach to religion can provide a pro-social path of melioration and activism.
While meliorism-a critical middle ground between optimism and pessimism-is a well-known approach within pragmatism, in particular, it has only rarely been examined in metaphysics. Starting from the distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics (P. F. Strawson), this article argues for a meliorist understanding of metaphysics as a continuously improved reflection on our human categorization of reality that cannot, however, be measured against any prestructured reality as it is in itself. Whereas the optimist idea of achieving the "best" metaphysical categorization-a "final" representational structure that would mirror the structure of the world in itself, as it were-is incoherent and should be replaced, melioristically, by the humanly achievable pursuit of better structures, this view should not be reduced to revisionary metaphysics, as metaphysicians may not agree on what makes a categorization better than its rivals. The article argues that metaphysical "betterment," especially when pragmatically articulated, should be taken to a reflexive meta-level: what is pursued is a continuous amelioration of our self-understanding as agents viewing our world from within our engagement with it. This entangles metaphysics with ethics. Holistic pragmatism (Morton White) can be employed to make sense of this essentially humanistic idea.
In an era of environmental catastrophe, anxiety about our roles-both destructive and productive-in protecting the natural goods and landscapes underpinning our existence have reached a fever pitch. Extreme weather ravaging our communities takes on terrifying, even sublime, proportions; grief for what has been lost and anxiety what about remains, yet precariously, binds us in a terrible double-helix of negative affect. This article asks: what resources can ecopoetry offer us in formulating meanings that transform brute events that overwhelm us into opportunities for resilience and positive transformation? Drawing on John Dewey's metaphysics and aesthetics for theoretical grounding, but focusing on his essay "Events and Meanings" and the role of communication in making sense of hardship, this article proposes an ecopoetic approach to reconciling ourselves with the environmental problems of today without resigning ourselves to environmental defeatism, recognizing opportunities for renewed understandings and approaches that negotiate self and world.
This article explores honesty as a virtuous disposition that one should wish to see enacted by children entering adulthood, and as something ennobling rather than owed. Rather than define it in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, the article probes its various dimensions (from an aversion to lying to an inclination for honest work) and some of the challenges faced by those who would enact it in an excellent manner, including the fact that we are not transparent to ourselves. That said, certain general characteristics are ventured including sincerity, truthfulness, forthrightness, and integrity as well as a kind of carefulness that sometimes favors an artful restraint. Such dimensions only become apparent, however, when assuming the task of concretizing the virtue of honesty through its situated enactment, a process that can lead us to even be honest about how difficult it is to know when and whether we are being honest.
In a deep-cutting, far-ranging exploration of the idea of communication John Durham Peters sets dialogue and dissemination in stark contrast. He invokes at critical junctures in his complex argument the classical pragmatists (above all, James, Dewey, and especially Peirce). While Peters in doing so not only illuminates his topic but also shows the salience of the pragmatists to his inquiry, he fails to deploy one of the most important resources in this tradition-the Peircean concept of semiosis (or sign-process). This article addresses that lacuna.
According to Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment, taste, or the aesthetic power of judgment, does not contribute to the cognition of its object. Nonetheless, elements within his philosophical enterprise suggest a deep cognitive significance of taste. Drawing on Kant's discussions of concept formation in the J & auml;sche Logic and the "law of affinity" in the Critique of Pure Reason, this article argues that taste discerns an indeterminate systematicity or "family" in a beautiful form, even though its exact "family members" are not all given. It posits that the diverse elements of a form can be unified based on their affinity-namely, their capacity to transition through intermediate elements with overlapping similarities or "family resemblances." While taste does not contribute to cognition in the sense of constituting a cognitive judgment, it does drive further reflection on an object and thereby indirectly promotes cognition.
A formal method of speculative philosophy emerges when recursion, rather than foundational origin, becomes the structural point ofdeparture. Traditions groundedin givenness-whether epistemological, phenomenological, or metaphysical-presuppose an inaugural moment of thought. In contrast, recursion posits that thought arises only through reentry: it is never first. Drawing on Peirce's abductive logic, Hegel's dialectical mediation, and recursive systems theory, this article develops a triadic model of speculative recursion-defined by iteration without origin, displacement without symmetry, and conditional ground-formation. This reorientation reframes speculation not as a movement toward foundational certainty or an acceptance of infinite regress, but as the generative articulation of structure through recursive delay. Systematic thought becomes a non-originary process, producing coherence without invoking absolute ground. Within contemporary post-foundational debates on rationality, autonomy, and construction, recursion appears not as a flaw but as the very condition of philosophical generation. The resulting framework supports an account of recursive identity that is neither presupposed nor constructed, but sustained through patterns of conditional reentry. Structural ontology, in this account, unfolds not from being or presence, but from recursive structure- without origin and without end.
The question of Adorno's appropriation of theology has moved toward the center of recent scholarship. Leading positions argue that Adorno is an ardent secularist, using theological language only rhetorically; that Adorno's philosophy is an Inverse Theology; or that Adorno's philosophy evinces a Negative Theology. What is it about Adorno's philosophy that produces such divergent readings and which, if any, is correct? This article reviews these three influential positions, discusses key elements in Adorno's philosophy that these readings hinge on, and argues that ultimately the logic of the constellation, Adorno's premier model for his philosophy, undercuts these positions. What's more, this article suggests the model of Adorno's theological constellation offers an underappreciated nonfoundationalist framework that shows important promise for critical social theory today.
Kant was a thinker of dualisms, so much so that he left us with a subject split in two. The Kantian subject is fractured, unable to know her own unity, and epistemologically divided between noumenal and phenomenal. For Kant, the split subject emerges at a metaphysical and ontological crossroads, caught between a metaphysics of morals and a metaphysics of nature. Through an analysis of the Kantian subject and the logic of illusions necessary to subjectivity, the following paper joins psychoanalysis and German idealism by showing how the Transcendental Dialectic is a dialectic of desire emanating from a divided and barred subject and Other. This article argues that the Kantian subject is a subject of the unconscious, emerging and disintegrating through a dialectic of desire in the abyss of the Real between two metaphysical realities, nature and freedom, ceaselessly seeking the unity of the subject and reality.
The critique of zero-point epistemologies has been a core development in decolonial philosophies, yet this critical move too easily falls back on an over-determination of place, fixing the thinker in their spot. This article argues that decolonial critique should move beyond zero-point theorizing without resorting to spatial or geographic determinism. This article illustrates the risks of this dualistic model by analyzing eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse in Latin America and Europe in the period where geography establishes itself as a science. In this context, the racial determination of geography marks white European subjects as uniquely capable of reaching zero-point indetermination while non-white subjects are determined irreducibly by their geography and unable to achieve epistemic standing. Beyond this dualism, this article develops a pluralistic account of places of decolonial critique where the critical thinker is situated but not fixed in place. This article employs Santiago Castro-G & oacute;mez's concept of heterarchy to articulate such an open conception of critical place by charting the intersections between local, regional, and global spaces.
This article examines the two carceral novels (The Walls of Water and The Hole) of the Mexican philosopher, writer and labor activist Jos & eacute; Revueltas using as a lens Richard Rorty's views on solidarity-particularly, Rorty's views on what solidarity consists in, how it is developed and the effects it has, and this article argues that, if Rorty's views on solidarity are correct, Revueltas's carceral novels have a remarkable ability to expand our solidarity in virtue of their raw portrayal of the shared humiliation and suffering endured by prisoners within the Mexican penal system, which Revueltas was well acquainted with. Specifically, this article shows that Revueltas's characters in the two novels develop solidarity in virtue of a common susceptibility to pain and humiliation, that they show what solidarity consists in since they share common selfish hopes about small things that are woven into their final vocabulary and, finally, that they illustrate the effects of solidarity as they are forced to live in environments where all traditional differences (e.g., race, tribe, religion, etc.) eventually fade.
