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 Simkhovitch is an under-studied voice in the pragmatist tradition, and her unpublished speeches on religion, love, and care for others gives us the materials with which to construct a notion of democracy that proffers attention to the local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.
