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Abstract: Alexandre Kojève’s “Immanence et transcendence” (1939) critically examines Father Grégoire’s attempt to prove the existence of God through metaphysical causality. In line with his 1930s lectures on Hegel, Kojève contends that theism and atheism are not resolvable through theoretical reason alone but require a practical decision. This early, previously unpublished text gives a unique insight into Kojève’s criticism of transcendence, echoing earlier ideas from his Russian manuscript on Atheism (1931). Ultimately, for Kojève atheism is not merely a negation of God but an active decision based on freedom. PubDate: 2025-04-18
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Abstract: This short communication offers a response to Moravec’s arguments in Henri Bergson and the philosophy of religion. PubDate: 2025-04-17
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Abstract: Mathilde Tahar’s Du finalisme en biologie. Bergson et la théorie de l’évolution offers a bold reinterpretation of Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) in light of contemporary biology. She reconstructs Bergson’s critique of Darwinism, mutationism, orthogenesis, and neo-Lamarckism, arguing that his Élan vital is neither a metaphysical force nor teleological, but a heuristic tool for understanding evolutionary regularities. The book follows a three-stage structure: a historical reconstruction of Bergson’s evolutionary thought, an engagement with modern genetics and the synthetic theory of evolution, and a vision for a future biology that embraces historicity. Tahar advances three key ideas: (a) organisms are agents, (b) evolution follows regularities rather than strict laws, and (c) evolutionary constraints shape norms beyond natural selection. She introduces the metaphor of evolution as a spinning top moving in a spiral, offering a dynamic model of biological development. The book also establishes systematic connections between Creative Evolution and Bergson’s broader philosophical corpus, including his works on time, memory, and society. With its interdisciplinary approach and philosophical depth, Tahar’s study exemplifies how philosophy can not only engage with but also contribute to contemporary scientific debates. It is an essential reading for philosophers and biologists alike. PubDate: 2025-04-14
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Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
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Abstract: The conception of the free act in Henri Bergson’s 1889 Time and Free Will involves the underdeveloped idea that “effects precede their causes” in the motivational structure of the free decision: rather than motives determining the decision, the decision, on this account, gives shape to, and thus brings into existence, its motives. This paper illuminates this peculiar and perhaps counter-intuitive notion of backwards causation in the free decision in the light of Emile Boutroux’s account of freedom in his 1874 On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature, from which Bergson has borrowed key elements of his own analysis. The paper shows how the idea of effects preceding their causes in the free decision is expressed in Bergson’s later doctrine of retroactivity in art history, according to which the present shapes the past. This admittedly difficult doctrine, one that also remains undeveloped in Bergson’s work, has often been misunderstood, even by some of Bergson’s greatest commentators; it is often identified with Bergson’s critique of retrospective illusions in history, but that critique is itself dependent on the positive idea of retroactivity. In this way, the paper shows that and how free action from a Bergsonian perspective involves retroactivity and is thus retroactive freedom. PubDate: 2025-04-05
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Abstract: This article revisits John Haugeland’s early work on natural language understanding to address contemporary debates about large language models and their capacity for genuine understanding. Through a reinterpretation of Haugeland’s essay “Understanding Natural Language” via key notions in the thought of Martin Heidegger, the article argues that world-disclosing care and the capacity for taking responsibility—what Haugeland calls “giving a damn”—are the conditions of possibility for understanding. By contrasting additive and transformative approaches to understanding, the paper highlights the ontological stakes underpinning contemporary debates about understanding in AI. It concludes by situating the framework Haugeland calls “existential holism” as an overall critique of additive theories. PubDate: 2025-03-15
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Abstract: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of language is a central yet underdeveloped component of his overall philosophical project. His recently published 1953–1954 lectures on The Problem of Speech (2020) shed light on his understanding of language at a critical moment in the development of his thought. In this paper, I develop some central ideas from the course materials and use them to interpret Merleau-Ponty’s views on language and their significance for philosophical method. I begin with a reconstruction of the introduction to the course, in which Merleau-Ponty provides a dialectical path into a philosophy of language that progresses alternatively through naïve, objectivist, and extreme subjectivist perspectives on language before arriving at a mature view that integrates what was true in each of the preceding views. A critical moment in this dialectic is the encounter with foreign languages, illustrated by Western linguists’ difficulties assimilating Chinese syntax to the model of the Indo-European languages. The genuine encounter with foreign languages allows Merleau-Ponty to propose a universality of human linguistic experience despite the genuine, radical differences between human languages. I suggest that we understand language as a concrete or lateral universal and situate this view within Merleau-Ponty’s thought. I then elaborate the consequences of this understanding of language for phenomenological method and practice. Because phenomenology requires a language, and because the phenomenologist’s way of being in the world is pervasively linguistic, language cannot be simply and directly suspended at the outset of phenomenology. However, Merleau-Ponty’s indirect method can bring language into view for the phenomenologist, without assuming a view from nowhere on language and experience. PubDate: 2025-03-09
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Abstract: Both Husserl’s and Levinas’ phenomenologies conceive an intrinsic relationship between ethics and the idea of God. It is not clear however how one should understand this relationship and what could be its proper phenomenological value. I argue in this article that the idea of God has a specific henomenological meaning for ethics, as it is conceived both by the later Husserl and by Levinas. This phenomenological meaning resides in the structure of ethical subjectivity, insofar as its relationship with the good, both as striving towards the good and as obligation to be good, necessarily entails the recognition of the idea of God. Both in Husserl’s and in Levinas’ phenomenologies the idea of God bears a necessary relationship to infinity: it is indeed understood as infinitely distant being (Husserl) or as idea of the infinite itself (Levinas), and generates a form of striving towards an ethical ideal (Husserl) or a form of ethical obligation (Levinas). PubDate: 2025-02-05
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Abstract: I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze both offer accounts of passivity capable of paving the way for a philosophy of time constitution operating outside the structure of human consciousness. Taking, as a point of departure, the fundamental role that temporalization plays in phenomenology as the universal grounding of givenness, I argue that both Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze offer similar and complementary accounts of “lower levels” of time constitution: they both think through the articulation of a non-anthropomorphic “here and now” that precedes the articulation of a fully-fledged consciousness. I then argue that this passive time constitution, which precedes any human faculty of thought, is de facto open, beyond the “here and now,” to multiple degrees of virtual memory or “pure past.” Such considerations subvert and complexify the common views that equate the animal’s capacity of retention with its capacity to be open to a world. Finally, I suggest that these syntheses of temporalization are not teleologically oriented, that is, their deployment in organic systems of higher complexity is neither their culmination, nor their final stage. The organic syntheses can be made to resurface. For the human subject, this results in the disorganization of thought and the reshaping of sense-making faculties. PubDate: 2025-01-30
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Abstract: The influence of Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity has grown considerably. However, recent commentaries increasingly trace disagreements in the literature to Malabou’s own ambiguous uses of the concept. This paper weaves together these criticisms and places them in the Hegelian context out of which Malabou developed her views. Plasticity is Malabou’s argument for reimagining Hegel’s Aufhebung as a non-teleological view of change in which the “suppleness” of material plays an important role. As presented in The Future of Hegel, Malabou lays out her view of plasticity through the very Hegelian process of aufheben she is actively rethinking. Original lessons about change drawn from examples of material transformation are developed into an ontology of “becoming.” I argue that the charge of ambiguity in the literature stems from the lack of appreciation of this move from limited examples to novel ontology, something Malabou later acknowledged. I suggest distinguishing between plasticity and what I call “neoplasticity.” The former refers to concrete examples of material change, inspired by the plastic arts, in which the role of material suppleness is explicit. The latter refers to cases of transformation in which the role of malleability in the process of change is implicit and requires being considered in light of her ontology of non-teleological change. PubDate: 2025-01-25
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Abstract: In this paper I argue that conscience is a phenomenon that takes place on two different architectonic levels: the sedimented level of intentional consciousness and the pre-intentional level of sense-formation and intersubjective perceptive phantasiai. On this pre-intentional level, one does not clearly distinguish between what is alien and what is one’s own: the lived experiences are not yet ascribed to an already constituted self but can be qualified as “nomadic.” This architectonic level is the locus of one’s openness to the Other and their embodied life, be it ethical or aesthetic openness. This is why pre-intentional conscience is lived through as a silent call. This call, on the one hand, affects and destabilizes the recipient and compels them to a certain understanding, and, on the other hand, it is marked by an essential ambiguity regarding the identity of the caller and/or the transferred message. This call becomes manifest in the response, when it gradually acquires a well-defined shape and is subsequently identified as the voice of my authentic self, or the voice or the gaze of the Other in need, or the voice of a universal law, or the voice of God. The recipient of the call of conscience becomes a kind of “translator” or “spokesperson” who lends their own flesh with its bodily and mental habits to the caller, translating the silent call into a practical judgement of conscience. PubDate: 2025-01-25
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Abstract: Drew M. Dalton’s, The Matter of Evil, engages the history of philosophical pessimism, speculative realism, and ethics with the goal of finding a material absolute to ground contemporary philosophical theory. Dalton advocates for entropy as this absolute, giving rise to a philosophy of “unbecoming.” Being faithful to Kant’s critical project and the consequent limitations placed on human reason, Dalton rejects the kinds of nihilism, quietism, and fideism that so often emerge in the wake of Kant’s discoveries. Despite the collapse of metaphysical absolutes in Western philosophy, Dalton believes that ethical responsibility can still be grounded in the law of entropy. Tracing the latest developments in biology, chemistry, and physics, Dalton draws from philosophical pessimism and speculative realism to show that there is no escaping entropy. Everything that exists will unravel and the universe will eventually die. Yet, instead of bringing us to the brink of despair, Dalton champions an ethics that fights back against unbecoming and works to alleviate unnecessary suffering on a social and political level. PubDate: 2025-01-25
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Abstract: This introduction to the special issue on the phenomenologies of aging explores the relative philosophical neglect of aging as a distinct topic. It critiques the naturalistic reduction of aging, which frames it primarily as decline, and examines the ethico-political implications of this perspective. In order to contextualize the possibilities of forming a new sustained philosophical debate on aging, we describe the earlier advances made in the field by notably Simone de Beauvoir’s work and the developments in critical gerontology, aging studies and the anthropology of aging and the life course. The introduction then programmatically states the need for a revitalized philosophical discourse on aging, suggesting that phenomenological inquiry can reveal the ontological complexities of intergenerational relationships and shared existence. Finally, we briefly introduce the contributions to this special issue by drawing forward the themes of corporeal temporality, generationality and the problem of sharing the world across generations. PubDate: 2024-11-25
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Abstract: While many people, when contemplating the prospect of becoming old, tend to focus on the deteriorating capacities of the aging body, much less attention has historically been paid to the changing social relationships that inevitably accompany old age as peers and life partners age and die. Merleau-Ponty ends the Phenomenology of Perception with Antoine St. Exupéry’s claim that human beings “are a knot of relations.” When we understand a human being as a knot of relations, the social fragility of old age becomes readily apparent, for this knot inevitably begins to unravel as longstanding personal and professional relations are attenuated through retirement, illness, and death. Other factors also increase the social fragility of old age, most notably the fact that the elderly, as Beauvoir notes in The Coming of Age, are most often treated with less dignity and respect than their younger counterparts in social, clinical, and professional encounters. The unraveling of the knot of relations is not the end of the story, however, for different ties are formed as elderly people establish relationships with caregivers, clinicians, and total strangers. To address the social fragility of old age, I argue, we must provide the social supports necessary for elderly people to develop meaningful new bonds, especially in cases where their mobility is severely limited, so that the unraveling of the knot of relations that is an inevitably component of old age does not result in a complete severing of one’s ties to loved ones and to the human community. PubDate: 2024-11-16
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Abstract: This paper sets out a phenomenological account of how the autobiographical past can, on occasion, assume certain future-like qualities. I begin by reflecting on the analogy of a bore wave, as employed in a novel by Julian Barnes. Building on this, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in order to address how our memories are revised in light of our current concerns and vice versa. Then, by adapting Edmund Husserl’s conception of temporal “protention,” I show how acts of remembering are integral to a process of ongoing reconciliation between our current orientation towards the future and the autobiographical past. They sustain, disrupt, and reconsolidate a non-localized, dynamic sense of who we are, in ways that are inseparable from how we experience time. PubDate: 2024-11-09
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Abstract: This article pays heed to Klaus Held’s work by focusing on his last book Die Geburt der Philosophie bei den Griechen. The article shows that the book brings together two central themes that occupied Held throughout. First, how the birth of philosophy coincides with the birth of the polis (the political world) and second, how the pre-Socratics gave philosophical credence to the world in which we live, a world which Husserl later calls the “life world.” Through a novel and unorthodox reading of Parmenides, Held shows that the option is not between two paths: the path of truth and the path of doxa. Instead Parmenides shows that there is only one path: The path of truth is the path of doxa. It is this insight that allows Held to argue that philosophy needs to pay heed to the world in which we live. This is the world as it appears and matters to us. Held thus believes that we learn from the pre-Socratics that the ecological crisis we face today of philosophical significance. PubDate: 2024-10-21
