For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

The primary task confronting an examination of the claimed connection between Kant's general theory of cognition and his account of aesthetic judgment requires clarifying perhaps the most obscure component of that account, the doctrine of the harmony of the faculties. Kant's presentation of this doctrine makes it notoriously difficult to penetrate. Much of what Kant says about the harmony of the faculties – perhaps the very phrase “the harmony of the faculties” – is rather imprecise and metaphorical. Yet, the importance (...) of a correct understanding of the harmony of the faculties to assessing both the merits of Kant's aesthetic theory and his claims for the epistemological significance of reflection is difficult to overstate, for it is precisely this state of harmony that ultimately grounds the validity of judgments of taste and does so in virtue of being a state in which the most general prerequisites to conceptual judgment are present. (shrink)

Much critical attention to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to two related concerns. The first is Kant's skeptical attack on the claims of pure reason to epistemic authority, where the focus is on the paralogisms and the antinomies of pure reason. The second involves Kant's refutation of idealism. These two concerns are of course intimately connected with one another and there are various ways to express that interconnection. Perhaps most generally it can be said that (...) Kant's assessment of reason in these two contexts is negative: it argues for the limitation of reason's claim to unbridled application and views reason as a faculty whose native propensity to seek such employment must be checked. Reason, as it turns out, is the great metaphysical impostor, whose representations, the ideas, have no epistemic warrant whatsoever. For it is the essence of Kant's position in the Dialectic that metaphysical conundra cannot be solved so long as reason arrogates to itself a direct and unrestricted epistemic or cognitive role and that reason ought to forebear from assigning itself any such status. Such a self-restriction of reason is, additionally, transcendentally necessary because it is that very limitation, Kant argues, that constitutes transcendental critique. (shrink)

Architecture is a philosophical puzzle. Although we spend most of our time in buildings, we rarely reflect on what they mean or how we experience them. With some notable exceptions, they have generally struggled to be taken seriously as works of art compared to painting or music and have been rather overlooked by philosophers. In On Architecture , Fred Rush argues this is a consequence of neglecting the role of the body in architecture. Our encounter with a building is first (...) and foremost a bodily one; buildings are lived-in, communal spaces and their construction reveals a lot about our relation to the environment as a whole. Drawing on examples from architects classic and contemporary such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, and exploring the significance of buildings in relation to film and music and philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Fred Rush argues that philosophical reflection on building can tell us something important about the human condition. (shrink)

Fichte was at the height of his philosophical activity and influence during the last decade of the eighteenth century in Jena. It was during this period that he developed his idea of a Wissenschaftslehre or a “science of knowledge.” A Wissenschaftslehre is an ongoing investigation by subjects of their subjectivity which may be captured only imperfectly in medias res in the form of a written document, but which is crucially not identical with any written philosophical text. So Fichte distinguishes between (...) Wissenschaftslehre and its presentations. In the Jena period Fichte completed two such presentations. The first, the Grundlage der gesammten Wis-senschaftslehre [WL], contains the famous analysis of the preconditions for consciousness in terms of the posits of I and not-I and their reciprocal limitation. Fichte became dissatisfied with his treatment of the central problems in the 1794 version and began working on a second version in 1796. Only two introductions and the first chapter of this new presentation appeared in print. Due to his dawning belief that philosophy was appropriately done solely in oral or dialogic form and the psychic toll of the “atheism controversy” that led to his dismissal from Jena in 1799, by the early 1800's Fichte abandoned plans to publish the entire second presentation. Lectures on the entire second presentation given in 1796-9, the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo [WLnm], are preserved, however, in two sets of student notes. The importance of the discovery of these notes is difficult to overestimate. WLnm develops new and more convincing positions on such fundamental issues as the nature of subjectivity, the unity of reason, and the relation between self-consciousness and intersubjectivity that greatly enhance Fichte's historical status and his relevance to contemporary debates on a variety of philosophical concerns. (shrink)