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Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt

2012-02-23T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.40 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Michael Marder, Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt, Continuum, 2010, 190pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781441180001.

Reviewed by Lars Rensmann, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

Michael Marder's Groundless Existence is, in more ways than one, a bold book. And it intends to be. It proposes far-reaching reinterpretations of Carl Schmitt's political thought, which Marder conceives in terms of a post-metaphysical, non-objectivist political ontology. In fact, Marder turns the German thinker into a founding father of an existential-phenomenological ontology of political subjectivity emerging "at the dusk of Western metaphysics." Situating Schmitt's theorizing in this distinct context, Marder seeks to disclose largely unexplored philosophical elements of Schmitt's political and legal theory. In Marder's account, Schmitt makes us understand "the political" categorically as a subjective-existential experience -- a subjective distinction that is not bound to particular societal spheres or ordering linearity but allows for, and epitomizes the possibility of, radical self-expropriation. Marder describes political...

The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethic

2012-02-23T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.39 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Michael Slote, The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2011, 167pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199790821.

Reviewed by Samantha Vice, Rhodes University

In The Impossibility of Perfection, Michael Slote argues that perfect happiness and virtue for humans is in principle impossible. This is because ethical phenomena are far more complex, and raise far more potential for conflict and failure in values, than philosophers have been willing to recognise. He defends a view of necessary imperfection and ethical complexity that is compatible with, and grounded in, the feminist care ethics he has defended in previous work.

Slote credits Isaiah Berlin with first expressing the view that ethical perfection is impossible, and along with feminism, Berlin is the inspiration for his investigation. Aiming to provide the arguments for the imperfection thesis that Berlin failed to, Slote's own approach depends on exploring in detail examples of conflicts between...

Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism

2012-02-22T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.38 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism, Oxford University Press, 2011, 295pp., $75.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199579969.

Reviewed by Andrew Sepielli, University of Toronto

David Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously is a defense of "robust metanormative realism", or the view that there are "objective, irreducibly normative truths" (p. 4).[1] Realism of a broadly non-naturalist sort has made a huge comeback in recent years -- so huge that it may even be the majority position among normative theorists. This means that Taking Morality Seriously is less brazenly iconoclastic than it would have been had it been published a decade ago. But its novelty is apparent throughout, as it presents creative and ambitious arguments for realism, and uncommonly perspicacious responses to the best arguments against it. It instilled in at least this reader a sense of excitement about what metaethics might look like going forward.

The book consists of 10 chapters: an...

Towards a New Manifesto

2012-02-22T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.37 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, Rodney Livingstone (tr.), Verso, 2011, 113pp., $14.95 (hbk), ISBN 9781844678198.

Reviewed by Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley

Gretel Adorno was a remarkable woman about whom far too little is known.[1] Although the recent publication of her correspondence with Walter Benjamin has confirmed the impression that she was a formidable intellect in her own right, she remains largely a mystery.[2] What we do know for certain is that she was deeply devoted to her husband Theodor, whom she married in September, l937. Abandoning a career as a chemist to support his work unreservedly, she seems to have been resigned to his extra-marital affairs, and was so despondent after his death in August, l969 that she made a botched suicide attempt. Among the many services she rendered was the dutiful taking of minutes from the intellectual discussions he thought...

Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671

2012-02-21T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.36 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671, Oxford University Press, 2011, 796pp., $150.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199567911.

Reviewed by Henrik Lagerlund, The University of Western Ontario

For the past decade there has been a growing trend in medieval scholarship and also to some extent in early modern scholarship that seeks to bridge the gap between medieval and early modern philosophy. This new trend has gradually brought medieval and early modern philosophy together and it has become clear that modern philosophy did not suddenly spring into existence through the genius of René Descartes, but gradually grew over several centuries into something that by the late seventeenth century looked very different from the Aristotelian philosophy shaped by Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. A lot happened over the four centuries in between, both in the discussions of ideas and in the culture at large independent of the philosophical ideas themselves, to...

Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person Is That

2012-02-21T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.35 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Amy Olberding, Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person Is That, Routledge, 2012, 232pp., $125.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415897051.

Reviewed by Myeong-seok Kim, Sung Kyun Kwan University

In this elegantly written book on Confucius and his Analects, Amy Olberding does a splendid job of explaining how the narrative depictions of Confucius in diverse circumstances collected in the Analects make a necessary complement to the more theoretically or conceptually oriented components of the book. Olberding argues that while the former is often skipped in embarrassment by many contemporary interpreters of the Analects, it actually reveals important aspects of human moral development and motivation that are not well captured by the text's conceptual schemata and that would even make us reconsider some recently presented virtue-ethical accounts of Confucius' thought. Specifically, Olberding focuses on Confucius' physical bearing or good manners in dealing with various situations, and argues that Confucius' demeanor regulated by the rituals (lǐ) carries a personal...

Nature, Reason, and the Good Life: Ethics for Human Beings

2012-02-20T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.34 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Roger Teichmann, Nature, Reason, and the Good Life: Ethics for Human Beings, Oxford University Press, 2011, 192pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199606177.

Reviewed by Erasmus Mayr, The Queen's College Oxford

At a time when many philosophers appear to believe that major philosophical problems can be nicely separated and treated almost in isolation from each other, Roger Teichmann's book comes as a timely reminder to the contrary. Both in its general approach and in its execution, it is the very opposite of those highly specialized books which are conceived as near-exhaustive and extremely detailed examinations of narrowly circumscribed topics. Teichmann's impressively comprehensive approach makes the book highly readable -- and accounts for some of its main philosophical virtues. But it also means that, unavoidably, his emphasis is often more on stating his views than on offering fully worked out arguments for them.

Teichmann characterizes his book as a study in 'linguistic philosophy' which is...

Phänomenologie des Lebendigen: Heideggers Kritik an den Leitbegriffen der neuzeitlichen Biologie

2012-02-20T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.33 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Thomas Kessel, Phänomenologie des Lebendigen: Heideggers Kritik an den Leitbegriffen der neuzeitlichen Biologie, Karl Alber, 2011, 294pp., €39.00, ISBN 9783495484692.

Reviewed by Daniel Dahlstrom, Boston University

In this masterful study that is bound to alter the landscape of research into Heidegger's early work, Thomas Kessel demonstrates the folly of marginalizing Heidegger's treatments of organisms and animals. Following a comprehensive review of secondary literature, including the relevant writings of prominent critics (e.g., Sartre, Löwith, Derrida), and a sketch of the Cartesian concern underlying the modern understanding of science that Heidegger aims to undo, the introduction charts the development of his hermeneutical phenomenology. Kessel takes his readers through the topics and themes dominating Heidegger's earliest engagement with philosophy, from its roots in the Neo-Kantian problem of categories addressed by his habilitation and first publications, through his fruitful combination of the Husserlian doctrine of categorical intuition with an interpretation of aletheia,...

Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science

2012-02-19T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.32 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke, and Matthew H. Slater (eds.), Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science, MIT Press, 2011, 355pp., $30.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-262-51626-6.

Reviewed by P.D. Magnus, University at Albany SUNY

This volume collects fourteen essays which were originally delivered as talks at the 2008 Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference. They cover a wide range of topics, and some of them are very good.

The range is so tremendous that the volume often seems to lose focus. The title of the collection, a metaphor from Plato, is now the standard motto for discussions of natural kinds. The subtitle invokes metaphysics and science. So one might expect every contribution to address at least two out of three: natural kinds, metaphysics, and science. The foreword (by John Dupré) and the introduction (by Matthew H. Slater and Andrea Borghini) take a broad view of the terrain, and they provide a good introduction to debates at the intersection of...

The Future of the Philosophy of Time

2012-02-19T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.31 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Adrian Bardon (ed.), The Future of the Philosophy of Time, Routledge, 2012, 219pp., $125.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415891103.

Reviewed by Meghan Sullivan, University of Notre Dame

The Future of the Philosophy of Time is a compilation of papers delivered at the eponymous 2010 conference at Wake Forest University. It has the benefits and defects that one would typically expect from a conference volume. On the one hand, the papers are clearly written, can be read largely independently of one another, and display a broad sample of methodological approaches. On the other hand, the range of questions addressed by the papers in the volume is somewhat narrow. For example, while four of the ten essays discuss B-theoretic accounts of temporal experience, none of the papers defend any distinctively A-theoretic arguments. Most of the papers also presuppose a high degree of familiarity with the philosophy of time. This book will be of...

Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Argument

2012-02-16T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.30 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Catherine H. Zuckert (ed.), Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: Authors and Arguments, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 280pp., $95.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781107006225.

Reviewed by Thad Williamson, University of Richmond

Political Philosophy in the Twentieth Century consists of essays on eighteen prominent twentieth-century political philosophers. According to the editor, Catherine Zuckert, the selected thinkers each addresses a paradigmatic question of political philosophy: "How can we best live, not merely as individuals, but also in communities that have to coexist, if not actively cooperate, in an ever more closely interrelated world?" (p. 2) This is surely the right question to ask, and anyone interested in pursuing it will benefit from -- and take pleasure in -- engaging with the answers suggested in this volume.

Despite the title, the writings of the authors selected do not literally encompass all of the twentieth century. Instead, the story picks up after World War I with Part I...

Evidence and Religious Belief

2012-02-16T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.29 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Kelly James Clark and Raymond J. VanArragon (eds.), Evidence and Religious Belief, Oxford University Press, 2011, 214pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199603718.

Reviewed by Trent Dougherty, Baylor University

This excellent collection is more evidence of the renewal of interest in things evidential in both general and religious epistemology. For the sake of space considerations, I will focus on the first two sections of the book, which are more methodological -- examining the role of evidence in religious belief -- whereas the third of the three sections of the book contains arguments for and against religious belief.

Part I, "Exploring the Demand for Evidence," begins with the late James Ross's essay "Willing Belief and Rational Faith." Ross takes evidentialism to be a thesis about knowledge to the effect that "a person is always unjustified . . . in claiming to know something for which he has insufficient evidence to assure" (18). We...

How to Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge

2012-02-15T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.28 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Stephen Hetherington, How to Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, 260pp., $99.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780470658123.

Reviewed by B.J.C. Madison, University of Warwick

There is very little overall agreement among philosophers concerning the nature of knowledge. Still, certain very general aspects of knowledge are taken to be near platitudes that are rarely challenged, for example, that knowledge entails truth, that it is a kind of mental state, and that it is incompatible with certain kinds of luck. That accounts of knowledge containing these features have so far received little critical scrutiny does not of course mean that they are correct, however. In his latest book, How to Know, Stephen Hetherington forcefully challenges the orthodox conception of knowledge that has come to dominate nearly all contemporary discussions of knowledge. Hetherington's project is not merely critical, however. Instead he proposes a novel alternative theory of knowledge that he calls Practicalism,...

Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks

2012-02-15T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.27 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Andrew Benjamin, Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks, Continuum, 2010, 186pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781441176806.

Reviewed by Brent Adkins, Roanoke College

What is the relation between violence and the political? Is the political inherently violent? Does every founding political act require violence, such that violence and the political are inseparable? The dominant trend in recent Continental thought has been to affirm the inseparability of violence and politics. Giorgio Agamben following Carl Schmitt argues that sovereignty itself cannot be thought without a founding violence, because the sovereign is by definition exempt from the law. This exemption establishes what both Schmitt and Agamben call the "state of exception." Jacques Derrida argues in a similar vein that acting in accord with law necessarily entails a certain lawlessness; the conditions of peace are an ineradicable violence. Both Agamben and Derrida take up the legacy of the ancient Greeks as...

The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind

2012-02-14T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.26 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

James Garvey (ed.), The Continuum Companion to Philosophy of Mind, Continuum, 2011, 386pp., $190.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826431882

Reviewed by Amy Kind, Claremont McKenna College

In this volume, editor James Garvey has assembled eleven contributions on key topics in philosophy of mind (e.g., consciousness, physicalism, mental causation) from leading researchers in the field. These topical contributions are bookended by an opening piece by Ian Ravenscroft that offers a brisk but comprehensive survey of the basic themes motivating contemporary research in philosophy of mind, and a closing piece by Paul Noordhof that reflects on the current state of the field and offers predictions for its future. The book also contains a glossary, a chronology of philosophy of mind from 800 BCE to 1950, and a list of print and electronic research resources in philosophy of mind and related areas.

As always with a volume like this, a reader might...

Philosophy as Criticism: Essays on Dennett, Searle, Foot, Davidson, Nozick

2012-02-14T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.25 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Ilham Dilman, Philosophy as Criticism: Essays on Dennett, Searle, Foot, Davidson, Nozick, Brian Davies and Mario von der Ruhr (eds.) Continuum, 2011, 163pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781441146915.

Reviewed by John A. Humphrey, Minnesota State University, Mankato

This book consists of six critical essays by Professor Dilman on five books by five notable philosophers (there are two essays on Davidson). The five authors/books subjected to Dilman's critical eye are, in order, Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality, Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, Donald Davidson's Essays on Actions and Events, and, last but not least, Robert Nozick's The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations. One significant thing about this volume is that Dilman began work on it knowing that he had a terminal illness. A second is that Dilman chose "philosophers I would disagree with." Also significant, as well as surprising and refreshing, is that prior to undertaking this project Dilman had not read any of the philosophers whose work...

Kurt Gödel and the Foundations of Mathematics: Horizons of Truth

2012-02-13T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.24 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Matthias Baaz, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Hilary W. Putnam, Dana S. Scott, Charles L. Harper, Jr. (eds.), Kurt Gödel and the Foundations of Mathematics: Horizons of Truth, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 515pp., $99.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521761444.

Reviewed by Michael Liston, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

This volume collects twenty-one of the invited essays presented at the Vienna Gödel centenary symposium in 2006. The contributors are leading researchers in mathematics, mathematical logic, computer science, philosophy, theology, and history of mathematics. The preface tells us that the interdisciplinary symposium provided new insights into Gödel's life, work, legacy, and their implications for future research. The editors' goal is to create a lasting impact on the academic community by taking advantage of the rich intellectual exchange at the symposium to produce a volume that covers both the technical and the profoundly reflective aspects of Gödel's work and that will interest both specialized and multidisciplinary readers, including graduate students and informed non-specialists. The volume falls short of success in achieving this goal. On the...

Adorno on Nature

2012-02-13T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.23 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature, Acumen, 2011, 198pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781844652624

Reviewed by Eric S. Nelson, University of Massachusetts Lowell

Deborah Cook's Adorno on Nature is a welcome contribution to interpreting Theodor Adorno's philosophy of nature and its contemporary environmental import. In five chapters this book offers a comprehensive and careful analysis of the crucial and often underestimated role of nature in Adorno, tracing Adorno's conception of "natural history" (Naturgeschichte) from the 1930s to the 1960s and articulating its implications for environmental philosophy and activism. This nuanced study also critically unravels the secondary literature surrounding Adorno. It contests the tendency to construe Adorno's project as a pessimistic-utopian augury of Habermas's conception of communicative rationality or to overemphasize its non-cognitive affective and mimetic dimensions by emphasizing the significance of materialism and critical reason in Adorno's works.

"Natural history" has been a basic yet contested concept in...

Practices of the Self

2012-02-12T21:55:00-0500

2012.02.22 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Charles Larmore, Practices of the Self, University of Chicago Press, 2010, 201pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780226468877.

Reviewed by Carol Rovane, Columbia University

This is an English translation of a book that Larmore originally published in French. One of the main virtues of the book is that it brings into relation important work in both the Anglophone and Francophone philosophical literature of the twentieth century, and it does so for the sake of a goal that is particularly well served by this approach, which is to elaborate a coherent ideal of authenticity.

Larmore starts with Lionel Trilling's distinction between sincerity and authenticity -- the distinction between showing oneself to others as one is, vs. being oneself. Although some philosophers view the latter ideal, of authenticity, as requiring some sort of fidelity to one's true self, Larmore dismisses such views as "hackneyed" and, on this ground, he...

Personal Value

2012-02-12T21:00:00-0500

2012.02.21 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews

Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Personal Value, Oxford University Press, 2011, 185pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199603787.

Reviewed by Mark LeBar, Ohio University

In this work, Rønnow-Rasmussen attempts to expand our taxonomy of kinds of value by distinguishing between personal and impersonal value. To do so, he must offer an analysis of the first (and, by way of it, the second), and then distinguish personal value from other types, familiar from other distinctions among kinds of value, notably: agent-relative vs. agent-neutral value, intrinsic vs. extrinsic value, and final vs. instrumental value. Both in ambition and result, this is an exploratory work. Rønnow-Rasmussen is clear that he himself plans to extend the project, and the book may be seen as an invitation to others to develop and extend the analysis. Overall, however, he makes an excellent case that the idea of personal value is worthy of further study and offers some significant...