Cambridge texts in the history of philosophy

Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination

“…(PI, §129) 30 In this chapter, I want to explore Wittgenstein's concern with seeing and vision by focusing specifically upon four questions. First, how do we account for the emphasis which Wittgenstein places upon vision (especially in the later writings); and what does this reveal about his relation to some of the 'ocularcentric' traditions of twentieth-century philosophical and aesthetic discourse?…”

“…28 Implicit in this human drive to the inhuman is a sense of 'disappointment with the world as it is' 29 and at the same time a 'desire for a reform or transfiguration of the world'. 30 Towards the end of 'Ending the Waiting Game', Cavell describes Hamm's attitude as 'hung between': suspended between hope and despair, salvation and damnation, an imagined world and the real one. This acute self-division points, however, to nothing more and nothing less than the fact that Hamm is condemned to a human life 'on earth'; and as the play puts it 'there's no cure for that ' (118, 125).…”

“…27 As Kant clearly puts it in the 'Doctrine of Virtue' of the Metaphysics of Morals: 'while it is not in itself a duty to share the sufferings (as well the joys) of others, it is a duty to sympathize actively in their fate; and to this end it is thereby an indirect duty to cultivate the compassionate natural (aesthetic) feelings in us, and to make use of them as so many means to sympathy based on moral principle and the feeling appropriate to them' (AK 6: 457). 28 30 Kant is able to offer an affirmative challenge to bourgeois ethico-political reason -a challenge which comes from his Formula of Humanity. In Section II of the Groundwork, Kant articulates this formula as follows: 'Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means' (AK 4: 429).…”

Loneliness, its nature and forms: an existential perspective

“…Nietzsche counsels those who embark on this inner odyssey that one can be both his worst and best in solitariness. 41 If the rewards of enduring loneliness and solitude are inestimable, so also, he avows, are their copious and variegated perils.…”

<b>Todd May</b>. <i>The Philosophy of Foucault</i>. London: Acumen, 2006.

“…22 But like some of the other criticisms of Foucault's work documented in the book, I find the over-emphasis on the 'accuracy of Foucault's studies' to be somewhat problematic, partly because it traps Foucault within a representational logic that his 'profound Nietzscheanism' explodes; nor is it adequate for evaluating whether Foucault's work is 'untimely' in the sense Nietzsche gives to it in his Untimely Meditations. 23 As I see it, Foucault's work is 'untimely' not because the 'ship of fools' he describes in Madness and Civilisation is something more than Foucault's dazzling aesthetic imagination, it is 'untimely' because of the ethics of permanent revolt interlinking thought and practice that runs through all of Foucault's work.…”