Author: ailouros

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1999

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

The relationship between speculative philosophy and the organization of civil society, between philosophical economics and ecological equilibrium has not been systematically developed in modernity. Philosophers, such as Kant and Hegel, would not have imagined how a residual science such as economics, could spiral off into an unbridled Pythagoreanism or how ethics could collapse into that to which it is applied. The fragmentation of the intellectual disciplines is as much the adoption of other values, of mathematics, of hypothetico-deduction, of proof and of manipulative engineering, as it is isolation and xenophobia.

There are two recently published antidotes to these developments, Arundhati Roy’s The Cost of Living and Dierdre McCloskey’s The Vices of Economists. The former is an architect writing about the diabolical absurdities of big dam construction and population displacement in the Narmada Valley in India, the latter a professional economist who rails against statistical significance, blackboard proofs and social, or rather, people engineering that perversely dominate her chosen discipline. While few writers today have the historical and philosophical perspective, much less the perseverance, to elaborate a metaphysics out of their painfully won insights, these authors, in their thin volumes, manage to coalesce a world-view that shatters much conventional wisdom. The Cost of Living, especially, combines an informed non-fictional narrative with a powerful, poetic style that intuitively applies many of the philosophical and economic principles of Henry George. Towards the end of The Greater Common Good (pp.80-81), in The Cost of Living, she intones:

The Cost of Living, especially, combines an informed non-fictional narrative with a powerful, poetic style that intuitively applies many of the philosophical and economic principles of Henry George. Towards the end of The Greater Common Good (pp.80-81), inThe Cost of Living, she intones:

Big Dams are to a nation’s “development” what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains Part IV, the final instalment, of “Metaphysic and Dialectic: Ancient and Modern” by James Lowry. It is expected that this series will be published by the Institute as a Monograph. Also in this issue are some reflections on Hegel’s Concept of Denken by Mark Nyvlt, who is currently doing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston University, and working primarily in the area of the relationship between Hegel and Aristotle.

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Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1999

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

Occasionally I am the recipient of various discussions and controversies via what is now known as Internet listservers. This form of communication can be most valuable. As always it depends on the quality and tone of the individual submissions. “Netiquette” is obviously still in its early stages of refinement. There is something about the spontaneity of the Internet, without the social restrictions of face to face contact, that seems to grant participants a linguistic license which often borders on the obstreperous. There are now listservers for almost every type of philosophical discourse – some freewheeling and anarchic, others controlled by various rules decreed by the manager of the listserver.

I was struck recently while on one listserver of how prevalent the temptation is for philosophy students to seek out secondary literature before they had even begun to study an original text. There were even requests for secondary literature from particular perspectives, such as an analytical reading of Hegel’s Logic or a post-modern interpretation of Kant. The pitfalls associated with reviewing secondary literature before one has a thorough understanding of the original text are obvious and need no repeating here. It appears to me, however, that the philosophical condemnation of such practices is neither common nor fashionable. Graduate students therefore feel no hesitation in making such admissions and requests. There is now no disciplinary shame in confessing your intentions to read this literature as a modus vivendi to allegedly understanding Plato or Aristotle.

There are several possible remedies to this situation. Quotations from secondary sources in term papers will result in demerits not advancement. The sighting and citation of secondary literature in classroom discussions will be strictly forbidden. Professors deeply immersed in such practices will have to exercise restraint. Survey courses based on textbooks designed primarily by the larger commercial publishing houses should be eliminated from all curricula. Finally, the classroom mantra at the beginning of every semester will be the understanding of the text through individual study, effort and reflection. Let the students know that they are usually capable enough.

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This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains Part III of “Metaphysic and Dialectic: Ancient and Modern” by James Lowry and “F.W.J. von Schelling and Post-Hegelian Nihilism” by Francis Peddle which are continuations of essays published in Volume X, Number 2, Fall, 1998. F.W.J. von Schelling is the last representative of classical German Idealism before its disintegration as a philosophical force around the middle of the nineteenth century. He remained an idealist all his life. His philosophical writings have enjoyed a considerable resurgence in recent decades.

As an interpreter of Hegel he was astute, conceptually rigorous and often prophetic of later developments for which a critical understanding of the import of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is a necessary prerequisite. With his invocation of a positive philosophy, and his preoccupation with Naturphilosophie, as opposed to Hegel’s negative rationalism, many modern writers see him as more exemplary of a form of modern existentialism than as an idealist. The following essay is primarily concerned with the issue of Schelling’s understanding of the role of nothing in relation to the Absolute in Hegel, and philosophy in general, and the implications this has for modern nihilism.

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1998

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

With this issue of ELEUTHERIA the Institute completes its tenth year of publication. It is noteworthy that the first volume in the Spring of 1989 contained an announcement that the scholarly and philosophical work of the Institute would be accessible by members while a computer was in “host” mode on Monday evenings between 7:00 and 10:00pm. The intervening years have witnessed an unheard proliferation of journals, semi-journals, newsletters, monographs, bulletins and assorted intellectual efforts. Then in recent years the Internet, E-mail, electronic journals, philosophical news services and websites have supplanted much traditional publishing. Many of the well known print journals still retain their prestige and honour. Their permanency may, however, be somewhat less resilient than those wanting publication within may surmise.

Financial considerations are not the only reasons driving these developments. There is an air of democracy, of freedom and anarchic revelry on the Internet that is almost irresistible. Its blandishments are what one cares to make of them, without the coercive rot and peer group sidling that bedevils much of institutional scholastic life. As a cursory acquaintance with the history of ideas reveals, most great writing, such as Giambattista Vico’s New Science or Henry George’s Progress and Poverty , have been Sisyphean exercises in self-publication. Conventional wisdom dismisses vanity publishing. It is nonetheless integral to our cultural and philosophical traditions. If the Internet lightens the task of the mute Beethovens, Platos and Dantes lurking in our midst, then it is worthy of support and respect.

In the near future the Institute will have a website and join the ranks of global instantaneity and but hopefully not spontaneity – one of the Internet’s more beguiling but counter-intellectual attributes. It is not yet clear if humanity has moved on to another sequence, or perhaps moment, in the articulation of absolute mind. Certainly technology as an external force and instrumentality must always remain subordinate to our moral and spiritual consciousness.

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In Volume IX, Number 2, Fall 1997 I declared our intention to produce the ten volumes ofELEU­THERIA in a bound edition. The Board of Directors has since then revisited this issue and has decided to reproduce selected thematic essays to be published in theMonograph Series . ELEUTHERIA has evolved over the years from its original inception as a more philosophical newsletter to a philosophical journal with the occasional reference to newsworthy items relevant to Institute activities. Issues of the Monograph Series will be announced herein with the usual discounts to Institute members.

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This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains the continuation of articles by James Lowry and myself of essays published in Volume X, Number 1, Spring, 1998 and Volume IX, Number 2, Fall, 1997 respectively. The metaphysical problem of dialectic as understood by the ancients requires the suspension of modern scientific and Christian assumptions. To confront the metaphysics of modernity through Kant and Hegel also necessitates a thorough survey of the many presuppositions associated with the concept of nothing. How one can reconcile or metaphysically integrate the ancients and the moderns, if such a reconciliation is possible, is an important undertaking of speculative philosophy.

Ottawa, Canada

Spring 1998

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

In Hegel’s Dialectic , Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth cen-tury, states:

It seems to be a fundamental trait of philo­sophical consciousness in the nineteenth century that it is no longer conceivable apart from historical consciousness.

The inherent antinomial nature of reason awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. The post-Kant­ian development of philosophy is primarily an odyssey of the increasing historicity of truth. While this development diminished faith in the universal validity of philosophy it did not eradicate the conviction that thought could somehow dwell outside of time. The result was the formation of a fifth underlying antinomy of reason in which the thesis asserted the possibility of scientific and philosophical truth, while the antithesis presented an unbounded historical relativism based on the radical historicity of subjectivity and objectivity. Hence the source of most contemporary dogma­tisms and scepticisms.

Kant’s four antinomies originated in inferential and syllogistic reasoning. They are circumscribed by reason’s higher powers and are not in any sense destructive of the rational faculty itself. Recognition of the mutual validity of thesis and antithesis renders nugatory a constitutive employ­ment of the transcendental cosmological ideas. Reason is protected from the darker onslaught of its own possible self-annihilation as long as it is delimited to a regulatory function.

The fifth antinomy of post-Kantian modernity juxtaposes reason and anti-reason, universal valid-ity and historical relativism. However, in this antinomy thesis and antithesis are not innocent and mutually plausible adversaries. The assertion of one necessarily undermines the foundation of the other. This total incompatibility is rooted in the fact that if truth is irretrievably historicized, then universal transhis­torical validity is not ration-ally enter­tainable as a possibility, unlike the inferences reason makes in the antheses of Kant’s original four antinomies.

The antithesis in the primary antinomy of post-Kantian thought declares that a human being can never stand outside of time and history. A trans-historical absolute is unattainable. Does such an affirmation of the historicity of consciousness necessarily entail a thoroughgoing denial of rationality and lead to nihilism? And is such an antithesis inextricably dependent upon and sur-reptitiously assumptive of the universal reason which it denounces? Denying the possibility of positing something outside of time and history may very well necessarily presuppose certain logical and formal structures of thinking that are indeed unrevisable and atemporal. The proofs of the antinomy of modernity would therefore seem to involve the same assumptions of their opposites as are found in the Kantian cosmologi­cal proofs.

Speculative metaphysics must not simply confront the crisis of historical relativism, radical historicism and the question of whether or not historical existence per se has any meaning. It is conclusion­ary as much as it is heuristic, critical and reflec­tive. This is a perennial mandate even though historicity as such often disguises and sidetracks our metaphysical endeavours.

Ottawa, Canada

Fall 1997

Message from the President

Francis Peddle

This issue of ELEUTHERIA contains a series of book reviews by Peter McCormick on Japanese philosophy and culture, and a piece by myself on Kant’s “Amphiboly of the Con­cepts of Reflection.” Next year will be the tenth anniversary of the publication of ELEU-­THERIA . The Board of Directors has decided to publish a bound copy of all ten volumes, or twenty issues, with an introductory essay on the role of speculative philosophy in moder­nity. Those members wishing to order copies in advance should contact the Institute as only a limited number will be published.

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The Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology, where James Lowry and myself are professors, recently inaugurated a Ph.D. program in philosophy. We think this program is unique in its concentration on the history of philosophy, the theory of the history of philosophy, metaphysics, value theory and philosophical anthropology. The description states that “the programme is designed so that the more traditional history of philosophy courses tie in with the theory of the history of philosophy courses and so that both will intersect with themes in metaphysics.” For more information about the Ph.D. program please contact the Chairperson of the Philosophy Department, Gabor Csepregi at (613) 233-5696. The Dominican College will celebrate its centenary in the year 2000.

As reported in the last issue the Internet is rapidly becoming a vast storehouse of information on philosophy. It now provides access to all the major texts of our philosophical and cultural traditions. We will regularly update our readership on philosophical resources on the Internet that are of particular interest to speculative philosophy and the objectives of the Institute. A particularly useful site is a hypertext version of Norman Kemp Smith’s translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at http://www. arts.cuhk. edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr. This web site is especially valuable for scholars, and those engaged in graduate work on Kant, because it allows for word searches of the English text. Another excel­lent site, organized by topic, with links to an extensive range of philosophical information, is Philosophy in Cyberspace at http://www.personal.monash.edu.au/~dey/phil/index.htm. As any user of the Internet knows once you get on-line you can go just about anywhere with enough persistence. I encourage mem­bers who utilize the Internet to send us via E-mail their web site recommendations.

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With the Fall issue of ELEUTHERIA we once again enclose our annual request for member­ship renewal. If anyone has professional questions about charitable donations for the Institute, or about how to contribute to the Institute’s Endowment Fund, they should contact me.