This article offers an interpretation of Plato’s Menexenus in which the figure of Socrates emerges as critical of both the Periclean and Aspasian vision of politics. By speaking in the voice of Aspasia in the Menexenus, Socrates is able to draw out the limitations of the Periclean politics of freedom without straightforwardly identifying himself w…[Read more]

This essay attempts to uncover the ideology of form that operates in an unquestioned way in much philological scholarship concerning Aristotle’s thinking. Drawing on four different interpretations of form in Aristotle, that of Joseph Owens, Edward Halper, Michael Frede and Günter Patzig, and Michael Loux, this essay attempts to show the manner…[Read more]

Ontology has been traditionally guided by sophia, a form of knowledge directed toward that which is eternal, permanent, necessary. This tradition finds an important early expression in the philosophical ontology of Aristotle. Yet in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s intense concern to do justice to the world of finite contingency leads him to…[Read more]

While the rhetoric of the “end of metaphysics” is guided by a well-founded concern to call into question the hegemonic function of principles, it remains misguided insofar as it rejects the entire history of Western thinking as totalizing. While this article recognizes this legacy of totalizing thinking, it also seeks to locate another ten…[Read more]

Rather than adopting an uncritical conception of the geometrical method as optimal due to its inherent objectivity, this article delineates the rhetorical power of the geometrical method as it is deployed by Spinoza in the Ethics. Specifically, the article focuses on the first fourteen propositions of the Ethics in order to illustrate how they are…[Read more]

In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote that “art’s fateful hour has struck” and that he had “captured its signature” in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction.” Less than a month after these words were written, Martin Heidegger gave a lecture entitled “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Freiburg. These two philosophical ref…[Read more]

This article offers an interpretation of the transition that occurs in Physics A.7, in which Aristotle establishes an important new role for form in accounting for ontological identity. It then turns to Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of physis in order to show the dangers, both ontological and ethical, endemic to Hei…[Read more]

In order to suggest why Kant does not offer an explicit argument for the necessary connection between the synthesis of the imagination and the categories, this article argues that the productive imagination and the understanding are in fact two aspects of one and the same ability (Vermögen), and further, that their identity may be thought in such…[Read more]

By way of an analysis of Arendt’s defense of the public/private distinction in The Human Condition, this essay attempts to offer a re-interpretation of the status of the family as a realm where the categories of action and speech play a vital role. The traditional criteria for the establishment of the public/private distinction is grounded in an i…[Read more]

By investigating Levinas’ notion of the transcendence of the face to face against the backdrop of his own conception of traditional Western philosophy, the extent to which Levinas himself fails to transcend the very structure of western philosophy is elucidated.