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John Dewey, in his resistance to foundational individualism, declares that individual autonomy so conceived is a fiction; for Dewey, it is association that is a fact. In his own language: “There is no sense in asking how individuals come to be associated. They exist and operate in association.” In a way that resonates with Confucian role ethics, the revolutionary Dewey particularizes the fact of associated living and valorizes it by developing a vision of the habitude of unique, defused, relationally-constituted human beings. That is, he develops a distinctive, if not idiosyncratic language of habits and “individuality” to describe the various modalities of association that enable human beings to add value to their activities and to transform mere relations into a communicating community.

In Confucian role ethics, Dewey’s contention that association is a fact is restated in a different vocabulary by appealing to specific roles rather than unique habitudes for stipulating the specific forms that association takes within lives lived in family and community—that is, the various roles we live as sons and teachers, grandmothers and neighbors. For Confucianism, not only are these roles descriptive of our associations, they are also prescriptive in the sense that roles in family and community are themselves normative, guiding us in the direction of appropriate conduct. Whereas for both Confucianism and Dewey, mere association is a given, flourishing families and communities are what we are able to make of our facticity as the highest human achievement.

Rebecca Comay, Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, The University of Toronto discusses Hegel and Beckett followed by a response from Paul Kottman of The New School for Social Research.

Presented by Fordham Philosophy

I defend a contextual reconstruction of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. My contextualist reconstruction contrasts with the rationalist reconstruction predominant in contemporary Anglo-American scholarship. After discussing the differences between the two approaches, I show how the rationalist reconstruction has distorted our understanding of Nietzsche in at least two respects. First, in trying to extract theories from Nietzsche’s corpus that will be attractive to contemporary philosophers, it has caused scholars largely to neglect the nature, structure, and argument of Nietzsche’s published works. Here, I make my case by focusing on common misunderstandings of Nietzsche’s free spirit works. Second, it has caused scholars to tame Nietzsche’s project by dismissing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as mere poetry and distancing Nietzsche from controversial ideas such as the will to power and the eternal recurrence. In contrast, I argue that by reading Nietzsche as a naturalist through the lens of a historical influence like Schopenhauer, rather than anachronistically through Quine, we can begin to make sense of these essential features of his project. I close with some remarks about why a contextual reconstruction may not only be truer to Nietzsche, but also more philosophically satisfying than the rationally reconstructed Nietzsche currently on offer.

Contact Sara Pope for more information.

Contact Sara Pope for more information.

Luca Corti (University of Padua) – March 6

Amy Allen (Penn State) – March 27

Andreja Novakovic (UC Berkeley) – April 3

Alberto Siani (University of Pisa) – May 8

Luca Corti (University of Padua) – March 6

Amy Allen (Penn State) – March 27

Andreja Novakovic (UC Berkeley) – April 3

Alberto Siani (University of Pisa) – May 8