Abstract: This essay is an attempt to look at the existential phenomenon of being addicted from the perspective of speculative philosophy. The starting point is the description of Walter Benjamin’s narcotic experiences. Further in my considerations I am guided by the Kantian categories of the dialectics of pure reason, with particular emphasis on transcendental ideas. However, only the…
Abstract: In this essay I analyze the phenomenon of boundary and the mode(s) of human experiencing of it. I claim that it is essential, or even foundational, to culture. Humans encounter boundaries positively or negatively virtually everywhere, in all forms of experience of reality and of themselves. To experience a boundary is, obviously, not identical with a simple acceptance of…
Abstract: Whereas classical Darwinian evolution is based on the model of vertical development, per species, and related sexual selection and natural mutations, along with environmental selective pressures, epi-genetics presents a supplemental view of horizontal development as DNA is both selectively transcribed and translated by mRNA and influenced by a process of horizontal gene transfer, including genetic…
Abstract: This article is part of a larger project that explores how to channel people’s passion for popular arts into legal social justice by reconceiving law as a kind of poetry and justice as dance, and exploring different possible relationships between said legal poetry and dancing justice. I begin by rehearsing my previous new conception of social justice as organismic…
Abstract: This paper aims to reframe disability through John Dewey’s transactional theory of culture to indicate how disability is not located in the biological organization of the individual nor in the organization of culture, but in the transactions between the two. This paper will apply Dewey’s theory of culture to disability studies and philosophy of disability…
Abstract: In the late 1800s masculinity as understood in the United States’ urban northeast underwent a major transformation as the preceding emphasis upon decorum and civility gave way to a new ideal based on masculine health and fitness. This thesis seeks to demonstrate the significant role that Eugen Sandow, a Prussian born strongman who rose to international fame at the turn of…
Abstract: What motivates the voluntary suffering of training for a long-distance run – or any other difficult athletic skill? Long-term pleasure cannot adequately explain this seemingly masochistic activity. On the contrary, I argue that pleasure, or “reinforcement,” is not the only ultimate motivator of behavior. Each of the emotion systems defines its own intrinsic values,…
Abstract: The author begins by analyzing Walter Benjamin’s quarrel with George Kreis and the respective visions of culture advocated by both sides of the debate. Then, he offers a reading of a poem by Paul Celan in which the poet sides with Benjamin, but also makes his position more complex, ultimately offering a paradoxical figure of “the secret…
Abstract: Encrypted in Derrida’s contribution to the Capri Seminar on Religion in 1994 are three retrievals: of his discussions of speech and of systems of inscription; of a concealment of splittings in the supposed continuities of traditions; and of a complicity between the operations of religion and those of a dissipation of the unities of science, Enlightenment, and…
Abstract: The text juxtaposes two different understandings of religion, the first: Hegelian, where it functions as an imaginary representation of the concept, and the second: Derridean, which confronts and radicalizes the idea of the death of God. At the center of their juxtaposition is the process of abstraction and the religious figure…