The 'Wordsworth-Spinoza Link' and Ethics: Motivating the Wordsworthian Moral

Marjorie Levinson has established a link between Spinoza's philosophy and Wordsworth's poetry, focussing specifically on the two authors' shared metaphysics. In this paper I will follow the chain of Levinson's link and show that Spinoza and Wordsworth share an ethics, too. Spinoza's is an ethics of perspective; his primary prescription is to hold a perspective which acknowledges the metaphysical truth of the interconnectedness of all things for the sake of one's mental health. After grounding Wordsworth's well-known prescriptions of communion with nature in a metaphysics of monistic Nature (as Spinoza suggests), we will be in possession of vocabulary with which to describe a much deeper version of the Wordsworthian moral than has hitherto been familiar. Importantly, though we arrive at our description of the Wordsworthian moral by following Spinoza, it remains markedly Wordsworthian and is a novel particularization of Spinoza's general ethical suggestion.

Analysis of The Category of Truth - “Aletheia” in Plato’s Epistemology

The article reflects the explanation of the concept of the truth by Plato, referring to his allegory "the Cave" and the analogy "the Divided Line" as well as to the dialogues. At the same time, the concept of the truth is being analyzed in the context of episteme and doxa and, accordingly, the hierarchical idea of knowledge, formed by the philosopher, is being investigated. The world of ideas, which forms the basis of Plato's philosophy, is assessed as a world where there is the truth and the unity, the true is separated from its shadow. In addition to the above, Plato's ways of achieving the metaphysical truth are being discussed. The article emphasizes that Plato was the first representative of the oldest theory in history, the theory of correspondence of the truth. Key words: Plato, aletheia, episteme, doxa, idea, knowledge, the divided line

Kajian Metafisika “Relasi Kuasa” Dalam Pemikiran Michel Foucault

Foucault was the first philosopher after World War II who spoke of Nietzscheas a serious political philosopher. For him all kinds of truth claims are interpretations ofa world, which do not really exist as something ahistorical. Three important factors thatinfluence Foucault’s young thinking are, First, the history and philosophy of the Frenchschool of knowledge which was then influenced by the thoughts of Georges Canguilhemwho had many thoughts about the history and philosophy of biology. Second, the linguisticstells Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralist psychology developed by Jacques Lacan,and Georges Dumezil’s (a proto-structuralist in the comparison of religion) had a majorinfluence on Foucault. Third, namely Foucault was infatuated with French avant-gardeliterature, especially the works of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot. In general,the definition of power according to Foucault is divided into two types, namely negativedefinition and positive definition. In the negative definition it is stated that power isnot through violence or the results of an agreement. In the positive definition of powerthat power is the whole structure of actions that suppress and encourage other actionsthrough persuasion, stimulation, seduction, coercion and prohibition. For Foucault poweris productive and cannot be separated from knowledge. Knowledge gives birth to power,power gives birth to knowledge. Knowledge is institutionalized and becomes the authority of power that determines this to be true and that which is wrong. The peculiarity ofthe concept of power from Foucault is that power is carried out more than possessed, notinherent in actors or interests, but united in various forms of practice. Foucault’s thoughtopened up the possibility to dismantle all domination and power relations, such as powerin knowledge between discourse creators, bureaucrats, academics, and “uncivilized”common people who had to be disciplined, regulated and “nurtured”. From the study offoucault’s works, it seems that the metaphysical truth of power relations lies in its historicalstatement, which is actually nothing but to perpetuate the power itself.

Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy

Schopenhauer claims that his understanding of morality identifies and preserves its essential content as it is shared among various philosophical, religious, and cultural traditions. Indeed, he seems to argue that only by rooting moral value, virtue, and responsibility as he does in compassion and beneficence can a satisfactory account of morality be given. At the same time, however, Schopenhauer also insists that no prescriptive account of morality can be given: the very idea of a moral rule is spurious, and morality can only be approached from a theoretical perspective. In this chapter, the author argues that Schopenhauer reconciles this tension between conventional and revisionist strands by justifying morality as the appropriate form of responsiveness to the intrinsic senselessness of existence. Morality, then, is not a rational or strategic pursuit but an expression of the correct attitude toward the unavailability of any sensible pursuit; it is practical insofar as it needs to be sustained in order to express the appreciation of metaphysical truth. The author then addresses three sets of issues: why compassion is a superior form of responsiveness to indifference or arbitrariness, the extent to which this account preserves the content of morality as conventionally understood, and the extent to which this account enables Schopenhauer to address objections regarding the distinctness of persons, the importance of phenomenal concerns, and the possibility of agency.

On the Persistence of Social Groups

In this short discussion note, I cast doubt upon the common view that social groups persist throughout changes in their membership, by virtue of the maintenance of their structure and/or function. I offer two counterexamples, and consider two possible responses to a natural objection to them, neither of which support the view that it is a metaphysical truth that social groups persist through changes in their membership, or persist by virtue of the maintenance of their structure and/or function.

Revelation

This chapter internalizes the postmodern critique of religion and explores the potential for a new theology of revelation. It integrates cultural particularism by maintaining the concept of revelation at the heart of Jewish theology, while recasting it as a non-metaphysical experience. It also tackles the problem of language through its textual manifestations and explores linguistic functions or 'signifiers' that reflect a communal reality. The chapter illustrates how language is used as an instrument to designate a variety of conflicting and complementary narratives rather than as a description of a metaphysical truth. It discusses Tamar Ross's non-realist application of mysticism to religious truth statements and Rav Shagar's denial of language's ability to refer to anything beyond itself.

“Weak Thought” and the Reduction of Violence

In this interview Vattimo discusses with Zabala the possibility of a nihilist philosophy of law as an alternative to the idea of justice and the violence that predictably results from it. To make this substitution would involve the redirection of humanity away from its self-understanding as progressively approaching a metaphysical truth that is eternal and toward the acceptance of an already existing “polytheism of values,” where truth is a contingent and changing product of discursiveness. A society that structures its legal system on what Vattimo terms “optimistic nihilism” would dismiss any urge for the unity and strength supposedly characteristic of monoculturalism and univocal values. Such cohesion as is possible must come from flexibility, responsiveness to contingency, and an openness to multivocal values. “To apply justice to human affairs,” Vattimo argues, is no more than “to adjust things” as conditions change.

Music in Balance

This essay argues that musicological interpretations of Immanuel Kant’s music aesthetics tend to misread his stance as a defense of artistic formalism and autonomy—traits that, although present in his account of music, in fact reinforce his peculiarly low estimate of music’s value among the fine arts. Kant's position and its subsequent influence can be grasped more securely by analyzing his dichotomy between “free” and “dependent” beauty. Through an exploration of this opposition’s echoes and applications in the thought of three “Kantian” music critics and aestheticians in the two decades after the appearance of the Critique of Judgement—J. F. Reichardt, an anonymous series of articles commonly attributed to J. K. F. Triest, and C. F. Michaelis—this essay argues that Kantian aesthetics as applied in practice involved close attention to the impact of genre, style, function, and compositional aims on the relevant standards of judgment for an individual musical work. The result was not one-sided support for the aesthetic or metaphysical “truth” of absolute music, but a characteristic balance between the claims of “pure” and “applied” art forms—a balance that continued to be maintained in the transition from classical to Romantic aesthetics in the first decade of the nineteenth century.

Burthogge, Richard (c.1638–c.1704)

Richard Burthogge, perhaps the first but certainly not the least interesting modern idealist, was a minor philosopher who responded to a variety of English and Dutch influences. His epistemology, constructed as an undogmatic framework within which to debate theological and metaphysical issues, contains remarkable resemblances to later, even recent idealism. He argued that, since our faculties help to shape their objects, we never know things as they are in themselves: all the immediate objects of thought are appearances. ‘Metaphysical truth’ is therefore beyond us, but we approach ‘logical truth’ in so far as our notions harmonize or cohere with one another and with experience. In this spirit, Burthogge advocated a tolerant reasonableness in religion, while in metaphysics he postulated a universal mind, united with matter, of which individual minds are local manifestations.

Parmenides (early to mid 5th century BC)

Parmenides of Elea, a revolutionary and enigmatic Greek philosophical poet, was the earliest defender of Eleatic metaphysics. He argued for the essential homogeneity and changelessness of being, rejecting as spurious the world’s apparent variation over space and time. His one poem, whose first half largely survives, opens with the allegory of an intellectual journey by which Parmenides has succeeded in standing back from the empirical world. He learns, from the mouth of an unnamed goddess, a dramatically new perspective on being. The goddess’s disquisition, which fills the remainder of the poem, is divided into two parts; the Way of Truth and the Way of Seeming. The Way of Truth is the earliest known passage of sustained argument in Western philosophy. First a purportedly exhaustive choice is offered between two ‘paths’ – that of being, and that of not-being. Next the not-being path is closed off: the predicate expression ‘… is not’ could never be supplied with a subject, since only that-which-is can be spoken of and thought of. Nor, on pain of self-contradiction, can a third path be entertained, one which would conflate being with not-being – despite the fact that just such a path is implicit in the ordinary human acceptance of an empirical world bearing a variety of shifting predicates. All references, open or covert, to not-being must be outlawed. Only ‘… is’ (or perhaps ‘… is…’) can be coherently said of anything. The next move is to seek the characteristics of that-which-is. The total exclusion of not-being leaves us with something radically unlike the empirical world. It must lack generation, destruction, change, distinct parts, movement and an asymmetric shape, all of which would require some not-being to occur. That-which-is must, in short, be a changeless and undifferentiated sphere. In the second part of the poem the goddess offers a cosmology – a physical explanation of the very world which the first half of the poem has banished as incoherent. This is based on a pair of ultimate principles or elements, the one light and fiery, the other heavy and dark. It is presented as conveying the ‘opinions of mortals’. It is deceitful, but the goddess nevertheless recommends learning it, ‘so that no opinion of mortals may outstrip you’. The motive for the radical split between the two halves of the poem has been much debated in modern times. In antiquity the Way of Truth was taken by some as a challenge to the notion of change, which physics must answer, by others as the statement of a profound metaphysical truth, while the Way of Seeming was widely treated as in some sense Parmenides’ own bona fide physical system.