Volume 7, Issue 1

Modern continental thought is skeptical toward happiness and no longer easily reconciles its pursuit with a desire for justice, the good, and truth. Critical theory has unmasked happiness as a commodity within an industry, an ideological tool for control, and a sedative to, justification of, and distraction from social injustice. This article argues that these diagnoses make it all the more important that philosophy, rather than taking leave of happiness, once again turns it into a serious object of thought. Employing the work of Badiou and Agamben as case studies, it asks what a critically informed yet affirmative philosophy of happiness should entail at a structural level. Assessing their philosophical models of happiness, this article 1) recognizes in their work a revival of the ancient ideal of a true, just, and happy life, 2) opens up a new way of evaluating their work, and 3) articulates basic requirements of a contemporary, affirmative philosophy of happiness beyond the happiness industry and its critics.

The article explores the relationship between two different approaches to happiness and knowledge, that is, the contemplative model and the economistic and instrumental model. Whereas the former equates happiness with the contemplative life, the latter separates happiness from knowledge and subordinates both to what present-day policy-makers call “the economy of well-being.” While biopolitical modernity seems to have rendered the contemplative model obsolete and purposeless, the article suggests reviving the contemplative lifestyle, by putting forward three arguments. First, it contends that we should challenge the economistic and instrumental model, by reaffirming the principle that knowledge and happiness are primarily intrinsic values and ends in themselves. Second, the two models do not necessarily exclude each other and we should strive to combine them. Third, the envisaged integration of the two models requires that we revise them significantly. The elitist and metaphysical character of the traditional contemplative model must be abandoned as it is no longer palatable to modernity. Also, the primacy of economic and instrumental rationality that defines the modern biopolitics of knowledge must be questioned.

This article takes as its point of departure Hannah Arendt’s discussion of public happiness, contextualising it within her thoughts on politics, democracy and revolution. It draws on Arendt’s discussion of how the expression “pursuit of happiness” has historically shifted from a public understanding of happiness into an increasingly privatised one. The article engages with Arendt’s account of public happiness in order to reanimate her radical democratic critique of how representative politics reduces the scope of political action and participation; and how the notion of happiness in a neoliberal era can only be interpreted in economistic and subjectivist terms. Furthermore, the article turns to examine how recent works in contemporary political thought, namely, those by Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, extend and transform the stakes of Arendt’s account of public happiness. On one hand, Cavarero’s notion of surging democracy is considered as an account of radical politics that keeps alive the Arendtian concern with public happiness by contextualising it within contemporary political struggles and social movements. On the other hand, Butler problematises Arendt’s discussion of politics for its neglect of precarity; however, this article argues that Butler’s work on assembly extends Arendt’s by highlighting possibilities of resistance, radical democracy and even public happiness amid experiences of loss and grief. Although prima facie it might appear that happiness and precarity are opposed to each other, this article points towards contemporary political practices, such as those of Ni Una Menos, that are critically reanimating public happiness through the intertwining of affective registers that range from joy to grief.

This article traces the idea of domesticity through the work of Emanuele Coccia to explain his conception of happiness. Coccia argues that it is only by taking domestic concerns seriously that philosophy can begin to theorize the possibility of happiness today, claiming that rather than beginning with the polis, “philosophy must think the city from the home, and the home from the kitchen.” The article begins by situating Coccia's work in the tradition of Giorgio Agamben's critical project and then explores the idea of the home from his 2016’s The Life of Plants through 2020’s Metamorphoses to understand the reason for devoting an entire book to the topic in 2021’s Philosophy of the Home . The final sections of this article turn to Philosophy of the Home itself to explain his conception of happiness more concretely, focusing on his conceptions of love and interdependency, as well as the fundamental importance of nourishment and the kitchen.

This article investigates the anthropology of Spinoza as a strategy for happiness, political, as well as individual. Inspired by the readings, comments, and perspectives of Matheron, Deleuze, and Balibar, I will analyze Spinoza’s theory of the affects as the basis for this strategic anthropology. These authors all share an ontological and political vision organized around the concepts of multitude and the transindividual which result directly from Spinoza’s analysis of the human affects in books III and IV of the Ethics , and his theory of political dynamics developed in the Political treatise . They consider Spinoza a contemporary and share with him the idea of a relational ontology and an inextricable and mutual interdependence of the individual and the community which is captured in the concept of the transindividual. With Matheron/Spinoza I will focus on the question of anthropology and the structure of thought, with Deleuze/Spinoza on the kinds of knowledge in relation to the human mind and body, and with Balibar/Spinoza on the transindividual, productive, active, and thus strategic nature of our thinking. These three analyses of human thought and affects all proceed from the hypothesis of conatus /desire as human essence and aim not just at theoretical knowledge but rather at the effective improvement of our well-being and lives, that is, at happiness.

The considerable literature discussing Walter Benjamin’s “idea of happiness” points both to the important role it plays in his thought and, in this context, to the diversity of interpretations his elliptic style has generated. The pivotal role played by the term in Benjamin’s oeuvre from his early writings on language to his Passagenwerk originates in what has been regarded as his “dialectics of happiness.” While this is certainly a plausible diagnosis, a closer look at the wording of the relevant passages in Benjamin’s oeuvre reveals more nuanced and numerous manifestations of the indirectness that characterizes his approach to happiness. Benjamin invokes the term “happiness” ( Glück ) at crucial crossroads in his thought. It oscillates between potentiality and inaccessibility; individual and collective experience; commemoration and utopia, Eros and emancipation, concrete phenomena and abstract ideas, and last but not least between politics and theology. Equally striking are the divergent modes of expression in which Benjamin’s notion of happiness is articulated. They range from the inexpressible (das Ausdruckslose) to the most lyrical effusions. My talk will correlate Benjamin’s seemingly incommensurable invocations of happiness with the very detours, incompletions, and indirections in his writings about this state of being.

The role and value of happiness in the work of Paul Ricoeur remains an understudied theme. It is especially Ricoeur’s unique dialectical understanding of happiness, unhappiness, and chance which brings a crucial and much-needed insight and correction with regard to the understanding of happiness in our contemporary culture. For Ricoeur, happiness is always in relation to unhappiness, and it appreciates chance within the striving–receiving tension that remains characteristic of happiness. This understanding of happiness provides an alternative to the destructive notions of happiness that leave us trapped in the hedonistic treadmill, the endless unsatiable desires of our existence, the narcistic satisfaction of our needs, and the infinite unhappy pursuit of happiness.

Nietzsche is commonly interpreted as strongly rejecting and even despising any possible conception (or pursuit) of happiness. And yet, one of the most pervasive topics in Nietzsche’s work is the problem of human suffering, the pursuit of meaning (or purpose) in life, and the possibility of a joyful or affirmative disposition toward existence. In this article, I argue that Nietzsche’s criticism of common conceptions of happiness should be seen as a redefinition, rather than a rejection, of the notion of human happiness, with important implications for contemporary discussions on the topic. I start by addressing three of the main contemporary theories of happiness from a Nietzschean perspective, underlining both the points of convergence and the points of divergence between Nietzsche and each of these accounts. I then gather the conclusions of the previous section, add Nietzsche’s positive claims on happiness and the meaningful life, and sketch what might be called a Nietzschean theory of happiness. Finally, I situate Nietzsche’s position in the contemporary debate on the topic and outline what I take to be his most important contributions to current discussions on happiness, meaning, and well-being in human life.

Albert Camus and Rachel Bespaloff had an undeniable influence on the existential thought of the twentieth century. The former, by claiming the world to be silent to our search for meaning, based the concept of happiness in the inherent value of life. The latter grounded her happiness in music and transcendence rather than in the acceptance of the absurd human condition, though the two thinkers seem to agree on the importance of subjective contemplation. In this article, I will offer a reading of Camus’s works that emphasizes his view of happiness in awareness of the absurd. I will then argue for the ethical and political challenges that such happiness causes. Finally, by putting into dialogue the philosophies of Camus and Bespaloff, I wish to show that the two thinkers advocate for the possibility of happiness despite the suffering of the world, and show that this concept, understood as contemplation, can be rooted in the absurd as well as in transcendence.

The article investigates a possible omission within Alenka Zupančič conceptualization of comedy as presented in her 2008 book The Odd One In: – on Comedy . The lack which this work will reveal lies in Slovenian philosopher’s neglect of the conditions of possibility of experiencing comedy, which – we claim – hinges upon happiness, a state forged and conditioned by a particular relation with the “other” (the primal object in psychoanalytical meaning). In order to execute such investigation, the methodological tool, rooted in both the theories of comedy and psychoanalysis, will be introduced: the navel of thought. This notion will make use of the reasoning of Sigmund Freud and posit the existence of a symptomatic point within any theory of comedy, that is a point at which a certain incongruence of the theory plays out. It is only when we are equipped with the theoretical tool of the navel of the thought will we proceed to find such a point within Alenka Zupančič book.

The view of happiness that I propose in this article and derive on the basis of Aristotle’s and Henri Bergson’s ideas recommends that we must first understand life as an activity – not as a sum of accumulated experiences and things; nor a set of projects; nor fateful or haphazard events that befall us, but as a formative activity in which we play a key role. Ἐνέργεια or de l’action are at the core of life and it is by getting a hold of this creative core that we stand to live happily (Aristotle) or joyously (Bergson). For both thinkers, the possibility of happiness and joy comes to the fore, to no small extent, as a certain orientation in our thinking, i.e., as φρόνησις and θεωρία, for Aristotle, and as philosophy for Bergson. Our thoughts inform our choices and actions as well as our view of the world, grounding our sense of meaning, purpose, and value of action. It is by reckoning with the ever-unfolding act of life and with our own actions in it (actions which can be vicious, senseless, and unexamined or creative and constitutive of a life well-lived) that we also take hold of the possibility of happiness and joy.

With reference to Steven Feld’s “acoustemology,” his epistemology of sounding and listening, developed in the Bosavi Rainforest in Papua New Guinea, where the trees are too dense to afford a distant view and meaning has to be found up close, on the body with other human and more-than-human bodies, this essay deliberates how sound knows in entanglements and from the in-between: in a being with as a knowing with rather than from a distance. In this way, this essay, from the densities of the rainforest, critiques Western knowledge and its reliance on visual categories, straight lines, and universalising principles that pretend objectivity and a distant view. Instead, it turns to the relational indivisibility of sound that lets us hear interdependencies and confronts us with the invisible of which we are part. In conclusion, it proposes that sound studies as applied, transversal studies enable such a paradigm shift that at once reveals what hegemonic knowledge strands exclude and invites a different dialogue from the in-between of everything.

Noting that one may hear without listening, the article probes the phenomenological and epistemic distinction between hearing and listening. To listen is to be attuned to voices muffled by silence or camouflaged by a defensive rhetoric resonant with a voice inflected by festering wounds, existential and political. In exploring how one is to listen to these voices of silence, I draw upon Martin Buber’s concept of dialogical “inclusion” of others’ stories, to listen without interpretation to allow the voice behind his – or her or their – story, be it merely etched viscerally in the language of silence, to dwell aside one’s own story in a dialogue unencumbered by perceptions of the Other forged by cultural, social, political constructs, and perhaps most insidiously one’s own defensive postures.

Studies about the influence of sound and ambient environments on understanding and the affects, prior to intentional acts of consciousness, are employed to rectify self-fragmentation exemplified in Heidegger and Augustine. Due to a visual bias that suppresses his auditory disposition in Being and Time , Heidegger gestures toward Dasein ’s fulfillment in social-being yet also recoils from it. To ameliorate this impasse, his underdeveloped modification of existence is revisited by way of Augustine’s attunement to rhetoricity during his conversion experience. As a result of embracing a shared ambient space, he brings care for others as oneself into the realm of “the with” and thereby verifies the significance of an auditory way of being-in-the-world to the formation of communities.

In this article, I aim to clarify some of the ways in which the auditory dimension of the self is constituted through the mediation of technology. I show that by excluding our immediate surroundings with mobile personalized and private auditory technologies, we are increasingly laying down a personal, inner spatial grid of acoustic memories that get integrated into our narrative identity and co-constitutes the space of familiarity and belonging that gives us a sense of who we are. To do so, I first lay out a clear ontological ground. Next, I outline how the auditory dimension of the self is constituted and subsequently mediated technologically. Finally, I bring to bear Erving Goffman’s theatrical framework of performative self-constitution as a useful framework to illustrate how, on one hand, the culturally available repertoire on which the imagination draws to constitute the self has augmented thanks to the contributions of other people in distal spatiotemporal contexts; on the other, the reconfiguration of how we listen to the world and the other people in it entails muting or blocking out of other voices. This can stunt how we conceive of ourselves, producing an epistemic bubble involving a tunnel “vision” or echo-chamber effect. In addition, due to the coupling of bodily and cognitive structures with mobile, privatized auditory technologies that thereby become transparent in experience, others, by listening in on us, acquire the ability to privilege certain types of behavior while suppressing others. Thus, there is a danger that the individual autonomous agency so important to self-constitution can be compromised.

In this article, the methodological meaning of listening will be explored as an ethical-existential heeding. Grounded in an understanding of listening as a matter of heeding, I present a framework founded on Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy entitled Calling and Responding, in which human being’s relation to the world is conceptualised as a process of paying heed to a summons from the Other – followed by a responsible response to that summons – and in turn calling the Other. Such an understanding of the interactions in-between self and the Other is based on the premise that one has an auditory disposition when perceiving and dealing with the world. I elaborate the Buberian foundation of the concepts comprising the framework, clarify the method of philosophical conceptualisation, and present practical examples from the context of pedagogical relations.

In this essay, I explore the notion of the encounter as a challenge to the second-person perspective. I do so by turning to Jacques Derrida’s account of the encounter with the associated notions of address, second-person perspective, otherness, and the secret involved in the understanding of the encounter. My argument is not only that such a dynamic can be seen in Derrida’s deliberation, but also that drawing the connection between encounter and Derrida’s account highlights the complex way in which the second-person perspective is involved in the dialogical situation.

I explore the roots of ontological thinking in the late thought of Georg Lukács via the development of the nature of praxis in German Idealism and the thought of Marx. I contend that the thesis of spontaneous, self-creation as well as social relatedness are both core themes in German Idealism that achieve definitive form in Marx’s thought. In effect, I argue that the human capacities for relatedness and the formation of relations with others paired with the teleological structure of human practical agency constitute a crucial ontological ground for critical theory. It is this that Lukács focuses on in his later ontological writings and which can be used to re-orient contemporary critical theory and critical philosophy which has been dominated by post-metaphysical and neo-Idealist currents in recent decades.

The investigation into the foundations of social critique has increasingly gained importance in the tradition known as Critical Theory. In this context, I will analyze Lukács’ work, particularly History and Class Consciousness, to comprehend the foundation he provides for social critique, rooted in the adoption of Marxism as a method. I posit that the escalating disjunction between the critique of the object and the critique of theory is attributable to the deepening social fragmentation engendered by capitalist structures. This inherent characteristic underscores the imperative for a cohesive amalgamation of epistemic and socio-ontological critique. To elucidate Lukács’ model of critique, I will give particular attention to the chapter “What Is Orthodox Marxism?”. By doing this, I aim to elucidate Lukács’ assertion that the Marxist method facilitates a harmonious integration between the epistemic and socio-ontological dimensions of life, once it incorporates crucial categories such as historicity, totality, reciprocal action, and mediation. Furthermore, his method underscores the symbiotic relationship between some elements of the political economy and the German philosophical tradition, which shapes Lukács’ conceptualization of critique.

The present article tries to show the originality of Lukács’s theory of Actuality ( Wirklichkeit ) by comparing it with the same notion in Hegel’s Logic. It results that Lukács’s interpretation of Marxism and the Russian Revolution depends on a clear and independent theoretical position with regard to Hegel and his Idealistic theory of Modality. Particular importance is given to the new conception of the Dialectical interplay between the notions of Objective Possibility and Historical Necessity.

This study explores the pivotal concept of “objective possibility” within Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness , a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to “objective possibility” and related terms in essays like “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness,” emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term’s roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber’s methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber’s use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel’s dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action.

The central axis of the article is the argument that History and Class Consciousness adopts from the Hegelian dialectics not only the category of totality but also the master–slave dialectic, although it never refers explicitly to the latter. Hence, in this article, we aim to detect the subtle influence that the Hegelian master–slave dialectic exerts on History and Class Consciousness and, more specifically, on the constitution of the Lukacsian concepts of reification, praxis, working class-bourgeoisie interaction, working-class self-consciousness, autonomous subject. Our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is mostly – but not only – based on its philosophical–anthropological interpretation by A. Kojeve. Kojeve’s interpretation, by attributing a crucial role to labour in the mastery–slavery dialectic, focuses on that aspect of the Hegelian dialectic which, in our estimation, was determining for HCC. In addition, our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is based on some occasional references Lukacs has to it in Young Hegel as well as on his interpretation latent in History and Class Consciousness.

The present article aims at providing some clarification on the Horkheimer-Neurath 1937 debate, so as to make three main claims: (a) around 1937 (even though perhaps neither in the early 1930s, at the time of his review of Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia , nor after the Second World War, at the time of Adorno’s disenchanted statement, “the whole is the false”), Horkheimer belonged to the Hegelian-Marxist tradition stemming from Lukács’s History and Class Conscioussness (1923); (b) notwithstanding Neurath’s semantic and epistemological holism, his fallibilism, his rejection of Wertfreiheit in the social sciences, his commitment to socialism, there is still a gulf between his position and Horkheimer’s, for Neurath did not accept the main methodological claim made by the latter, namely, the Lukács-inspired view that what “constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought” is the Hegelian “point of view of totality”; (c) highlighting the main differences between Neurath’s and Lukács’s versions of Marxism – one concerning the very idea of dialectic, and the other concerning the epistemic privilege of the proletariat – can throw some light on and help understand better the distinctive features of Lukács’s Hegelianization of Marxism.

This essay argues that the supermarket partakes in the reification of the nuclear family form. The supermarket is a ubiquitous food space, shaping subjectivity through the ordinary aspects of everyday life. The ubiquity of this space obscures the historical nature of the nuclear family, presenting it instead as the natural and necessary structure of kin relations. I begin with a discussion of Georg Lukács’ account of reification, examining the ways reification thus theorized reveals the reifying force of the supermarket. I then make an intervention into Lukács’ notion of reification, attending to the ways domestic labor, procreation, the production of labor power, and the home as the center of consumption support the reification of the nuclear family both in and outside of the supermarket. In conclusion, this analysis points to the connections between the supermarket, the nuclear family form, and the production of climate chaos to argue that reconfigurations of family and food relations are necessary in the face of ongoing and proliferating climate-related crises.

This article critically examines the emergent phenomena of AI-generated and NFT art through the lens of Georg Lukács’ theory of reification and its existential implications. Lukács argued that under capitalism, social relations and human experiences are transformed into objective, quantifiable commodities, leading to a fragmented and alienated consciousness. Applying this framework to AI and NFT art, these technologies can be said to represent extreme examples of the reification of art and creativity in the digital age. AI art generators reduce artistic production to abstract, computable properties divorced from lived experience, while NFTs transform digital art into speculative commodities, imposing the logic of private property and exchange value onto the previously open domain of online culture. The existential dimension of this reification is explored, raising questions about the nature of creativity, originality, and the value of art in an increasingly financialized and automated world. The article suggests that a Lukácsian critique must not only diagnose the reified character of these cultural forms but also identify their potential for resistance and transformation, pointing toward a re-humanized and emancipatory vision of art in the digital age. Contemporary theorists such as Tiziana Terranova, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Benjamin Noys are invoked to further elucidate these issues.

Dust is a distinctive material that, in addition to its physical properties, reveals anthropological and cultural dimensions, particularly within aesthetic contexts. In a collaborative project focused on “dust,” a theoretical-systematic approach is combined with an artistic-practical-participatory one. Philosophical reflections and artistic concepts related to the material “dust,” specific artworks involving dust, and the relationship between artwork and theory are interwoven. Thus, the text discusses various types of dust, the role of the artist, different modes of perception, cultural context, forms of dust and materiality, media-specific characteristics, and questions of mediation. Throughout this process, common practices of artistic and theoretical engagement are transformed and developed.

Attuned to sonic, aesthetic, and sensory modes of experience, and directed particularly to explore the implications of sound as it informs political thought and actions, in 2021, I began investigating Jerusalem’s soundscape. Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s argument that our perception is impacted by the subjectivity of listening, I invited a group of Palestinian and Israeli artists to work with me on this project, hoping to capture the multiple soundscapes this city offers to its residents, visitors, and passers-by. In this essay, I examine two of the group's projects: “Listening Walks in Jerusalem,” an online sonic archive open for anyone to listen to and download; and “Scores for Social Acoustics in Jerusalem,” an anthology of suggested listening paths in the city. I suggest that these artistic acts succeeded in capturing a range of sonic experiences of Jerusalem and may even have gone beyond Nancy’s words to provide tangible methods for listening to a sound event and hearing it (almost) the same.

The article conceptualizes Agamben’s inoperativity from a historicized perspective, discussing how inoperative or “falling” works of art can reveal the limits of neoliberal capitalism. It discusses contemporary works by Guy Ben-Ner and Ragnar Kjartansson as paradigmatic examples of the ways art reveals the limits and exhaustion or falling of late neoliberalism, particularly in relation to its fusion of work, affective labour, and performance. Relying on Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic categories of the zany and the interesting and Alenka Zupančič’s notions of the comic, the article examines how said categories, as they function in a comic manner in the artists’ works, suspend (rather than negate) the neoliberal order. The essay has two purposes: first, they illustrate the waning ideological influence of neoliberalism, signalling its “passing away,” and discuss how art can “tell time” and engage with historicity. Second, this essay demonstrates how art can encapsulate a frozen-dialectical process of “falling down” or Giorgio Agamben’s Inoperativity – representing its own arrival at its formal limit, its exhaustion albeit without its negation. However, unlike Agamben’s accepted use of the concept, here Inoperativity and the potential it opens is historicized – and appears as a response to late neoliberalism, suspending its forms without negating them.

This essay is written around the art-action عطر עטרה A Guava scent collection from an artist’s point of view. It connects the decision-making process and manifestations of the scent collection to dominant convictions about the “flaws” of scent and the sense of smell in Western philosophy. According to these convictions, the sense of smell and scent have no relevance to rational thinking and/or scientific knowledge and by implication to a political debate, for three reasons: scent is volatile, the sense of smell is non-verbal, and the sense of smell is too subjective to rely on. By contrast, I argue that the supposed “flaws” of scent and the sense of smell, might, in fact, contribute in a constructive and productive way to a sociopolitical debate, as will be demonstrated by the art installation of the Guava scent collection .

This article discusses three recent philosophers who speak in different ways about the retroactive construction of reality by human knowledge. Bruno Latour unapologetically claims that the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II could not have died of tuberculosis, as determined by a team of French doctors in 1976, since this disease was not discovered until three thousand years after his death. Slavoj Žižek often makes comparable arguments, though his version of retroactivity draws on both psychoanalysis and dialectics in a way that is never the case for Latour. Yet in his 2012 book Less Than Nothing , Žižek takes the more prudent, realist-sounding line that changes in scientific theories do not change nature itself. The real novelty in retroactive theories is provided by Thomas Kuhn, who draws our attention to a grey temporal zone in scientific discovery in which it is impossible to pinpoint the exact date of any breakthrough. For Kuhn, this stems from a dualism found in reality itself: one between the fact “that” a thing exists and the determination of “what” its properties are. The tension between these two moments is responsible for much of the vagueness and drama surrounding any paradigm shift in the sciences and is closely related to at least one plausible theory of metaphor. In closing, three Hollywood films are cited as helpful examples for understanding the different ways in which a paradigm shift works its retroactive magic.

This article investigates the analogy of the “laws of nature” through Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic naturalism (ON). Both thinkers challenge the literalist interpretation of scientific knowledge by emphasizing the indirect nature of relation and the primacy of the autonomy of discrete beings over pre-established physical laws. Harman’s OOO defends this autonomy as the irreducible independence of objects from their relations, while Simondon focuses on the modulation of information in shaping the laws of nature through individuation. The article argues that while science remains the best recursive triangulation between logic and empirical evidence, its grasp of an ultimate, literal Truth is constricted by an epistemological relation to autonomous realities, grounded in analogy. Consequently, the laws of nature are considered as legislated by discrete autonomies, with space and time emerging from the things themselves. The article concludes by discussing the consequences of this reframing in light of the ancient conception of díkēkosmos (cosmic justice).

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” However, dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components imply one another and interact. This article shows that systems theory has long asserted the fundamental character of Harman’s dyad, expressing it as the union of internal structure and external function, which correspond exactly to what Levi Bryant, characterizing Harman’s views, refers to as the intra-ontic and the inter-ontic, respectively. After interpreting Harman’s dyad in terms of the ontology of systems theory, the article illustrates his dyad with a variety of examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. The structure–function dyad is a spatial conception of a system as an object. It is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or with an additional orthogonal dyad. Adding a temporal dyad to the structure–function dyad joins the idea of an event and/or process to the idea of an object.

This article investigates the tenet of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) that art, like philosophy, is a form of cognition different from literal knowledge by applying key OOO concepts to the analysis of the Renaissance painting The Ambassadors (1533), a double portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543). The Ambassadors is found to exemplify the key principles of OOO in its treatment of objects and their relationships. Through an OOO lens, the painting becomes not merely a literal representation of the subjects and their possessions, but a dynamic interplay of real and sensual qualities that exceeds any straightforward paraphrase. The figures and objects in the work are not simply passive symbols, but active agents that withdraw from direct access, preserving their autonomy and inviting the viewer’s participatory engagement. Holbein’s masterpiece comes alive precisely by troubling its own representational coherence, drawing the viewer into an uncanny encounter with the withdrawn depths of objects. By reading The Ambassadors through an object-oriented framework, the painting exemplifies art’s capacity to operate as a non-literal form of cognition, irreducible to mere symbolic codes or propositional knowledge.

Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) emphasizes the autonomy of objects, positing a withdrawn surplus of being that resists reduction to its parts or the sum of its parts. However, Harman’s framework faces conceptual tensions, including challenges in reconciling epistemological and ontological dimensions, explaining the formation of compound objects, and ascribing determinate features to experientially inaccessible objects. I argue that these issues arise mostly due to Harman’s over-commitment to a withdrawn substantial core of objects. To address these issues, I propose turning to Jean-Luc Nancy’s post-phenomenological materialism and Alain Badiou’s mathematical realism. Both Nancy and Badiou offer alternatives to Harman’s substantialist core, emphasizing a local, contextually bound identity of things, which describes a restricted domain from the endlessly broader horizon of relations and situations in which each thing is or can be involved. They thus account for the surplus of being in each thing and consequently their ontological autonomy without recourse to a substantive grounding. I argue such a relational-friendly account of pluralism avoids the conceptual issues Harman’s OOO runs into. Lastly, I emphasize the value of OOO as an advocate for ontological equality that seeks to avoid the emergence of privileged actors or centralized discourse. This dialogue between Harman, Nancy, and Badiou thus seeks to advance the possibility of pluralistic ontologies within relational frameworks, combining the perspectives of OOO with post-phenomenological theories to explore the complexities of relationality without recourse to non-relational substrata.

The debate surrounding the definition and specificity of cinema continues in contemporary film philosophy and theory. This article challenges the traditional approach of medium specificity and proposes Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as an alternative framework for understanding cinema. Drawing on OOO’s core principles, the article argues that films, like all objects, are autonomous entities with their own reality. Their meaning is not inherent, but rather emerges through the “performative” interaction between the film object and the viewer. This interaction generates “sensual qualities” that constitute the film’s aesthetic experience. The article contends that focusing on the performativity of cinema, rather than seeking a fixed definition, offers a more productive approach to philosophizing on film. It allows for a deeper understanding of how films function as objects and the ways they generate meaning in relation to viewers.

In recent years, a vast array of thinkers have been invested in challenging the long-standing binary division between the human and nonhuman. The notion of the human microbiome especially attests to the truth of such a complication, since current research in biology strongly suggests that we are at the very least as much microbe as we are human and that the number of microorganisms in the human body outnumber distinctly human cells considerably. In this article, we aim to bring the biological notion of the human microbiome in dialogue with Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) so as to ultimately show that there can be a fruitful exchange of ideas between the two currents of microbiome research and OOO more specifically, and that Graham Harman’s top-down account of objective emergence can be fruitfully a bottom-up approach according to which the parts of an object also impact and constrain the whole.

Working in the framework of object-oriented ontology, Graham Harman claims that science strictly adheres to literal language as opposed to metaphorical language. In this article, I argue that such a distinction between literal and metaphorical language cannot be made cleanly in the context of contemporary physics. First, I identify aspects of scientific practice that point to non-literalism, which include non-linguistic elements of scientific discourse, the problem of interpretation of mathematical formulations of some theories, and the acceptance of incompatible theories that describe the same object. Second, I outline an argument that at least some theories in physics constitute complex metaphors based on Harman’s own definition.

We revisit the notion of vicarious causation in Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in order to first show that Harman has articulated two iterations of his account that are in tension with one another; one is found in his earlier paper “On Vicarious Causation,” while the other is contained in his later writings following the publication of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. This involves a critical assessment of his developing theory of metaphor in a way that encourages sympathetic revision in the service of improving his non-correlationist view of intra-objective relations.

In this article, I use Object Oriented Ontology’s (OOO) account of metaphor as a perspective on the topic of hypnosis and some related phenomena. This analysis shows the potential of OOO’s theory of aesthetics to be informative outside of the usual realm of aesthetics, while simultaneously highlighting some of its shortcomings. Understanding hypnosis from this aesthetic point of view can be illustrative of the ways in which our experience is more generally mediated by factors outside of our conscious awareness. In particular, I will take advantage of this understanding to convey a message of caution regarding how we carry out psychological experiments and scientific research at large. At the same time, the connections drawn in this work highlight the central role played by social dimensions in aesthetic situations and should serve to highlight the need to bring forth such dimensions when thinking about aesthetics in OOO.

I spell out two theses, one shared by Kant and Heidegger, the other Kant’s alone: (1) there is a difference between “within-time-ness” (Innerzeitigkeit) and original or pure time (the temporal difference); (2) the temporal difference is articulated by a self-conscious act not bound by time. While each agrees that the “time-less” original or pure time has limits within which particular temporal determinations have their significance, Kant goes further in asserting that the pure ‘I’ must cognize the determinate boundaries of original or pure time if objective cognition is to be possible. The ‘I’ thus rejects time as a horizon of its own significance. An understanding of this argument suggests why Kant’s position is not as obviously susceptible to Heidegger’s criticism: not only does Kant positively argue that the ‘I’ is atemporal, but the content of this argument tells us why it is impossible for the ‘I’ to be ‘extant’ or a superadded representation in need of unification with temporality. Finally, it suggests that the dispute between Kant’s and Heidegger’s philosophical orientations rests not on whether temporality has been understood, but on how the ultimate conditions of intelligibility relate to their limits.

While sharing some features in common with presentist accounts of time, Hegel’s theory of time fundamentally offers an alternative to standard A-Theories, B-Theories, and C-Theories of time. While compatible with Kantian ideality of time on the one hand and spacetime in the theory of general relativity on the other, Hegel’s theory of time reaches beyond both a transcendental form of sensibility on the one hand and a paradigm for material motion in physics, on the other. Further, while Hegel’s theory of time provides reason to reject such theories of time as the Moving Spotlight, Growing and Shrinking Block, and a range of others, my interest here is in making comprehensible Hegel’s theory of time itself. I will argue that according to Hegel’s theory, the past and the future exist as constitutive of the now, and the now is not separable from space, but rather is itself spatial becoming. Stemming from his underlying logic of actuality and becoming, Hegel espouses the view that history (the past) and future possibility are present and constitutive of the “now.” Understanding his theory of time will also help shed some light on a systematic feature found across his philosophy of nature and mind. Additionally, while his theory presents an elegant notion of time within his philosophy, it also offers an intuitive and productive solution for a traditional identity problem of concrete particulars across time and intervenes in contemporary philosophy of time.

This article traces the development of Edmund Husserl’s approach to the concept of the ego through the different stages of the evolution of his phenomenological project. The aim is to delineate Husserl’s shifting viewpoints from a Humean to a Kantian perspective, particularly focusing on the transition toward a Kantian transcendental approach. Through an analysis of Husserl’s engagement with Kant’s texts, especially on transcendental apperception, the study reveals how Husserl’s encounters with Kantian philosophy informed his conceptualization of the ego. It further examines the “empty character” of the ego, contrasting Husserl’s and Kant’s strategies to address Humean skepticism and their differing solutions for integrating the egological dimension into subjective experience: The transcendence-in-immanence of the ego for Husserl, the I as analytical form of thoughts for Kant.

My primary goal in this article is to provide a historical reconstruction of Heidegger’s relationship to Hermann Lotze’s logic of validity ( Logik der Gültigkeit ). Lotze’s characterization of truth’s “actuality” solidifies the fallacious presupposition that the essence of truth is to be understood primarily in terms of logical assertions. In Heidegger’s view, the predicates “true” and “false,” as the paradigmatic attributes of propositions and judgments, are derivatives of a fundamental and “primary being of truth” known as disclosedness ( Erschlossenheit ). Heidegger marks this decisive position in §44 of Being and Time and gains its methodological purchase by deconstructing traditional logic ( kritischer Abbau der überlieferten Logik ). Heidegger’s treatment, however, is abbreviated, and his sources remain notoriously concealed. For this reason, much is to be gained by examining the supplement provided one year earlier in a lecture course titled Logic: The Question of Truth (WS 1925–26). Heidegger devotes nearly 100 pages to the contemporary situation of philosophical logic. In this course, Heidegger critically evaluates a core principle of both phenomenology and neo-Kantian Erkenntnistheorie : the concept of validity ( Geltung ). This term originates from Lotze’s Platonic Ideenlehre , which asserts that Platonic “ideas” correspond to thoughts through a logical necessity. Consequently, they are deemed valid and eternally self-identical but do not need to exist in the world. For the purposes of this study, I show the historical significance and influence of Lotze’s Logic on twentieth-century Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology. I provide a detailed account of Lotze’s interpretation of the Platonic theory of ideas, which supports his theory of validity. By returning to Lotze’s text, I provide an in-depth review of Heidegger’s reading of Lotze, whom he charges with misleading twentieth-century epistemology. If successful, this article provides the necessary and historical context to understand what is left unsaid and concealed in §44 of Being and Time . This article also serves the auxiliary purpose of acting as a prolegomenon for Heidegger’s urgent return to Aristotle’s thought and accurately determining the essence of truth.

In his account of the individuation and creation of thinking in Difference and Repetition Gilles Deleuze claims that there belongs “an experience of death.” What does this mean and imply for an attempt to come to terms with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism? The following article presents a reading that explores this question, arguing that Deleuze’s account of what it means to think has two aspects that must be understood in relation to each other. On the one hand, Deleuze’s ontology of intensive difference involves an image of human individuation grounded upon a “death present in the living.” On the other hand, Deleuze writes that in the creation of “thinking in thought” there is an experience of death. Understanding the relation between the individuating aspect of death – as the emergence of the pure and empty form of time as the basis for representational thinking and judgement – and the experience of this individuating factor in the creation of thinking in thought, Deleuze’s claim can be made sense of and its centrality in his system clarified. When death as an individuating factor becomes experience, thinking is transmuted from dead representation to intensive life, and transcendental empiricism is operationalized.

Immanuel Kant is often conveyed as a Platonic or Newtonian thinker of the temporal, expressing time as an absolute and continuous repository wherein all objects occur. However, employing themes from his aesthetic writings, what happens when Kantian “sublime” time is reoriented towards a more discontinuous temporal register? This essay employs just such a reading, while also utilising Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), as a methodological device for rethinking both Kantian and object time as neither solely continuous nor discontinuous, but somewhere inbetween these two determinations, in what I term their “ontological ambience.” By doing so I offer a critique of both Kantian orthodoxy and Harmanian OOO, via a comparative analysis of (1) how Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger thematise Kantian temporality, and (2) how Harman develops their subsequent ideas about time. This schema provides post-Kantian philosophy with a provisional model for thinking posthuman time in new and productive ways: as ambient temporalities.

This article concerns the work of the prime movers of the Neo-Meinongian “revival,” Terry Parsons and Richard Routley, and specifically their solution to the issue of how to formulate the Characterisation Principle (a thing that is so and so, is so and so). Both adopted variations of the nuclear/non-nuclear (characterising/non-characterising) strategy. This article discusses their implementations of the strategy and its problems.

This article examines the evolution of the concept of existence in modern visual representation and reasoning, highlighting important milestones. In the late eighteenth century, during the so-called golden age of visual reasoning, nominalism reigned supreme and there was limited scope for existential import or individuals in logic diagrams. By the late nineteenth century, a form of realism had taken hold, whose existential commitments continue to dominate many areas in logic and visual reasoning to this day. Physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and linguistic positions underlie both nominalist and realist views. Since the paradigmatic works on visual reasoning in the 1990s, formal diagram systems have been developed that revive either the nominalist or realist perspectives. Unlike in the nineteenth century, these are not motivated by philosophical views. Nevertheless, they may still have an impact on many areas of philosophy and science outside logic.

Lewis Carroll has been credited for developing a “Method of Trees” for solving multi-literal sorites problems, which anticipates several aspects of contemporary “tableau” or tree systems of logical proof. In particular, Carroll’s method pioneers the use of branching paths as a means of displaying or illustrating inclusive disjunction. However, rather than focusing on the respects in which Carroll’s tree diagrams resemble contemporary tree systems, I propose to focus instead on significant aspects in which they differ. In particular, I will show how the sorts of multi-literal sorites problems that Carroll’s method of trees is designed to solve are particularly ill-suited for resolution by more contemporary tree methods. I will also show how Carroll likely used something like this method, not only to solve but also to craft some of the trickier logical puzzles for which he is also famous.

This article concerns existents as a contentious issue in contemporary Abelardian scholarship. More precisely, it concerns the ontological standing of forms in Abelard’s metaphysics. Take, for example, the apple on my desk. What ontological standing does its redness have? Is it an actual entity over and above the apple or is it in some sense “reducible” to it? Abelard, famously, was a nominalist, so the question is not about some purported universal redness. Rather, it is about the particular redness of the particular apple on my desk. The issue is contentious in that the best current accounts of Abelard’s metaphysics disagree strongly about how to answer this question. Here, rather than focusing on Abelard’s own writings – which so far have yielded no definitive answer – I will consider some anonymously transmitted and mainly unedited logical texts from the twelfth century and show how his contemporaries understood Abelard’s view and how the followers of his philosophical nemesis, Alberic of Paris, reacted to it.

Latin and English are good examples of languages in which temporal information is expressed to a significant extent by the tense system of verbs. Medieval speculative grammar dealt extensively with the grammar of tensed sentences and temporal adverbs. And starting in the 1960s, there was an explosion of theorizing about linguistic temporal indicators, principally tense systems and temporal adverbs, in anglophone linguistics and philosophical logic focused on semantics for natural language. I argue that despite important differences with respect to methodology and underlying assumptions, there is significant agreement about the underlying structure of constructions involving tense and the ontological commitments that follow from a semantic analysis of these constructions. I use as examples Modi Significandi by Boethius of Denmark and Events in the Semantics of English by Terrence Parsons.

Kant criticizes Plato for his interest in positing ideas that are entirely purified from any sensible elements, but which, nonetheless, exist in some supra-sensible reality. I argue that Kant’s criticism can be repositioned and even countered if, in our assessment of Plato, we assign a wider scope of significance and greater value to the senses. In order to lend focus to my article, I analyze Socrates’ presentation of what I translate as the “look of the Good” (τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέαν, 508e) in the Republic so as to show the proximity between Plato and Kant on the question of sensibility. I also draw on the Phaedo and extant literature that goes against the traditional view regarding the status of Ideas or Forms, including the Idea of the Good. I further discuss an affinity between the Good that is “beyond being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, 509c) in the Republic and Kant’s view of God as an Ideal of Reason. Given my articulation of the importance of the sensible dimension in Plato, there is a continuity between Kant and Plato on the question of the illegitimacy of certain ideas. In other words, in my reading (and contrary to Kant’s view of Plato), Kant does not so much overturn Plato’s metaphysics, but develops further the view that is already inscribed in Plato.

This article analyzes the artwork of two seemingly distant contemporary artists – Toomas Altnurme and Cao Jun – elucidating their creative processes through the theoretical frameworks of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, and Henri Bergson. In Section 1, I offer reasons for a side-by-side examination of Altnurme’s and Jun’s art. In my discussion of Altnurme’s art in Section 2, I argue that his process exemplifies Heidegger’s view that artists must abnegate themselves in order for their creations to come into being. In Section 3, I elucidate Jun’s painting in its power to decenter the usual, object-oriented, circumspection of the mind. I ground my analyses in Freud’s concept of dream logic. Freud’s work on dreams allows me to approach Jun’s creative process as a work of translation whereby the artist translates the preconscious elements into images that we – the audience – then see on canvas. In Section 4, where I offer a comparative examination of both artists, I rely on Bergson’s articulation of the importance of intuition in order to show that both Altnurme and Jun create artworks that disclose to us the non-objective dimension of life wherein action or process and possibility take precedence over objectively existing things.

This article explores the use of the concept of “faith” in three non-Christian philosophers. The study begins with Nietzsche, who, while deeply critical of Christian belief throughout his work, offers a positive reformulation of the term in a few key texts. From here, the discussion proceeds to two authors who are deeply influenced by Nietzsche, François Laruelle, and Nishitani Keiji. Laruelle’s recent turn to non-theology sees him engaging directly with Christian theological material and presenting a distinction between a positive form of “faith” in contrast from standard religious “belief,” a distinction I suggest bears close resemblance to Nietzsche’s approach, especially in relation to the Apostle Paul. Finally, Nishitani offers his own account of faith, one inspired primarily by the Buddhist notion of faith, but also referencing Christian theology and specifically the practice of Paul, while also connecting with Nietzsche. The connecting theme for all three thinkers is rooted in Zarathustra’s encouragement to be “faithful to the earth,” a non-transcendent, immanent formulation of faith. Faith, in Nishitani and Laruelle especially, is non-doctrinal, non-dogmatic, and non-intellectual; it is, instead, practical, an immanent existence, a way of life resulting in a different form of connection with the world around us.

In his critique of post-Kantian philosophy, Meillassoux expresses considerable doubts as to how it is capable of describing a world independent of man. He places Heidegger among the ranks of thinkers who are caught in the same trap of the thought-world circle. In this article, I will first examine which complex indirect proof Meillassoux uses to find a path towards an independent reality. In the next step, I will discuss where Heidegger locates Beings in themselves against the backdrop of the Dasein-Being correlation. A radical change of perspective on what it means to be a thinking and understanding “subject” is proposed in this context. In contrast to Meillassoux, an appropriate interpretation of Heidegger’s Dasein can show that there is no need for an indirect proof of a real outside of the correlation. The decisive question is how Heidegger’s correlation of Dasein and Being can be reconciled with statements about the ancestral or whether it stands in implacable opposition to such statements.

This article explores the Lithuanian philosophical conception of philotopy by Arvydas Šliogeris, which, emphasizing the significance of place and experience, imposes limits on Nihil. Philotopy, as conceived by Šliogeris, is a novel method of contemporary philosophy, it is a possible answer to present-day challenges, both existential and environmental. The cosmopolis, as a concentration of things close to humans, primarily allows them to realize their finitude, similar to their place and the things closest to them. Consequently, this realization of the infinity of virtuality extends to an awareness of language as Nihilistic equipment. This mode of thinking also proves to be ecologically beneficial, as it de-virtualizes the individual and establishes a cosmopolis, which remains the beacon of hope and the source of the will to return to the surface of things – because only there can one experience a sparing fullness. This work seeks to illustrate that the fundamental relationship with a place is shaped during childhood, often rooted in the home. Tuan’s phenomenological approach justifies the formation of philotopian thinking and its legitimacy. This article argues that the place becomes determinative not only through the relationship where one becomes accustomed to coexisting with the Other, but also in shaping the vocabulary. Research reveals that language, as the fundamental plane of connection with the world, is influenced by place.

This article aims to outline a theory of political boredom based on the concept of the liberal temporal dispositive . According to this concept, modern politics is characterized by the reduction of political time consumption to enable the growing temporal autonomy of the individual. However, individuals may experience considerable stress in their pursuit to utilize this free time effectively. Boredom arises when individuals fail to “fill” their available time with meaningful actions. Political crises of boredom occur as attempts by individuals to relieve the pressures accompanying temporal autonomy, sometimes restarting political temporality on a new, massive scale. Furthermore, the article examines modern political philosophy as inherently rooted in the liberal temporal dispositive. Through several historical examples, it is discussed how political philosophy may either contribute to imbuing politics with a desire for meaning or abstain from it in an attitude of serene resignation. It is proposed that liberal democracy requires a temporal ethics based on the latter.