Books by Alistair Welchman
Cambridge University Press, 2022
Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Wes... more Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation is one of the central texts in the history of Western philosophy. It is one of the last monuments to the project of grand synthetic philosophical system building, where a single, unified work could aim to clarify, resolve, and ground all the central questions of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, aesthetics, and science. Poorly received on its initial publication, it soon became a powerful cultural force, inspiring not only philosophers but also artists, writers, and musicians, and attracting a large popular audience of nonscholars. Perhaps equally importantly, Schopenhauer was one of the first European philosophers to take non-Western thought seriously, to treat it as a living tradition rather than as a mere object of study. This volume showcases the enormous variety of contemporary scholarship as well as the enduring relevance of this beautifully written text.
The World as Will and Representation, Volume 2, 2018
The World as Will and Representation is the major achievement of Schopenhauer’s life, and the bac... more The World as Will and Representation is the major achievement of Schopenhauer’s life, and the backbone of his intellectual career. In 1844 he published a revised and extended edition of it, and now added a whole second volume of ‘supplementary’ essays. It is this second volume, even longer than the first, that we have here in translation. In 1859, the year before he died, Schopenhauer revised both volumes for a final time, making many further additions.
The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religi... more The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement.
First published in 1818, The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire phil... more First published in 1818, The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion, in an attempt to account for the world in all its significant aspects. It gives a unique and influential account of what is and is not of value in existence, the striving and pain of the human condition and the possibility of deliverance from it. This new translation of the first volume of what later became a two-volume work reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names and bibliography, and succinct editorial notes, including notes on the revisions of the text which Schopenhauer made in 1844 and 1859.
• A new accurate translation providing the reader with an up-to-date version of the text • Contains substantial introduction, editorial notes, bibliography, chronology and glossary for aiding those new to the subject and also for highlighting the connections between Schopenhauer and other philosophers and philosophical issues • Full editorial notes within the text provide a useful resource to higher level scholars
Essay on Transcendental Philosophy presents the first English translation of Salomon Maimon's pri... more Essay on Transcendental Philosophy presents the first English translation of Salomon Maimon's principal work, originally published in Berlin in 1790.
In this book Maimon seeks to further the revolution in philosophy wrought by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by establishing a new foundation for transcendental philosophy in the idea of difference. Kant judged Maimon to be his most profound critic, and the Essay went on to have a decisive influence on the course of post-Kantian German Idealism. A more recent admirer was Gilles Deleuze who drew on Maimon’s Essay in constructing his own philosophy of difference. This long-overdue translation makes Maimon's brilliant analysis and criticism of Kant's philosophy accessible to an English readership for the first time.
The text includes a comprehensive introduction, a glossary, translators' notes, a bibliography of writings on Maimon and an index. It also includes translations of correspondence between Maimon and Kant and a letter Maimon wrote to a Berlin journal clarifying the philosophical position of the Essay, all of which bring the book's context alive for the modern reader.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von Schelling (1775-1854) was a colleague of Hegel, Holderlin, Fichte, G... more Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Von Schelling (1775-1854) was a colleague of Hegel, Holderlin, Fichte, Goethe, Schlegel, and Schiller. Always a champion of Romanticism, Schelling advocated a philosophy which emphasized intuition over reason, which maintained aesthetics and the creative imagination to be of the highest value. At the same time, Schelling's concerns for the self and the rational make him a major precursor to existentialism and phenomenology. Schelling has exercised a subterranean influence on modern thought. His diverse writings have not given rise to a system or school of thought; rather, individual philosophers have been influenced by the resonance of his ideas and their influence on contemporary ideas and movements. The New Schelling brings together a wide-ranging set of essays which elaborate the connections between Schelling and other thinkers - such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan - and argue for the unexpected modernity of Schelling's work.
This thesis is an interrogation of the viability of transitive production, which I associate with... more This thesis is an interrogation of the viability of transitive production, which I associate with the Aristotelian term hylomorphic. The central axiom of hylomorphic production that will be targeted for critique is that the agent of production must be distinguished absolutely from the product. The thesis follows the thought of production primarily in its characteristically modern instantiation in the Kantian transcendental, but I also elaborate a long example from Milton of the pre-modern form of transitive production in its explicitly theological mode. The argument seeks to demonstrate that the productive aspect of the operator of transitive production is incompatible with the transcendental element, and that Kant was himself increasingly aware of this problem. The Third Critique, under the rubric of an aesthetics, it will be argued, manifests this awareness in its problematic of a manifold of empirical laws. That this constitutes a difficulty for transcendent idealism means that the transcendental operators of the First Critique have failed to constitute experience in a relevant and important way. Furthermore, it is possible to see in some of the famous slogans of the Third Critique, an indication of another mode of production which is immune to the difficulties of the axiom of transitive production. In conclusion I suggest that the consequences of this new mode of intransitive production, associated with materiality, is destructive of the thought of the axiomatic otherworldliness of production operators. Production is not operated at all. Some suggestions are then made as to the explanation of the error embodied in the axiom of transitivity.
Papers by Alistair Welchman
The New Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2025
Schopenhauer’s philosophy has a complicated relation to politics. On the surface, pessimism is a... more Schopenhauer’s philosophy has a complicated relation to politics. On the surface, pessimism is an inauspicious foundation for any sort of liberatory politics and elides more comfortably with conservatism. But a closer look complicates this superficial elision. In this paper, we will be examining these complications and investigating what important insights Schopenhauer can offer for this difficult historical moment (but as Schopenhauer powerfully reminds us, what historical moment hasn’t been equally difficult?). In particular, the relation between Schopenhauer’s pessimism and contemporary movements like Afropessimism can demonstrate perhaps not so much the liberatory potential of Schopenhauer’s pessimism as the Schopenhauerian dimension of today’s radical political critique.
Forthcoming in Norman and Welchman (eds) Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press), pp. 200-223, 2021
In this paper I argue, in the first section, that Schopenhauer was a direct perceptual realist. I... more In this paper I argue, in the first section, that Schopenhauer was a direct perceptual realist. I think Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant in the Appendix to WWR 1 is largely bound together by his view that Kant was still welded to a pre-critical indirect perceptual realism which creates the various points of tension or compromise formations that Schopenhauer enumerates. In the second section I go on to argue that this perceptual direct realism sheds light on his account of compassion, in particular making it more plausible that he is a direct realist about our perception of the emotions, or wills, of others (at least in the appropriate circumstances). This helps to resolve a problem identified in the literature, especially by David Cartwright. In the last section I address an objection, and show that far from being an objection, it in fact strengthens my position.
Robert Wicks (ed) Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer (Oxford University Press 2020), pp. 49-66, 2020
Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich Willi... more Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This paper examines the motivations for Schopenhauer's immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling's philosophy, both to Schelling's metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling's epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer's substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling's errors: still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling's errors.
Douglas Hedley, Chad Meister and Charles Taliaferro (eds.) The History of Evil in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Vol. IV of Chad Meister and Charles Taliaferro (eds.) The History of Evil (Routledge), pp. 150-166, 2018
Schelling (1775–1854) and Schopenhauer (1788–1860) both operate in the German idealist tradition ... more Schelling (1775–1854) and Schopenhauer (1788–1860) both operate in the German idealist tradition initiated by Kant (1724– 1804), although both are critical of some of its developments. Schelling’s interest in evil—which is at its most intense in his 1809 Freedom essay (full title: Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom and Related Matters)—stems from his belief that Kant’s account of morality, and hence much of the idealist tradition, in fact makes evil, in the broad sense of moral badness, impossible. For Schelling this is a disaster because without a meaningful choice whether to act morally we are not free, and without agency he thinks we are not even individual persons. We become mere puppets of universal reason. In the Freedom essay Schelling links these theories with the traditional Christian conception of evil as a privation, and attempts by contrast to develop a concept of “radical” or “positive” evil that grounds both our freedom and individual personality. The project falters not necessarily with the conception of evil, but with Schelling’s residual commitment to the rationality of morality and inability to frame a satisfactory conception of freedom to match his conception of radical evil.
Schopenhauer argues on both a priori and empirical grounds that life is not worth living: he is the first philosophical pessimist (although he was himself slow to embrace this term). As a result he is primarily interested in situational evil in a broad sense understood as just badness of some kind. But he also has an account of moral evil, both in the broad and narrow senses. In the broad sense of general moral badness, he attributes evil to egoism; but he also has an account of a class of special motivations that he terms “malicious” which are evil in a narrow sense, i.e. comprise an intense subset of the morally bad. Schopenhauer may solve some of the problems Schelling encounters, but he in his turn encounters other problems with his theory.
Palgrave/Macmillan Schopenhauer Handbook, 2017
Schopenhauer positions himself squarely within the tradition of Kant’s transcendental idealism, a... more Schopenhauer positions himself squarely within the tradition of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and his first sense of the metaphysical comprises the synthetic cognition a priori that makes experience possible within transcendental idealism. This is Schopenhauer’s transcendental metaphysics. As he developed philosophically however, Schopenhauer devised a second sense of the metaphysical. This second sense also depends, albeit negatively, on transcendental idealism because its central claim—that the thing in itself should be identified with will—looks like precisely a species of transcendent metaphysics, a claim that goes beyond the possibility of experience into the cognitively forbidden realm of things in themselves. I shall argue however that this second sense of the metaphysical can be formulated much more independently of transcendental idealism, following a recent similar interpretation of Kant due to Rae Langton, and that this makes for some surprising connections to contemporary metaphysics.
Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy, 2017
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a system philosopher in the grand tradition of classical Germ... more Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a system philosopher in the grand tradition of classical German idealism. Broadly an adherent of Kant’s transcendental idealism, he is now most noted for his belief that Kant’s thing in itself can best be described as ‘will’, something he argued in his 1819 work The World as Will and Representation (WWRI 124/H 2:119).
Schopenhauer’s term ‘will’ does not refer primarily to human willing, that is, conscious striving towards a goal. Following Kant he argues that willing remains conditioned by the forms of representation and therefore cannot be identified with the thing-in-itself. To reach the thing-in-itself, all forms of representation must be removed to arrive at a conception of will as striving without a goal. This conception is at the root of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: willing is experienced by conscious beings as suffering; and the world, including each of us, is in-itself endless willing without the possibility of satisfaction. Only two things hold out the prospect of any relief: the disinterested contemplation of works of art provides temporary respite from the striving will for the many; and a very few saintly beings may be able to still or quiet the will completely and achieve a state that Schopenhauer identifies as nirvana.
These concerns—with suffering, meaning, asceticism and renunciation—are already problems in moral philosophy in a wide sense. But Schopenhauer also has a moral philosophy in the ‘narrower’ sense (WWRII 589/H 3:676; Cartwright 1999) that addresses questions such as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the proper criterion for right action, moral motivation, and the virtues and vices. Indeed Schopenhauer makes a distinctive and quite contemporary contribution to virtue theory, advocating compassion (Mitleid) as the source of all human virtues.
Yitzhak Melamed (ed.) Eternity (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016), pp. 179-225
The story of eternity is not as simple as a secularization narrative implies. Instead it follows ... more The story of eternity is not as simple as a secularization narrative implies. Instead it follows something like the trajectory of reversal in Kant’s practical proof for the existence of god. In that proof, god emerges not as an object of theoretical investigation, but as a postulate required by our practical engagement with the world; so, similarly, the eternal is not just secularized out of existence, but becomes understood as an entailment of, and somehow imbricated in, the conditions of our practical existence.
The sections that follow discuss some of those central figures in modern European philosophy whose views prominently feature some consideration of eternity. I start with Kant in section I. Kant’s critique of speculative theology is well-known, and this hostility would appear to make it unlikely that the eternal, with all its theological baggage, would feature prominently in Kant’s critical philosophy. But in fact Kant’s transcendental idealism endorses no fewer than three different concepts of the eternal, including what turns out to be the most historically influential idea: that practical reason involves a kind of eternal, non-temporal action. Kant shifts this notion of a non-temporal act from its original theological context of god’s actus purus to a practical context, setting the stage for Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s later development of this theme. Before detailing this trajectory however, section II is devoted to Hegel, the philosopher whose radical historicism is perhaps more than any other thinker responsible for making “the nineteenth century preeminently the historical century.”4 Hegel is not fertile soil for the concept of the eternal, but his historicism does turn out, at a crucial moment in the philosophy of nature, to presuppose a certain conception of eternity as an eternal present. Perhaps more importantly for the further development of eternity in nineteenth century thought however is that both Schelling and Kierkegaard situate their views of the eternal in the context of a collective rejection of Hegel. Section III discusses Schelling, who returns to Kant’s conception of non-temporal choice, seeing human capacities for free eternal self-creation as rivaling god’s. Such powers are required, Schelling argues, to resist the sublimation of the individual human person into the blankness of the Absolute. Section IV briefly consider Schopenhauer’s view that the in-itself of everything is an endlessly striving will. Section V concerns Kierkegaard who is strongly committed to the eternal, and indeed criticizes Hegel for compromising his conception of the eternal by thinking it temporally; but he is obsessed by the paradoxical question of our practical “access” to the eternal within a particular temporal moment: the decisive moment, imbued with significance that can turn life around and create a new person, pushing Schelling’s concerns even further. The remaining, shorter sections, present briefer accounts of more recent figures who make important use of some conception of the eternal: Nietzsche’s eternal return (section VI), Agamben’s (1942-) theory of sovereignty (section VII) and finally Alain Badiou’s unapologetic attempt to resuscitate eternity as the condition of revolutionary political change (Section VIII). I end with a concluding meditation (Section IX).
Alessandro Medri (ed) La Filosofia tedesca dell'ottocento (Villasanta: Limina Mentis), Apr 2015
This paper proposes a taxonomy of evil along two dimensions: first, whether it is identified with... more This paper proposes a taxonomy of evil along two dimensions: first, whether it is identified with badness of whatever kind (this has been the traditional view) or whether it represents only an acute proper subset of badness; second, whether it applies in the first instance to actions, states of affairs or people/institutions. Schelling and Schopenhauer both draw the same consequences from Kant: that the locus of moral responsibility lies paradoxically with character, and not with actions (which flow necessarily from character). And both also draw metaphysical consequences from this: Schelling postulates the famous 'indivisible remainder' that resists both rationality and causality to explain the possibility of evil; and Schopenhauer derives his metaphysics of the will. But they differ on their interpretations of evil: for Schelling evil is still, as with the tradition, simply badness; and it is egoism that leads to badness. To be sure he metaphysicalizes and generalizes both these claims, but they remain fundamentally traditional. He is at his most interesting where he departs from tradition, and that is in proposing what we can understand as a theory of hegemony: what distinguishes evil is that it is egoism that presents itself as the good. Schopenhauer has a more contemporary approach: he regards evil as a proper subset of the bad, and details a special motivational structure that makes characters evil as opposed to merely bad, one that goes beyond egoism to a form of disinterested malice. Equally his metaphysical generalization of the will allows him to propose a theory of evil that also applies to states of affairs.
Craig Lundy and Daniella Voss (eds) At the Edges of Thought: At the Edges of Thought: Deleuze and Post-Kantian Thought (Edinburgh/Oxford UP, 2015), Jun 2015
Deleuze does not mention Schopenhauer very frequently. Certainly Schopenhauer does not appear to ... more Deleuze does not mention Schopenhauer very frequently. Certainly Schopenhauer does not appear to be in the counter-canon of life-affirming philosophers that Deleuze so values – indeed, far from it. Nor does he appear to be even a favoured ‘enemy’ as he describes Kant, or as he sometimes appears to view Hegel. Nevertheless, I think Schopenhauer’s break from Kant is crucial for understanding not only Deleuze’s account of Nietzsche, but also for a proper grasp of the core Deleuzian distinction between the actual and the virtual, at least in its guise as the distinction between desiring-production and social production in Anti-Oedipus.
Tom Froese and Massimiliano Cappuccio (eds) Enactive Cognition at the Edge of Sense-Making: Making Sense of Non-Sense, Nov 24, 2014
The development of an embodied view of cognition has led to advances in our understanding of ling... more The development of an embodied view of cognition has led to advances in our understanding of linguistic meaning. Despite these advances, this theory of language arising and developing from embodied cognition may, however, also be criticized for repeating certain failings of the very conceptual-propositional theory it claims to supersede. So-called “objectivist” theories of meaning fail to account for the ways in which cognition depends on the specific character of the human body and brain, instead treating sense-making as the manipulation of abstract, amodal symbols by disembodied minds. By the same token, mainline experientialist theories, though claiming to take account of the nexus of brain, body, and world, fail to present cognition as fully grounded in the interactions of bodies with their environment, overemphasizing the embodied mind and leaving the environment as colorless and idealized. By focusing on an individual’s sensorimotor interactions or “couplings” with the environment and the ways in which these interactions structure cognition, the enaction paradigm represents an important corrective to the embodied theory of cognition. Yet even as it offers this corrective, the enaction paradigm has met with its own criticisms. For all that it proposes a view of cognition as the effect of flat brain-body-action-world systems, some have alleged that this paradigm can only address on-line and fundamentally reactive forms of cognition and that “representation-hungry” types of cognition will elude it. Recent work has endeavored to meet such critiques by focusing specifically on language as the central theater for explaining how the enaction paradigm accounts for higher cognition and abstract sense-making. This paper extends such results by looking at the ways in which French philosopher Gilles Deleuze offers conceptual resources for an enactive account of language, in particular his extensive consideration of language in The Logic of Sense. Specifically, Deleuze’s distinction between the nonsense of Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau creations and that of Antonin Artaud’s “translation” of Carroll’s Jabberwocky highlights the need for an enactive, rather than merely embodied, approach to sense-making, particularly with regards to the general category of what Jakobson and Halle (1956) call “sound symbolism.” The exploration of these direct connections between sense-making and other apparently nonsensical systems promises to account for the enaction of higher order cognitive systems in more basic terms, without presupposing the required linguistic sense-making properties. At the same time, such exploration, we suggest, may conjure up its own challenges for enactive thinking.
This interview of Simon Critchley was conducted by Alistair Welchman and ranges over the followin... more This interview of Simon Critchley was conducted by Alistair Welchman and ranges over the following topics: Saint Paul (and the recent readings of him by Critchley himself, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou); Alain Badiou and the notion of the ‘absolutely new;’ Gnosticism (Marcion); Occupy Wall Street; science fiction; nihilism; Hamlet and tragedy; faith; the ‘demand’ and Europe.
Politics of Religion/Religions of Politics, 2014
The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religi... more The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement.
Welchman (ed) Politics of Religion/Religions of Politics, 2014
In Part I of this essay I take a canonical case of political theology, Schmitt’s theory of sovere... more In Part I of this essay I take a canonical case of political theology, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty (1985; 1922), and show how Agamben derives his account of sovereignty from an interpretation of Schmitt that relies on the interesting theological premise of an atemporal act or decision, one that is traditionally attributed to god’s act of creation, and that is only ambiguously secularized in the transcendental moment of German Idealism. In Part II I show how this reading of Schmitt can be used to avoid a certain kind of negative political theology associated with deconstruction because Agamben’s reading of Schmitt explains the emergence of certain specific temporal structures associated with the sovereign political decision: the sovereign political decision cannot be represented as having a beginning, and hence recedes phenomenologically into a kind of a priori past; and the sovereign decision cannot be represented as completed, and hence it is experienced as a ‘perpetual expenditure of energy’ that lacks comprehensible relation to a goal. In Part III I defend Agamben’s interpretation of sovereignty as a transcendental act from Negri’s objection that Agamben simply equates without argument Negri’s radically democratic conception of revolutionary constituent power with Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty (1999, p. 13). My defense relies on identifying Agamben’s ‘paradox of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, pp. 15ff.) with a ‘paradox of democracy.’ (Mouffe 2000; Whelan 1983) In Part IV I realize a corollary of the identification of the two paradoxes, of sovereignty and democracy: that political borders are the spatial site of the application of the act of political sovereignty, and possess a kind of transcendental spatiality akin to the special temporality associated with sovereignty. I apply this understanding to the privileged special case of the US-Mexico border: the structures implicit in Agamben’s analysis explain some crucial features of this case of walling: its manifest failure to achieve, even in principle, the purpose for which it is allegedly intended; the failure of democratic polity to address those affected by the wall; the appeal to sovereign powers in the legal legitimation of border policy. I defend Agamben’s analysis against other apparently competing views, especially those of Wendy Brown (2010) and argue that the transcendental act of sovereignty comprises a kind of primary political repression that opens up the space for ideological understandings of the wall, but does not itself comprise one. In Part V I address the question whether Agamben’s derived category of ‘bare life’ can also be used in the context of the border, arguing that it can. I conclude with some critical remarks about the limits of Agamben’s view.
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Books by Alistair Welchman
• A new accurate translation providing the reader with an up-to-date version of the text • Contains substantial introduction, editorial notes, bibliography, chronology and glossary for aiding those new to the subject and also for highlighting the connections between Schopenhauer and other philosophers and philosophical issues • Full editorial notes within the text provide a useful resource to higher level scholars
In this book Maimon seeks to further the revolution in philosophy wrought by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by establishing a new foundation for transcendental philosophy in the idea of difference. Kant judged Maimon to be his most profound critic, and the Essay went on to have a decisive influence on the course of post-Kantian German Idealism. A more recent admirer was Gilles Deleuze who drew on Maimon’s Essay in constructing his own philosophy of difference. This long-overdue translation makes Maimon's brilliant analysis and criticism of Kant's philosophy accessible to an English readership for the first time.
The text includes a comprehensive introduction, a glossary, translators' notes, a bibliography of writings on Maimon and an index. It also includes translations of correspondence between Maimon and Kant and a letter Maimon wrote to a Berlin journal clarifying the philosophical position of the Essay, all of which bring the book's context alive for the modern reader.
Papers by Alistair Welchman
Schopenhauer argues on both a priori and empirical grounds that life is not worth living: he is the first philosophical pessimist (although he was himself slow to embrace this term). As a result he is primarily interested in situational evil in a broad sense understood as just badness of some kind. But he also has an account of moral evil, both in the broad and narrow senses. In the broad sense of general moral badness, he attributes evil to egoism; but he also has an account of a class of special motivations that he terms “malicious” which are evil in a narrow sense, i.e. comprise an intense subset of the morally bad. Schopenhauer may solve some of the problems Schelling encounters, but he in his turn encounters other problems with his theory.
Schopenhauer’s term ‘will’ does not refer primarily to human willing, that is, conscious striving towards a goal. Following Kant he argues that willing remains conditioned by the forms of representation and therefore cannot be identified with the thing-in-itself. To reach the thing-in-itself, all forms of representation must be removed to arrive at a conception of will as striving without a goal. This conception is at the root of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: willing is experienced by conscious beings as suffering; and the world, including each of us, is in-itself endless willing without the possibility of satisfaction. Only two things hold out the prospect of any relief: the disinterested contemplation of works of art provides temporary respite from the striving will for the many; and a very few saintly beings may be able to still or quiet the will completely and achieve a state that Schopenhauer identifies as nirvana.
These concerns—with suffering, meaning, asceticism and renunciation—are already problems in moral philosophy in a wide sense. But Schopenhauer also has a moral philosophy in the ‘narrower’ sense (WWRII 589/H 3:676; Cartwright 1999) that addresses questions such as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the proper criterion for right action, moral motivation, and the virtues and vices. Indeed Schopenhauer makes a distinctive and quite contemporary contribution to virtue theory, advocating compassion (Mitleid) as the source of all human virtues.
The sections that follow discuss some of those central figures in modern European philosophy whose views prominently feature some consideration of eternity. I start with Kant in section I. Kant’s critique of speculative theology is well-known, and this hostility would appear to make it unlikely that the eternal, with all its theological baggage, would feature prominently in Kant’s critical philosophy. But in fact Kant’s transcendental idealism endorses no fewer than three different concepts of the eternal, including what turns out to be the most historically influential idea: that practical reason involves a kind of eternal, non-temporal action. Kant shifts this notion of a non-temporal act from its original theological context of god’s actus purus to a practical context, setting the stage for Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s later development of this theme. Before detailing this trajectory however, section II is devoted to Hegel, the philosopher whose radical historicism is perhaps more than any other thinker responsible for making “the nineteenth century preeminently the historical century.”4 Hegel is not fertile soil for the concept of the eternal, but his historicism does turn out, at a crucial moment in the philosophy of nature, to presuppose a certain conception of eternity as an eternal present. Perhaps more importantly for the further development of eternity in nineteenth century thought however is that both Schelling and Kierkegaard situate their views of the eternal in the context of a collective rejection of Hegel. Section III discusses Schelling, who returns to Kant’s conception of non-temporal choice, seeing human capacities for free eternal self-creation as rivaling god’s. Such powers are required, Schelling argues, to resist the sublimation of the individual human person into the blankness of the Absolute. Section IV briefly consider Schopenhauer’s view that the in-itself of everything is an endlessly striving will. Section V concerns Kierkegaard who is strongly committed to the eternal, and indeed criticizes Hegel for compromising his conception of the eternal by thinking it temporally; but he is obsessed by the paradoxical question of our practical “access” to the eternal within a particular temporal moment: the decisive moment, imbued with significance that can turn life around and create a new person, pushing Schelling’s concerns even further. The remaining, shorter sections, present briefer accounts of more recent figures who make important use of some conception of the eternal: Nietzsche’s eternal return (section VI), Agamben’s (1942-) theory of sovereignty (section VII) and finally Alain Badiou’s unapologetic attempt to resuscitate eternity as the condition of revolutionary political change (Section VIII). I end with a concluding meditation (Section IX).
• A new accurate translation providing the reader with an up-to-date version of the text • Contains substantial introduction, editorial notes, bibliography, chronology and glossary for aiding those new to the subject and also for highlighting the connections between Schopenhauer and other philosophers and philosophical issues • Full editorial notes within the text provide a useful resource to higher level scholars
In this book Maimon seeks to further the revolution in philosophy wrought by Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by establishing a new foundation for transcendental philosophy in the idea of difference. Kant judged Maimon to be his most profound critic, and the Essay went on to have a decisive influence on the course of post-Kantian German Idealism. A more recent admirer was Gilles Deleuze who drew on Maimon’s Essay in constructing his own philosophy of difference. This long-overdue translation makes Maimon's brilliant analysis and criticism of Kant's philosophy accessible to an English readership for the first time.
The text includes a comprehensive introduction, a glossary, translators' notes, a bibliography of writings on Maimon and an index. It also includes translations of correspondence between Maimon and Kant and a letter Maimon wrote to a Berlin journal clarifying the philosophical position of the Essay, all of which bring the book's context alive for the modern reader.
Schopenhauer argues on both a priori and empirical grounds that life is not worth living: he is the first philosophical pessimist (although he was himself slow to embrace this term). As a result he is primarily interested in situational evil in a broad sense understood as just badness of some kind. But he also has an account of moral evil, both in the broad and narrow senses. In the broad sense of general moral badness, he attributes evil to egoism; but he also has an account of a class of special motivations that he terms “malicious” which are evil in a narrow sense, i.e. comprise an intense subset of the morally bad. Schopenhauer may solve some of the problems Schelling encounters, but he in his turn encounters other problems with his theory.
Schopenhauer’s term ‘will’ does not refer primarily to human willing, that is, conscious striving towards a goal. Following Kant he argues that willing remains conditioned by the forms of representation and therefore cannot be identified with the thing-in-itself. To reach the thing-in-itself, all forms of representation must be removed to arrive at a conception of will as striving without a goal. This conception is at the root of Schopenhauer’s pessimism: willing is experienced by conscious beings as suffering; and the world, including each of us, is in-itself endless willing without the possibility of satisfaction. Only two things hold out the prospect of any relief: the disinterested contemplation of works of art provides temporary respite from the striving will for the many; and a very few saintly beings may be able to still or quiet the will completely and achieve a state that Schopenhauer identifies as nirvana.
These concerns—with suffering, meaning, asceticism and renunciation—are already problems in moral philosophy in a wide sense. But Schopenhauer also has a moral philosophy in the ‘narrower’ sense (WWRII 589/H 3:676; Cartwright 1999) that addresses questions such as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the proper criterion for right action, moral motivation, and the virtues and vices. Indeed Schopenhauer makes a distinctive and quite contemporary contribution to virtue theory, advocating compassion (Mitleid) as the source of all human virtues.
The sections that follow discuss some of those central figures in modern European philosophy whose views prominently feature some consideration of eternity. I start with Kant in section I. Kant’s critique of speculative theology is well-known, and this hostility would appear to make it unlikely that the eternal, with all its theological baggage, would feature prominently in Kant’s critical philosophy. But in fact Kant’s transcendental idealism endorses no fewer than three different concepts of the eternal, including what turns out to be the most historically influential idea: that practical reason involves a kind of eternal, non-temporal action. Kant shifts this notion of a non-temporal act from its original theological context of god’s actus purus to a practical context, setting the stage for Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s later development of this theme. Before detailing this trajectory however, section II is devoted to Hegel, the philosopher whose radical historicism is perhaps more than any other thinker responsible for making “the nineteenth century preeminently the historical century.”4 Hegel is not fertile soil for the concept of the eternal, but his historicism does turn out, at a crucial moment in the philosophy of nature, to presuppose a certain conception of eternity as an eternal present. Perhaps more importantly for the further development of eternity in nineteenth century thought however is that both Schelling and Kierkegaard situate their views of the eternal in the context of a collective rejection of Hegel. Section III discusses Schelling, who returns to Kant’s conception of non-temporal choice, seeing human capacities for free eternal self-creation as rivaling god’s. Such powers are required, Schelling argues, to resist the sublimation of the individual human person into the blankness of the Absolute. Section IV briefly consider Schopenhauer’s view that the in-itself of everything is an endlessly striving will. Section V concerns Kierkegaard who is strongly committed to the eternal, and indeed criticizes Hegel for compromising his conception of the eternal by thinking it temporally; but he is obsessed by the paradoxical question of our practical “access” to the eternal within a particular temporal moment: the decisive moment, imbued with significance that can turn life around and create a new person, pushing Schelling’s concerns even further. The remaining, shorter sections, present briefer accounts of more recent figures who make important use of some conception of the eternal: Nietzsche’s eternal return (section VI), Agamben’s (1942-) theory of sovereignty (section VII) and finally Alain Badiou’s unapologetic attempt to resuscitate eternity as the condition of revolutionary political change (Section VIII). I end with a concluding meditation (Section IX).
I think their position can be made clear by seeing them in the intellectual framework of post-Kantian idealism. The central thought of Kant’s mature philosophy is the distinction between things as they appear to us, and things as they are in themselves. And a correlate of this distinction is that we cannot know what things in themselves are like, since our access to them is only by way of how they appear.
German idealists responded to the inaccessibility of things in themselves in two different ways. The dominant mainstream of idealist thought dismissed the idea of things in themselves as paradoxical and unnecessary. But a counter-tradition, including Maimon, Schelling, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, took the idea as a challenge and responded by attempting to give a positive characterization of things in themselves that is maximally abstracted from the contribution of human cognitive structures. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari can best be seen as operating in this German counter-tradition.
On this way of understanding Deleuze and Guattari, there is a phenomenological component to their thought: they sometimes start from descriptions of experience. But Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in establishing invariant structural features or genetic conditions of experience. Rather they are interested in ‘peak’ experiences, for example experiences of art works that break everyday experience apart and allow us to see something else. Equally, they are metaphysical thinkers. But their metaphysics is not of a traditional type; rather it is filtered through Kant’s notion of the thing in itself: a ‘realism’ that goes beyond the real of everyday experience, and hence beyond the invariant structures that classical phenomenology identifies as its conditions of possibility.
Equally, there is a scientific component to their thought. But precisely because it is metaphysical their project cannot be identified with a merely scientific ontology.
in the cognitive sciences to linguistic analysis. We propose a new model that draws on concepts from cognitive semantics and that works independently of causal hypotheses. In a slogan, we propose a “metonymic” rather than “metaphorical” relation between sensorimotor representations and semantic fields, in which schematic experiential structures are “profiled” for certain traits. These representations encompass a wider field of experience than merely embodied image
schemas, including social embeddedness, and require a correspondingly widened understanding
of linguistic meaning that is not structured only in compositional “tree-like” ways, but where semantic connections are made across arbitrary points in a network, or, to appropriate the terminology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1980), a rhizome.