Dr. Jason M. Wirth is professor of philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, Environmental Philosophy, and Africana Philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (Indiana 2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (SUNY 2017), a monograph on Milan Kundera (Commiserating with Devastated Things, Fordham 2015), Schelling’s Practice of the Wild (SUNY 2015), and the co-edited volume (with Bret Davis and Brian Schroeder), Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (Indiana 2011). He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal, Comparative and Continental Philosophy. He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick as well a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy.
Freydberg, Bernard. Schelling's Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now... more Freydberg, Bernard. Schelling's Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. 144 pp. S55.00 cloth; $19.95 paperback. In the third (1815) draft oi Die Weltalter Schelling took stock of his philosophical enterprise, warning that "we must not misjudge our time" and that it "is still a time of struggle." Schelling may have been right about the struggle, but he misjudged his time. Perhaps his thinking was so provocative that it could only appear as untimely. Despite his meteoric rise as a philosophical Wunderkind, Schelling had published nothing of real significance since the 1809 Freiheitsschrift, keeping a relatively low profile until his brief return to the Berlin limelight in 1841. Remarkably, he nonetheless understood himself to be writing for his entire age, and even heralding for it another age in which (according to Die Weltalter) "one is still coming who will sing the greatest heroic poem, grasping in spirit something for which the seers of old were famous: what was, what is, what will be." Yet his bewildered contemporaries largely misunderstood Schelling. Hegel, in his infamous remarks in the 1807 Phanomenologie des Geistes, tacitly but decisively dismissed Schelling's work as the "night when all cows are black. " Furthermore, Hegel regarded his own enterprise as an Aufhebung of Fichte's subjective spirit and the objective spirit of Schelling's Naturphilosophie and so these two thinkers faded into Hegel's pantheon of spirit. Despite Hegel's malicious misreading of Schelling, it nonetheless provided a convenient excuse to avoid engaging this difficult thinker. In the German-speaking world, a Schelling renaissance began in the 1950s with a series of watershed monographs (led by Walter Schultz and others), but this did not register in the English speaking philosophical world. This has begun to change with the publication in the last two decades of a handful of influential studies. Bernard Freydberg, in this fine study of the Freiheitsschrift , reflects on the inherent difficulty that confronts any serious Schelling reception: "The truth about Schelling is that his thought is always out of place, in Greek atopon - strange, literally 'out of place, or even 'having no place'" (112). In the bulk of his study, Freydberg presents the provocative strangeness of Schelling's thought in a close and rigorous reading of what has emerged as his most important work, thanks to the publication in 1971 of Heidegger's own "Auseinandersetzung" with it [Schellings Abhandlung uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit). …
As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel i... more As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel in particular and German Idealism more broadly, as strikingly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. In the third or 1815 draft of Die Weltalter, Schelling writes that while “all thinking must begin the dialectic, it cannot end in the dialectic.” Schelling continued his turn toward what he called “positive philosophy,” which emerges “toto caelo” differently than from the “universality” and “indeterminacy” of negative thought (as he first characterized it in the 1809 Freedom essay). What is this new mode of thought, born—both for Schelling and for his unexpected admirer Rosenzweig—from the limitations of negative thought? How does one characterize this rupture within Idealism itself?
The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essay... more The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy celebrates and situates this emphasis in the genre of the gift and its giving. The process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is so present in the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and need for identities beyond our own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses; it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom—for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds and receive the blessings of logos from each other. The increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a regressive narcissism that shows the ego’s reassertion in the light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy itself has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Although not an invective against thinking nor against modern and contemporary philosophy’s genuine advances, The Gift of Logos portends to shed the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are. This transformation is our greatest gift to each other. To give it voice is the gift of Logos and what this collection of essays commemorates
The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essay... more The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy celebrates and situates this emphasis in the genre of the gift and its giving. The process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is so present in the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and need for identities beyond our own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses; it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom—for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds and receive the blessings of logos from each other. The increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a regressive narcissism that shows the ego’s reassertion in the light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy itself has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Although not an invective against thinking nor against modern and contemporary philosophy’s genuine advances, The Gift of Logos portends to shed the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are. This transformation is our greatest gift to each other. To give it voice is the gift of Logos and what this collection of essays commemorates
Continental philosophy, beginning with Kant, has found itself exposed to the abyss of reason. Thi... more Continental philosophy, beginning with Kant, has found itself exposed to the abyss of reason. This crisis makes it a more ready dialogue partner with some of the Zen tradition. I explore this opening by bringing Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253) into an encounter with Continental thought, broadly construed. Rather than demonstrate how Dōgen already fits within Continental thought or re-engineering the latter so that he can fit, I argue that this encounter, already precipitated by Continental philosophy’s own acknowledgement of the felix culpa of Western philosophy’s otherwise indefensible overreach, transforms and expands the manners in which thinking counts as philosophical. This is no less than to recover a sense of philosophy as genetic and creative, rather than a shopworn tool kit of universal insights.
On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis’s Transfigurem... more On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis’s Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination. Each of the chapters, by some of the leading thinkers in Continental philosophy, engages Sallis’s work on both ancient and new senses of aesthetics—a transfiguration of aesthetics—as a beginning that is always beginning again. With a responsive essay by Sallis himself, On the True Sense of Art forms a critical introduction to the thought of this generation’s most important aesthetician.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/facbooks2016/1021/thumbnail.jp
This is a series of three interwoven philosophical reflections on the identity of the anthropos i... more This is a series of three interwoven philosophical reflections on the identity of the anthropos in the Anthropocene. Who is this anthropos? I argue that it does not indict humanity as such but rather a certain way of being human. Moreover, this mode of being human does not extend to all human beings, but rather only to a fortunate few who disproportionately benefit from fossil capital. I respond to this crisis by considering philosophical and, for want of a better word, spiritual, resources in indigenous traditions as well as Zen.
... But the good is its being per se. It is essentially good and not so much something good as th... more ... But the good is its being per se. It is essentially good and not so much something good as the Good itself. Schelling, The Ages of the World (1815 version) 1 Wie soll denn der Mensch der geganwärtigen Weltgeschichte auch nur ernst und strengfragen können, ob der Gott ...
Freydberg, Bernard. Schelling's Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now... more Freydberg, Bernard. Schelling's Dialogical Freedom Essay: Provocative Philosophy Then and Now. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. 144 pp. S55.00 cloth; $19.95 paperback. In the third (1815) draft oi Die Weltalter Schelling took stock of his philosophical enterprise, warning that "we must not misjudge our time" and that it "is still a time of struggle." Schelling may have been right about the struggle, but he misjudged his time. Perhaps his thinking was so provocative that it could only appear as untimely. Despite his meteoric rise as a philosophical Wunderkind, Schelling had published nothing of real significance since the 1809 Freiheitsschrift, keeping a relatively low profile until his brief return to the Berlin limelight in 1841. Remarkably, he nonetheless understood himself to be writing for his entire age, and even heralding for it another age in which (according to Die Weltalter) "one is still coming who will sing the greatest heroic poem, grasping in spirit something for which the seers of old were famous: what was, what is, what will be." Yet his bewildered contemporaries largely misunderstood Schelling. Hegel, in his infamous remarks in the 1807 Phanomenologie des Geistes, tacitly but decisively dismissed Schelling's work as the "night when all cows are black. " Furthermore, Hegel regarded his own enterprise as an Aufhebung of Fichte's subjective spirit and the objective spirit of Schelling's Naturphilosophie and so these two thinkers faded into Hegel's pantheon of spirit. Despite Hegel's malicious misreading of Schelling, it nonetheless provided a convenient excuse to avoid engaging this difficult thinker. In the German-speaking world, a Schelling renaissance began in the 1950s with a series of watershed monographs (led by Walter Schultz and others), but this did not register in the English speaking philosophical world. This has begun to change with the publication in the last two decades of a handful of influential studies. Bernard Freydberg, in this fine study of the Freiheitsschrift , reflects on the inherent difficulty that confronts any serious Schelling reception: "The truth about Schelling is that his thought is always out of place, in Greek atopon - strange, literally 'out of place, or even 'having no place'" (112). In the bulk of his study, Freydberg presents the provocative strangeness of Schelling's thought in a close and rigorous reading of what has emerged as his most important work, thanks to the publication in 1971 of Heidegger's own "Auseinandersetzung" with it [Schellings Abhandlung uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit). …
As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel i... more As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel in particular and German Idealism more broadly, as strikingly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. In the third or 1815 draft of Die Weltalter, Schelling writes that while “all thinking must begin the dialectic, it cannot end in the dialectic.” Schelling continued his turn toward what he called “positive philosophy,” which emerges “toto caelo” differently than from the “universality” and “indeterminacy” of negative thought (as he first characterized it in the 1809 Freedom essay). What is this new mode of thought, born—both for Schelling and for his unexpected admirer Rosenzweig—from the limitations of negative thought? How does one characterize this rupture within Idealism itself?
The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essay... more The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy celebrates and situates this emphasis in the genre of the gift and its giving. The process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is so present in the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and need for identities beyond our own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses; it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom—for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds and receive the blessings of logos from each other. The increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a regressive narcissism that shows the ego’s reassertion in the light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy itself has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Although not an invective against thinking nor against modern and contemporary philosophy’s genuine advances, The Gift of Logos portends to shed the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are. This transformation is our greatest gift to each other. To give it voice is the gift of Logos and what this collection of essays commemorates
The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essay... more The Continental tradition has always placed great emphasis on the Logos. The Gift of Logos: Essays in Continental Philosophy celebrates and situates this emphasis in the genre of the gift and its giving. The process of receiving, or giving, of the gift overcomes the existential alienation and separation that is so present in the human condition. To ritualize giving and its gifting is to provide a syntax of solidarity that bespeaks our desire for cohesion and need for identities beyond our own. To give a gift is to befriend. The gift of logos is more than a gift from the gods and goddesses; it is an act of giving for those friends of wisdom—for those philosophers who give to each other and to their worlds and receive the blessings of logos from each other. The increasing objectification of human being has mobilized a regressive narcissism that shows the ego’s reassertion in the light of the meaningless quantifying forces from without. By not reflecting deeply enough upon its conditions of existence in the modern world and on its orginary moments, philosophy itself has not been immune from this besotted sense of self. Although not an invective against thinking nor against modern and contemporary philosophy’s genuine advances, The Gift of Logos portends to shed the delusion that theoretical re-description is somehow the same as transforming who we are. This transformation is our greatest gift to each other. To give it voice is the gift of Logos and what this collection of essays commemorates
Continental philosophy, beginning with Kant, has found itself exposed to the abyss of reason. Thi... more Continental philosophy, beginning with Kant, has found itself exposed to the abyss of reason. This crisis makes it a more ready dialogue partner with some of the Zen tradition. I explore this opening by bringing Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253) into an encounter with Continental thought, broadly construed. Rather than demonstrate how Dōgen already fits within Continental thought or re-engineering the latter so that he can fit, I argue that this encounter, already precipitated by Continental philosophy’s own acknowledgement of the felix culpa of Western philosophy’s otherwise indefensible overreach, transforms and expands the manners in which thinking counts as philosophical. This is no less than to recover a sense of philosophy as genetic and creative, rather than a shopworn tool kit of universal insights.
On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis’s Transfigurem... more On the True Sense of Art collects essays by philosophers responding to John Sallis’s Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art as well as his other works on the philosophy of art, including Force of Imagination and Logic of Imagination. Each of the chapters, by some of the leading thinkers in Continental philosophy, engages Sallis’s work on both ancient and new senses of aesthetics—a transfiguration of aesthetics—as a beginning that is always beginning again. With a responsive essay by Sallis himself, On the True Sense of Art forms a critical introduction to the thought of this generation’s most important aesthetician.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/facbooks2016/1021/thumbnail.jp
This is a series of three interwoven philosophical reflections on the identity of the anthropos i... more This is a series of three interwoven philosophical reflections on the identity of the anthropos in the Anthropocene. Who is this anthropos? I argue that it does not indict humanity as such but rather a certain way of being human. Moreover, this mode of being human does not extend to all human beings, but rather only to a fortunate few who disproportionately benefit from fossil capital. I respond to this crisis by considering philosophical and, for want of a better word, spiritual, resources in indigenous traditions as well as Zen.
... But the good is its being per se. It is essentially good and not so much something good as th... more ... But the good is its being per se. It is essentially good and not so much something good as the Good itself. Schelling, The Ages of the World (1815 version) 1 Wie soll denn der Mensch der geganwärtigen Weltgeschichte auch nur ernst und strengfragen können, ob der Gott ...
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