Philosophy Today

The first article I ever published. An interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy that takes creative play as the central concept of his positive views. Play becomes the paradigm for understanding human life and the cosmos in a post-nihilistic world.

I thank Cressida Heyes and Lisa Kall for their careful and generous readings, and especially for the questions they pose. Even as Heyes and Kall raise very different kinds of concerns, each fundamentally requires that I reflect more carefully upon the issues of philosophical method that took me on the improbable path that resulted in Making Sense of Intersex. I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to their criticisms among philosophers at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Though I cannot respond in detail to all of the questions raised by Heyes or Kall, I will try to address what I see as those which most directly challenge my arguments.RESPONSE TO HEYES: BACK TO NIETZSCHEHeyes is skeptical of my invocation of Nietzsche and the value of my proposal that ressentiment is a motivating force in the surgical and hormonal normalization of the bodies of children with atypical sex anatomies. Heyes contrasts my identification of ressentiment in the response of medical specialists who promote unnecessary medical interventions for intersex anatomies with Wendy Brown's identification of ressentiment in her critique of identity politics in "Wounded Attachments" (Brown 1993): "Is ressentiment a generalizable attitude" Heyes asks, "in which those who deviate from the norm are punished for their jouissance through moralizing revenge, or is it (as for Brown) the moralizing revenge of the disempowered?" (Heyes 2016: 795). In other words, it doesn't seem to follow that physicians, who occupy positions of power and authority, can be understood to express ressentiment in their treatment of obviously powerless children.To Heyes it might appear that an obvious extension of a Nietzschean analysis in the context of thinking about intersex would focus, as Brown vividly puts it, on "the wounded character of politicized identity's desire" (Brown 1993: 391). Brown casts a harsh light on contemporary claims to politicized identity, what in the 1990s was often expressed with respect to subjugated racial and sexual categories. Brown sees in the "desire for recognition" marked by politicized identity claims, a reiteration of "regulatory, disciplinary society" (398). Following Foucault-yet critical of what she sees as Foucault's "curious optimism" his "confidence" concerning the possibilities of resistance (397)-Brown cautions that rather than emancipation, these claims to identity, expressed, as they must be, within the terms of"discourses of liberal essentialism and disciplinary normalization," effectively replicate or reinforce the mechanisms of power that produced the subjugated positions from which activists now claim authority (398). In elaborating this claim, Brown brings Nietzsche into the analysis, identifying proponents of identity politics and their claims to civic membership and political rights with those "slaves" in Nietzsche's genealogy whose revolt resulted in the transvaluation of values.Reading Brown today, I might see in the claims by some intersex activists, including those wholly focused on demedicalizing intersex, an illuminating comparison. The skepticism Brown expresses with respect to prospects for resistance grounded in identity claims is a prudent reminder of the skepticism we should exercise with respect to the promise of legal and political "fixes" focused on the problem of assigning gender to newborns with what is still called "ambiguous" sex.Take for example the acclaim that greeted the 2012 German law mandating a sex assignment of "X" to intersex infants instead of "M" or "F" Hailed as an important advance, the German law has been repeatedly misrepresented in news media throughout Europe and the US as offering parents a "choice" in sex assignment of their children (see, e.g., Bendavid 2013; Heine 2013). As the Swiss activist group Zwischengeschlecht ("Between Genders") explained when the law went into effect, this legislation does not in fact provide parents with increased options, but formally prohibits registration of children with intersex as "M" or "F" Physicians, not parents, are vested with the authority to register children's sex assignment. …

In this paper, we propose a Simondonian interpretation of quantum mechanics taking as a standpoint his “preindividual hypothesis” in order to consider the problem of contextuality. We will examine whether the epistemological obstacle produced by the notion of entity can be bypassed by specifying, according to Simondon and the Kochen-Specker Theorem, the mode of existence of quantum potentialities.

The mind-body problem today resembles a battle-zone in which warring camps, including physicalists, property dualists, panpsychists (Shan 2003), and emergentists (Gonzalez, Broens, and Haselager 2004) clash on a darkling plain, each side regarding the others' positions as radically unacceptable. Amid this struggle, neutral monism lies as a neglected option, treated as a historical position that has somehow failed. The purpose of this essay is suggest that neutral monism is indeed the solution to the problem, and to outline a form of that theory which avoids some of the drawbacks of previous versions. Defining Physicalism In affirming neutral monism, I shall be denying physicalism, and therefore it would be good to know that the denial (and affirmation) of physicalism has content. More trouble has been generated than necessary over the vagueness in the term physicalism. Critics have pointed out that to assert that mind can be explained in terms of present-day physics is a booby-trapped theory, inasmuch as historical extrapolation strongly suggests that our physical theories will eventually be discarded in favor of new theories. Therefore it has been suggested that physicalism is the doctrine that consciousness will be explicable by a "completed physics."1 But there is no reason to think that there is or ever will be such a thing as a completed physics. We could as well say that the solution to the mind-body problem is whatever answer Santa will bring us this year. Yet to say more vaguely that mind will be explained in terms of some future physics is still an empty position, since we do not know what conceptual transformations physics (that is, the future science that will be called physics) will undergo.2 Therefore this physicalism reduces to saying that mind will be explained in terms of something or other. We should note also a graver danger than vagueness. We can foresee the possibility that mind will be explained physically by cheating; that is, that the palette of fundamental ideas used in physics will be enlarged by the addition of mental entities. That the new, augmented physics will be able to account for the mind will produce the bogus appearance that some epoch-making reduction has occurred. But semantic changes wrought by future generations are not our concern. We are no more responsible for applications our grandchildren may make of the term "physics" than Kant was for the crop of occult books that currently resides beneath the label "Metaphysics" in bookstores. Yet a perfectly coherent and meaningful theory can be formulated by humbly adopting a definition of "physics" from the American Heritage Dictionary (3rd ed.) and defining physicalism as: "The doctrine that mind can be explained in terms of the science of matter and energy and of interactions between the two." This is clear enough, at least if we remember to use the physicists' definition of "energy": "the capacity for doing work," and steer clear of the New Age use in which energy is a modish re-labeling of the supernatural force that anthropologists call mana.3 As for matter, I stress that it is essentially an object, that is something derived from perception by abstracting away the subject. The proposed definition of physicalism avoids two perilous shoals. On the one hand, it disentangles us from responsibility for how our descendants use the word "physics." On the other hand, by refraining from specifying any particular physical theory, but only mapping out a kind of theory, the definition does not tie us to any perishable propositions.4 Having defined physicalism, it is now possible meaningfully to deny it and seek a better alternative. Problems with Physicalism I shall not attempt a comprehensive refutation of physicalism here. My aim is different. I shall only refer to a couple of the points that may be made against physicalism as a way of motivating the alternative theory I wish to present. …

Now if we might be inclined to endorse Heidegger's deconstruction of politics [and ethics] in modernity as being complicitous with a certain metaphysics of the will, a metaphysics which is ultimately hegemonic and destructive, we might also be willing to wonder whether the task of thinking that emerges from this diagnosis is not ultimately heading toward a philosophical dead end, one which, to be more specific, seems to rule out the very possibility of praxis.

... hermeneutics, phenomenology and revelation in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and RichardKearney. Key themes discussed are the philosophy of religion and God and the rapport between philosophy and theology. Related research. Jean-Luc Marion. Robyn Horner (2005). 3 ...

The aim of this article is to show how, through Derrida, the concept of unconditional hospitality can be understood through a logic of the parasite. In a supplementary chain that leads to the figure of the parasite, I first knot two main concepts: hospitality and unconditionality. Then I explore the knotting itself through two theoretical articulations discussed by Derrida in many of his text on the work of mourning and the altered constitution of ipseity. Finally, I will arrive at the unpublished seminar Manger l’autre (1989-1990) to focus on the “eating trope” of hospitality. Since para-sitos only means eating-with, the parasite is not a priori a negative notion, but rather suggests a trespassing of frontiers. All the above articulations finally lead me to propose a reading of these topics through a notion of incorporation.

Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency advocates a “speculative materialism” or what has come to be called “speculative realism” over against “correlationism” (his term for [nearly] all post-Kantian philosophy). “Correlationism” is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” As part of his criticism of “correlationism,” Meillassoux argues that it necessarily leads to fideism, referencing the return of the religious in contemporary phenomenology and the fundamentalist fanaticisms of contemporary religion to make his point. It is this criticism of “correlationism” that I will explore in this paper—in two ways. On the one hand, I argue that, at least in the work of thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, what Meillassoux calls “correlationism” leads to faith in doubt rather than fideism. On the other hand, I argue that “correlationis...

La « Theologie negative du temps » de Theunissen (1991) marque une nouvelle etape du debat allemand sur la possibilite et la necessite de la metaphysique au-dela du paradigme de la conscience de soi. Theunissen vise en effet a inverser les affirmations philosophiques du temps dominant la pensee post-metaphysique et tracer ainsi un chemin vers une nouvelle metaphysique

Dans le cadre d'un dossier consacré à Foucault, l'A. propose une lecture politique de l'esthétique de l'existence développée dans le second et le troisième volume de l'«Histoire de la sexualité». Soulevant le paradoxe d'un impossible retour aux conceptions grecques ...

In this article I take up the image of inclination developed by Adriana Cavarero in her book, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude as a mode of developing an account of history informed by an ontology of heterogeneous ethics. Clarifying the potential of inclination contra the Kantian figure of “uprightness,” the principle task of this article is to reimagine the implications of inclination with regard to Walter Benjamin’s theses on history. Ultimately, I show that by pushing at the relationality inherent to an inclined ontology of the self a meaningful exchange can be generated between plural historical temporalities, a move that reveals the inclined figure’s potential to redeem narratives of the historically dispossessed.