The paper deals with the wider philosophical context of Rousseau's pessimistic belief that societies in their public (linguistic, artistic, political etc.) practices only ever advance in their corruption. The paper emphasizes what has been perhaps insufficiently noted in the past, namely that, for Rousseau, corruption is inscribed into the order of nature. Public institutions, then, including language, which is the first social institution, according to Rousseau, originate in nature, and it is in nature that we find also the motor of their decadence.
COBISS.SI-ID: 53467234
In "Less Than Nothing", the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj Zizek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Zizek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought - Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2278535
The book The World and its Predicate II. Testing the Limits of the Utterable investigates the connections between the concepts of public space and philosophy at exactly the place where they both emerged for the first time, in Ancient Greece. The claim of the book is to offer a new explanation of the emergence of philosophy in Greece. This study on pre-Socratic philosophy examines the birth of philosophy as a reaction to momentous social shifts that took place in the 6th and 7th century B.C: first democratic impulses, vacant place of the monarch, laicism of religion, devaluation of genealogies in colonies, the ever louder voice of the many, public debate in the agora, etc. In a strong and negative reaction to the conditions of its formation, the philosophical science first manifests itself in non-dialogical, incommunicable forms that were public on principle but elitist by content: short adages by Thales, epigrams by Xenophanes, the poem of Parmenides, or the aphorisms of Heraclitus.
COBISS.SI-ID: 273297920
The new theory of language in the 17th century coincided with the end the traditional order of disciplines in the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), which in mediaeval times provided a comprehensive view of the problems of discourse. The article focuses on some key passages in PortRoyal Logic and Locke’s Essay that provide us with a typical early modern scheme of linguistic representation, characterised by a heavily emphasised dualism of ideas and words. Since ideas are also the meanings of words and are ontologically essentially private, one can raise the question of where in this analysis of language it is even possible to locate its public features. The article attempts to show that a private language is not only possible for Locke and the PortRoyalists, but that it is even a necessary and primary character of language. Language becomes a public medium of communication only at the junctures of private meanings constituted by the “common use” of words. The article then focuses on the almost complete marginalisation in the two works of the theory of public speech. Rhetoric, in the 17th century often reduced to mere eloquence, has no place in philosophy, and the duties of making speeches persuasive were taken over by reason alone. To show how the jurisdictions of the trivial disciplines were transformed in the linguistic theories proposed by the PortRoyal Logic and Locke, one can construct a hypothetical early modern trivium in the following order: idea – word – figure or logic – grammar – rhetoric. Rhetoric is found to have kept its structural place only to be singled out as dangerous.
COBISS.SI-ID: 53691746
The article investigates the connections between the concepts of public, democracy, sophism, and philosophy. Based on a reconstruction of the circumstances within which philosophy arose in the colonies of Asia Minor, one cannot but notice that philosophy does not originate in the continuity of but rather as a reaction to the conditions of its emergence. The article claims that the main external principle of organisation of philosophical truth is nothing other than “aristocratic resentment”, appearing precisely at the historical moment of the opening of the public space of debate and argument, of laic religion, and the absence of a sovereign. On these grounds, the Parmenidean birth of ontology is not interpreted as an ecstatic experience of being and as a pristine existential sentiment of the precedence of being over nothing, but rather as an ontologised and hypostatised attempt to neutralise a grammatical negation, an attempt to suppress the small “is not” that became an unstable and highly charged form in the times of emerging sophism.
COBISS.SI-ID: 53709922