The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature

Contributors

Contributors Josep Maria Bech is professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona in Spain. He has written widely on issues of modern European thought and quandaries in the historiography of philosophy. Among his works are Les idees que s’oculten en el temps (Barcelona: EUB, 1998), De Husserl a Heidegger (Barcelona: EUB, 2001), Merleau-Ponty (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2005), Glossari de filosofia de la ment (Barcelona: BdE, 2008), and “Institution at the Crossroads” (in Merleau-Ponty: Thinking Without Dualisms Today, Paris: Vrin 2009). He is currently working on philosophical problems posed by historiography and social theory, with a focus on the significance of side-stepping agency, the dispute over the epigenesis of meaning, the protracted quarrel between constructivism and realism, the pitting of semanticism versus geneticism and of holism versus individualism, the clash between causalism and interpretivism, and the lengthy feud amid contextualisms and heterologies, as well as between functionalism and intentionalism. Jeffrey A. Bernstein is associate professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He works in the areas of Spinoza, German philosophy, and Jewish thought as they relate to questions concerning the philosophy of history. He has published articles dealing with Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Freud, Adorno, Agamben, and Benjamin. He is currently at work on a book tentatively entitled Leo Strauss on the Borders of Philosophy, Judaism, and History, as well as a book-length study of history and iconoclasm. Patrick Burke is dean of Gonzaga in Florence (in Italy) and professor of philosophy at Gonzaga University. He specializes in contemporary French philosophy and has published extensively on the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the influence of Schelling on his thought. Carolyn Culbertson is assistant professor of philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. She received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Oregon, where she completed a dissertation addressing the relationship 341 342 Contributors between language, authenticity, and social life in Heidegger’s work. Her current research draws from both Continental philosophy and modern literary criticism to examine the different roles language may play in self-development and the implications these carry for ethical being. Bernard Flynn is professor of philosophy at the SUNY-Empire State College and regularly offers seminars at the Graduate and the Undergraduate New School For Social Research. He has published on contemporary thought, notably, Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics (Humanities Press, 1992), The Philosophy of Claude Lefort (Northwestern, 2006), and the co-edited volume, Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy (SUNY, 2009). He has also published many articles on contemporary philosophy as well as on the history of philosophy. Currently he is writing a book entitled, The Adventures of the Event. Kyriaki Goudeli is assistant professor in the Philosophy Department of Patras University in Greece, and was lecturer at Warwick University in England (1996–2002). She is the author of Challenges to German Idealism: Schelling, Fichte and Kant (Palgave/Macmillan, 2002), and of various publications on German Idealism, Romanticism, and Modern Philosophy. Her research interests are in the areas of Modern Philosophy and the Renaissance, with a special interest in the philosophies of Nature, art, and religion, the receptions of ancient Greek philosophy in modernity, metaphysics, cosmology, and mythology. Annette Hilt is a researcher and teaches philosophy at Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz (Philosophy Department and the Eugen Fink Research Center for Phenomenological Anthropology and Social Philosophy). Her research focuses on the history of phenomenological thinking, the philosophy of expressivity, narratival perspectives on anthropology, and, most recently, the philosophy of education. Her recent publications include Ousia—Psyche—Nous: Aristoteles Philosophie der Lebendigkeit (Alber, 2005), the co-edited (with Cathrin Nielsen) volume, Bildung im technischen Zeitalter: Sein, Mensch und Welt nach Eugen Fink (Alber, 2005), and the co-edited (with Anselm Böhmer) volume, Das Elementale: An der Schwelle zur Phänomenalität (Königshausen & Neumann, 2008). Recent essays include “The Anthropological Boundaries of Comprehensive Meaning, its Finitudes and Openness: Towards a Hermeneutics of Expressivity” (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. October 2009) and “Hermeneutik der Transzendenzen: Verstehen und Verständigung an den Grenzen 343 Contributors der Erfahrung” in the edited volume, Alfred Schutz: Phänomenologische Hermeneutik der sozialen Welt. Joseph P. Lawrence is professor of philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of Schellings Philosophie des ewigen Anfangs (Königshausen & Neumann, 1989). In addition to a number of articles on Schelling, he...