Project MUSE®: Philosophical Topics - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Philosophical Topics.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 38 (Spring 2010) through current issueLatest Articles: Philosophical TopicsTWOProject MUSE®Philosophical Topics2154-154X0276-2080Latest articles in Philosophical Topics. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Introduction: Philosophy as Discourse: The Thought of Stephen Mulhall
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983528
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The papers in this volume of Philosophical Topics originate from a conference on the philosophy of Stephen Mulhall held in the spring of 2022 at Lehigh University on the occasion of Mulhall’s Selfridge Lecture. The conference was a small gathering over three days and afforded participants the opportunity to engage in intense dialogue both in and out of the “official” sessions. Participants were particularly fortunate to benefit from Stephen’s presence; his contributions to discussion were always illuminating and were offered in the spirit of deepening ongoing conversations. All of the papers in this volume have been substantially reworked in the light of this occasion; Stephen’s responses will continue to foster
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallIntroduction: Philosophy as Discourse: The Thought of Stephen Mulhall2026-02-17text/htmlen-USIntroduction: Philosophy as Discourse: The Thought of Stephen Mulhall2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®126032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17Walking and Falling: Mulhall and Cavell on Redemptive Steps in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983529
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You’re walking, and you don’t always realize it, but you’re always falling. With each step, you fall forward slightly, and then catch yourself from falling. Over and over, you’re falling and then catching yourself from falling. And this is how you can be walking and falling at the same time.In Philosophical Investigations, the simplest question or most mundane request—e.g., “In what did your meaning Mr. N.N. consist?” or “Point to an object; now point to its color”—can unleash torrents of manic nonsense or, alternately, reduce us to sudden (mental) paralysis. At a stroke, we lose contact with the conditions enabling our ordinary capacities. Those capacities now appear utterly mysterious, and seem to require that we
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallWalking and Falling: Mulhall and Cavell on Redemptive Steps in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations2026-02-17text/htmlen-USWalking and Falling: Mulhall and Cavell on Redemptive Steps in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®1589722026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17Nothing Hidden
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983530
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In 1903, at more or less the inception of what we call Analytical Philosophy, G.E. Moore selected as the motto for Principia Ethica, this line from Bishop Butler: “Everything is what it is, and not another thing” (Moore 1978, ii). Jasper Johns arrives from the opposite side of things: I am concerned with a thing’s not being what it was, with its becoming something other than what it is, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely and with the slipping away of that moment, with at any moment seeing or saying and letting it go at that.In the same interview he elaborates:In focusing your eye or your mind, if you focus in one way, your actions will tend to be of one nature; if you focus in another way
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallNothing Hidden2026-02-17text/htmlen-USNothing Hidden2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®681732026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17Dwelling in the enigma: Heidegger, Being and human finitude
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983531
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About one thing, Heidegger is clear: the notion of Being is mysterious. In recent years, many interpreters have explained what Heidegger calls the “enigma of Being” [BT: 23] by appealing to the fact that the notion of Being seems to be the most familiar and, at the same time, the most alien. On the one hand, we always experience entities in relation to their Being. On the other hand, the Being of all these entities is not an entity itself and, for this reason, how we manage to talk about Being at all is far from clear. If so, any attempt to articulate Being, and our experience of entities in relation to it, including Heidegger’s own attempt, runs the risk of failing.In order to overcome this impasse, philosophers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallDwelling in the enigma: Heidegger, Being and human finitude2026-02-17text/htmlen-USDwelling in the enigma: Heidegger, Being and human finitude2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®934432026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17(In)Alienable: Acknowledgment and Its Limits
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983532
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“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”I think I should begin by dashing whatever hopes the title to my paper may have raised that its pages will be devoted to exploring the Alien movies, about which Mulhall has written so extensively. While I am as fond of idle speculation as most in our field, I believe it would be unwise for me to hold forth on things Mulhall has written that I have never read, concerning a series of films that I have never seen. That could be interesting—in some sense of interesting—but I doubt it would be especially productive. But to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmall(In)Alienable: Acknowledgment and Its Limits2026-02-17text/htmlen-US(In)Alienable: Acknowledgment and Its Limits2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®453282026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17Disappointment with criteria: Cavell, Rhees, and skepticism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983533
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In this paper, I explore some, I think in some ways surprising, connections between the thinking of Stanley Cavell and Rush Rhees. The intertwinings at which I look are foreshadowed in the writings of Stephen Mulhall, especially in Inheritance and Originality and The Conversation of Humanity. In Part I, I survey Mulhall’s critical reactions to Rhees’s qualms about Wittgenstein’s apparent uses of the famous example of the builders in §2 of Philosophical Investigations and of the notion of language-games. Mulhall’s responses challenge Rhees’s view of the role of the builders in Wittgenstein’s thinking, but also underline Rhees’s deeper concerns with the unity and reality of language. In Part II, I present a reading
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallDisappointment with criteria: Cavell, Rhees, and skepticism2026-02-17text/htmlen-USDisappointment with criteria: Cavell, Rhees, and skepticism2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®770362026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17The Resurrection of God?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983534
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My starting point in this essay is the project that Stephen Mulhall undertakes in his recent book The Ascetic Ideal.1 The project is a curious one. I mean this in an entirely non-pejorative sense of ‘curious’, which I hope to elucidate. Another way to put it would be to say that the project is a fascinating one. It is a development of the genealogy that Nietzsche provides, in The Genealogy of Morality,2 for the ascetic ideal.Before I proceed, I need to say something about how we are to understand the two key expressions here: ‘genealogy’ and ‘the ascetic ideal’. I shall begin with the latter.In the very first sentence of his book Mulhall himself defines the ascetic ideal as “the various ways in which the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallThe Resurrection of God?2026-02-17text/htmlen-USThe Resurrection of God?2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®497702026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17“A Wedge-Shaped Core of Darkness”: On Self-Knowledge, Self-Opacity, and Soul-Pictures
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983535
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This paper explores the idea that forms of self-opacity—vicissitudes of self-consciousness, and disruptions of straightforward self-knowledge—need not be understood exclusively or necessarily as pathologies nor as brute psychological facts, but can be valued as part of a rich moral psychology and conception of selfhood. I think that something close to this orienting idea can be found in Iris Murdoch, and so it will be helpful to turn to Murdoch in setting our task.In the opening pages of The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch introduces her idea that philosophical moral psychologies and conceptions of selfhood can be understood as what she calls “soul-pictures.”1 In this text and elsewhere Murdoch is concerned to analyze
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmall“A Wedge-Shaped Core of Darkness”: On Self-Knowledge, Self-Opacity, and Soul-Pictures2026-02-17text/htmlen-US“A Wedge-Shaped Core of Darkness”: On Self-Knowledge, Self-Opacity, and Soul-Pictures2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®949282026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17On not acknowledging an animal’s wound: Reading Coetzee with Mulhall
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983536
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Our intellectual culture is structured by crude oppositions: continental versus analytic philosophy, philosophy versus theology, philosophy versus literature, high culture versus low. Stephen Mulhall stands out among contemporary thinkers for his ability to work across these oppositions, illuminating one domain with insights gleaned from others. Mulhall’s work is not devoted to interventions in whatever debates happen to be popular in the philosophical ‘literature’. Instead, his work is guided by questions and texts that speak to fundamental problems of human life.Mulhall’s gifts are on full display in The Wounded Animal: J.M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. Mulhall focuses on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallOn not acknowledging an animal’s wound: Reading Coetzee with Mulhall2026-02-17text/htmlen-USOn not acknowledging an animal’s wound: Reading Coetzee with Mulhall2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®703832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17Response to Lehigh Conference Papers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/983537
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It was both an honour and a privilege to participate in a conference at which so many colleagues and friends offered such scrupulously detailed, charitable, imaginative and thought-provoking responses to writings of mine from a variety of occasions and decades. I can only hope that my response to them—being about as long as the longest among them, and so inevitably more selective in its concerns and less detailed in their working out—will live up to the example of exacting but collegial engagement that they set. I certainly owe real thanks to Filippo Casati and Gordon Bearn for their conceiving of the occasion of the conference, and the week of other activities at Lehigh University that surrounded it, and their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/610/image/coversmallResponse to Lehigh Conference Papers2026-02-17text/htmlen-USResponse to Lehigh Conference Papers2026-02-172026TWOProject MUSE®1536292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-02-17