Thought: A Philosophical History

337 Pages·2021·8.091 MB·English

by  Panayiota Vassilopoulou, Daniel Whistler

THOUGHT: A PHILOSOPHICAL
HISTORY
Of all the topics in the history of philosophy, the history of different forms of thinking and
contemplation is one of the most important, and yet is also relatively overlooked. What is it to
think philosophically? How did different forms of thinking—reflection, contemplation, critique
and analysis—emerge in different epochs?
This collection offers a rich and diverse philosophical exploration of the history of thought, from
the classical period to the twenty-first century. It covers canonical figures including Plato, Aristotle,
Descartes and Kant, as well as debates in less well-known areas such as chinese thought and
Neoplatonism and the role of speculation in nineteenth-century Russian philosophy.
Comprising twenty-two chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is
divided into five parts:
• Flourishing and Thinking from Homer to Hume
• The Thinking of Thinking from Augustine to Gödel
• Images and Thinking from Plotinus to Unger
• Bodies of Thought and Habits of Thinking from Plato to Irigaray
• The Efficacy of Thinking from Sextus to Bataille
Thought: A Philosophical History is the first comprehensive investigation of the history of
philosophical thought and contemplation. As such, it is a landmark publication for anyone
researching and teaching the history of philosophy, and a valuable resource for those studying
the subject in related fields such as literature, religion, sociology and the history of ideas.
Panayiota Vassilopoulou is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK. In
addition to publishing widely on Neoplatonism and Aesthetics, she has been at the forefront of
the development of models for interconnecting history-of-philosophy research with con-
temporary philosophical practice, particularly social and reflective practices in non-academic
institutions (galleries, museums, the cultural industries, and the health sector).
Daniel Whistler is Reader in Modern European Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of
London, UK. He is co-author of The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity,
author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity and has edited numerous
volumes including the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy.
REWRITING THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Series editors: Aaron Garrett and Pauliina Remes
The history of philosophy has undergone remarkable growth in the English language philoso-
phical world. In addition to more and better quality translations of canonical texts, there has been
a parallel expansion in the study and research of sources, thinkers and subjects hitherto largely
neglected in the discipline. These range from women philosophers and late ancient thinkers to
new Western and non-Western sources alike. Simultaneously, there has been a methodological
shift to far greater intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives in the history of philosophy,
cutting across the humanities and social sciences.
Rewriting the History of Philosophy is an exciting new series that reflects these important changes in
philosophy. Each volume presents a major, high-quality scholarly assessment and interpretation of
an important topic in the history of philosophy, from ancient times to the present day, by an
outstanding team of international contributors.
The Senses and the History of Philosophy
Edited by Brian Glenney and José Filipe Silva
Molyneux’s Question and the History of Philosophy
Edited by Gabriele Ferretti and Brian Glenney
Information and the History of Philosophy
Edited by Chris Meyns
Thought: A Philosophical History
Edited by Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Handbooks-in-Applied-Ethics/book-series/RWHP
THOUGHT: A
PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY
Edited by
Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler
First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2021 selection and editorial matter Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler to be identified as the author of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
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and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vassilopoulou, Panayiota, editor. | Whistler, Daniel, 1982- editor.
Title: Thought : a philosophical history / edited by Panayiota Vassilopoulou
and Daniel Whistler.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Rewriting
the history of philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051593 (print) | LCCN 2020051594 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367000103 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429445026 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Thought and thinking--History.
Classification: LCC B105.T54 T535 2021 (print) | LCC B105.T54 (ebook) |
DDC 128/.3--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051593
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051594
ISBN: 978-0-367-00010-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-77094-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-44502-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
CONTENTS
Contributors viii
Introduction: Patterns of thinking 1
Panayiota Vassilopoulou and Daniel Whistler
Part I
Flourishing and thinking from Homer to Hume 7
1 Thinking like a hero 9
Casey Perin
2 The primacy of practice and the centrality of outlook: Reflections on
Chinese ethical traditions 21
Kwong-loi Shun
3 Thinking, theorizing and theoria 36
Stephen Clark
Part II
The thinking of thinking from Augustine to Gödel 47
4 The myth of the mental: An Augustinian critique of Dreyfus
and McDowell 49
Catherine Pickstock
5 Romantic thinking 60
Nicholas Halmi
v
Contents
6 Pure and impure thinking in Hegel’s Encyclopedia 75
Markus Gabriel
7 Denkicht—Thicket-thinking with Walter Benjamin around 1917 91
Peter Fenves
8 Formal-syntactical thinking and the structure of the world 101
Paul M. Livingston
Part III
Images and thinking from Plotinus to Unger 115
9 Plotinus: Philosophical thinking as self-creation 117
Panayiota Vassilopoulou
10 Thinking’s history: Descartes and the past tense of thought 135
Andrea Gadberry
11 Polyp-thinking in the eighteenth century 148
Lydia Azadpour and Daniel Whistler
12 The mythic imagination as an ‘experiment in philosophy’: Erich
Unger’s contribution to the phenomenology of thinking 162
Bruce Rosenstock
Part IV
Bodies of thought and habits of thinking from Plato to Irigaray 177
13 Thinking about the unthinkable: Hypothesizing the khôra in the
Timaeus 179
Luc Brisson
14 Thought in motion: Lucretius’ materialist practice 190
Thomas Nail
15 Thinking philosophically in the middle ages: The case of the early
Franciscans 205
Lydia Schumacher
16 The ‘thought-work’; or, the exuberance of thinking in Kant and Freud 219
Stella Sandford
vi
Contents
17 Thinking otherwise with Irigaray and Maximin 236
Rachel Jones
Part V
The efficacy of thinking from Sextus to Bataille 251
18 Thinking without commitment: Two models 253
Richard Bett
19 Thinking, acting, and acting by thinking: Marx and Althusser 266
Gregor Moder
20 ‘Thoughts and purposes have come to me in the shadow I should
never have learned in the sunshine’: The development of philosophical
thinking in the literature of Frances E. W. Harper 279
Catherine Villanueva Gardner
21 The void of thought and the ambivalence of history: Chaadaev,
Bakunin, and Fedorov 293
Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet
22 The destruction of thought 307
Gil Anidjar
Index 320
vii
CONTRIBUTORS
Gil Anidjar teaches in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern,
South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, USA. His most recent book is
Qu’appelle-t-on destruction? Heidegger, Derrida (Montreal, 2017).
Lydia Azadpour is a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is
currently completing a project on the concept of species in Kielmeyer, Hegel and Schelling.
She is the co-editor and translator of the Bloomsbury edition, Kielmeyer and the Organic World:
Texts and Interpretations (2020).
Richard Bett is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Johns Hopkins University, USA.
His books include Pyrrho, his Antecedents, and his Legacy (Oxford University Press, 2000),
translations of works by Sextus Empiricus, and How to be a Pyrrhonist, a collection of his essays
(Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Luc Brisson is Emeritus Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research
(Paris [Villejuif], France; Centre Jean Pépin, UMR 8230 CNRS-ENS, PSL) and is known for
his works on both Plato and Plotinus, including bibliographies, translations, and commentaries.
He has also published numerous works on the history of philosophy and religions in Antiquity.
Kirill Chepurin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the National Research University Higher
School of Economics, Moscow. He has held visiting positions at Humboldt University, Berlin,
and University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include German Idealism and
Romanticism, political theology, and critical theory.
Stephen Clark is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and an
Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Theology at the University of Bristol. His
books include Aristotle’s Man (1975), The Nature of the Beast (1982), From Athens to Jerusalem
(1984, 2019), Philosophical Futures (2011), Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor and Philosophical Practice
(2016), and Can We Believe in People? (2020).
viii
Contributors
Alex Dubilet is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University,
Tennessee. He is the author of The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to
Modern (Fordham, 2018). Dubilet works across contemporary continental philosophy, critical
theory, philosophy of religion, critical study of secularism and political theology.
Peter Fenves, the Joan and Sarepta Professor of Literature at Northwestern University, USA,
is a professor of German, Comparative Literary Studies and Jewish Studies. He is the author of
several books, including The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford
University Press), and Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth (Routledge).
Markus Gabriel holds the Chair for Epistemology, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy at
the University of Bonn and is Director of its International Centre for Philosophy. His books
include Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), Why the
World does not Exist (Polity, 2015) I am not a Brain. Philosophy of Mind for the 21st Century (Polity,
2017) and The Limits of Epistemology (Polity, 2019).
Andrea Gadberry is Assistant Professor at New York University. Her first book, Cartesian
Poetics: The Art of Thinking, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2020.
Catherine Villanueva Gardner is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies
at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, USA. Her central interests are in challenging the
boundaries and definitions of philosophy through the retrieval of neglected or forgotten
historical women philosophers.
Nicholas Halmi is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of
Oxford and Margaret Candfield Fellow of University College, Oxford. Author of The
Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford University Press, 2007), he is currently completing
a study of aesthetic historicism in the period 1650–1850.
Rachel Jones is Associate Professor in Philosophy at George Mason University, Virginia. She is
the author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy (Polity, 2011) and of articles and chapters on
Kant, Irigaray, and Lyotard. She works on post-Kantian European philosophy as read through
feminist, queer, decolonial and critical race perspectives.
Paul M. Livingston teaches Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the sole
author of four books: Philosophical History and the Problem of Consciousness (Cambridge University
Press, 2004); Philosophy and the Vision of Language (Routledge, 2008); The Politics of Logic:
Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (Routledge, 2012); and, most recently,
The Logic of Being: Realism, Truth, and Time (Northwestern, 2017).
Gregor Moder is Assistant Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is currently
pursuing a three-year research project on the theatricality of power, part of which is being spent
as a Fulbright Scholar at Princeton University. His recent works include Hegel and Spinoza:
Substance and Negativity (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and an edited volume on the
Object of Comedy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
Thomas Nail is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of,
among other monographs, Lucretius: An Ontology of Motion (Edinburgh University Press, 2018),
ix