The Telos Press Podcast: Nir Evron on Hannah Arendt, Thinking, and Metaphor

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Nir Evron about his article “Hannah Arendt, Thinking, Metaphor,” from Telos 196 (Fall 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discussed how Arendt understands the difference between a metaphorical and a literal view of the world; her view of metaphor as a bridge between the thinking ego and the social and political world that it inhabits; the tension in Arendt’s The Life of the Mind between her desire to move beyond metaphysical assumptions and her unwillingness to let go of the philosophical tradition; the consequences for morality of her conception of metaphor; the impact of the Eichmann trial on Arendt and how it prompted her to explore the connection between thoughtlessness and evil; and her belief that the individual’s ability to think in a critical fashion might serve as a check on the descent into totalitarianism. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 196 are available for purchase in our online store.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Epistemology’s Political-Theological Import in Giambattista Vico

Marco Andreacchio’s “Epistemology’s Political-Theological Import in Giambattista Vico” appears in Telos 185 (Winter 2018). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.

The twentieth-century rise to fame of Giambattista Vico as anticipator of historical relativism obscures essential elements of the eighteenth-century philosopher’s message. Vico’s stringent argumentation points well beyond contemporary expectations, offering a classical alternative to both a political depreciation of metaphysics and a metaphysical depreciation of politics. Carrying on a Renaissance tradition inaugurated most notably by Dante Alighieri, Vico invites us to rediscover or return to the poetic language of pagan antiquity as political-theological key to philosophical reflection upon the nature of the human mind. What Vico intends to defend are not old myths as such, but the essential independence of the human mind from any and all myths, be they ancient, medieval, or modern.

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Defending Moral Realism

Anthony M. Matteo’s “In Defense of Moral Realism” offers a fascinating argument. He begins with the seemingly innocuous premise that philosophy, and by extension theorizing of any stripe, should be linked to what people actually do. Philosophy of science is his analogue, the obtuse, jargon-laden pages of such work often seeming to generate little useful insight for the practitioners of science. An account of morality, by analogy, should be useful to practicing moral agents.

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Phillip Blond on Universals, the Good, and the Future of European Politics

In this video from the 2014 Telos in Europe Conference, Phillip Blond of ResPublica proposes that the future stability of representative democracy, particularly in Europe, depends upon a new understanding of universals that would provide the basis of the good.

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Hegel’s Revolutionary Password

As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Robert Wyllie looks at Alain Manville’s “Hegel and Metaphysics,” from Telos 42 (Winter 1979).

In “Hegel and Metaphysics,” Alain Manville joins the echelon of French theorists who attempt to focalize Hegelianism around one core concept. In the vanguard, Jean Wahl turned unhappy consciousness into an organizing principle for reading Hegel. More famously, Alexandre Kojève pared Hegelianism down to the core master-slave dialectic. Manville focuses upon the annihilation of metaphysics in Hegel’s speculative recognition that being equals nothingness. Speculative thought transcends the understanding (Vernunft), which sees only an ontological contradiction. Hegel dismisses Vernunft and metaphysics, Manville argues, to grasp concrete reality in a postmetaphysical sense.

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The Polis of Meditation: Reading the Idea Dei in Descartes’ Meditation III

The following paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Telos Conference, held on February 15–17, 2013, in New York City.

Much has certainly been said about the place of otherness in René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. But one could, or rather, should be more precise and determine that the majority of what has been said about otherness in Descartes’ opus magnum concerns an essential banishment of the other, not to call it an essential exclusion, at the face of the “I.” In a text that, as some would have it, inaugurates the age we call Modern and starting with its genre, critics have no problem directly drawing a line from the monological voice that gives rise to the Modern subject to the egocentricity that perhaps best characterizes an age in which the mechanization of Nature—if we are still to be called Moderns—is rapidly coinciding with its destruction. As if the question of genre in the Meditations were not one of extreme complexity, the monologue, or so the story goes, finally replaces dialogue as the genre of Modernity and the other, slowly fading away, loses its voice under the authoritarian submission to the monophonic first-person singular.

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