Subjects and Sense

Recognizing the subject as the consciousness that internalizes knowledge of the world and tries to make sense of it, mediating between the particular and the universal, and the constant reorientation toward the horizons of thought, the telos, as a guide for practice—these are defining components of the philosophical tradition at stake. It has thrived—and thrives—in secular intellectual versions, but it is also inextricably linked to western religious traditions, so much so that it is pointless to try to drive a wedge between reason and religion in this context. It is a tradition that resists a reduction of the world to the exclusive givenness of naturalism; mere facticity, described by an empirical positivism, is always insufficient. Yet at the same time it also resists the historicism of Zeitgeist, the complete relativization of human experience to the arbitrary prejudices of whatever culture seems to have seized power: thought has to be more than a random endorsement of the dominators of the day. This issue of Telos is a stock-taking of the current debates on these components of the philosophical tradition, on the viability of the subject—at the center of the legacy—and the sense and senses it came to make out of the world.

Introduction
Russell A. Berman

Et Tu, Subject?
Dianna Taylor

The Ritual Birth of Sense
C. J. C. Pickstock

The Fade-out of the Political Subject: From Locke to Mill
Rahul Govind

Laws, Exceptions, Norms: Kierkegaard, Schmitt, and Benjamin on the Exception
Rebecca Gould

Contingency and Necessity in the Genealogy of Morality
Paul di Georgio

Chiasms in Meditation or Toward the Notion of Cartesian Fiction
Juan Carlos Donado

Seeing the Countryside: Behind the Pastoral and Progressivist Veils
Steven Knepper

The Cultural War between Athens and Jerusalem: The American Case
Luciano Pellicani

Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome: A Reply to Luciano Pellicani
Adrian Pabst

Notes and Commentary

Improvising the Future: Theory, Practice, and Struggle in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Towards a New Manifesto
Matt Applegate

Reviews

The Way We Suffer Now
Derek Hillard

A Journal Views Itself
James V. Schall