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, James Santucci looks at Paul Piccone’s “Towards a Socio-Historical Interpretation of the Scientific Revolution” in Telos 1 (Spring 1968). This essay was also republished as part of the anthology Confronting the Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone, available from Telos Press.
Paul Piccone begins this essay with a word of caution for anyone looking back at the scientific revolution:
The scientific revolution of the 16th century is popularly thought of as having freed mankind from superstition and myth. This account, however, runs into difficulties when it is realized that superstition and myth are still with us and, furthermore, that institutionalized irrationality is a predominant feature of 20th century society.
The popularly held view that Piccone mentions doesn’t just arrive at different conclusions about what happened in history; it requires a completely different view of how history happens. History, in this view, has been continuously building toward modernity, and the triumph of rationalism and science in the sixteenth century were culture’s first steps toward the superior ways of being and thinking that we have today. The signal that our ways of being and thinking today are superior, of course, is that we have them today, and what could possibly be more modern?
The date was August 22, 1933. Only ten days before, Winston Churchill had spoken publicly for the first time about the dangers of German re-armament. Almost exactly two months later, Germany would withdraw from the League of Nations. During that same year, Martin Heidegger would controversially speak in public about Hitler’s referendum, stating: “The National Socialist revolution is not merely the taking over of a present-at-hand power in the state by another power that has grown sufficiently [strong] for it, but rather this revolution brings the complete overturning [Umwälzung] of our German Dasein.” 
Translated by Thomas Friese
Sean Franzel: My article explores the question of the public sphere rather indirectly, mainly via the assumption that the project of literary criticism involves the critic positioning him or herself vis-à-vis other critical voices. Criticism seems unavoidably to imply the existence of a/plural community/ies of discourse that debate the status of certain shared objects or topics of interest. My article focuses on two specific critics who take issue with modes of canonical or hegemonic critical discourse that heroize literary and philosophical figures and that cast them as larger-than-life personalities. In its modern form, these discourses begin in the Romantic period, and their legacies reach into twentieth-century authoritarianism as well as into contemporary celebrity culture. My article is interested in different ways that critics resist this heroizing, monumentalizing discourse. Additionally, I suppose that my article presumes the idea that the notion of the “public sphere” references a place where individuals take on certain public personae; in this context, I view figures such as Jean Paul and Walter Benjamin as seeking to counteract the fetishization of larger-than-life heroic public personalities. 
In “Joyce and Phenomenology,” Joseph Ferrandino proposes a “phenomenological reading” of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and while he admits that much of the epic eludes such sweeping, categorical interpretations, he maintains that “in terms of aims and methods, Ulysses can only be seen as a concrete application of what Husserl means by phenomenology” (84). Ferrandino provides an excellent gloss on Husserl and his notoriously difficult philosophy before he delves into the equally difficult Joyce. Ferrandino explains that the aim of Husserl’s phenomenology is “to get back to the ‘things themselves.’ This is done by suspending judgment . . . reducing the immediate experience to the operations of the life-world (the phenomenological reduction), and then constituting again the whole in its proper subjective sense” (87). Joyce, in objectifying individual experience so deftly, enables us, as readers, to consider our own experience from a sort of literary remove. Ferrandino understands this to be analogous, even equivalent, to the work of the phenomenologist: “It is from this viewpoint that the reader can come to grasp the proper meaning of the experience, just as the phenomenologist who has performed the reduction can view the bracketed experience and its correct sense” (91). The reader’s experience of Ulysses, Ferrandino argues, is a reflexive one, and by bringing us into an awareness of ourselves as readers the text also aligns us with Joyce as the author: “We, as readers, have access to the same viewpoint that Joyce has. We are not Stephen walking on the strand contemplating philosophical problems. The philosophical is not the object of our act of awareness. It is Stephen’s object. Our object is Stephen’s act of awareness and its object” (90). 
