Maria Villela-Petit

The Might of Words: A Philosophical Reflection on "The Strange Death of Patroklos"

These are the words Achilles speaks to Hektor, whom he has just struck with a fatal blow. He reminds the son of Priam how, after stripping Patroklos’ fallen body, Hektor made off with the fallen man’s armour, which is Achilles’ own. Earlier, refusing to spare the life of Lykaon, another son of Priam, despite the victim’s pleas for mercy, Achilles had already recalled the death of his dear friend Patroklos. On that occasion, Achilles’ words to Lykaon exalt Patroklos for his prowess as a warrior: &dquo;So friend, you die also. Why all this clamour about it? Patroklos is also dead, who was better by far than you are.&dquo; &dquo;

Book Review: Parcours de la Renaissance -! Trois Études

Paul Ricœur’s latest book does not depart from the general movement of his philosophical work as he himself has understood it. As with his other books, he proceeds from ‘recognizing a residue left over from the previous project, a residue that in its turn leads to a new challenge’. What was it this time that encouraged Paul Ricœur to push his thinking further? The answer may be summarized in a word: identity.1 Parcours de la Renaissance is the endpoint of the philosophical problematic of identity that has occupied Paul Ricœur starting with his trilogy Temps et Récit. At the conclusion of a research project aiming to establish a close correlation between ‘the activity of telling a story’ and the temporal nature of human experience Ricœur, in the ‘Conclusions’, reaches the point of developing the notion of ‘narrative identity’. If there is a story, it is of someone who acts and suffers, that is, a ‘who’ (individual or collective) that may be indicated in response to the question: ‘Who did this?’, ‘Who acted in that way?’ or ‘Who did that happen to?’ Thus there is an individual or collective entity whose identification is produced through the narrative process itself, be it historiographic or fictional (in the case of literary fiction). According to Ricœur: ‘The story recounted tells the who of the action. So the identity of the who is itself only a narrative identity.’2 The idea of narrative identity thus allows us to think about the question of personal identity taking full account of the temporal nature of existence3 – that of a being who, while coexisting with others, is made to change in the course of a story. It is once again personal identity, especially in its reflexive dimension, that is the subject of Soi-même comme un autre. There identity is seen as a polarity: the idem-pole of biological identity and the constant features of the character, and the ipse-pole of the auto-determination of a self that recognizes itself as the responsible author of its actions. So a mediating role is assigned to narrative identity between these two poles. And, according to Soi-même comme un autre, it is in the soil of a philosophy of ipseity that ethics is rooted. Hence the impossibility of reducing ethics merely to the sphere of moral law in the sense of Kant’s practical philosophy. So far we have only touched on the problematic of identity developed by Paul Ricœur in his previous books. In his new one, identity is immediately placed in the context of the notion of recognition.

Making One out of Many: The Brazilian Experience

published in this issue of Diogenes. Foregrounding miscegenation, and understanding its origins, has been one of the constant themes among the most distinguished practitioners of Brazilian thought since the 1930s, and has been accepted, indeed demanded, since the 1920s by the artistic and literary movement known as ’modernism’, of which one of the major figures was the Sio Paulo writer, Mario de Andrade.’ Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), who would now have been

Reviews : Images of the Sky (A Chronicle)

Does living on Earth not also for human beings mean being open to the sky?’ Watching day alternate with night, relying on the seasonal cycle, finding their way according to the position of the stars, humans have always been aware of their dependence on the sky and tried to understand the origin of life in relation to it. And it is up to the sky again that their imagination and thoughts fly whenever they feel cramped in their earthly habitat. Following the axis of their own vertical position, the earth that is the floor for humans is

Man and Nature: Bearings, Resources

The question concerning our basic relations to nature, our knowledge of nature as such, our rule over nature, is not a question of natural science, but this question is itself in question in the question of whether and how we are still addressed by what is as such within the whole.1

Topoï of the Body and the Soul in Husserlian Phenomenology

As the title suggests, the question posed here is the following: What are the problematical topoi in which the theme of the body and the soul arises in Husserlian phenomenology?