Exercises in Constructive Imagination

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-VII

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2. Introduction

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 1-5

3. Knowledge Versus Belief

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 7-15

4. A Strange (?) Quantum World

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 17-23

5. Promissory Names

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 25-30

6. What is Logic About?

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 31-42

7. Dialectical Logic at Work in the Elective Affinities What We Can Learn From Goethe About Hegel

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 43-56

8. Discriminating from Within

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 57-62

9. The Poetics of (Philosophical) Interpretation

   • Ermanno Bencivenga

   Pages 63-74

10. Kant’s Sadism

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 75-81

11. Respect for Structure

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 83-87

12. The End of Analysis

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 89-95

13. Being-Idle

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 97-100

14. Taking Care of Ethical relativism

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 101-107

15. Montaigne’s Pre-And Post-Modern Notion of Subjectivity

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 109-119

16. An Oblique View

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 121-123

17. Beyond Tolerance?

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 125-136

18. An Answer to the Question “Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future?”

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 137-147

19. Machiavelli, for Example

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 149-165

20. The Degradation of Talent

    • Ermanno Bencivenga

    Pages 167-169

Philosophy in this century has often self-consciously presented itself as aiming at the destruction or deconstruction of the philosophical tradition or even of theorizing as such. The basis for such self-description may well be a deep-seated anxiety about death; but whatever its grounds, the procession of distinguished intellectuals who seem mostly concerned with who gets to turn off the light on philosophy on his/her way out is one main reason why philosophy seems to have lost its grip on public opinion and public policy. Which is ironical, because there is often considerable constructive work going on under the pretence of all this `destruction', but the superficial rhetoric has more currency and impact than the substance of that work. This book brings back the spirit of bold, imaginative, even outrageous theorizing into philosophy, and contains a series of examples of it, venturing playfully into quantum mechanics and political theory, psychoanalysis and environmental ethics, philosophy of language and sociology, without any attempt at `systematically exhausting' these disparate fields but rather using them as suggestive excuses and arenas for the display of intellectual creativity. There are numerous echoes among the various pieces, and between them and other works by the same author; but again these resonances are not systematized. The result is more to be seen as a collection of snapshots of an intellectual landscape than as a hierarchical regimentation of it.

• Hegel
• Immanuel Kant
• ethics
• interpret
• language
• logic
• philosophy
• psychoanalysis

• University of California, Irvine, USA

  Ermanno Bencivenga

Policies and ethics