Acting and Ontology in Molière
Though counts the of actors French and seventeenth acting, a consistent century has feature left a is number their theoretiof accounts of actors and acting, a consistent feature is their theoretical underdevelopment. This underdevelopment may seem perplexing since a signal achievement of so-called classical France was the invention of theory itself in a specifically modern sense. We meet the self-consciously professional discipline Rene Descartes brought to the scientific "search for truth," imposing order on the rational pursuit of knowledge through close logical analysis of the conditions of possibility of rational thought as such. We get the systematic lessons in statecraft laid down in Cardinal Richelieu's posthumous Testament politique ( Political Testament) (1688) or Gabriel Naude's Considerations politiques sur les Coups d'Etat ( Political Reflections on Coups d'Etat) (1639), reducing government to a rigorous science grounded in unblinking scrutiny of the material interests that drive political agents. Boileau's L'Art poetique (The Art of Poetry) (1674) presents a synoptic system of literary forms based on the principle of rational self-possession that, for all the aweinspiring sublimity of its most telling effects, enables poets to say just and only what they mean to say as a function of the critical "idea" that governs poetic utterance. And we have the equally critical goal Pierre Corneille sets himself in the three discourses on dramatic art framing his collected Theâtre of 1660, deriving practical rules from
Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe
List of Illustrations Preface: Lost Horizons Acknowledgments 1. Not Empty Silence The Age of Dissimulation 2. Taking One's Distance Civil and Moral Dissimulation 3. Confidence Games Dissimulation at Court 4. The Government of Designs Dissimulation and Reason of State 5. The Writing on the Walls Notes Bibliography Index
Between identity and difference: Three ways of reading Nishida's non-dualism
The philosophy of Nishida KitarŌ offers the reader today not only a paradigm for a comparative philosophy, but also a methodological framework to construct a Buddhist philosophy. The key and, at the same time, the obstacle to his philosophy is the concept of the "self-identity of the absolute contradiction." This conceptual cornerstone of Nishida's philosophy is as controversial among scholars today as it is central to his philosophy. Critics, such as Tanabe Hajime and Takahashi Satomi, argue that Nishida's philosophy privileges the principle of identity over that of difference and falls into a monism; his supporters, most of all Nishitani Keiji and Ueda Shizuteru, to the contrary, claim that it comprises the key to philosophical non-dualism. In general, I am convinced that even his "self-identity of the absolute contradiction," if it is read carefully within the context of Nishida's philosophy, will render a paradigm that falls neither into a logical contradiction nor into a monism but that provides the foundation for a non-dualist philosophy. To this end, I will reread it first in the context of Nishida's overall project and, then, on the background of Nishida's debates with his critics.