Chapter 3 plays out a philosophical engagement with organization and technology following Martin Heidegger’s well-known association of industrialization with technological enframing in which the question of self-knowing had been thoroughly and perhaps irredeemably concealed. Were it possible to ask such a question, then Heidegger identifies an essential un-at-homeness to the being (Dasein) able to question its condition of being, its ‘thereness’, thereby setting in play an uncanny condition of being able, in principle (qua being human), to dis-conceal one’s essence, and yet continually falling short of ever doing so. It is this uneasy revealing that sets the scene for our investigation of the self in its environment. It is because of his essentialized association of technology, industrialization and the concealing of being that Heidegger equates the possibility of its being unconcealed with a political movement that pushes back at the global order, and restores a more archaic, human-centred version. The profound and horrific irony being that it was in totalitarian national socialism that he found such a movement, an enduring affiliation that has been unmoored in detail in his Black Notebooks.

After the return to the defense, Simmias and Cebes raise objections to Socrates’ kinship argument, Socrates warns them to avoid misology, and then he responds to Simmias’ objection. These objections and this warning simultaneously serve as the climax of the first half of the dialogue and set the agenda for the second. I argue that misology is a more specific problem than it is typically taken to be, a problem that aspiring philosophers (like Socrates’ companions) are especially at risk of suffering, one that involves not merely becoming cynical about arguments but positively hating them. I then turn to Simmias’ objection and Socrates’ response to it. I argue that, as Socrates interprets Simmias’ theory that the soul is a harmonia, it makes the soul a properly fitted together composite, not the formal structure possessed by such a composite. This means that Socrates is not arguing against a type of supervenience theory or epiphenomenalism, as is frequently claimed. Socrates’ arguments against Simmias’ theory highlight how it cannot explain basic ethical features of the soul that the kinship argument’s account can explain.

After unpacking the sense in which Heidegger uses the term "contradiction," the chapter reviews his use of it in the strictly logical, “injunctive” sense as the “principle of non-contradiction” (PNC) and “law of thinking,” particularly as he wields it in the course of exposing what otherwise appear to be cases of vagueness or ambiguity. It then reviews his tendency in some contexts to align the PNC with a metaphysics that restricts being to being on hand (vorhanden) and the dilemma that this ontological interpretation presents, given his apparent adherence to the principle, even as he proposes a broader understanding of being. The chapter then suggests that his analysis of attunement in the 1929/30 lectures introduces a more expansive reading of the PNC and that this reading is corroborated by his existential interpretation of the principle in the Winter Semester of 1933/34. The interpretation is a ringing endorsement of the PNC and the sameness of reference it enjoins as a condition for being-with-one-another. The chapter concludes by probing the implications of this ontologically broader – or post-ontological – interpretation of the PNC for thinking and speaking of being itself, riddled with “nothingness” as it is.

In "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy" Cavell draws together Wittgenstein’s philosophical procedures and the grammar of aesthetic judgment as Kant articulates it in the "Third Critique." Cavell primarily focuses on the universal voice. But there is an internal relation between the four different moments, and in particular, I would argue, between the second and the fourth, in which Kant shows aesthetic judgment to presuppose a common sense.

The relation between the universal voice and common sense is articulated in terms of a polarity of expression and ground. The expressive pole in aesthetic judgment is most evident in acts of criticism of art in which, judging with a universal voice, one takes oneself to be representative. But it is equally important that this expression be of a natural ground that underlies our common existence in language. The ground we stand on in judging is not a position, but rather a form of life in common. I end my chapter with an analysis of Cavell’s surprising turn to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to illuminate this recognition of a ground of attunement, a common world that can be called my world, in and through our judgments of art.

We understand Aristotle’s soul–body hylomorphism better if we first understand the critical discussions of his predecessors which occupy most of the first book of his De Anima.  Given that he regards his view as preferable to all earlier approaches, he must also think that his alternative, hylomorphism, avoids the pitfalls he identifies in those positions. In some cases, it is easy to see why he might think hylomorphism is defensible where they are not: for instance, he regards the reductively materialistic views of the earliest natural philosophers as explanatorily impoverished. In other cases, however, this is far from clear. Aristotle highlights for special consideration the view that the soul is a harmonia (attunement) of the body, a view which, as was noted in antiquity, bears more than a passing resemblance to his own hylomorphism. It proves both difficult and instructive to determine, then, how he supposes hylomorphism avoids the problems he identifies in the doctrine of the soul as a harmonia. The core difference, it emerges, turns on Aristotle’s thoroughgoing teleology: the soul, he thinks, unlike a harmonia, has an intrinsic good toward which the body is orchestrated.

This chapter turns to the question of how the judgment of taste is related to cognition and to the larger conception of judgment discussed in Chapter 2. It offers a new reading and contextualization of the argument of §21, in the Fourth Moment of the Analytic of the Beautiful, which establishes a “common sense” as a necessary condition of the universal communicability of cognition. On my reading, Kant does not provide, or seek to provide, a deduction of the judgment of taste avant la lettre. His point, instead, is to show that cognition involves its own form of reflective judgment. Cognitive judgment considered from the perspective of the third Critique – actual, situated judgment – depends on a norm beyond that of correctness: of aptness or appropriateness; of what calls for judgment. My reading is an alternative not only to the widespread “aesthetic” construal of Kant’s argument, on which it is meant to establish an aesthetic common sense, but also to the “epistemic” construal proposed by Henry Allison, on which it is meant to establish an epistemic common sense.

This chapter is centered upon the section of the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” that Kant calls the “key” to the critique of taste and in which he elaborates the judgment of taste in terms that are striking yet scant, familiar yet elusive: a “state of mind” of “free play” of the cognitive powers, in which they are in “harmony” or “attunement” and are mutually “animated,” and in which their “subjective relation” corresponds to a “subjective condition” of cognition. I propose that a key to Kant’s thought is to be found in the notion of “universal communicability,” which this section introduces. The sense of “communication” on which it depends is, I argue, to be understood robustly, as having to do with the imparting of something to someone. I then argue that the judgment of taste turns on an experience of wanting to render communicable, or explore and articulate, one’s encounter with the extra-factual aesthetic character of the object. My interpretation reorients the role and significance of pleasure, and of feeling more generally, in the judgment of taste. The pleasure of the judgment of taste is in the object and in one’s state of mind, which the object is felt to awaken.

This introductory chapter motivates and sketches the book’s approach. The chapter identifies the heart of the problem that the judgment of taste poses in terms of its apparent presumptuousness in demanding pleasure. Many scholars read Kant’s Critique of Judgment as adumbrating an account of the aesthetic that has little connection with our actual aesthetic experiences or with our ways of explaining and supporting aesthetic judgments. Among art historians, critics, and theorists, Kant is regarded as the source of a distorting notion of the aesthetic that chooses affect or pleasure over meaning. For example, Kantian aesthetics is widely taken to entail a specific approach to art criticism, viz. a narrow formalism. My interpretation aims to show that the judgment of taste is a contentful engagement with an object the terms of which are not specifiable in advance. To enter a judgment of taste is to expose one’s sense of what matters. This is why a risk of presumptuousness is characteristic of the judgment of taste. It is also why the judgment of taste is exemplary of judgment generally

Chapter 4 draws on a series of interrelated ideas including those of Emmanuel Levinas and phenomenological and Buddhist thought concerning ethics as a non-violent relation to the Other; a relation that is marked by one’s response to an other’s singularity. The aim is to outline a key element for creating institutional change that recognises this singularity, appreciating the complexity involved in living with others and the challenges this places on educational institutions. In particular, it argues that changes in educational institutions must encompass both the people who exist in them and the practices that constitute these spaces as institutions in the first place. In this light, while institutions are governed by rules, regulations, policies, legal frameworks and organisational structures, they institute themselves as institutions through cultures, which are composed of relationships, practices, experiences and shared imaginaries. These practices are not only cognitive or intellectual but also embodied, sensate and phenomenal. Thus in order for institutional change to have any real purchase, it is necessary that the transformation of cultures qua embodied practices, and the imaginaries that support them become the focus of our efforts, towards promoting new forms of relationality and new modes of sensibility in pluralistic contexts.