Jos De Mul
(Prof.dr.) Jos de Mul is full professor Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and scientific director of the Research Institute Philosophy of Information and Communication Technology (φICT). He has also taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Fudan University (Shanghai), and Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto). From 2007-2010 he was president of the International Association for Aesthetics. In 2012 he became a visiting fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). His publications include: Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1999) , The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey's Hermeneutics of Life (Yale University Press, 2004), Cyberspace Odyssey (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and Destiny Domesticated. The Rebirth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Technology (State University of New York Press). He is the winner of the Praemium Erasmianum Research Prize and the Socrates Prize. His work has been translated in more than a dozen languages. Extended biography, publication list and loads of download at www.demul.nl. Email: [email protected]
Phone: +31243584657
Phone: +31243584657
less
InterestsView All (10)
Uploads
Papers by Jos De Mul
Dilthey’s scattered remarks on the notion of the organic and Plessner’s biophilosophy as his starting point for the development of a biohermeneutical theory of biological purposiveness, which aims at bridging the gulf between the natural and the human sciences. Whereas the natural and human sciences are closely connected with a third-person
and a first-person perspective respectively, the author argues that the second-person perspective plays a crucial role in the life sciences. In opposition to the natural sciences, in which causality is the key notion, and the human sciences, which rest on the notion of meaning, the author argues that the central concepts that characterize the second-person perspective of the life sciences are functionality and intentionality.
ISBN: 780300097733
Cloth: US $52.00 (Order); €33,99 (Bestel)
One of the founders of modern hermeneutics, German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) confronted the question of how modern, postmetaphysical human beings can cope with the ambivalence, contingency, and finitude that fundamentally characterize their lives. This book offers a reevaluation and fresh analysis of Dilthey’s hermeneutics of life against the background of the development of philosophy during the past two centuries.
Jos de Mul relates Dilthey’s work to other philosophers who influenced or were influenced by him, including Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida. Weaving together systematic analysis and historical investigation, de Mul begins the book with an account of the horizon on which Dilthey developed his unfinished masterwork, Critique of Historical Reason. The author then elaborates a systematic reconstruction of Dilthey’s ontology of life, relates the ontology to the work of other twentieth-century philosophers, and positions Dilthey’s thought within current philosophical debate.
Jos de Mul is full professor in philosophical anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Winner of the Praemium Erasmianum Research Prize.
"A thorough, insightful account of Dilthey's philosophy, this book offers many valuable new contributions. De Mul argues effectively for Dilthey's relevance today"
Rudolf Makkreel, Emory University, Atlanta
"De Mul is an ambitious commentator. He reconstructs both biography and cultural context, and he interprets virtually all of Dilthey's more substantial writings while seeking to engage with his critics. In addition to extensive discussions of Dilthey's own writings, there are long sections on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Gadamer, and Derrida. In a book that may stand as one of the best and most thorough in the recent critical literature on Dilthey, de Mul successfully tackles all of these challenges"
Espen Hammer, The Review of Metaphysics 60:4 (2007) Read entire review
In an era of heightened existential vulnerability and awareness of finitude there is a correspondingly heightened need for new contexts of human understanding. Here we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to de Mul for providing us with a superb explication of the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose precocious insights into the finitude and historical contingency of human understanding promise to contribute immeasurably to the widening of its horizons.
Robert D. Stolorow, Human Studies. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences (2012) Read entire review
Amazon.com: Most Helpful Customer Reviews
This work by de Mul is the definitive synthesis on Dilthey available in English. It not only develops the thought of Dilthey chronologically, it also sets his thought in an overall structure that he terms the Critique. This structure solves one of the major problems of Dilthey studies - how to organize his disparate thoughts when no definitive work of his exists. Until this book, most other treatments, while helpful and informative, have not managed to rise to the precision and clarity of this work.
One of most helpful aspects to this book is the author's ability to locate and identify the tensions in Dilthey and provide the structure that is needed to understand them. By describing how ambivalence, contingency, and finitude serve as structuring ideas to Dilthey's thought, the author saves a reader from finding Dilthey contradictory and incomprehensible.
One final aspect of praise for this work is the clarity of thought and writing. A helpful and detailed Table of Contents allows any reader to quickly discover the argument and structure of the book.In addition, most esoteric and technical terms and ideas (including many 19th Century German philosophical concepts) are explained quickly and understandably in a way that allows one unfamiliar with these ideas to follow. These explanations, however, do not sidetrack the argument from its purpose and therefore do not prove distracting to one more familiar with the history and ideas referenced.In conclusion, after having read many works on Dilthey, I find this to be the clearest, most informative, and best written of them all. Not only will it introduce one to a great philosopher, it will also provide a synthesis of his thought that is invaluable.
Review
xviii + 423pp. Cloth, $48.00-Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) is a difficult thinker to come to terms with. His lifelong project of writing a "critique of historical reason" was never completed and is handed down to us in fragments. Although his influence on the development of hermeneutics and the philosophy of the human sciences has been vast, his work was heavily criticized by several prominent neo-Kantians as well as Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, and today he is not widely read. Finally, as Jos de Mul remarks in this excellent study, Dilthey was not averse to ambivalence or even contradiction, and his writing may be seen as the unstable meeting-point of many of the most consequential trends in nineteenth-century philosophy: "Dilthey's philosophy is the reaction of a nineteenth-century thinker, torn between romanticism and positivism, to the social, cultural, and spiritual upheavals of his time. His thinking is a reflection on the Industrial Revolution and the transformations of nature and mankind that went with it, on conservative Prussian politics, on the rise of the empirical human sciences, and-above all-on the growth of historical consciousness" (p. 366). De Mul is an ambitious commentator. He reconstructs both biography and cultural context, and he interprets virtually all of Dilthey's more substantial writings while seeking to engage with his critics. In addition to extensive discussions of Dilthey's own writings, there are long sections on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Gadamer, and Derrida. In a book that may stand as one of the best and most thorough in the recent critical literature on Dilthey, de Mul successfully tackles all of these challenges. Like Rudolf Makreel, though with a somewhat different twist, de Mul situates Dilthey's project in relation to Kant's transcendental idealism. Dilthey agrees with Kant that objective knowledge (and reason in general) should be analyzed in terms of the structural conditions of possibility that both enable and set limits to it. However, Dilthey reacts against Kant's commitment to the ahistorical nature of these conditions, arguing that rather than pure a priori categories and concepts, what ultimately makes human knowledge possible is life (Leben), from which any possible categorical structure emerges. Dilthey's philosophy, de Mul claims, is best understood as a "transcendental-historical life philosophy." Like much of the contemporary philosophy (Brandom, Habermas, McDowell and others) it anticipates, it emphasizes the need to situate the human subject in historical and cultural contexts of meaning that exceed its full explicit grasp while at the same time insisting that historicism does not necessarily imply relativism. The "life-categories," derived from life itself, make up what Dilthey refers to as the historical a priori of those who belong to our life-form. It is perfectly possible, Dilthey claims, to acknowledge the essential finitude of the human orientation in the world-the impossibility of going beyond the boundaries of our own historical meaning-horizons-without thereby holding that the life-categories somehow must be arbitrary or irrationally adopted. De Mul sees Dilthey moving from an epistemological (and, to some degree, psychological) type of argumentation to one that is decidedly ontological. Dilthey's Leben or Lebensform precedes the formation of the epistemic subject with its objectified object and forms a kind of pretheoretical world that recedes into the background but can never be bypassed when engaging scientifically. When dealing with Husserl's and Heidegger's critiques, de Mul invokes this point. Both Husserl's attribution of psychologism and Heidegger's critique of the failure to respect the ontological difference fail to take into account the later Dilthey's deep-seated orientation toward ontology. One of de Mul's most prominent theses is that Dilthey in almost all relevant respects should be regarded as a philosopher of finitude. As a result of his "being-limited" in time and space as well the impossibility of retrieving a traditional transcendental metaphysics, there is for Dilthey a tragic dimension to man-and to modern man in particular. While Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger have always been regarded as thinkers who have attributed a certain tragic dimension to human life, it is surprising but interesting to be told that Dilthey can be included in this group as well. Sounding almost Nietzschean, for Dilthey one of the tasks of hermeneutics, by offering understanding and form, is to transform the sense of limitation into "representations with which we can live" (p. 372). De Mul's book serves as a poignant reminder that despite its many internal tensions and difficulties, Dilthey's thinking is still alive and relevant. Whether or not we can hope for a renewed scholarly interest of the same scope and intensity as has recently been seen with regard to figures such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, this is a book that has the potential to spark off further research in Dilthey's many writings.-Espen Hammer, University of Essex.
Destiny Domesticated investigates three approaches Western civilization has tried to tame fate: the heroic affirmation of fate in the tragic culture of the Greeks, the humble acceptance of divine providence in Christianity, and the abolition of fate in modern technological society. Against this background, Jos de Mul argues that the uncontrollability of technology introduces its own tragic dimension to our culture. Considering a range of literary texts and contemporary events, and drawing on twenty-five centuries of tragedy interpretation from philosophers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, literary critics George Steiner and Terry Eagleton, and others, de Mul articulates a contemporary perspective on the tragic, shedding new light on philosophical topics such as free will, determinism, and the contingency of life.
Hard cover - 358 pages
$90.00 hc
ISBN 978-1-4384-4971-5
Electronic - 358 pages
$27.95
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-4973-9
Paperback - 358 pages
$27.95
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-4972-2
Release Date: January 2015
SUNY Press
state university of new york press
1-877-204-6073 • [email protected] • www.sunypress.edu
Vol. 15 | 2011 International Yearbook of Aesthetics
Playful Identities presents academic research at the intersection of media theory, play and games studies, social sciences and philosophy. The book carves out a cross-disciplinary domain that connects the most recent insights from play and game studies, media research, and identity studies.
Valerie Frissen is ceo of the SIDN Fund and professor of ict & Social Change at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Sybille Lammes is associate professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick.
Michiel de Lange is a part-time lecturer New Media Studies at Utrecht University.
Jos de Mul is full professor of Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University Rotterdam.
Joost Raessens is full professor of Media Theory at the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University.
“An illuminating study on the increasingly complexity of ludic media and technologies of the self.”
– Prof. Dr. Mathias Fuchs, Leuphana University Lüneburg
“What a brilliant, refreshing, and positively playful approach to the ludic imperative. These are the smartest, most articulate, and up-to-date essays on this subject, by the very people creating this field of study.”
– Douglas Rushkoff, author, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, and Playing the Future.
Thanks to a grant from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) this book can be downloaded for free in the OApen Library (Open Access Publishing in European Networks).