A paper that explores the relation of the Yoneda Lemma in Category Theory to the structure of Existence and Being (Plato's Theory of Forms) has been posted https://www.academia.edu/115745588/Existence_Mathematics_Being with its companion piece https://www.academia.edu/116150118/Binary_Expression_of_Existence. For those interested in Ontology and the nature of Existence thought about in terms of mathematics these papers might be worth a look.

Hi there,

I am a PhD student, also a folk-singer/musician endeavoring to transform philosophy into music. Novalis’s unfinished masterwork Heinrich von Ofterdingen was originally envisioned by Novalis as a musical—so I had to turn it into music! The song I present to you is a folk-style rendition on a ukulele that draws from some of my favorite parts in the novel. It opens with Fable singing a celebration of the founding of the kingdom of eternity, Sophia as priestess of hearts. It also portrays Fable's encounter with the Sphinx in a scene that was inspired by Goethe's fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. In the final section of the song, the son of the naturalist finds the mysterious red carbuncle of the Princess in the forest; it is sparkling red with mysterious ciphers on the converse side-- the stone of the heart. Novalis’s poetry is filled with alchemical, mythic and esoteric references to the trained eye; this song is a homage to Novalis's genius—in my own personal estimation, Heinrich von Ofterdingen is the greatest poetic work ever penned. You have to experience it to understand! Hope you enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO2HSbK7BSE

Continental Philosophy discord server has two new reading groups on Deleuze's Desert Islands (Monday 10am PDT) and Hippolyte's Logic of Sense (Tuesday 10am PDT). https://twitter.com/cont0phil http://continentalphilosophy.net/ Both groups just starting.

Is there any difference between Being, Existence, and Reality? I'm trying to understand Continental Philosophy but they aren't very good at definition. Thanks very much for your responses.

Hokay, my undergrad philosophy department had a strong analytic tendency (with a big dash of scholastic Thomism thrown in). There was definitely a kind of general low key vibe of derision towards continental stuff. I had a logic prof once quip that a lot of continental philosophy was "poetically written self help with a veneer of philosophy."

But folks seem to get so much out of it, they seem to see such beauty and interest and worthiness. I want to get me some of that. I want to see what they see when they read Sartre and Hegel and Nietzsche.

Any advice to get into the right headspace?

I've checked out some articles, summaries/previews of dissertartions/books and so on (some of which I'll quote from below), so, I've gotten closer to finding the answers I'm looking for, but it would still be interesting to get more opinions. Maybe even some of you will disagree with some of my sources!

Here's part of the summary of a dissertation (Adorno and Derrida. Remarks on their differing aesthetics.) I came across:

These items are then further developed in critical practice; for that purpose, Adorno's essays on Stefan George and Derrida's work on Paul Celan were chosen. It is being argued that while Adorno takes a prescriptive stance on some issues of literature (e.g. canonization and a rejection of newer art forms), when it comes to the societal applications of literature, it is Adorno's theory that is better able to account for these, since it has a framework which allows for minute descriptions of these processes. On the other hand, Derridean text analyses can be more yielding due to various theoretical constructs such as differance, trace, dissemination, but his theory lacks a working definition for a societal grounding of literature, thereby seriously impeding its own progress. This becomes clear in his treatment of Paul Celan. While he is able to interpret many facets of Celan's poetry and theory of writing in a very interesting way, the one aspect informing all of Celan's writings, the Holocaust, is left aside. Due to the Derridan theory's lack of grounding in actual history, the historical fact of the Holocaust cannot inform his own writing, thereby cutting short an otherwise invigorating and extensive hermeneutical interpretation. Both theories have their advantages, but as theory geared toward societal change, Adorno's theory proves to be more yielding.

Insofar as the claim about "the Derridan theory's lack of grounding in actual history" is accurate, how would you summarize Derrida's reasoning regarding that? Would anyone say that the author underestimates Derrida's theory in terms of how geared it is or isn't toward social change, or is the premise uncontroversial?

Here's something from the abstract of another interesting source (Derrida, Adorno and the Problem of the Political Subject) I found:

Such a characterization of the French/German split in Continental political thought has also contributed to the scarce literature that makes an attempt to discuss Derrida in connection with Adorno. It seems that Derrida, the “postmodern” French thinker of deconstruction, does not have much in common with Adorno, the German “thinker of modernity,” especially when it comes to their takes on the political subject. However, such a pitting of Derrida against Adorno is too broad, and does not take the commonalities in their political philosophies into account . This paper aims to show the commonalities between these authors views on the political subject, without erasing crucial differences between them. Throughout their works, both Derrida and Adorno critique the violence and exclusions inherent in the notion of the self-centered, autonomous subject. However, Derrida is more suspicious than Adorno about the possibility of a rethought subject without invoking the violence of the self-centered subject, which leads to difficulties in his conceptualizations of an agent of socio-political transformation.

From an article called Adorno's Other Son: Derrida and the Future of Critical Theory:

Fichus published as a book the speech that Jacques Derrida delivered in Frankfurt in September 2001 in acceptance of the Theodor-W.-Adorno Prize. This little autobiographical text might seem to be of interest only for those who care about Derrida's person. Notably, it can be read as a surreptitious announcement by the philosopher of his imminent death. However, Derrida made this announcement through a complex discursive strategy that suggested a strong identification with the individual destinies and intellectual projects of Adorno and Benjamin. The personal turns out to have tremendous philosophical importance as it gives Derrida the opportunity to engage in an astonishing reassessment of the relationship between deconstruction and Critical Theory.

From the Amazon page about Adorno's Nonidentical and Derrida's Différance: For a Resurrection of Negative Dialectics:

The virulent anti-Hegelianism of French poststructuralism and its (difficult) confrontation with Jürgen Habermas has long obscured the closeness of Jacques Derrida's "différance" to Theodor W. Adorno's "Nonidentical." Taking the overarching theme of "identity and difference" as a guide, we can peel apart what unites and separates these two thinkers. In so doing, certain "de-realizing" effects of Derrida's entrapment in signs reveal themselves. By contrast, Adorno's social and cultural diagnosis, when extrapolated to a post-Fordian context is astonishingly fruitful. Attempts to trivialize negative dialectics as a model of intellectual self-understanding from a past age or as an esthetic reserve of ways of life are untenable.

From Peter Dews' 1986 New Left Review article Adorno, post-structuralism and the critique of identity:

In the English-speaking world, it is the relation between the characteristic procedures of deconstruction developed by Derrida and the ‘negative dialectics’ of Adorno which has attracted the most attention: a common concern with the lability and historicity of language, a repudiation of foundationalism in philosophy, an awareness of the subterranean links between the metaphysics of identity and structures of domination, and a shared, tortuous love-hate relation to Hegel, seem to mark out these two thinkers as unwitting philosophical comrades-in-arms. However, up till now, the predominant tendency of such comparisons has been to present Adorno as a kind of deconstructionist avant la lettre. The assumption has been that a more consistent pursuit of antimetaphysical themes, and by implication a more politically radical approach, can be found in the French Heideggerian than in the Frankfurt Marxist. It will be the fundamental contention of this essay that, for several interconnected reasons, this is a serious misunderstanding. Firstly, although there are undoubtedly elements in Adorno’s thought which anticipate Derridean themes, he has in many ways equally strong affinities with that mode of recent French thought which is usually known as the ‘philosophy of desire’. It is only the exaggeration of the constitutive role of the language in post-structuralism, it could be argued, and a corresponding antipathy—even on the intellectual Left—to the materialist emphases of Marxism, which have led to this aspect of Adorno’s work being overlooked or underplayed.

And finally, here's what triggered my curiosity about how similar Adorno's and Derrida's interpretations of Heidegger are:

Why was Adorno against epistemology? Because it deals with foundations. The very posing of the question of foundations from a traditional critical theory perspective is a problematic undertaking. Adorno was deeply distrustful of any kind of philosophical or extra-philosophical foundations. According to him, all discussions of foundations, origins, or prima philosophia precipitate thought into reification and identity logic or, better yet, into an idealism that freezes existing relations of domination into an unwarranted ontological dimension. Thus, Adorno was adamantly opposed to Heidegger, to scholastic philosophy and even to what he understood Husserl to mean, in addition to most empirical work and survey research in social science.

(By the way, does "and even to what he understood Husserl to mean" imply that the author thinks Adorno misunderstood Husserl? Is it common among experts to think that Adorno did misundersandd him?)

Do you take issue with any of those excerpts? Is there anything in particular you'd recommend exploring to learn more? I've started reading the Dews article, and I like it a lot so far. The other sources are interesting too, so I'll check out those further, but, as I said, I'd still like getting more perspectives.