Phil Hopkins

Heraclitus stands in opposition to the general systematic tendency of philosophy in that he insisted that the contents of philosophy are such as to require expositional strategies whose goal it is to do something with and to the reader rather than merely say something. For him, the ...

Heraclitus stands in opposition to the general systematic tendency of philosophy in that he insisted that the contents of philosophy are such as to require expositional strategies whose goal it is to do something with and to the reader rather than merely say something. For him, the questions of philosophy and, indeed, the matters of the world such questions take up are not best approached by means of discursive propositions. His view of the relation of the structures of reality to the structures of language requires procedures for understanding the world and talking about it that recognize and exploit the essentially riddle-like nature of both things and words.

This essay addresses two central issues that continue to trouble interpretation of Zeno’s paradoxes: 1) their solution, and 2) their place in the history of philosophy. I offer an account of Zeno’s work as pointing to an inevitable paradox generated by our ways of thinking and speaking about things, especially about things as existing in the continua of space and time. In so doing, I connect Zeno’s arguments to Parmenides’ critique of “naming” in Fragment 8, an approach that I believe  adds considerably to our understanding of both Zeno’s puzzles and this enigmatic aspect of Parmenides’ thought.

Perhaps the most interesting intersection with morality in marketing is to be found in "cause" marketing that goes beyond offering moralized identity packages as commodities to portray the act of consumption itself as moral activism. The latter is, of course, made possible by the former. The marketing project of branding-of cultivating deep emotional attachments to the symbolic face of commodities-commodifies those very emotions, blurring the boundary between the private/personal and the market, between person-hood and consumer object, with significant impact on both our moral and metaphysical structures. If we see ourselves primarily, or at least frequently, in market terms, as instances of market-derived identities configured through mythic images and narratives whose character is ineluctably spectacular, then our encounter with "others," particularly others in "need," almost always as spectacle presented through the same market-inflected and market dominated communication media, must inhabit the same existential mode. "Others" are market objects too. Our engagement with them is appropriately expected to occur in and through the marketplace.

The introduction to Mass Moralizing, a book in which I examine the explicitly moralistic narratives in marketing and related mass media for their relation to and impact upon our popular notions of who it is possible and desirable for us to be as selves and with and to whom we may belong and owe obligation.

A draft of a chapter for an upcoming Companion to Ancient Greek philosophy that argues that the earliest Greek thinkers did not assume a material and mechanistic ontology, and reading them through such a lens is not only anachronistic, but occludes their richest thinking.  For at least some of them, even material forces could be fully understood only in terms as much ethical and psychological.  Justice was not a metaphor or analogy for understanding the motive forces of the kosmos, but an integral dynamic at work at the heart of things. 

This chapter focuses on Anaximander, Empedocles, and Anaxagoras.