For the Tempus-fugitives: Christopher Norris on the Philosophy (and Poetry) of Colour

Born in 1947, Christopher Norris is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. He worked first on literary criticism, then on the question of realism and antirealism in philosophy (as a strong adversary of antirealism), on Derrida and deconstructionism and, more recently, on the philosophy of science. In the past few years he has also authored several philosophical poems. In this issue we present two poems he wrote that are dedicated to color. Color is a recurrent theme in Norris’ poetry. Why? And why does Norris choose, for nearly ten years past, to mainly use poems for his philosophical investigations? Is there a link between his interest on color and this choice he has made? Moreover: Norris was always a strong adversary of antirealism and the extreme consequences of the “linguistic turn”. Isn’t there a contradiction between this philosophical position and the importance he gives to poetry? Perhaps color can give us a key

Colour for Philosophers: Introduction

«The ox becomes furious if a red cloth is shown to him, but the philosopher, who speaks of colour only in a general way, begins to rave». This is still true now: the philosophical discussion on colour is very lively. There is a debate within Anglo-American philosophy that has been going on for the past fifty years, and is still going on today, as is demonstrated by the imminent publication of the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, which we are happy to announce in this issue. Colour is something very familiar but, nevertheless, it is also a subject on which philosophers never cease to raise questions. Why

REVIEW D. Brown, F. Macpherson (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour, Routledge, London 2020, pp. 496, ISBN 9780415743037

«Why has the examination of many different aspects of colour been a prominent feature in philosophy, to such an extent that the topic is worthy of a handbook?». This is the question that opens the editors’ introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Colour, whose imminent publication we are happy to announce here

«To call fools into a circle»: Benjamin’s interpretation of As you like it and The Tempest

Calderon and Shakespeare are the two main authors that lie behind Benjamin’s examination of the German baroque drama. This paper addresses the importance of Shakespeare in his difference from the other big European cousin, Calderon. This does not mean that, according to Benjamin, Shakespeare is more important than Calderon (his beautiful essay on Calderon of 1923 contradicts this point), but rather that the English author brings to light an element that in Calderon is in some way missing. This is what Benjamin in some critical texts from the period of the Trauerpielbuch calls the «dramatic». Why does Benjamin say here that the dramatic precedes the tragic? And what does this have to do with the two Shakespearian characters he refers to in a letter of the same year, Caliban and Ariel? Moreover, is the interpretation of The Tempest that this passage implies the same as the one that he suggested in his previous essay on As you like it (1918)? These questions will lead to a few passages of the Trauerspielbuch that were particularly difficult to translate (not only in the two Italian previous translations, but also in the first English version, by John Osborne) and that can shed light on some important aspects of the book itself. In this context, another Shakespearian character will come to the aid, the Jacques of As you like it, with his Greek invocation «to call fools into a circle»

Stuff that matters. Mimesis and (the end of) magic in Walter Benjamin

The paper focuses on the quite famous but also still quite mysterious idea of “immaterial similarity” (or more literally “nonsensous similarity”) by Walter Benjamin. Benjamin argues that the production of an immaterial similarity is in some way an act of magic. But it is also at the same time an overcoming of magic itself. And the reason is that the “immaterial similarity” can open the way to a “materialistic perspective”. How can that be? In order to answer, we’ll consider Benjamin’s idea of “matter”. In Benjamin’s early writings matter (Materie) appears, as we shall see, as something magic. But there is another idea, which is quite near to matter but is not exactly the same: the idea of “stuff” (Stoff). The stuff is the “material” things are made of. If we search for a definition of it, we can find that it is “the mute, soft and flocky element that – like the snow in the snow globes – clouds over inside the core of things”. We are going to examine this problematic definition. We’ll discover that way that the idea of stuff marks, in comparison to matter, a possibility. A possibility that has to be seized, before it “flits past