Some ten years ago I read for the first time the passage from which this contribution draws its title. It marks, for me, something like the beginning of an obsession–but one that only takes me in circles, back to those lines, where I find comfort alongside a certain sense of futility in a passage that I know I will never fully unravel. In this futile return there is a feeling of coming home, but also of a continuous departure which most (...) often leads down familiar paths–all of them leading back to where I started–but also sometimes yielding a new route to travel both vainly, in the hope of a new discovery, and of course in vain, as these new paths always seem to take me back home; if I’m lucky a home that is somewhat altered, not necessarily rendered more or less clear to me but somehow deepened, given an added depth or dimension. But each departure is nonetheless accompanied by a marvelous sensation of quickening, a nervousness or jitteriness that pushes me to literally move, to get up from my desk and pace nervously, a sort of push that must be redirected back into the text from which it emerged. (shrink)

Weber's theory of value spheres outlines a project of institutional polytheism, each ordered around a ‘god’. This suggests not only that social theory can build a religious sociology, but that a theory of institutions must be an exercise in comparative religions. Weber's comparative sociology of religions, however, does not align with his theory of value spheres in terms of his distinction between polytheism and monotheism, transcendence and immanence, salvation and mysticism, being possessed and possessing. A theory of institutional logics points (...) beyond Weber's separation of value and instrumental rationality, faith and practice, and hence the ways in which he partitioned the institutions of modernity. (shrink)

This study examines elderly residential life in long-term care settings, focusing on the ways residents interact with their physical and social environments. It further proposes that the residential environment is an important player for everyday ethics in long-term care settings, and is also an important factor in enhancing the quality of life for residents. By employing the theories of place identity and environmental meanings and listening to the voices of the elderly collected through an ethnographic field study in elderly homes (...) of life care, the study reveals the residents’ experiences of going through declining health and moving through the stages of care. Two major themes were identified. The first theme of liminal life portrays the elders’ fears as they move through the stages of care. This theme includes four sub-themes: the loss of home and the loss of autonomy; impending loss and its constant reminders; the social classification of “us” and “them”; the irreversibility of moving. The second theme of relational life describes the keys to successful transitions as experienced and told by the residents. The second theme includes three sub-themes: shifting identity and the acceptance of old age; human interdependence and building trust; an accompanied death. Study implications are further discussed, including specific suggestions for social programs and revisions to the physical environments. A more fundamental question about place-based staged care is also raised so as to serve as a point of departure for reflections and discussions amongst health professionals, planners and designers, and other decision-makers. (shrink)

This article takes up the problematic of the ‘new normal’ and its necessary twin, the ‘will to religion’. The notion of the ‘new normal’ describes the shift to the persistent presence, indeed requirement, for religious assessment in all manner of public and institutional life. The idea of the will to religion reflects a broadly Foucauldian perspective on the care of the self and the requirement to confess—in this instance to confess one’s belonging to a religious category. The article calls for (...) a robust attention to the discursive construction of a normal in which we are all religious, and to which values are constituted as ‘universal’ or that we owe our moral and intellectual condition to religion. The article points to four consequences of this shift to a ‘new normal’ in which we are all religious, including the essentialization of religious identities, the overemphasis on religion, the infiltration of particular measures of religiosity, and the spread of religious freedom protectionism. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic that struck New York City in the spring of 2020 was a natural experiment for the clinical ethics services of NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP). Two distinct teams at NYP’s flagship academic medical centers—at NYP/ Columbia University Medical Center (Columbia) and NYP/ Weill Cornell Medical Center (Weill Cornell)—were faced with the same pandemic and operated under the same institutional rules. Each campus used time as an heuristic to analyze our collective response. The Columbia team compares consults during the pandemic with (...) the same period during the year prior. The Weill Cornell service describes the phases of the pandemic to depict its temporal evolution and subsequent ethical challenges. Both sites report that the predominant ethical challenges centered around end-of-life decision making, setting goals of care, and medical futility, all complicated by resource allocation questions and the ambiguity of state law under crisis standards of care. The Columbia campus saw a statistically significant increase in ethics consultations provided to Hispanic patients, perhaps reflective of the disproportionate burden of COVID-19 suffered by this demographic. While Weill Cornell and Columbia saw a surge in clinical ethics consultations, the two services assumed a more expansive role than one normally played in institutional life. Serving as intermediaries between frontline clinicians and senior hospital administrators, consultants provided critical intelligence to hospital leadership about the evolution of the pandemic, disseminated information to clinicians, and attended to the moral distress of colleagues who were asked to provide care under truly extraordinary circumstances. The COVID-19 surge in New York City revealed latent capabilities in ethics consultation that may prove useful to the broader clinical ethics community as it responds to the current pandemic and reconceptualizes its potential for future service. (shrink)

Typical philosophies of liberation often assume, and sometimes argue, that freedom and democracy will be best experienced through an absence of institutions. Contrary to this trend in theory, the author argues that a better philosophy of liberation will seek to transform institutions, rather than abolish them. Using examples of cooperative experiments in the Basque territories and in Brazil, the author argues that experiences of liberation are achieved through new forms of institutional life that nurture participatory and egalitarian relationships between people.

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not (...) always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life. (shrink)

Institutional operability refers to the normative conditions governing the exercise of power of office that makes an institution work. Because institutional action occurs by the interrelated actions of the officeholders, a focus on institutional operability requires the analysis and assessment of the officeholders’ conduct in their institutional capacity. This article distinguishes two perspectives on operability: ‘outward’ and ‘inward.’ The outward view emphasizes predefined instructions for efficient execution, focusing on rule-following to achieve institutional purposes. The inward perspective highlights role-playing and reflective (...) engagement among officeholders to uphold an institution’s raison d’être. The inward perspective brings to the fore the relational aspect of institutional life and officeholders’ interrelated responsibility for guiding institutional action. (shrink)

This article calls into question the simplistic identification of modern technology with quantitative efficiency in order to develop three main themes. First, I establish that technology, broadly construed, is the use of knowledge and resources to meet specific human needs. Accordingly, dominant technical practice that favors efficiency and numerical criteria and discriminates against other technologies should more appropriately be called “technology of technology.” Second, I delineate how dominant practice in engineering is an exemplar of technology of technology, when it becomes (...) socially ambitious while remaining technically provincial and bears upon our personal and institutional life. Third, I illustrate what I call the “subjugated technical practice,” which exists under the rule of the dominant technical practice. Recognizing the importance of subjugated technical practices to engineering, I propose the concept of “critical technology of technology,” which is intended to advance technological alternatives and make critique an essential part of our technological world. (shrink)

Voegelin's project was to develop a theory of social action and of political order. This enterprise involved an analysis of human experiences of participation in reality. The analysis of experience led Voegelin to a theory of consciousness, understood as the human mode of participation. According to Voegelin, every society attempts to order its institutional life in light of its experience of participation; it is this process that constitutes history. Through symbols, each society articulates its experiences and thereby endows its own (...) order with meaning in terms human and divine. Social life, then, is more than a matter of meeting practical needs; it is also a matter of attunement to the truth of order, i.e., the structure of reality. Thus, at the heart of Voegelin's work is the relationship between the order of reality apprehended in consciousness and the concrete social orders which attempt to embody that order. The question of social change arises when one asks to what degree any society is capable of realizing the truth of order in its institutions and practices. ;The first three chapters situate Voegelin's understanding of society within the context of his thought on reality and consciousness. A fourth chapter emphasizes that the history of attunement is always potentially a history of derailment. Chapters 5 and 6 trace the struggle for order in Israel and Hellas. Given the tension that attends the struggle for attunement, Chapter 7 considers to what extent Voegelin believes social change is possible. A final chapter considers the "resolution" of the problem through Voegelin's emphasis on history as differentiation of consciousness and the vision of transfiguration pointing beyond problems of order. I will also consider how Voegelin's cognitional framework influences his resolution of these issues; in particular how his distinction between consciousness as luminous and as intentional introduces ambiguities into his analysis of society and social change. (shrink)

The idea that we can properly be held responsible for what we believe underlies large stretches of our social and institutional life; without that idea in place, social and institutional life would be unthinkable, and more importantly, it would stumble and fall. At the same time, philosophers have argued that this idea is strange, puzzling, beyond belief, false, meaningless or at any rate defective. The first section develops the alleged problem. The burden of this paper, however, is not to discuss (...) the merits of this idea but rather to measure the damage in case the idea turns out to be defective indeed. This is done by substantiating the claim that this idea indeed underlies large and important stretches of our social and institutional life. Section 2 substantiates that claim by presenting the results of a web search on the use of what I call "deontological epistemic expressions", i.e. expressions in which deontological and epistemological notions (both broadly construed) are combined; examples are "obligation to believe", "not permitted to forget", "right to know". The ubiquitous use of these expressions, I argue, is linguistic evidence for the claim that the contested idea indeed pervades our social life. Linguistic evidence, however, can be frail and misleading. From the fact that we say that the shade is moving we cannot conclude that shades really exist; likewise it may not be permitted to conclude from the ubiquitous use of deontological epistemic expressions that there really are doxastic obligations (and hence doxastic responsibilities). The third section, therefore, moves beyond the linguistic evidence and discusses two social institutions, viz. education and law as we find them in modern Western societies, and argues that they cannot be made sense of unless the contested idea is in place. Educational and legal systems of course vary greatly throughout the Western world. Such differences as exist, however, are irrelevant for the claim I will be making in this paper. The final section states the conclusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.4 (2001) 611-631 [Access article in PDF] Galileo and Spinoza: Heroes, Heretics, and Hermeneutics T. M. Rudavsky Introduction My purpose in this paper is to explore what happens when a scientific methodology rooted in mathematical geometry is then applied to biblical hermeneutics. Galileo and Spinoza are both thinkers who, in their adoption of the methods of philosophy and science, challenged the limits of (...) their social, intellectual, and theological margins. Both thinkers were regarded by their peers as threats to the institutional life of their respective communities; both espoused doctrines that were regarded as heretical by their governing bodies. What I shall try to demonstrate is that Galileo and Spinoza share a methodological program of natural science which, rooted in a mathematical view of nature, is then applied to Scripture. It is this methodological preoccupation that dooms them both and ultimately subjects them to the charge of heresy.In this paper I shall examine the circumstances, both personal and ideological, surrounding the excommunications of both Galileo and Spinoza. The implications of the ideological impetus for the excommunications I situate in the process of "secularization of theology," a term used by Funkenstein to describe the scientific turn in the seventeenth century. 1 I want to compare the hermeneutic methods which were developed in two controversial works, Galileo's Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, completed in 1615, and Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise,published anonymously in 1670, but possibly commenced [End Page 611] much earlier, and then to explore the application of these hermeneutic methods to the proof-text adduced by both writers, namely, Joshua 10:12-13. Galileo and Spinoza: The Scientific Quest By suggesting that Galileo and Spinoza represent the tensions inherent between religion and science, I am not simply acquiescing to the adversarial model of the science-religion wars as they have been portrayed by late nineteenth-century historians of science. These scholars would have us believe that science has been persecuted by religion: more specifically, that western science has been persecuted by the Catholic Church. For example, in his enormously influential work History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, John William Draper argued that the Church "became a stumbling block in the intellectual advancement of Europe for more than a thousand years." 2 On this antagonistic model, the history of scientific development was presented as a war against a narrow-minded establishment that feared science; the conflicts between science and religion were seen as a one-sided affair in which the Church sought to suppress truth-seeking scientists. Jewish institutions were not castigated nearly as maliciously on this view (perhaps, the cynic may argue, because by this point in history Jews wielded so little power).But as Brooke, Funkenstein, Feldhay, and others have reminded us, the Draper-White model of conflict between science and religion is overly simplistic. It is important to recognize that, especially in the early modern period, religion, philosophy, and science were mutually influential upon one another. Of course the term "science" is itself anachronistic when used in the early modern period. Were it not for the ubiquity of references to the "science-religion" wars, the term "natural philosophy" would be more appropriate. Funkenstein and Brooke have, for example, articulated many examples in which theological concepts influenced scientific and philosophical modes of discourse in the seventeenth century. 3It must be recognized too, that many of the struggles which occur between religion and science are not merely ideological wars but have a human dimension as well; ultimately, it is people who interact, not theories--personalities loom large and can affect the outcome of a debate. That this is certainly the case with both Spinoza and Galileo should come as no surprise. Rivka Feldhay, for example, argues that most accounts of Galileo are based on "overriding binary [End Page 612] opposition: that of the Church versus science," 4 an opposition which she claims is myopic and narrow. Scientific truths are not simply waiting to be discovered; they are embedded in social constructs. While I agree with Feldhay that social construction... (shrink)

The authors conducted a qualitative analysis of thirty-seven issues of The DDU Review, a newsletter produced by residents of the Dual Diagnosis Unit, a residential unit for people who had diagnoses of developmental disability and serious mental illness in the Central State Hospital. The analysis of the newsletters produced between September 1988 and June 1992 revealed three major themes: 1) the mundane; 2) good behavior; and 3) advocacy. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, the discourse of medicalization—such as relations with physicians, (...) diagnoses, and medications—receive little attention. Instead, the patient-journalists focus on prosaic aspects of institutional life. The patients used their writing as a form self-definition and advocacy. The authors argue that even though it is tempting to consider the patients’ emphasis on good behavior as evidence of institutional control, internalized discipline, and medicalization, a more nuanced interpretation, which focuses on how the patients’ understood their own experiences, is warranted. Researchers must also recognize the ways in which The DDU Review reveals the patient-journalists’ experience of an institutional life that includes non-medical staff, varied social relationships among patients, and negotiated freedoms. (shrink)

This paper offers a personal reflection on the value of legal scholarship. It is set in the context of the contemporary literature on the state of contemporary legal scholarship. The paper argues that the state of contemporary legal scholarship is too often evaluated on the exclusive basis of the style and content of legal scholarly works. The challenge that this paper seeks to meet is to provide a broader and richer platform upon which legal scholarship can and should be evaluated. (...) That challenge is met by offering a brief account of the five responsibilities of legal scholarship (reading, writing, teaching, collegiality, and engagement). These five responsibilities are designed to provide a framework for imagining the institutional life of a legal scholar. The paper argues that it is that full life, rather than merely the scholarly output, that should necessarily be included in any assessment of the state of contemporary legal scholarship. (shrink)

En Australie, jeune nation et très vieux continent, la mémoire des origines reste un sujet sensible. Les années de gouvernement conservateur en Australie ont vu le retour d'un certain discours nationaliste à la recherche des héros du passé. La « guerre des histoires » éclate concernant notamment la question des relations entre indigènes et colons depuis le début de la colonisation britan­nique en 1788. Les institutions sont touchées : le nouveau Musée National est accusé d'avoir négligé les « aspects positifs (...) de la colonisation » ; le Sommet d'Histoire dresse le projet de « nationaliser » et de « centraliser » la mémoire du pays en introduisant un nouveau cursus dans les écoles. L'identité du pays est en jeu.Australia is both a "young nation" and an old continent, in which the subject of origins can still touch a raw nerve. The years of conservative government saw the return of a certain type of nationalist discourse seekingfor heroes of the pasto This period also saw the outbreak of the "history wars" , which brought in a clash of opposing about relationships between indigenous peoples and settlers during British colonisation. This debate also affected institutional life: the new National Museum of Australia was accused of having neglected the "positive aspects of colonisation", and the History Summit proposed a new curriculum in schools that would "nationalise" and "centralise" official memory. The nation's very identity is at stake. (shrink)

This article considers the political significance of game theoretical notions of cooperation by responding theologically to the writings of David Willetts, a minister in the UK government. The argument is that the forms of cooperative institutional life which societies require can be neither explained nor planned for solely by mathematical modelling of rational self-interest. What altruistic, civic cooperation depends upon is a complex web of affective trust, often theologically formed by open-handed faith rather than a self-protective pinch, so that wise (...) risks may be taken for the sake of future generations. (shrink)

The martyr is a potent symbol of sacrifice in Western cultural discourse. Understanding martyrdom as sacrifice, however, blunts the potency of the martyr's action. It obscures the violence by which the martyr's death becomes, paradoxically, a means to define institutional life. In this article, I propose an analogous relationship between the early Christian martyr and Giorgio Agamben's enigmatic homo sacer. Like homo sacer, the Christian martyr provides an “other” against which to organize institutional life. Read as a sacrifice, the martyr (...) also exemplifies the threat of biopolitics that Agamben describes, where mere existence can be isolated from political life and made subject to sovereign violence. Distinguishing the martyr from their institutional appropriation is a step toward exposing the modes of violence inherent in sovereign power. It provides the possibility of reconceptualizing the martyr as an autonomous figure of resistance, not as homo sacer but as homo profanus. (shrink)

The paper aims to ques- tion the traditional view of the early Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific institution in continuous existence. According to that view, the institutional life of the Society in the early decades of activity was characterized by a strictly Baconian methodology. But the re- construction of the discussions about fossils and natural history within the Society shows that this monolithic image is far from being correct. Despite the persistent reference to the Baconian Solomon House, the (...) Society did not impose or support a common programme of research in the field of the natural history of the Earth. (shrink)

Each of us begins with a set of concerns, desires, and interests of our own, and each of us can recognize that the same is true of others. We can then remove ourselves in thought from our particular position in the world and think simply of all those people, without singling out as I the one we happen to be. From this abstracted impersonal standpoint, the content and character of different individual standpoints remain unchanged. The impersonal standpoint plays an essential (...) role in the evaluation of political institutions. Any political theory that aspires to moral decency must try to devise and justify a form of institutional life, which answers to the real strength of impersonal values while recognizing that they are not all we have to reckon with. (shrink)

The paper honors Heda Festini; it’s first part contains author’s personal memories of Heda. The central part of the paper addresses a favorite author of Heda Festini, Franjo Petrić, and his Utopia The Happy City-State. It then places the utopian construction on the map of contemporary understanding of political theorizing. Utopias, like the one due to Petrić, result from thought-experimenting; in contrast to purely epistemic thought-experiments they are geared to “guidance”, as Petrić puts it, namely advice giving and persuading. Political (...) thought-experimenting can be understood to a large extent as work in ideal theorizing; a matter little noticed in the literature. Classical cases cover “ideal theory” in the sense of given, non-temporal arrangement; “ideal” either in a very limited sense of strict compliance (Rawls), or in a wider sense of normatively marked properties, not instantiated in actual political reality. Platonic tradition belongs to a third genus, “ideal” in the sense of recommended end-state; Utopias add to this theoretical quality the dimension of “guidance”, so that they are motivational, time-related ideal theories. The paper depicts these relations between thought-experimenting as a wider genus, and ideal theorizing as its prominent political-philosophical sub-species. The paper is thus a tribute to Heda Festini who helped me find my way to analytic theorizing, and help analytic philosophy to start serious institutional life in our native Croatia. (shrink)

This article explores Hegels concept of education within the context of his idea of ‘second nature’. Hegel believes that institutional life forms, which have been formed through education, culture, technical and social progress, constitute the ‘second nature’ of human beings. The immediacy of institutional forms which act as humans’ ‘second nature’ is the product of social and cultural mediation. The phenomenon of morality is here of central importance, because through morality the natural arbitrariness of the will is transformed and the (...) substantial spirit of freedom prevails. In Hegel’s opinion, human individuals differ from animals on account of education ; only through education does the human being become that which he should be. Bildung is a ‘formatio’ of the personality, which transcends particular knowledge, because it enables one to make a judgment concerning relationships and objects of our experience. By education human beings achieve the ability to raise themselves up from the concrete to the universal. We become conscious thereby that we exist within the ‘realm of the spirit’ and educate ourselves from its abundance. (shrink)

This paper presents the state of research on Hobbes in France these last 7-8 years. First of all, it explains how the generation of forerunners in the 1970s and 1980s has been replaced by the birth of a vigorous French school of Hobbes scholars in the 1990s and then by a new generation of academics during the recent years. The first part of this paper deals with the institutions and the institutional life concerned with Hobbes in France. The second part (...) is devoted to eight recent monographs on the English philosopher. The third one is focused on various collections of papers as well as special issues. The fourth part reckons five recent translations into French of some of Hobbes's works. The whole gives a complete account of the intense activity of scholars on Hobbes in France today, including works that are about to be published. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent attachment (...) to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant. (shrink)

Since the early twentieth century, the term “chimera” has been used to describe many experimental composite plants and animals. Composite animals and embryos, involving the transfer of cells from different species to make chimeras, continue to be a fundamental cornerstone of biomedical research. However, the twenty‐first century appears to be offering a new role for composite animals. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, composite animals and embryos have taken on a different form of life—an institutional life. With this institutional (...) life, I argue, comes an opportunity to recast differences between humans and other animals and to reconsider how research on human health is governed. (shrink)

Kelly, Gerard The tumultuous events of the sixteenth century irrevocably changed the shape of the Western Church and thus Christianity more generally. The division that ensued affected not just the institutional life of the church, but also towns and villages, families and neighbours. For generations, people lived with the consequences of this division, often within the intimacy of their own family life. Fortunately, this has changed. The twentieth century is rightly referred to as the ecumenical century. We are able to (...) point to milestones on the way to unity, beginning with the Edinburgh Missionary Conference in 1910, and then the First World Conference on Faith and Order in 1927, and the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948. After the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Catholic Church began to participate in ecumenical gatherings. Its entry brought a new way of ecumenical dialogue, and the era of the bilateral dialogue began, alongside the existing multilateral dialogue. Today the Catholic Church at the international level has been and/or continues to be in dialogue with the Anglican Communion, the Lutheran World Federation, the World Methodist Council, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Baptist World Alliance, the Disciples of Christ, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and three families of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches. In Australia the Catholic Church is currently engaged in dialogue with the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church and the Uniting Church. The Catholic Church participates in a multilateral way through both the Joint Working Group with the World Council of Churches and as a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. (shrink)