This chapter contains sections titled: I II III.

The United States prison system, the largest in the world, operates through both exploitative and rehabilitative modes of discipline. To gain political and public support for the extensive resources expended housing, feeding, and controlling its incarcerated population, the carceral state strategically emphasizes a mix of each mode. Agriculture in prisons is particularly illustrative. With roots in racial capitalism and the carceral state’s criminalization of poverty, plantation convict leasing system, work reform efforts, and punitive and welfarist carceral logics, prison agriculture (...) embodies explicit forms of exploitation and claims of rehabilitation. Accordingly, this article contextualizes and explains results from a nationwide study of state prisons within our framework of the disciplinary matrix. At least 662 adult state prisons have agricultural activities, including an array of animal, food, and plant production. We find that the drivers of these activities are financial, idleness reduction, reparative, and training. Our disciplinary matrix framework departs from conventional assignments of a particular activity to one disciplinary mode or the other and recognizes that any activity may be driven by different prison needs or philosophies. We investigate how different combinations of agricultural activities and drivers rely on discourses of deservingness to naturalize and reproduce structures of racialized, classed, and gendered control inside and outside prison, as well as the legitimacy of the prison system itself. (shrink)

Using the work of Robert A. Kagan's intellectual contribution on the intensification of law, leading authorities in the study of the politics of regulation and litigation examine the consequences of the expansion and intensification of law, both in the United States and the rest of the world. Part One considers bureaucratic legalism, a terrain in which popular and political discourse often conceives as a pitched battle between business and government, and in which claims about quantity—"too much" and "too (...) little"—take center stage. Here, the contributors examine the many ways in which regulators and the regulated cooperate, and the extent to which regulated entities internalize norms and practices associated with bureaucratic. Part Two considers adversarial legalism, a term that even among academics is often reduced to "litigiousness." The chapters in this section show that adversarial legalism is a much more complex, contingent, and multi-sided phenomenon than the popular debate over litigiousness suggests. Part III examines Kagan's core concepts in a comparative framework. Although some sometimes treat adversarial legalism as an American disease, scholars are increasingly finding it proliferating elsewhere, and debating whether it can take a prominent role in nations quite different in tradition and political structure from the United States. Across the globe, law and legalism in all its forms, bureaucratic and adversarial, is becoming more intense, and thus more central to politics, public policy and everyday life. The consequences are profound. Yet commentary is often stuck on old questions. Does the intensification of law reflect the withering of other social institutions? Is it a sign of moral decay? Or is it, on another account, signaling a new era of respect for universal human rights? The Politics of Legalism takes us instead in directions relatively unexplored by both scholars and popular commentators on law. Like Kagan's scholarship, it moves beyond stale debates about litigiousness and overregulation, and invites us to think more imaginatively about how the rise of law and legalism will shape politics and social life in the 21st Century. (shrink)

A colorful history of utilitarianism told through the lives and ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and its other founders In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the colorful story of the lives and legacies of the founders of utilitarianism—one of the most influential yet misunderstood and maligned philosophies of the past two centuries. Best known for arguing that "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong," utilitarianism was developed by (...) the radical philosophers, critics, and social reformers William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Together, they had a profound influence on nineteenth-century reforms, in areas ranging from law, politics, and economics to morals, education, and women's rights. Their work transformed life in ways we take for granted today. Bentham even advocated the decriminalization of same-sex acts, decades before the cause was taken up by other activists. As Bertrand Russell wrote about Bentham in the late 1920s, "There can be no doubt that nine-tenths of the people living in England in the latter part of last century were happier than they would have been if he had never lived." Yet in part because of its misleading name and the caricatures popularized by figures as varied as Dickens, Marx, and Foucault, utilitarianism is sometimes still dismissed as cold, calculating, inhuman, and simplistic. By revealing the fascinating human sides of the remarkable pioneers of utilitarianism, The Happiness Philosophers provides a richer understanding and appreciation of their philosophical and political perspectives—one that also helps explain why utilitarianism is experiencing a renaissance today and is again being used to tackle some of the world's most serious problems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle, and Red ViennaMalachi H. Hacohen*A stranger in his homeland even before emigrating in 1937, the philosopher Karl Popper is rarely considered an Austrian. Although he was born in Vienna in 1902 and buried there in 1994, he is known as an Atlantic intellectual and an anti-Communist prophet of postwar liberalism. He first became famous for The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). 1 He (...) wrote the book during World War II in his New Zealand exile, intending it as a defense of democracy against fascism. The defeat of Austrian socialism and the collapse of Central European democracies were the major experiences informing his analysis. But The Open Society quickly became, with Popper’s full support, a charter of Atlantic Cold War liberalism. His philosophy of science, exemplified best in Logik der Forschung, went through a similar transformation. 2 To be sure, it is commonly debated in the context of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle; but the circle’s emigration and the postwar triumph of analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American academy transformed positivism, too, into an Atlantic philosophy. The “fugue of exile’s disruptions” severed the thread connecting Popper to Austria. 3Yet Popper was the foremost philosopher to carry the progressive Viennese legacy into the postwar era. In his critiques of the Vienna Circle and Red Vienna he confronted the philosophical and political problems of Viennese late enlightenment [End Page 711] and the interwar crises of scientific reason and Central European democracy. Refashioning the fin-de-siècle progressive legacy, he drew novel visions of liberal science and politics, imagining utopian scientific and political communities that were engaged in the pursuit of truth and reform. He made critical debate the acid test of political and scientific rationality, the center of a new liberalism. Establishing a free public sphere as the sine qua non of the Open Society, he innovated on a familiar liberal motif, shared by thinkers as different as Kant, De Staël, Guizot, Mill, and Habermas.In The Open Society Popper also wrote the political platform of the postwar Social-Democratic Consensus that legislated for the welfare state and mobilized against Communism. During World War II he opted for a liberal-socialist alliance that would contain postwar Central European fascism. Instead, his “Popular Front” platform proved adaptable to postwar anti-Communism. He made a few naïve pronouncements on deterrence and the free world during the Cold War. 4 They reflect badly on his political philosophy. Yet disentangled from its Cold War associations, his liberalism contains an abiding cosmopolitan vision for an age that is looking beyond the nation-state. His cosmopolitanism originated as a solution to dilemmas of ethnic identity faced by the assimilated-Jewish Viennese intelligentsia. His Open Society expressed their dream of integration into a community that discounted religion, ethnicity, and nationality. 5 He refused to give up on cosmopolitanism in the bipolar world when Machtpolitik seemed the order of the day. Almost alone among postwar liberals, he retained a belief in an international legal order and challenged national self-determination. His vision has regained relevance today. Cosmopolitanism and critical debate provide a starting-point for renegotiating liberal dilemmas.“My theory of knowledge, my philosophy of science and my political philosophy are original only in their interdependence,” stated Popper in a 1976 interview. 6 His epistemology has major political and scientific significance. Well before cultural studies began deconstructing science, Popper countered philosophers’ and scientists’ claims of expertise. There is no philosophical method. Every person is a problem-solver, and so every person is a philosopher. “Science is nothing but enlightened and responsible common sense—common sense broadened by imaginative critical thinking.” 7 Demystifying science, he never gave up on the growth of knowledge. He conceived of science as an unending quest for uncertain but growing knowledge. A non-foundationist, [End Page 712] he insisted that objectivity meant intersubjectivity. Rationality was a product of critical debate. In today’s intellectual world, devoid of certainty, where systems of knowledge and identities have been thrown into flux, Popper’s unique synthesis of contingency, convention, and change with logical certainty, objectivity, and tradition suggests a promising direction in the... (shrink)

This paper discusses the economic, legal, moral, and political difficulties in developing drugs for the developing world. It argues that large, global pharmaceutical companies have social responsibilities to the developing world, and that they may exercise these responsibilities by investing in research and development related to diseases that affect developing nations, offering discounts on drug prices, and initiating drug giveaways. However, these social responsibilities are not absolute requirements and may be balanced against other obligations and commitments (...) in light of economic, social, legal, political, and other conditions. How a company decides to exercise its social responsibilities to the developing world depends on the prospects for a reasonable profit and the prospects for a productive business environment. Developing nations can either help or hinder the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to exercise social responsibility through various policies and practices. To insure that companies can make a reasonable profit, developing nations should honor pharmaceutical product patents and adhere to international intellectual property treaties, such as the Trade‐Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement. To insure the companies have a good business environment, developing nations should try to promote the rule of law, ethical business practices, stable currencies, reliable banking systems, free and open markets, democracy, and other conditions conducive to business. Overall, this paper advocates for reciprocity and cooperation between pharmaceutical companies and developing nations to address the problem of developing drugs for the developing world. In pursuing this cooperative approach, developing nations may use a variety of other techniques to encourage pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly, such as subsidizing pharmaceutical research, helping to design and implement research protocols, providing a guaranteed market, and bulk buying. (shrink)

The present article discusses the “peace versus justice” dilemma in international criminal justice through the lenses of the respective legal theories of Judith Shklar and Hannah Arendt—two thinkers who have recently been described as theorists of international criminal law. The article claims that in interventions carried out by the International Criminal Court, there is an ever-present potentiality for the “peace versus justice” dilemma to occur. Unfortunately, there is no abstract solution to this problem, insofar as ICC interventions will in (...) some cases be conducive while in others, they will be deleterious to peace. If a tension between peace and justice arises in a particular case, the article asserts, the former must be prioritised over the latter. Such a prioritisation, however, requires a vision of the ICC as a flexible actor of world politics which is situated at the intersection of law, ethics and politics, rather than a strictly legalistic view of the court. Ultimately, then, the present article seeks to probe whether the legal and political theories of Shklar and Arendt—in isolation, but ultimately also in combination—support such a flexible vision of the ICC. (shrink)

Cosmopolitans argue that the account of human rights and distributive justice in John Rawls's The Law of Peoples is incompatible with his argument for liberal justice. Rawls should extend his account of liberal basic liberties and the guarantees of distributive justice to apply to the world at large. This essay defends Rawls's grounding of political justice in social cooperation. The Law of Peoples is drawn up to provide principles of foreign policy for liberal peoples. Human rights (...) are among the necessary conditions for social cooperation, and so long as a decent people respect human rights, a common good, and the Law of Peoples, it is not the role of liberal peoples to impose upon well-ordered decent peoples liberal liberties they cannot endorse. Moreover, the difference principle is not an allocative or alleviatory principle, but applies to design property and other basic social institutions necessary to economic production, exchange and consumption. It presupposes political cooperation—a legislative body to actively apply it, and a legal system to apply it to. There is no feasible global state or global legal system that could serve these roles. Finally, the difference principle embodies a conception of democratic reciprocity that is only appropriate to cooperation among free and equal citizens who are socially productive and politically autonomous. a Footnotesa I am grateful to K. C. Tan for many helpful discussions and criticisms of this essay. I am also grateful to the other contributors to this volume for their comments, and to Ellen Paul for her many helpful suggestions in preparing the final version of this essay. (shrink)

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Rights and the Ethics of Globalization by Daniel E. Lee and Elizabeth J. LeeGuenther "Gene" HaasHuman Rights and the Ethics of Globalization Daniel E. Lee and Elizabeth J. Lee Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 264 pp. $27.99While there have been numerous books written on the nature of rights in a world of globalization, this book fills a gap by presenting a thoughtful and balanced discussion that (...) is firmly grounded in ethical theory yet takes into account the concerns of both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the realities of the business world. The authors acknowledge that there can be naive troublemakers in NGOs and greedy people in business as well as socially concerned people in both groups.The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with the philosophical foundations for addressing ethical issues in business within the context of globalization. Here the authors advocate for a limited, carefully defined notion of rights, properly noting that not everything of ethical significance falls under the notion of rights. The important distinction they make is between negative rights (the rights to life and freedom), which oblige us never to harm others, and positive rights (rights of entitlement, such as education, medical care, housing), which depend upon the various types of relationships, voluntary or involuntary, in which people find themselves. The former apply universally to neighbors near and far; the latter, because they are defined by relationships, apply primarily to neighbors near to us. With globalization distant neighbors often become near neighbors—for example, when a company builds a production facility in another country. In view of this, the authors argue that the Enlightenment’s individualistic understanding of rights is incomplete. A fuller version of rights (rooted in Aristotle) situates all humans in social communities where mutual charitable treatment is better suited to promoting human flourishing. With this in mind, the authors use the second form of Kant’s categorical imperative (“Always treat others as ends”) to map out some helpful practical guidelines for multinational corporations that are conducive to human well-being. Such guidelines seek to take into consideration all the constituencies that these organizations are called to serve—including shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, and communities of location.In part 2 the authors draw on these philosophical foundations and practical guidelines to discuss ethical issues related to business practices in four different [End Page 198] countries: respect for human rights in China given the widespread practice of outsourcing; the condition of workers in Liberia where Firestone is the largest employer; free trade and fair trade issues related to coffee growers in Ethiopia; and the question of whether low-wage factories (maquiladoras) in Mexico exploit workers or provide economic opportunity for them. The authors provide a fair evaluation of each situation rooting their discussion in the nature of each respective business and the conditions over which it has direct control.Part 3 deals with the possibilities and challenges of dealing with multinational corporations that do not respect human rights. Although many argue for sanctions and treaty provisions, the authors argue that these approaches have their limitations. As an alternative, they recommend the Alien Tort Claims Act as the most promising means of enforcing human rights standards among American multinational corporations with overseas operations.This is an insightful and balanced book on human rights and social ethics precisely because it has a positive view of markets and is optimistic about achieving greater social responsibility in the business world. It will be helpful to all committed to promoting ethical business practices in a growing global economy—not only in the church and academy but also in the legal community and business world and in NGOs.Guenther HaasRedeemer University CollegeCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ECHIC—The European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres 2023 Annual ConferenceIlenia Vittoria CasmiriEcological Mindedness and Sustainable Wellbeing, ECHIC—The European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres 2023 Annual Conference, May 25–27, 2023, University of Ferrara, ItalyThis year’s annual conference of the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres (ECHIC) invited international scholars with diverse backgrounds to explore visions of a desirable future world that is both environmentally sustainable and socially (...) just. In stressing the social and political relevance of the humanities in Europe today, the main goal of the Consortium, as it is articulated on the conference website, is the pursuit of the highest international standards of excellence with a spirit of innovation and exploration of new research areas:Since the World Commission on Environment and Development published Our Common Future (1987) [commonly known as the Brundtland Report], the notion of... sustainability has been expanded to incorporate environmental, cultural, legal, and economic features of a low-carbon future and to encompass the wellbeing of all living species, which involves material aspects such as the social acceptance of resource-efficient transitions and immaterial ones such as flourishing human capabilities. [End Page 625]The participants of the 2023 ECHIC conference on Ecological Mindedness and Sustainable Wellbeing presented original, multidisciplinary perspectives, and offered valuable opportunities to develop holistic approaches to the prismatic issue of environmental sustainability. Bringing together cultural diversity as well as local and global perspectives, keynoters and panelists addressed the vast array of challenges imposed by the perpetuation of anthropocentric worldviews. Their challenge to traditional demarcations between the humanities, the social sciences, economy, law, architecture, engineering, and the life and medical sciences, generated synergies for exploring interconnections between life forms, resources, and heritage. While the theoretical frameworks varied considerably, they all advocated for the need to overcome ideological, cultural, and spatial barriers in favor of broader, more inclusive approaches to other disciplines, other cultures, other humans, other species. Overall, the conference not only exposed the cultural and economic roots of social inequality and of uneven distribution of resources, thanks to unsustainable modes of capitalist production and consumption, but also highlighted the media’s positive effect in eliciting pro-environmental behaviors.Toward More Sustainable FuturesThe prismatic nature of the concept of sustainability inspired keynote speakers Alexa Weik von Mossner (University of Klagenfurt), Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont), Tim Waterman (University College London), and Antonio López (John Cabot University) to address climate apocalypse impacts on the human physical and psychological well-being from diverse personal and academic backgrounds.In the opening keynote lecture, “Growing Hope: Narratives of Food Justice and Sustainability,” Weik von Mossner explores the psychological implications of affect and emotion in the communication of environmental issues. Her diachronic account illustrates the rise and fall of the South Central Farm in Los Angeles, a sanctuary for locals by providing fresh produce, stimulating a sense of community, and representing a symbol of resilience against systemic inequalities. Weik Von Mossner elucidates the psychological benefits accruing from exposure to such a sustainably inhabited space. Her analysis of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary, The Garden (2008), affirms that climate change narratives across media may prompt food justice activism (Retzinger 2011, 337) by eliciting the emotional engagement of its audience. [End Page 626]However, observes von Mossner, the greater the popularity of the Farm, the greater the threat posed to its existence. Through documentaries, news articles, and online campaigns, the South Central Farm has received national and international attention. At the same time, media have shed light on the struggles faced by marginalized communities and provided a solid basis for discussions on social justice, environmental activism, and the value of communal spaces. She explains that activists used social media to voice their concerns about the potential eviction and the loss of a vital resource for the local community, leading to an outpouring of support from environmentalists and celebrities who had realized to what extent the predominantly low-income, minority community was affected by limited access to fresh food and green spaces.Adrian Ivakhiv, delivering his keynote “How to Face the Angel of History: A Call to Anthropocenic Conscience” the following day, suggests that a pervasive lack of an emotional... (shrink)

In spite of these efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to initiate ongoing research on contraception, the subject of birth control remained a problem of concern primarily to the social activist rather than to the research scientist or practicing physician.80 In the 1930s, as has been shown, American scientists turned to the study of other aspects of reproductive physiology, while American physicians, anxious to eliminate the moral and medical dangers of contraception, only reluctantly accepted birth control as falling within (...) their professional domain.As a result, the problem of cheap, effective, and safe contraception was not solved by these earliest attempts. Consideration of the subject was initiated afresh by private philanthropy after World War II, sparked by a new wave of interest in population studies.81 Summarizing such efforts to support research in the reproductive sciences, a recent Ford Foundation study has noted: “To initiate and sustain serious research in the reproductive sciences has required for more than half a century concerted effort by interested individuals and private organizations, mainly from outside the mainstreams of the biomedical research community.”82The early laboratory research on chemical contraception described in this paper was but one important outcome of the concerted effort made by reformers in the 1920s to eliminate a variety of social problems thought to derive from excessive fertility. Scientific arguments and expertise were employed to advocate reform as well as to define the appropriate solution to such social problems. Scientists were recruited as advocates for the movement, but they were also employed as researchers in laboratory investigations sponsored by these same reformers.Sponsors of these early laboratory studies noted the difficulty of obtaining first-class investigators.83 The routine analyses necessary for such research, as well as the traditional scientific aversion to applied problems, provide only a partial explanation for this response. The real difficulty lay in recruiting investigators to a field that had previously been taboo. Once opened up — first as socially relevant, and finally as scientifically sound — there was much interest in this area, and the appeal to researchers of the scientific issues surrounding fertility and reproduction soon surpassed that of the reforming value of birth control.A survey of the kinds of experimental investigations sponsored by birth control advocates indicates the range of physiological problems explored by contraceptive research. The most definitive work was done on the efficacy and safety of spermicides, but the potential of other contraceptive methods was also examined. Investigators attempted to develop spermatoxins that would effectively immunize women against sperm, and they also tried to elucidate the mechanism of hormonal control of reproduction. In fact, speculations about the possible hormonal manipulation of fertility were expressed at the Seventh International Birth Control Conference held in Zurich in 1930.84In the 1920s, clinical studies were undertaken to assess the effectiveness of the various birth control methods. Laboratory investigators complemented this work by screening spermicides for safety and testing for their ability to kill sperm. There were a variety of birth control preparations on the market, but no one really knew whether these were effective or even safe.85 Although the physiology of other major organ systems was well advanced, the scientific study of reproductive physiology and contraceptive technology was clearly in its infancy in this period. Routine analyses simply could not be conducted, because the fundamental research establishing baselines had not yet been done. Scientists used this fact to redirect attention to basic research on reproduction.Laboratory research on contraception indicated important unexplored areas for physiological investigation. Social activists, who had encouraged prominent scientists to become interested in both the social value and the genetic implications of birth control, found these investigators revising the goals of their research. The biologists had formed their own network and had begun to seek out funding, reformulating the justification for sponsorship of further investigations. The eugenic motivations underlying these studies, which had initially made them theoretically attractive to biologists, were gradually eroded. Concern with “human evolution” ceded its place to interest in physiological mechanisms. Crew and others began to note that the use of biological theory to justify essentially political decisions had serious limitations. Biologists had become uncomfortable with those very arguments which had originally captured their interest. Recognition of the potential political abuse wrought by applying scientific principles to society was expressed by Crew just one year after the Zurich meeting. Referring to previous assessments of the role of sex in reproduction, he generalized: “In the past the biologist has justified feudalism, Manchester Liberalism, socialism and every other type of social organization and political programme by reference to selected biological phenomena.”86 By 1932 Crew had also begun to question the biological logic of regulated breeding, and had made it clear to his American sponsor that there was no simple correspondence between the practice of birth control and the genetic improvement of the human race.87Biologists further began to recognize, however, that although the hopeful genetic solution to human problems was probably an illusion, contraception still remained one tangible means to alleviate, human misery. Some laboratory scientists, like Crew, acknowledged the applicability of their own particular skills to this problem. For a few brief years, social needs and scientific goals were mutually supportive and closely intertwined. But as laboratory researchers gained interest in the study of reproduction and established their own priorities in this field, they temporarily withdrew from the arena of debate over birth control as an important mechanism for social reform.With the rise of Hitler, the genetic arguments for birth control rapidly lost their appeal. But by that time the scientific problem of how to achieve effective contraception had entered the professional consciousness. Both physicians and scientists began to be aware of birth control as a subject within their domain of expertise, although outside the principal focus of their research. Scientific discussion of birth control permanently altered from a question of justification to a problem of method: How could one achieve reliable and safe contraception? This had been Sanger's and Dickinson's goal from the beginning. Laboratory scientists had indeed been persuaded to undertake this work; this research had in turn affected biologists' perceptions of the whole field of reproductive physiology, encouraging further study of reproductive mechanisms. The promise of new knowledge provided for continued funding of this research, despite the caution by scientists that the social benefits would not be as immediate or as far-reaching as advocates and they themselves had first argued.The activities of birth control activists and their supporting agencies, and the financial backing of private contributors and foundations, notably the Rockefeller philanthropies, provided an important new stimulus to the development of research on the biology of reproduction in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Biologists were able to claim an enlarged realm of issues for scientific study through their activities as advocates and as investigators for the birth control movement. At the same time, they promised as-yet-undiscovered possibilities for regulating human reproduction once its physiology was understood. The knowledge and control that they promised lay in understanding the whole reproductive cycle — not merely in evaluating the toxic effects of presumptive spermicides.Chemical spermicides never summoned the interest of scientists as the contraceptive pill was to do, yet that research did reinforce the widespread perceptions of scientific research as essential to social reform. Spermicide investigations focused research efforts in reproductive biology by challenging traditional taboos, defining problems for further study, and providing laboratory investigators the opportunity to assert the social and scientific value of their own skills. Crew echoed this attitude as he observed in 1934:Man has turned from the adventurous conquest of his environment to the conquest of himself. To-day is the day of biological invention, eagerly used for the control of the undesirable and the unwanted. Sex and reproduction are no longer hedged around by myth and taboo; they are no longer accepted as mysteries that defy understanding. They are matters inviting examination and explanation; they are regarded as expressions of physico-chemical forces, the nature of which is to be displayed. It is accepted that when knowledge is sufficient, control will be absolute, and, though knowledge is not yet sufficient, readers... must be persuaded to the view that this will not always be so.88The synergism between reproductive biology and social needs has been temporary and sporadic, but recurring, since the 1920s. Scientific research programs have clearly been influenced by issues raised by public debate. Nevertheless, reproductive biologists have continued to assert their own professional goals. For the most part, they have rejected problems without inherent scientific interest and have spurned applied research except as it has had a direct bearing on current research themes. This attitude, apparent among American and British investigators in the 1930s, created the intellectual context for the invention and acceptance of the technically sophisticated oral contraceptive pill. It did not foster the production and improvement of the simple, safe, effective, and cheap vaginal contraceptive desired by early birth control advocates. (shrink)

Bad philosophy is responsible for the climate and nature crises, and other global problems too that threaten our future. That sounds mad, but it is true. A philosophy of science, or of theatre or life is a view about what are, or ought to be, the aims and methods of science, theatre or life. It is in this entirely legitimate sense of “philosophy” that bad philosophy is responsible for the crises we face. First, and in a blatantly obvious way, those (...) institutions, organizations, corporations, businesses, endeavours, and activities of humanity that cause the crises and global problems we face, do so because of the aims they pursue (profit perhaps, or power, or heat and light for homes), and the methods adopted in pursuit of those aims – the philosophy in other words, built into the institution, organization, business, human activities, or whatever it may be. It is the philosophy of these institutions, organizations and activities that we need to change to put a stop to, or at least lessen the severity of, the crises we face, the global problems that confront us, above all the climate and nature crises. One institution has an especially crucial role in this respect: our universities. They are dominated in a multitude of ways by a particularly disastrous philosophy, a philosophy of inquiry which may be called knowledge-inquiry. This holds that the basic aim of the university is to acquire and apply knowledge. First, knowledge is to be acquired; once acquired, it can be applied to help solve social problems. But this philosophy of knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual disaster. As a result, universities are, in devastating and almost entirely unrecognized ways, humanitarian disasters too. Judged from the standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, the university shaped by the philosophy of knowledge-inquiry violates THREE of the four most elementary rules of rational problem solving conceivable in a wholesale, structural fashion, and it is this gross, wholesale, structural irrationality of the university, unnoticed by all but a few scientists and scholars, that is in part responsible for the creation of our grave global problems, and our current incapacity to learn how to solve them. The pursuit of knowledge, conducted in universities, within the framework of knowledge-inquiry over the decades and centuries, has produced much of great benefit to humanity. It has made the modern world possible. It has led to modern power production, modern industry and armaments, modern agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern travel and communications, and the internet. But these very successes have also created many of our most serious current global problems: the climate crisis; the destruction of natural habitats, the catastrophic loss of wild life, and impending mass extinction of species (the nature crisis); the lethal character of modern war; the impact on the natural world of the rapid growth of the human population; the menace posed by nuclear weapons; pollution of earth, sea and air; threats to democracy caused in part by the internet and social media. All these grave global problems have been made possible by modern science and technology, pursued largely in universities within the framework of knowledge-inquiry. Nevertheless, it is not science and technology as such that are the problem, but science pursued in a way that is dissociated from a more fundamental task of the university to help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways, so that progress may be made to a better world. Science and technology, pursued within the framework of knowledge-inquiry, create for some of us the power to act, but not the power to act wisely – not the power to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways. For that, we need our institutions of learning, above all our universities, to take as their primary task to help humanity learn how to do it. In order to do that, the philosophy of inquiry put into practice by universities needs to be dramatically transformed. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry – a revolution in the philosophy of the university, all around the world, wherever possible, so that the basic aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, construed to be the capacity, active endeavour, and perhaps desire, to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, wisdom in this sense including knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, but much else besides, methods being dramatically modified too so as to help achieve the new academic aim. The basic task of the university would be, not to solve problems of knowledge, but rather to help people in the social world beyond the university to resolve conflicts and problems of living so that what is of value in life may be realized by everyone, insofar as that is possible. The pursuit of knowledge would be vital, but not intellectually fundamental. The intellectual and institutional revolution we so urgently need in our universities would affect every discipline and aspect of the university; it would dramatically affect both research and education, and the whole way the university is related to the rest of the social world. The revolution, from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry would dramatically enhance the intellectual integrity and rationality of natural science, social inquiry, the humanities and technology, the character of these disciplines and the relationships they have with one another. University education throughout the university would be dramatically improved. And academic inquiry as a whole would do what, on the whole, it fails to do at present: it would help humanity resolve conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational and, as a result, increasingly successful ways, progress at last being made to a genuinely good, civilized world – a world in which there is peace, justice, liberal democracy, individual freedom, education, reasonable equality, sustainable prosperity and worthwhile opportunities in life, all of these for everyone, insofar as this is possible. Why, it may be asked, has academic philosophy not noticed that we urgently need to transform the current bad philosophy of inquiry of knowledge-inquiry into the far more intellectually rigorous and humanly valuable philosophy of wisdom-inquiry, so that we can begin to do what so far we have failed to do so lamentably: learn how to avoid impending disasters, and even make progress to a better world, something that seems at present almost unthinkable given the horrors of war, poverty, political enslavement of the 20th century, and the horrors of this century so far too? The answer is that academic philosophy is in a particularly pitiful state, as philosophers themselves, are just beginning to realize and lament. That is why academic philosophers are blind to the intellectual and humanitarian disaster of the bad philosophy that dominates universities today, and inconceivable to them to them that they might have, as a disciplinary task, to ensure academic inquiry implements a good philosophy of inquiry, and advocate and argue for change if it does not. Once upon a time, in Europe at least, philosophy was an intellectual power in the world. In the 17th century it created modern science which massively increased and improved our knowledge and understanding of the world, which in turn led to the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, and the modern world. Philosophy was once so intellectually powerful and influential that it changed the course of history. But philosophy also made in the past three disastrous intellectual blunders: the post-Cartesian blunder, the post-Newtonian blunder, and the Enlightenment blunder. Never acknowledged and corrected by subsequent philosophy right down to the present, these unrecognized intellectual blunders rendered academic philosophy the esoteric, pathetic, and powerless discipline it is today, so that throughout the last century and, so far, throughout this one, academic philosophy has remained blind to the intellectual disaster of knowledge-inquiry, and thus failed entirely to take up its proper disciplinary task of warning fellow academics of the structural irrationality of the philosophy that prevails in the university, and of proposing what steps need to be taken to put things right. Instead of performing such an urgently needed philosophical task, so-called analytic philosophy was reduced to analysing the meaning of words. Since then, there has been hardly any discernible improvement, even if analysis of concepts no longer dominates the scene. Bad academic philosophy is indeed responsible for intellectual and humanitarian failures of the university. What the three past intellectual blunders of philosophy are, why their persistence so dramatically reduces academic philosophy to a triviality, and why, furthermore, this results in the failure of scientists and scholars to see what is so blatantly bad about the philosophy prevailing in universities around the world – the failure to see what so urgently needs to be done to put right what has been wrong for so long: all this is made clear in this book. A new kind of philosophy emerges during the course of the argument, critical fundamentalism, which has as its task to keep alive imaginative and critical – that is rational – thinking about our fundamental problem: How can our human world, the world we experience and live in – the world of living things, people, consciousness, free will, meaning and value – how can all of this exist and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe? That problem encompasses all others of life, science and thought. Critical fundamentalism tries to improve answers to aspects of this problem; but it also seeks to encourage everyone to think about the problem, from time to time, and think about how it interacts, in both directions, with more urgent particular and specialized problems of life and thought. Critical fundamentalism sets out to help improve bad philosophy wherever it is to be found: in social, political, commercial, legal, financial, and international life; and especially in academia, in institutions of learning, so that they become devoted to enhancing the capacity of people to learn how to achieve what is of genuine value in this brief life of a few decades if we are fortunate. Critical fundamentalism does everything it can to bring about the revolution in our universities we so urgently need. If taken up by mainstream philosophy, it might really have an impact, and begin to transform universities for the better, in both intellectual and humanitarian terms, and thus, enable humanity to learn how, after the grim failures and horrors of the last century and this one, to make progress to a better world. -/- . (shrink)

This essay claims that a rupture between two languages permeates human rights discourse in contemporary Anglo-American legal thought. Human rights law is no exception. The one language is written in the sense that a signifying relation inscribed by institutional authors represents concepts. Theories of law have shared such a preoccupation with concepts. Legal rules, doctrines, principles, rights and duties exemplify legal concepts. One is mindful of the dominant tradition of Anglo-American conceptual jurisprudence in this regard. (...) Words have been thought to copy ready-made concepts. Acts of intellectualisation and the accompanying analytic technique have excluded a consideration of a very different sense of legal language. The second sense of a language concentrates upon unwritten acts of meaning which lack a discrete and assignable author. This essay aims to unconceal the importance of an unauthored language. Drawing from Edmund Husserl’s early writings, particularly his Logical Investigations, I shall argue that an unwritten language embodies the written language with acts of meaning. An act of meaning confers one’s experiential body into the content of a concept signified in a written language. In order to understand the importance of such pre-legal acts of meaning in human rights laws, I begin by outlining how universal human rights have been signified as universal by virtue of their content-independence. I then raise the problem of the exclusion of social-cultural phenomena as elements of human rights laws. The clue to this exclusionary character of human rights law rests in the analytic leap from an unwritten to a written legal language. The essay then addresses the effort to link legality with the social world: namely, the effort of grounding legality in a social convention. I examine how a social convention itself is conceptualized, leaving the remainder of acts of meaning. This failure of social conventions to access social-cultural phenomena encourages me to turn to acts of meaning as such acts were understood by Edmund Husserl in his earlier works. Meaning-constituting acts exist prior to intuitions and prior to social conventions. This priority exists analytically as well as phenomenologically. In order to exemplify this prior character of acts of meaning, I retrieve Antigone’s experiential knowledge in Sophocles’ Antigone. Antigone’s unwritten laws are characterized by an absence of mediating concepts. I then identify several elements of an act of meaning in an unwritten language: the experiential body as the source of the acts of meaning, praeiudicia (prejudgements), collective memories, the act character of meaning, and the act of interpretation of social behaviour. My final section raises the prospect of whether human rights can be considered universal if acts of meaning are that important in the identity of a law. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights asserts that governments are morally obliged to promote health and to provide access to quality healthcare, essential medicines and adequate nutrition and water to all members of society. According to UNESCO, this obligation is grounded in a moral commitment to promoting fundamental human rights and emerges from the principle of social responsibility. Yet in an era of ethical pluralism and contentions over the universality (...) of human rights conventions, the extent to which the UNESCO Declaration can motivate behaviors and policies rests, at least in part, upon accepting the moral arguments it makes. In this essay I reflect on a state's moral obligation to provide healthcare from the perspective of Islamic moral theology and law. I examine how Islamic ethico-legal conceptual analogues for human rights and communal responsibility, ḥuqūq al-’ibād and farḍ al-kifāyah and other related constructs might be used to advance a moral argument for healthcare provision by the state. Moving from theory to application, I next illustrate how notions of human rights and social responsibility were used by Muslim stakeholders to buttress moral arguments to support American healthcare reform. In this way, the paper advance discourses on a universal bioethics and common morality by bringing into view the concordances and discordances between Islamic ethico-legal constructs and moral arguments advanced by transnational health policy advocates. It also provides insight into applied Islamic bioethics by demonstrating how Islamic ethico-legal values might inform the discursive outputs of Muslim organizations. (shrink)

Endangered species are objects of intense scientific scrutiny and political conflict. This article focuses on the interplay among human-nonhuman relations, knowledge production, and the politics of endangerment. Advancing a historical ontology of endangerment, it highlights the role of transforming the nonhuman world in the coming to be of new objects of environmental knowledge. Such knowledge can provide the basis for credible claims of endangerment, facilitating mobilizations against the very human-nonhuman relations that produced it. An in-depth case study (...) of the delta smelt, an endangered species of fish caught in the center of California’s “water wars,” shows how changes in the instrumentalization of the nonhuman environment can produce new knowledge of nature that allows actors to make claims and form coalitions that would be otherwise inconceivable. Because its sole habitat is the hub of California’s water delivery system, efforts to save the species from extinction have reduced flows to farms and cities, fomenting conflict between environmentalists and water users. This article demonstrates that the taxonomic classification of the delta smelt as a species and evidence of its decline arose directly from the reengineering of California’s rivers for extractive ends. Ironically, the knowledge on which environmental advocates relied was a product of the instrumental relation to nature that they sought to transform. (shrink)

Human science researchers tend to be targeted for critique on the grounds that their approach is too individualistic to take due cognisance of societal and political influences. What is accordingly advocated is that the phenomenological and so-called romantic theories should be abandoned in favour of analytic or continental theories that have as their main focus the system, the group, the society, and the various influences of the social world on the existential reality of the individual.

In recent years, social scientists have turned their critical lens on the historical roots and contours of their disciplines, including their politics and practices, epistemologies and methods, institutionalization and professionalization, national development and colonial expansion, globalization and local contestations, and their public presence and role in society. The Social Sciences in the Looking Glass offers current social scientific perspectives on this reflexive moment in the social sciences. Examining sociology, anthropology, philosophy, political science, legal theory, (...) and religious studies, the volume's contributors outline the present transformations of the social sciences, explore their connections with critical humanities, analyze the challenges of alternate paradigms, and interrogate recent endeavors to move beyond the human. Throughout, the authors, who belong to half a dozen disciplines, trace how the social sciences are thoroughly entangled in the social facts they analyze, and are key to helping us understand the conditions of our world. Contributors. Chitralekha, Jean-Louis Fabiani, Didier Fassin, Johan Heilbron, Miriam Kingsberg Kadia, Kristoffer Kropp, Nicolas Langlitz, John Lardas Modern, Álvaro Morcillo Laiz, Amín Pérez, Carel Smith, George Steinmetz, Peter D. Thomas, Bregje van Eekelen, Agata Zysiak. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Criticism of Culture and the Culture of Criticism:At the Intersection of Postcolonialism and Globalization TheoryRevathi Krishnaswamy (bio)Why have culture in general and literature in particular emerged as key terms in critical theory today? Are we witnessing a dissolution of these categories similar to the earlier dissolution of the category of history, or are we witnessing an entirely novel consolidation of these categories? Has materialism essentially changed the semiotic (...) such that culture is now simply another commodity available for consumption on the world market, or has the semiotic radically subsumed the social such that cultural representation has become one with material reality itself? Has the relationship between the cultural and the economic altered in ways yet untheorized? Finally, what exactly does the culturalist turn in critical theory mean for the practice of postcolonial cultural/literary studies? And precisely what does it portend for the ongoing politics of decolonization?1 I shall attempt to engage these questions by focusing on two dominant theoretical discourses that regulate contemporary knowledge production in the humanities and social sciences: postcolonialism and globalization. While the "culturalist turn" in contemporary criticism has infected many disciplines, these two theoretical fields have been most influential in asserting the primacy or the constitutive role of the cultural in history, economics, and politics. Yet there has so far been relatively little explicit or systematic scrutiny of the links between postcolonialism and globalization theory.2The links are at once considerable and complicated. Despite differences in disciplinary origin (globalization theory in the social sciences, particularly sociology, and postcolonial theory in the humanities, particularly literary criticism), both discourses emerge at the intersection of imperialism, capitalism, and modernity. Both are concerned with the effects of unequal power relations between different geopolitical locations on the globe: postcolonial theory focuses primarily on a (Eurocentric) colonial past and studies how subaltern practices and productions in the non-Western peripheries respond to Western domination, while globalization theory concentrates mainly on [End Page 106] an (Americocentric) post/neocolonial present and examines how contemporary Western practices and productions affect the rest of the world. Furthermore, both theoretical paradigms have sought to question the universality attributed to Western modernity in metropolitan developmental theory by drawing attention to premodern, nonmodern, or alternatively modern formations in the margins. This attempt to dislocate Western modernity (from the theoretical center) has typically taken the form of dismantling those categories deemed to be central to the narrative of Western modernity—categories such as "nation," "nation-state," "culture" and so on. Consequently, both postcolonial and globalization studies have frequently focused on various forms of economic, political, social, and cultural flows that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state and operate in a deterritorialized or transnational fashion. Through these accounts, postcolonial theory has emphasized the cultural basis of history (the cultural constructedness of history as well as the archival value of cultural productions)3 while globalization theory, in turn, has highlighted the cultural basis of the economic (the economic value of cultural productions as well as the cultural production of economic value).But "besides their shared cultural grammar," the relationship between globalization and postcolonialism "is not very clear," notes Simon Gikandi in "Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality," a provocative essay that represents one of few attempts to explicitly articulate the relationship between the two discourses [628]. It is indeed unclear whether contemporary globalization theory has been made possible by the postcolonial challenge to older Eurocentric forms of globalization premised on the centrality of the nation and narrated in terms of modernization or whether postcoloniality itself is a consequence of a globalization premised on the marginalization of the nation, especially in the domain of the cultural and the imaginary. It is unclear whether the postcolonial and the global are one and the same, whether the postcolonial precedes and provides the foundations for global or transnational cultural studies [Eng and Stratton], or whether globalization created the historical and material conditions that both enabled the production of postcolonial theory and eroded its political purchase through incorporation into the Western academy [Ahmad]. What is clear, however, as Gikandi recognizes, is that the cultural and the literary have risen to new levels of prominence in both theoretical fields.The... (shrink)

A common view of politics is that it is reducible to applied ethics. If politics, in a classic phrase, is about “who gets what, when, and how,” then the task of normative political theory would simply be to tell us who is morally entitled to get whatever the “what” is in that statement.This view, however, can easily reduce politics to a dizzying vortex of actions to assess from an ethical perspective. And while the task of moral philosophy may be (...) precisely to articulate principles by which to pass such judgment, the focus of political theory lies elsewhere.To study and assess politics means attending to the institutional frameworks and structural conditions that enable or constrain human action to begin with. The question for normative political theory, in other words, is whether the organizational structure of a given society—embodied in its decision-making procedures, its distribution of power, and its defining patterns of production, reproduction, and distribution—is defensible or not.This question of justice in the institutional makeup of society has not been entirely ignored in animal rights literature. Animal advocates have always been clear about the massive societal ramifications of dismantling the speciesist order. Likewise, rights theorists and activists have often proposed concrete legal measures for improving the protection of animals, be it by piecemeal welfare reform in animal agriculture, by the abolition of specific practices in biomedical research, or by seeking the equivalent of human rights for select species like great apes or dolphins. The field has also seen fierce debate among animal advocates about the appropriate strategies for engaging with the state and the legal system.Nonetheless, most discussions have been about what it means to treat individual animals with respect, and not about what is required of a political order aspiring to just treatment of all species. In fact, it is only in the last decade that the issue of political justice has taken up a place at the center of animal ethics.Though the field is still developing, we may take it as a sign of maturity that it can now sport its first “short introduction” book: Alasdair Cochrane's Should Animals Have Political Rights? (2020). Its appearing as part of the Polity Press series Political Theory Today further attests to the book's timeliness.The starting point of Cochrane's book—and of political animal studies in general—is that political relations between humans and other animals are not optional but inevitable. Other animals live among us, and the way we organize our societies has a massive impact on the lives of other sentient animals both inside and outside the borders of our human communities. Assuming that these creatures possess intrinsic value as experiencing individuals with morally relevant interests, the question seems inescapable: What kind of polity can accommodate for the multispecies character of our communities and embody justice for all sentients? Cochrane's answer is largely the same as the one he offered in his previous book, Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018), where he laid out his full vision of a postnational and species-neutral “cosmozoopolis.”The present book is much more concentrated and written as an accessible introduction for readers new to the field. Over seven short chapters, Cochrane reconstructs his argument for an interspecies democracy by assessing a series of arguments and propositions drawn from previous literature on the topic.The first notion to be scrutinized is the popular idea that animal welfare legislation is enough to secure respect for animals. Here, Cochrane acknowledges that welfarism goes some way toward safeguarding animal interests, but he also stresses that its historical record has been disheartening. Welfarism protects animals only insofar as their protection coincides with human interests, and this is far from enough to ensure respect for the animals’ intrinsic value.The second line of argument tries to push beyond welfarism by claiming constitutional protection for animals. By this move, reformers hope to place animal interests on an equal footing with human interests and prevent the overriding of the former in the name of human entitlements (to property, artistic expression, freedom of science, and so forth). Looking at real-world cases, however, Cochrane finds that these constitutional provisions tend to be sidelined when they come into conflict with the interests of big agribusiness.Noting that more than constitutional protection is needed, Cochrane turns to a third set of arguments about legal personhood for animals. Winning personhood for animals would certainly constitute a radical step toward equalizing the interests of different species. Nonetheless, Cochrane argues that personhood alone would be insufficient. Intrinsic value, to him, cannot be fully respected unless animals win the political right to have their interests factor into society's articulation of the public good. As sentient beings, we can all make a claim on the political communities we are part of to not only recognize us as members but furnish us with the means to live well.The fourth and final step for Cochrane is to argue that democratic representation for animals is necessary for realizing these political membership rights. Without representation, he contends, political rights risk being watered down, leaving animals with much less than they are entitled to as sentient beings. Cochrane critically discusses several different models for how this representation could be organized. While he is partial to a system where specially trained human representatives are tasked with voicing the animals’ interests in the legislative process, he leaves many of the practicalities open for future experimentation.Readers familiar with the field of political animal studies will find little new in Should Animals Have Political Rights? For students new to the field, however, Cochrane's book does an excellent job introducing the main issues in a very accessible format. Students of “regular” political science will also benefit from the book's fresh challenge to the discipline's understanding of “the political” as well as its important insights into the relationship between individual and political rights. (shrink)

The Pedagogical Contract explores the relationship between teacher and student and argues for ways of reconceiving pedagogy. It discloses this relationship as one that since antiquity has been regarded as a scene of give-and-take, where the teacher exchanges knowledge for some sort of payment by the student and where pedagogy always runs the risk of becoming a broken contract. The book seeks to liberate teaching and learning from this historical scene and the anxieties that it engenders, arguing that there are (...) alternative ways of conceiving the economy underlying pedagogical activities. Reading ancient material together with contemporary representations of teaching and learning, Yun Lee Too shows that apart from being conceived as a scene of self-interest in which a professional teacher, or sophist, is the charlatan who cheats his pupil, pedagogy might also purport to be a disinterested process of socialization or a scene in which lack and neediness are redeemed through the realization that they are required precisely to stimulate the desire to learn. The author also argues that pedagogy ideally ignores the imperative of the conventional marketplace for relevance, utility, and productivity, inasmuch as teaching and learning most enrich a community when they disregard the immediate material concerns of the community. The book will appeal to all those who understand scholarship as having an important social and/or political role to play; it will also be of interest to literary scholars, literary and cultural theorists, philosophers, historians, legal theorists, feminists, scholars of education, sociologists, and political theorists. Yun Lee Too is Assistant Professor of Classics, Columbia University. She is the author of Rethinking Sexual Harassment;The Rhetoric of Identity in Socrates: Text, Power, Pedagogy; and The Idea of Ancient Literary Criticism, forthcoming; and coeditor, with Niall Livingstone, of Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning. (shrink)

This volume provides Dilthey's most mature and best formulation of his Critique of Historical Reason. It begins with three "Studies Toward the Foundation of the Human Sciences," in which Dilthey refashions Husserlian concepts to describe the basic structures of consciousness relevant to historical understanding. The volume next presents the major 1910 work The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences. Here Dilthey considers the degree to which carriers of history--individuals, cultures, institutions, and communities--can be articulated as (...) productive systems capable of generating value and meaning and of realizing purposes. Hegel's idea of objective spirit is reconceived in a more empirical form to designate the medium of commonality in which historical beings are immersed. Any universal claims about history need to be framed within the specific productive systems analyzed by the various human sciences. Dilthey's drafts for the Continuation of the Formation contain extensive discussions of the categories most important for our knowledge of historical life: meaning, value, purpose, time, and development. He also examines the contributions of autobiography to historical understanding and of biography to scientific history. The finest summary of Dilthey's views on hermeneutics can be found in "The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Manifestations of Life." Here, Dilthey differentiates understanding relative to three kinds of manifestations of life. After giving his analysis of elementary understanding, he examines the role of induction in higher understanding and interpretation, and the relevance of transposition and re-experiencing for grasping individuality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 491 adequacy of his ideas. Yet our view of a person's character can govern our view of what he is trying to do. More specifically, if we think Dewey never completely abandoned the idealistic standpoint with its emphasis upon the harmony of self and community realization, that he sought out easy solutions to tough moral problems, we will not regard his work as making an honest attempt (...) even to face these problems. (Coughlan is very sympathetic to Randolph Bourne's criticism of Dewey on this point.) Viewing Dewey in this way, one is tempted to come to Coughlan's conclusion that there is an ambiguity in Dewey's philosophy about how values are created and, moreover, that this conclusion "haunts any philosophy.., that does not allow itself to appeal to some transcendent source" (pp. 161-162). By the time we reach this latter conclusion we have forgotten that the aim of Dewey's moral philosophy is not to point to some transcendent source that tells us what is "right" to do. Indeed, to the extent that we appeal to such a source, we are apt to ignore the existent factors that are responsible for creating the problem. Put another way, Dewey's standpoint requires that we reject the view that one of the parties to a moral conflict is wrong because he holds the wrong moral rule and the other right because he holds to some rule that truly tells us what we "ought" to do. Instead, he maintains that the origin of the conflict is within the situation itself, and the only way out of the conflict (if there is a way out) is to take advantage of or even reconstruct the factors in the situation. Instrumentalism is the position, itself always open to revision and reconstruction on particular points, that the philosopher can offer an interpretation of moral and political problems that makes them more amenable to resolution. The philosopher, unlike the casuist, cannot tell us what to do. He attempts to provide a conception of ourselves and our social situation that will enable us to go about doing. On specific matters, Coughlan uncovers much new and interesting information. To list only a few items: he points to the possible influence of a minister named Newman Smyth on Dewey's short-lived philosophy of "dynamic intuitionalism" as developed toward the end of the important 1884 paper, "The New Psychology." He gives the most complete account so far of Dewey's unsuccessful "Thought News" experiment at Michigan and of the early development of the organic circuit theory. He tells us something of the details of Vermont life that would tend to dispel the simplistic notion that Dewey's interest in democracy was a product of his growing up there. And--most interesting of ail--a fascinating chapter on the early life of Mead and his friend Castle reveals that at one point Mead was so reduced to despair at the prospect of a cold universe governed by the laws of Newtonian physics that he simply rid himself of it by maintaining that space is simply a construction of the optic nerve: "the three dimensions simply rest upon it!" (p. 128). It was a tough time to try to become a successful philosopher. His tendency to speculate about Dewey's motives aside, Coughlan has given us the most complete and carefully worked out treatment of the early years of Dewey's life. DONALD F. KOCH Michigan State University Human Reafity and the Social World: Ortega's Philosophy of History. By Oliver W. Holmes. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975. Pp. xi + 175. $12.50) Professor Holmes's study in intellectual history is an inquiry into the interrelationship of Ortega's social and intellectual experiences with the formation of his ideas. In the author's own words: "This essay attempts a systematic analysis of Ortega's philosophy of human reality, the social world, and history. The unified analysis of his philosophy drew heavily upon the traditions of historicism, phenomenology, and existentialism. Such was the influence of these philosophical traditions that Ortega became, at once, critic and representative of their respective positions, problems, and solutions" (p. vii). 492 HISTORY... (shrink)

The new critical edition of the works and correspondence of Jeremy Bentham is being prepared and published under the supervision of the Bentham Committee of University College London. In spite of his importance as jurist, philosopher, and social scientist, and leader of the Utilitarian reformers, the only previous edition of his works was a poorly edited and incomplete one brought out within a decade or so of his death. Eight volumes of the new Collected Works, five of correspondence, and (...) three of writings on jurisprudence, appeared between 1968 and 1981, published by the Athlone Press. Further volumes in the series since then are published by Oxford University Press. The overall plan and principles of the edition are set out in the General Preface to The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, which was the first volume of the Collected Works to be published.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham's best-known work, is a classic text in modern philosophy and jurisprudence. First published in 1789, it contains the important statement of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy and a pioneering study of crime and punishment, both of which remain at the heart of contemporary debates in moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory. Printed here in full is the definitive edition, edited by the distinguished scholars J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. An introductory essay by Hart, first published in 1982 and a widely acknowledged classic in its own right, is reprinted here. It contains an important analysis of Bentham's principle of utility, theory of action, and an account of the relationship between law and morality.A new introduction by the leading Bentham scholar F. Rosen, specially written for this Clarendon Paperback edition, provides students with a helpful survey of Bentham's main ideas and an extensive bibliographical study of recent critical work on Bentham. Professor Rosen's essay also contains a new analysis of the principle of utility in Bentham's philosophy which is compared with its use in Hume and J. S. Mill. (shrink)

The German Democratic Republic was in existence for 41 years. A single generation spent its whole professional life there – namely those born in the early 1930s who carried this state’s hopes. With Karl Mannheim’s notion of generations as a unit in the sociology of knowledge in mind, this article describes this generation’s typical experiences from the point of view of a particularly telling group: economists at the Humboldt University of Berlin. I present their socialization in Nazi Germany, their formative (...) years in the aftermath of the Second World War that led to their choice of a politically driven profession, their studies during the first years of the GDR, when Stalinism was still the dominating dogma, and their commitment to a state career when writing their dissertations and habilitations. Ready to shoulder Honecker’s regime, their daily lives as professors were characterized by continuing attempts to reform teaching and research. In 1989 the ultimate reform transpired, and it encompassed the end of the state as well as of their professional careers. This narrative historicizes, on an experiential level, a tension often noted in GDR research, that between the ideological and productive functions of knowledge in socialism, that is, between loyalty and relevance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal AuthorityThomas J. BushlackMinisters of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority Jean Porter Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 368 pp. $30.00Jean Porter’s most recent book is the fruit of her participation with the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion since 2005. In this project she undertakes two interrelated tasks. First, she (...) provides compelling reasons for Christian ethicists to engage in questions internal to the discipline of jurisprudence. Second, she demonstrates how a natural law theory grounded in the work of the medieval scholastics can address some of the questions of contemporary jurisprudence. Readers familiar with her previous work will be delighted that she has extended her constructive account of natural law into the realms of jurisprudence and in the process also engages cultural psychology, rhetoric, political philosophy, and international law.Porter begins her engagement with jurisprudence in chapter 1 by noting a paradox recognized by many legal philosophers in the Anglophone world. Legal systems, as they have developed in the West, are characterized by a high degree of autonomy and independence vis-à-vis other social dynamics such as politics or morality. At the same time, however, no legal system can function in complete isolation from considerations of politics and morality. How can we account for the paradoxical autonomy of legal authority? Porter suggests that a scholastic account of natural law can provide a rationally defensible solution to this paradox by developing an account of natural authority (in chapter 2).The force of Porter’s argument rests on the capacity of her account to justify political and legal authority as a natural expression of the authority that any community exercises vis-à-vis its individual members. A community’s authority over its members is justified on the grounds that in prescribing or prohibiting particular acts, it must appeal to claims that could potentially be recognized as justifiable by any rational member of that community. The concept that creates this important hinge between an individual’s good and the good of the community is, of course, the common good. Scholars interested in the concept of the common good will find that her reflection upon it is both rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and applied with fresh insight to the realm of politics (chapter 3) and law (chapter 4). [End Page 210]One potential objection to Porter’s account of natural law could arise in response to her insistence that natural inclinations “underdetermine” the normative content of a natural law morality, leaving her account open to charges of cultural relativism or of being merely descriptive as opposed to normative. However, in this work she is able to turn these criticisms into assets for her account of natural law. She shows (successfully, I believe) how her theory of natural law is able to account for the plurality of moral, political, and legal systems that exist in our world today while still providing normative grounds for critiquing existing social systems. And in chapter 5 she demonstrates how nonderogable, jus cogens principles can be developed from her account of natural law and applied to the field of international law and human rights. In fact, the final section left me hungry for further development of her insights regarding the relationship between natural and international law.This book is written with the same rigorous logic and careful research that has made Porter one of the leading scholars of natural law theory in the field today. As such, this book would be suitable for academics in a wide variety of fields, such as law, political theory, and of course Christian ethics, or for advanced graduate students. It is most certainly a groundbreaking work for demonstrating how a theological account of natural law can engage in constructive dialogue with legal theory and politics at both a theoretical and a practical level.Thomas J. BushlackUniversity of St. ThomasCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Human rights make a universal claim that has often been suspected of expressing western cultural imperialism. Yet even a mere perusal of the history of human rights in Europe and North America reveals that human rights cannot be characterized as the obvious crystallization of occidental culture as a whole. Instead they were first propounded during the modernity as a response to the normative crises occasioned by Christian religious division in a society of developing pluralism. Human rights (...) formulated the basis for a new social contract between free and equal holders of rights in opposition to religiously motivated civil wars and the accumulation of absolutist dominion.Since pluralism and multi-culturalism in a more closely knit world order has become an inescapable reality, the idea of human rights, understood as the recognition of plurality and differences on the basis of equal freedom, could be the foundation for international orientation. Human rights could provide the foundation for consensus, however, only if the limits of their normative claim are clear. As the ethos of freedom inherent to human rights is oriented toward political-legal standards, it is not intended to replace the plurality of any developed religious or cultural ethos. But as human rights secure political-legal equality of rights to express and develop differing ideas and cultural forms, they do affect internal individual recognition of religious and cultural societies, from which they demand openness toward reform and willingness to communicate. Menschenrechte machen einen universalen Anspruch geltend, der indes oft als Ausdruck eines westlichen Kulturimperialismus verdächtigt wird. Ein Blick auf die Geschichte der Menschenrechte in Europa und Nordamerika zeigt freilich, daß Menschenrechte gerade nicht als selbstverständlicher Ausfluß der abendländischen Kultur im ganzen angesehen werden können. Vielmehr sind sie erst in der Neuzeit aufgekommen, und zwar als Antwort auf die normativen Krisen in der im Gefolge der christlichen Glaubensspaltung pluralistisch werdenden Gesellschaft. Gegen religiös motivierte Bürgerkriege wie gegen die Anmaßung absolutistischer Herrschaft formulieren die Menschenrechte die Grundlage eines neuen Gesellschaftsvertrages zwischen freien und gleichen Rechtsgenossen.Da Pluralismus und Multikulturalismus in der immer stärker vernetzten Weltgesellschaft vielerorts unausweichliche Realität geworden sind, vermag die menschenrechtliche Leitidee, nämlich die Anerkennung von Pluralität und Differenz auf der Basis gleichberechtigter Freiheit, heute auch international zur Orientierung zu dienen. Menschenrechte können indes nur dann konsensstiftend wirken, wenn ihr normativer Anspruch auch in seinen Grenzen deutlich wird: Da sich das menschenrechtliche Freiheitsethos vornehmlich auf politisch-rechtliche Standards richtet, zielt es nicht darauf ab, die Pluralität der gewachsenen religiösen oder kulturellen Ethosformen zu ersetzen. Indem Menschenrechte die gleichberechtigte Äusserung und Entfaltung unterschiedlicher Überzeugungen und Kulturformen politisch-rechtlich sichern, wirken sie freilich auch auf die innere Selbstwahrnehmung religiöser und kultureller Gemeinschaften zurück, denen sie Reformoffenheit und Kommunikationsbereitschaft abverlangen. (shrink)

Regardless of unpredictable and contingent geopolitical events such as last year’s surprising rejection of the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, this coming year will certainly witness a large surge in patriotism. The Winter Olympics in February, and the World Cup in the summer, both promise to whip national sentiments into a fever pitch. One other thing is certain, though: journals of philosophy and ethics will continue to debate the virtues of cosmopolitanism, as this number of Ethical Perspectives does (...) through its contributions below.Why is this? Why do philosophers and academics hold on to this idea of cosmopolitanism, an idea utterly lacking in the convictions of the general public? Is it perhaps because the first cosmopolitans were in fact philosophers? The first to identify himself as a cosmopolitan was Diogenes the Cynic, and Plato’s dialogues paint many of the Sophists in cosmopolitan hues. Although people generally support the idea of internationalism as far as it promotes trade, travel, and football tournaments, once it begins to meddle in internal affairs, as it does with outsourcing and transnational constitutions, they tend to fall back upon the patria. They killed Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, not the youth of the world.Whether it is the service and manufacturing industries of Asia and India ‘stealing’ American jobs, or widespread fears of Brussels’ legendary bureaucrats, the non-academic public consistently turns from its tepid embrace of cosmopolitanism to patriotism whenever threatened. Are we too quick to label this as self-interest or even selfishness? Or is there something else at work in the debate between cosmopolitanism and patriotism? Some approaches to cosmopolitanism are certainly guilty of an absolute removal of difference, of wishing away the nation state, of replacing it with an international body based on purely universal principles, and of wiping away the competencies of nations on many levels. The call for the world state can come across as an appeal for an anodyne and internationalist homogeneity based on a clinical morality that, for all its sensitivity, runs roughshod over the well-engrained cultural, legal, and social beliefs of many peoples.Clearly, this is what many Europeans fear, and to a large degree, Americans as well in their dislike for the International Court of Justice. Even the economic hegemony of outsourcing removes national power, and replaces it with pure economic rationality.Our contributors below do not advocate these reductions, although some may point to them. Key to each contribution below is sensitivity to the world as it is, to its need for difference even in the face of an ever-increasing globalisation that sometimes is connected with cosmopolitanism. Yet, every proponent of cosmopolitanism must sketch how it is possible in practice. Of course, an obvious problem is how to dwell consequently as a cosmopolitan. Not many contemporary cosmopolitans would be prepared to follow Diogenes’ commitment to rootlessness: living in exile after having been included in a forgery conviction aimed at his father, the ascetic Diogenes called a barrel his home. Such was his drive to live a levelled life that he cast away his only bowl upon seeing a poor peasant boy drinking from cupped hands. Today’s cosmopolitan leads a much more prosaic life, and hence the problem with cosmopolitanism begins as something mundane. Does not a cosmopolitan still pay national taxes? Does not a cosmopolitan still need a national passport and second country visas? But, the questions quickly turn ontological: how can one shed oneself of one’s nationality, of one’s belonging, as if it is just an accident of one’s own constitution, instead of as an important property of one’s own constitution? In other words, belonging is important: a citizen of the world still values citizenship. Clearly, the absolute cosmopolitan reduction is an absurdity: one is always rooted, in some sense. Even cosmopolitanism is rooted in a specific Western mindset, and is no self-evident preference of human existence.As Rudi Visker’s contribution so clearly shows through an investigation of the narcissism of minor differences, these questions revolve around the question of confrontation with alterity. What I am, in no small way plays off what I am not. I cannot be everything, if I am something. Freud’s analysis of minor differences reveals that members of a group identify with that group on the basis these minor differences. What is self-evident to a particular culture marks that culture off from another culture, a culture that by definition does not share the same set of the self-evident. To be a foreigner, as any ex-patriot can attest, is to stand outside of the self-evident, whether this means interpreting gestures, understanding commercial practices, or, as Freud would have it, staying on the correct side of national taboos. There is thus a dialectic of inner and outer, a dialectic which refuses a reduction of one to the other. As Visker puts it, recognising the stranger within oneself is quite different than recognising the stranger outside of oneself, and to confuse these as being the same is not only to misunderstand the very issue at stake, it is also a dangerous trivialisation of difference.But clearly, there is something viable and laudable in the idea of cosmopolitanism, since it stresses the universal moral community of humanity. Cosmopolitanism is an attempt to see all human subjects as subject to the same moral law. Indeed, the sort of federation to which cosmopolitanism leads, at least in a modified Kantian expression as Bert van Roermund tells us, even gives us good grounds to recognise the legitimacy and moral equivalence of states. Importantly, the international legal order does not draw its power from any supranational force, but from the choice of independent national actors to recognise it. Hence, this cosmopolitan order depends on nationhood, and good standing within this order depends on the degree to which a country decides to participate. Again, the universal here depends on well-rooted particularity, a particularity able to choose for the universal.What do we do, then, with outlaw nations, those nations that are hostile to the choice for the universal? Through a clear reading of Hegel, Paul Cobben proposes that the metric for a state’s legality is the measure to which it permits the moral freedom of its citizens to bloom. A free person requires a free legal order; only in such can a person obtain the full measure of human rights due. States that do not permit this blooming are illegitimate; they contradict the nature of the human person, and citizens dwelling under the yoke of these have the right to ask for outside assistance in removing this illegitimate power above them. However, for this plea to be met, two conditions must obtain: the oppressed people must have the wherewithal to form a political order after the removal of the illegitimate state, and the action must be grounded in the principles and support of a legal community, which in essence would be a world federation of states. In fact, it is morally incumbent upon all legal states to aim at such a world federation, upon pain of contradiction.Our duty to others does not end with the politically oppressed; the economically oppressed also lay a moral claim upon us. So, as Toon Vandevelde asks in his contribution, what about the global poor? The poor are hungry and in need of shelter and a future, but to address these issues at the level of rights is in a way heartless: what good does it do to legislate that everyone has the right to food, when this right can never be called upon, or enforced, in any meaningful sense? Moreover, approaches that demand non-prioritised generosity not only ignore the fundamental economic fact of scarcity, they also run the risk of creating the moral hazard of dependence on charity. The true cosmopolitan approach is the recognition of our common humanity and of our concomitant duty to help others as far as this help does not endanger us. This duty is compounded by the marginalisation of the poor through globalisation, a globalisation that they did not ask for. The extent of our help is indeterminate, but its direction is clear: it must aim to integrate those poor who wish it within our international systems, and so to ease their own transitions from poverty.Both Gil Anidjar and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher continue this theme of economy, but each from a highly specific viewpoint. Indeed, their contributions are perhaps somewhat darker, delving into an aspect of the unspoken underneath the choice for the universal. Anidjar begins with the relation between religion and economy within the interplay of Judaism and Christianity, whereas Bonnafous-Boucher focuses on the development of political economy through a Foucaultian lens. Although highly distinct contributions, both share the insight that the economy is now the central theme of our power structures, and that economy, isolated from questions of morality or justice, must likewise play a decisive role within the structure of cosmopolitanism, or, at minimum, the political unity of peoples. For, national government long ago ceded to a promiscuous mix of governance, and religion to economy. This nexus enthrones governance as an economic rationale stripped of all other trappings, and inscribes any possible cosmopolitanism within a framework of an aggressive capitalism, a kind of economic theology, a kind of hegemony in which state boundaries are essentially liquefied. Capital, after all, knows no boundaries. (shrink)

This book is a major new study of the doctrines of productivity and interest in Romanticism and classical political economy. The author argues that the widespread contemporary embrace of cultural historicism and the rejection of nineteenth-century conceptions of agency have hindered our study of aesthetics and politics. Focusing on the difficulty of coordinating paradigms of intellectual and material labor, Mieszkowski shows that the relationship between the imagination and practical reason is crucial to debates about language and ideology.From the Romantics (...) to Poe and Kafka, writers who explore Kant's claim that poetry "sets the imagination free" discover that the representational and performative powers of language cannot be explained as the products of a self-governing dynamic, whether formal or material. A discourse that neither reflects nor prescribes the values of its society, literature proves to be a uniquely autonomous praxis because it undermines our reliance on the concept of interest as the foundation of self-expression or self-determination. Far from compromising its political significance, this turns literature into the condition of possibility of freedom. For Smith, Bentham, and Marx, the limits of self-rule as a model of agency prompt a similar rethinking of the relationship between language and politics. Their conception of a linguistic labor that informs material praxis is incompatible with the liberal ideal of individualism. In the final analysis, their work invites us to think about social conflicts not as clashes between competing interests, but as a struggle to distinguish human from linguistic imperatives. (shrink)

Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics -/- 2015/3-4 -/- Editorial Dominique de Courcelles & Paul Ghils -/- This issue addresses the general concept of “spirituality” as it appears in various cultural contexts and timeframes, through contrasting ideological views. Without necessarily going back to artistic and religious remains of primitive men, which unquestionably show pursuits beyond the biophysical dimension and illustrate practices seeking to unveil the hidden significance of life and death, the following papers deal with a number of interpretations covering a (...) wide field extending from belief to theory, from emotions to concepts, from the wisdom of personal experience to the most sophisticated doctrines. Spirit and spirituality are indeed many-faceted notions. They may refer to the intricate world of the interacting spirits which inhabit living beings in animistic traditions, without excluding a “grand force” linking human beings within a dynamic whole on which their very existence rely . They also bear upon more atomistic and either/or approaches of Western philosophy, which have become embodied in Cartesian dualism against a monotheist background, to the point of freezing the essence of individuals and culminating in the extreme individualism that characterizes our contemporaries. However, this equally refers to the opposite conception of materialism, across times and cultures, from ancient India and Greece (Cārvāka, originally known as Lokāyata, or some Buddhist doctrines for the former, Democritus or Lucretius for the latter) to more contemporary materialistic schools, whether modern or postmodern. -/- The following papers look at the contrasting forms of the philosophy and spirit of the human factor set into a whole, with no artificial disjoint between the psychical and the physical levels, as Wittgenstein put it: “And how can a body have a soul?”. This approach is not unrelated to the notion of anthropocene examined in a recent issue of Cosmopolis, with provides another comprehensive framework open to a spiritual life emerging from the very environment that generated it. -/- *** The first section of this issue was edited by Dominique de Courcelles, director at the National French Research Centre (CNRS), whom we wish to thank for collecting relevant studies relating to the religious and political questions, with a view to focusing on the war of ideas inevitably waged behind images, concepts and perceptions, taking an asymmetrical approach. To the extent that they are mindful of global/local interactions and include representations, opinions and beliefs, such disciplines as philosophy, philology, history and social sciences can provide useful studies accounting for new practices in geopolitics and a fair diplomacy. -/- In her introduction, Dominique de Courcelles first poses the question of how the religious and political spheres interrelate, with their corresponding religious demands and humanistic values. She then suggests that the right question today may be breaking with the philosophy of human rights concerned with the defense of human beings against the hazards of arbitrary politics or the instrumental use of religion, in favour of a fair philosophy of humankind, a new humanism. This would consist in recognizing a common loyalty of all towards one interhuman, not only interstate community, to protect it from both the autonomy demanded by individuals and the instrumental use of minorities. -/- Considering the fact of diversity, so important today in terms of both politics and religion, Abdelhai Azarkan looks at the conditions under which tolerance could obtain the double status of right and duty. He revisits to two philosophers, John Locke and Voltaire, who thought about it from the historical reality of religious wars. The former made tolerance into a right, basing his analysis on the political-legal level, while the latter saw tolerance as a duty, from an analysis based on ethical-political criteria. -/- Mathieu Guidère examines what he calls semantic denominationalism, a term which implies religious attributes and identities, whichever national loyalties or personal belonging they may have at the same time. Since the early 2000s, thie phenomenon has expanded tremendously, compounded by the “war on terror” and the over media-oriented terrorist actions. Denominational expressions act as formal names for ordinary and high-profile players in domestic and foreign policies of democratic states. These systems reveal a receding secularization, while the powerful comeback of religious identities signals the failure of nation-states and the weakening of the humanist spirit. -/- Barbara De Poli retraces the history of a contemporary jihadism claiming its Islamic essence and asserting the truth of genuine coranic principles via the war on infidels, with a view to restoring the Caliphate. After defining the term jihad, she shows that even if this contemporary jiadism is spreading in the Muslim world, it radically departs from Islamic law and the received use of the term jihad, in so far as it is rooted in the early radical thinking of Islamic ideologues in the 20th century, starting with with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This current has been fueled by by international conflicts since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, in which the so-called Western countries bear a major responsibility. -/- Abderrazak Sayadi starts from the Tunisian experience to ask the question of humanist values and democracy within the relationships between the religious and political spheres. As a historian of religion, he is brought to demystify certain islamic principles and to paying attention to the reform of law, seeing the separation of religion and politics as a precondition to a successful democratic gamble and the establishment of a renewed humanism. -/- Dominique de Courcelles reminds us that getting a better knowledge of narrations and words makes it possible to better understand how logical and rhetorical thinking works for those who wage an asymetriccal war, re-enchanting and mystifying the world to better take control. As soon as 1932, an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud made it clear that, in order to free man from fatality and war, education understood as culture was fundamental. Such illustrations as the exécution of Oussama ben Laden and the Caliph’s speech in Mossoul show that a premiminary analysis of images and words is essential to a fair diplomacy conducted by people from civil society, whose culture and wisdom allow justice and force to speak together and better resist war. -/- Marcel Boisard thinks that on the day the guns fall silent, exhausted by war, we will not return to the state borders that have prevailed for a century as an outcome of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. It is time to prepare the “day after”, which will be a huge challenge. To this end, a summit of Middle-East nations is urgently needed to globally decide the fate of those peoples. On the condition that we know who the enemy is and accept to name it, to understand the history of the countries, groups and alliances, and to question any false or self-interested sense of certainty. -/- *** In the second section, Paul Schafer provides the author’s experiences to explain how culture, from the artistic to the biological, has the power to to open the doors to spirituality, from the inner self to the global environment. He asks himself whether a relative permanence of spirituality can arise from the specific moments that characterize it. Laurent Ledoux synthesizes the conclusion of a symposium held on 22 January 2015 on the links between philosophy and management, on the basis of the spiritual dimension conceived as “natural” and the answers it may suggest to the issues that face the organizations in a “contemporaniversal” world. Jacques Rifflet makes that question in a secular perspective, based on the wellsprings of personal commitment before it can be caught by any religious creed or scientific theory. In this sense spirituality, in alliance with reason, both inspires human consciousness and illuminates its destiny. Sami Aldeeb asks himself whether Islam can be reconciled with human rights. Caught between the belief in an absolute and final Word descended from the sky, and evidence showing that any religion is the creation of a given culture and a society situated in time and space, the Makkan and … contexts et médinois call for differentiated, if not opposite answers and exegeses. Bernard Carmona provides the outline of a dialogical framework, which is known to be a feature of debates between the various philosophical schools of classical India, exemplified here by the transdisciplinary perspective of debates within a Buddhist context. *** The articles not focused on the previous topic include a study by Landry Signé on China’s strategy, competing with the United States to control African resources. The author deals with the specific case of China’s rapprochement with Southern Sudan since Sudan was broken up. In the last paper, Goran Fejić and Rada Iveković, return to the essential role that women should play, and comments upon the role of some international legal instruments related in particular to the elimination of all forms of discrimination. The perspective is transnational and transethnic and is based on secular criteria, as regards nation-building and more generally society-building. Considering the persistence of widespread violence, whether in times of armed conflict or in times of peace, the question remains whether it is possible to fully implement rights and justice instruments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hugh Bredin I. A. RICHARDS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRACTICAL CRITICISM IN much of the English-speaking world, an essential component of literary studies is the exercise known as "practical criticism." The name, and to some extent the practice, originated in a book by I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, 1 in which he described an experiment conducted by him at Cambridge and elsewhere. In the experiment, undergraduate students of English (...) were given a number of unfamiliar poems, whose authorship was not revealed, and were asked to read and to submit written comments upon them. The result, in the words of one account, "was horrifying. Magazine poetasters were extravagandy praised, Donne, Hopkins, and Christina Rossetti firmly damned; every felicity was ridiculed, and every absurdity praised, by large minorities and even majorities."2 Richards himself did not respond to his discoveries in quite such a marked fashion as this, but he did betray the concern of someone in whom a longheld fear had been confirmed. He suggested that members of the Royal Society of Literature would have fared no better, and argued in general that an ability to read successfully — that is, with correct understanding and appropriate sensuous and emotive response — was rare and intermittent in even the most highly educated products of our schools and universities. He discerned a worsening of language performance compared with a few generations earlier, and advocated, as a corrective measure, widespread study of the theory of interpretation, and widespread training in the techniques thereof. This project he initiated himself in a subsequent work, Interpretation in Teaching.3 Richards's recommendations have not been adopted in general education practice, but they have been extremely influential in the pedagogy of literature; and it is generally said about other writers, such as Leavis, 26 Hugh Bredin27 Empson, and Brooks, that they have reinforced this influence. Practical criticism, as a teaching device, means the close and attentive reading of literary texts, usually poetry, usually by a small group, under the guidance of a tutor. As an examination method, it means the kind of test originally undergone by Richards's undergraduates. The end result ofthe practice — a result which, presumably, may or may not occur in the examination hall — is alleged to be "an opening up of the poem for what it can really be for us: a unique and fascinating experience, carefully wrought by its maker, and fully available only to those with the patience, as well as the sensibility, to recreate."* Practical Criticism is a most interesting work. The variety and divergence of views on the poems used for the experiment reveal unexpected and musty corners of the human spirit. Richards's diagnosis of the factors which may lead to errors in judgment and understanding is acute. His proposals for remedial action win our approval. What is puzzling, however, is that the result of the experiment should be a cause of surprise or dismay to anyone. What other result could there have been? Richards himselfremarked that "the precise conditions ofthis test are not duplicated in our everyday commerce with literature," and upon "the difficulty of judging verse without a hint as to its provenance."5 Yet he makes no concession to the fact that these conditions, with their attendant difficulty, must bear primary responsibility for the failings displayed by his students. His conviction was that the conditions helped to reveal defects in reading, and not, as seems more likely, that they helped to produce them. Any written text requires a context if it is to be fully understood. This is of course true of spoken language as well; and the extra complexity of poetry makes it especially susceptible to misinterpretation and misjudgment if taken in isolation. The first thing that any competent teacher will do with a poem is to provide a context — a period, a chronology, a social, political, religious, and intellectual background, a body of similar and contrasting works, works by the same and by related authors, linguistic and stylistic conventions, the relevant conceptions ofart and literature and their role in the world — all of this, and more. He will take it for granted that, as the student grows more deeply familiar with context, a context which... (shrink)

Preface The status of sovereignty as a highly ambiguous concept is well established. Pointing out or deploring, the ambiguity of the idea has itself become a recurring motif in the literature on sovereignty. As the legal theorist and international lawyer Alf Ross put it, “there is hardly any domain in which the obscurity and confusion is as great as here.” 1 The concept of sovereignty is often seen as a downright obstacle to fruitful conceptual analysis, carried over from its (...) proper setting in history to “plague and befog contemporary thought.” 2 . . . So contested is the concept that, rather than pursuing the contestation, many political theorists think we should give up so protean a notion. Granting that the debate on the relevance of sovereignty frustratingly oscillates between claims that it will either continue to exist or that it is about to disappear, forgetting it altogether, and thereby escaping this seemingly endless argument, can easily appear as the most urgent task for political theory . The following argument makes a case that the “urgent task” is not the abandonment of the concept of sovereignty, but an understanding of its essential philosophical nature as an integrated and evolving expression of practical reason. Sovereignty is neither ambiguous nor obscure once its fundamental presuppositions are laid bare and its many philosophical and historical manifestations shown to be the product, in actuality, of a single, dialectally dynamic but integrated set of metaphysical elements. This is the first of three arguments describing the evolution of international law as a manifestation of practical reason through an application of philosophical method to the source , locus , and scope of the concept of sovereignty. It moves from a dialectic balance favoring utility to a balance dominated by legal right to a dialectic of duty to humanity and nature. All three arguments are meant to be a contribution to the new field of International Legal Philosophy as defined by Phillip Allott. 4 This field combines a sensitivity to legal practice with an effort to understand the underlying philosophical determinants of empirical choice and behavior. One purpose of international legal philosophy is to “remove” from the minds of those who study the law what Diderot defined as “the sophism of the ephemeral,” and what Allott calls “the disempowering idea that what xii Preface happens to exist now is inevitable and permanent.” 5 A core imperative is to “reunderstand what it is to be a thinking being” 6 and to rediscover the dialectic between the private and the public as it determines, and is redetermined by, legal practice. This requires a “revolution in the human mind” 7 so that we may transcend the current dependence on positivist methods and empirical fact as an end-in-itself, and try to understand the underlying and more constant and essential ideas and inherent dialectics that constitute the substructure or “metaphysics” of international law. I will approach this “revolution” with the use of R. G. Collingwood’s philosophical method 8 and the philosophy of David Hume, applied to international law as an expression of practical reason. The goal of philosophical method is the construction of a comprehensive policy argument (CPA) for a public policy or legal issue. In addition to the conventional use of empirical models and their logic of investigation in the study of policy and law, CPA requires that an underlying philosophical logic of concepts be deciphered to identify the ideas within the issue, and their definition, overlap, and systematic interdependence. Philosophical method is a means with which to interpret and understand competing systematic and complete conceptual logics, existing at the core of an issue and pertinent to policy change. Philosophical method is therefore not meant to be a replacement for the empirical investigation of a policy or legal issue, or the use of scientific method in social studies. Rather, it is a complimentary and prerequisite method that seeks to transcend the limitations of positivism and present a more complete understanding of the philosophical presuppositions of positivist ideas like power, interest, or strategic rationality. Philosophical method is meant to be used with the facts of the policy or legal issue to match an illuminating logic of concepts with a pertinent logic of investigation . Within the CPA, the use of philosophical method and the metaphysics of a policy or legal issue is assumed to be critical to the full understanding of the overlapping concepts, dialectics, and scale of forms that determine, and are determined by, the empirical context of the policy or legal topic. Specifically, instead of utilizing bits and pieces of various theoretical arguments to address narrowly focused empirical questions, as positivism prescribes, I will address the evolution of international law as practical reason in three phases. Each will be approached through a single integrated logic of philosophical concepts from a particular philosopher (i.e., David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant). This philosophically holistic approach to the law is based on the assumption that only through the use of a single integrated argument in legal analysis can sovereignty, or any concept, be understood as a truly systematic and logical whole. A complete philosophical paradigm has a dialectic integrity and systematic logic that can more adequately describe the evolving essence of a concept like sovereignty. This approach also has the advantage of generating a number of distinct holistic descriptions of the law through the application of different philosophical systems, one at a time, to its factual structure. 9 Positivism does not seek Preface xiii holism, and rejects the idea that “theory” has such a characteristic. The essential or comprehensive substructure of any idea is therefore ignored in a method that recommends the observation of empirical problems through the use of whatever hodgepodge of theoretical elements is seen fit to frame its superstructure. This failure to deal with metaphysics has retarded both an essential understanding of international law as a species of legal system, and any holistic and dialectical conceptualization of its inherent concepts, like sovereignty. A second positivist convention expects modern theorists to create new theory rather than to refine and apply that of existing philosophy. This predisposition is driven by the positivist goal of discovery that ignores refinement as a possible purpose of philosophical analysis. Collingwood argues that philosophy must take that set of ideas already known and utilize existing systematic philosophical arguments to refine them so that they evolve closer to their essence as concepts. Considering this imperative, the idea of sovereignty can be assumed to have had valid usage for hundreds of years, over which time, the concept has evolved to mean different things, each a refinement of the definition that preceded it. Transcending positivism means that the scholar’s search is not for “new” material, but to decipher the metaphysical essence of a concept as it has been made manifest over time and context. These manifestations are rooted, and refined from, the known terms of that concept’s inherent idea(s). Rather than depending exclusively on positivism and its conventions, my work utilizes, in addition to Collingwood, the intact philosophical systems of Hume, Hegel, and Kant to trace the refinement of international law as a product of human practical reason. These paradigms, or integrated systems of logical concepts, will be applied to legal practice individually, so that each CPA can be deciphered separately. This provides a set of integrated and logically intact paradigms for the evolutionary stages of practical reason in international law. Because each argument is applied systematically, a deeper understanding of the source, locus, and scope in the development of law in general, and international law in particular, is possible where it is not with the application of various disconnected components of many theories. Each CPA based on Hume, Hegel, or Kant can then be used to describe a distinct context that its logic of concepts best illuminates; specifically, the (1) genesis, (2) contemporary dilemmas, and (3) future of the international legal system. By widening the perspective of international lawyers and policymakers, they can more easily perceive the dialectic of ideas that has created, and is refined by, the legal practice in which they participate. We also move toward Allott’s goal of “human self-perfecting.” 10 And, in addition, by providing a more complete knowledge of the origins of legal practice and its evolution, we illuminate the practical possibilities for what we might “choose to be” 11 in the future. To achieve this, the essential metaphysical elements of state sovereignty and its inherent evolutionary scale of forms will be deciphered and described. This will transform what appears to be a multitude of definitions and xiv Preface practical realizations of the concept of sovereignty into a set of interdependent manifestations of a single substructure, made of a single set of dialectic elements. The interpretation of international law through practical reason sorts and integrates a diverse and discordant literature and defines state sovereignty as a single concept evolving on a scale of forms that allows it to exhibit diverse character traits, all arising from different combinations of common and essential metaphysical elements. This approach, compared to positivist methods and legal realism, allows one to transcend current agreement that sovereignty is, at best, a narrowly focused set of empirical characteristics or, at worst, “organized hypocrisy.” 12 This method also encourages the scholar and practitioner to understand the predispositions and pitfalls of the concept of sovereignty, as well as its potential future paths, more effectively. The use of philosophical method to create policy paradigms out of preexisting philosophical systems and apply these to international law will be called Philosophical-Policy & Legal Design . This approach allows the use of preexisting and complete philosophical arguments that provide an adequate logic of concepts to chart the evolution of the idea of sovereignty along its scale of forms. An examination of the source of practical reason in human social convention with the employment of a philosophical-policy drawn from Hume’s logic of concepts about human nature will demonstrate this new approach. Why Hume? Because, up to now, without an adequate substructure we have arguments, like Brunne é’ s and Troope’s, 13 that may correctly identify international law as an “interactional” system, but cannot present any argument as to why it is, where this empirical reality comes from, or what its implications are for the future. Comparatively, Hume provides a logic of philosophical concepts that answers these concerns. First, he fulfills the requirements for a fuller understanding of the origin and evolution of law from social convention and the dependence of social convention on the human imperative for society. Second, he offers a more adequate delineation of the overlapping concepts of the law in terms of the ideas and institutions that deal with norms and justice (e.g., principle, process, practice, rule, power, interest). Third, he provides a fundamental understanding of the essential dialectics at the core of a conceptualization of the law with both unconscious and conscious human participation (i.e., passion. (shrink)

Discusses contemporary Confucianism's relevance and its capacity to address pressing social and political issues of twenty-first-century life. Condemned during the Maoist era as a relic of feudalism, Confucianism enjoyed a robust revival in post-Mao China as China’s economy began its rapid expansion and gradual integration into the global economy. Associated with economic development, individual growth, and social progress by its advocates, Confucianism became a potent force in shaping politics and society in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and (...) overseas Chinese communities. This book links the contemporary Confucian revival to debates—both within and outside China—about global capitalism, East Asian modernity, political reforms, civil society, and human alienation. The contributors offer fresh insights on the contemporary Confucian revival as a broad cultural phenomenon, encompassing an interpretation of Confucian moral teaching; a theory of political action; a vision of social justice; and a perspective for a new global order, in addition to demonstrating that Confucianism is capable of addressing a wide range of social and political issues in the twenty-first century. Tze-ki Hon is Professor of Chinese and History at City University of Hong Kong. He is the author of The Yijing and Chinese Politics: Classical Commentary and Literati Activism in the Northern Song Period, 960–1127, also published by SUNY Press; Revolution as Restoration: Guocui Xuebao and China’s Path to Modernity, 1905–1911; and The Allure of the Nation: The Cultural and Historical Debates in Late Qing and Republican China. Kristin Stapleton is Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 and Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family. (shrink)

ArgumentFor more than thirty years after World War II, the unconventional economist Kenneth E. Boulding was a fervent advocate of the integration of the social sciences. Building on common general principles from various fields, notably economics, political science, and sociology, Boulding claimed that an integrated social science in which mental images were recognized as the main determinant of human behavior would allow for a better understanding of society. Boulding's approach culminated in the social triangle, (...) a view of society as comprised of three main social organizers – exchange, threat, and love – combined in varying proportions. According to this view, the problems of American society were caused by an unbalanced combination of these three organizers. The goal of integrated social scientific knowledge was therefore to help policy makers achieve the “right” proportions of exchange, threat, and love that would lead to social stabilization. Though he was hopeful that cross-disciplinary exchanges would overcome the shortcomings of too narrow specialization, Boulding found that rather than being the locus of a peaceful and mutually beneficial exchange, disciplinary boundaries were often the occasion of conflict and miscommunication. (shrink)

This is the story of a seductive idea and its sobering consequences. The twentieth century brought a new cultural confidence in the social powers of invention – but also saw the advance of consumerism, world wars, globalisation and human-generated climate change. Techno-Fixers traces how passive optimism and active manipulations were linked to our growing trust in technological innovation. It pursues the evolving idea through engineering hubris, radical utopian movements, science fiction fanzines, policy-maker soundbites, corporate marketing, and consumer culture. (...) It explores how evangelists of technological fixes have proselytised their faith, and critically examines the examples and products of their followers. The new technological confidence mixed together beliefs that were simultaneously compelling and unsettling. As motor vehicles, electricity supplies and radio became part of modern life in the early decades of the century, it was hard to argue against the transformative effects and inevitability of such transitions. Like it or not, social consequences seemed to come inexorably with the Machine Age, the Space Age and the Information Age. This deterministic vision implied an ever more technological future with unavoidable social consequences. For many, innovative technologies promised appealing new lifestyles and powers. But for a narrower band of proponents – the first generation of technological fixers – wise engineering invention was touted as a guaranteed route to positive human benefits and societal progress. Socially-engaged engineers and designers argued that such improvements could be directed, hastened and amplified. These engineering adventurers argued that modern societies could be guided only by rational designers. They contended that adroit technological solutions could solve contemporary problems better than any traditional method, including economic initiatives, citizen education, political ideology, lifestyle changes, legal frameworks and moral guidance. Their seductive claims were tamed by more mainstream American enthusiasts, and eventually boiled down to the concept of the technological fix. Their shared confidence infused policy-makers, broadcasters and science popularisers. Trust in technological fixes shaped a new generation of managers and law-makers, engineers and educators, futurists and citizens – and continues to drive a new generation of techno-fixers today. This cultural wave, its promoters and detractors, have championed the promise and voiced concerns that we have inherited, still unresolved. This book tracks the hubristic influencers and weighs up the confidences and concerns associated with them: the dramatic potential for novel technologies to work alongside longer human traditions to meet our enduring ambitions – or to reshape society for the worse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Veritas Filia Temporis: Experience and Belief in Early Modern Culture *Brendan DooleyFew observers in the seventeenth century had any illusions about the reliability of political information imparted by the sources newly minted or voluminously increased during the course of the century. The newsletters appeared to be concocted from malicious gossip. 1The newspapers seemed to be published at the bidding of powerful political interests with little inclination to (...) tell the truth, 2and histories of recent events seemed to be based on faulty sources even when the writers endeavored to procure faithful accounts. “Truth is by nature elusive and slippery,” history theorist Agostino Mascardi admitted. All he could recommend as a defense for the inaccurate historian was the injunction against throwing the first stone: “Omnis homo mendax,” said David the holy king; and those who are such harsh critics of historians’ involuntary lies may well be astute trammelers of perfidy and deceit in their own lives.” 3He had no answer about historians who deliberately distorted the truth. In fact just when readers might have desired it most, from the earliest episodes of the Thirty-Years War to the last episodes of the Turkish Wars at the end of the century, the possibility of [End Page 487]gaining a realistic picture of the contemporary world seemed to be getting more and more remote.The argument of this article centers around a discussion of the cultural consequences of this late seventeenth-century trend. To some of the readers, writers, thinkers, and theorists in this period, the unreliability of information about their own time or about the past, however compounded by contemporary political and social circumstances, was nothing but a minor nuisance. To others it was a hint about the bad faith of the governments who influenced writers. To still others, this same unreliability raised deeply troubling questions about human nature and existence. It provided social and political reasons for historical skepticism, quite apart from one’s familiarity with Sextus Empiricus or the elite intellectual trends of the time. It placed everyday social and political reality in a new light, thus adding a more mundane element to the uneasy feeling produced by the new science and cosmology—the feeling, that is, of being borne along in uncontrollable currents whose exact nature the best minds nonetheless seemed incapable of understanding. It added to the disquiet produced by confessional disputes, suggesting that truth might be beyond human capacity to grasp. 4Not only in Italy but throughout Europe in the late seventeenth century this discussion will show, existing methods of ascertaining facts in political and military affairs both in the present and in past times came under a new sort of scrutiny as part of what some scholarship has regarded as no less than a wide-ranging “crisis of consciousness” at the threshold of the Enlightenment. 5The conclusion opens briefly onto the sequel of these episodes. The crisis was resolved at least in part by a corresponding movement for methodological change as well as by a reform of ideas about the proper place for intellectual improvisation in the formation of narrative in order to make historical writing persuasive as well as civically useful again. If the product of error and fraud was skepticism, the product of skepticism was modern historiography. 6 [End Page 488]History and ExperienceObviously, the elusiveness of political truth that helped touch off the late seventeenth-century crisis was no novelty of the age. Deliberate misinformation was a fully-recognized political strategy at least by the time that Machiavelli made it an explicit part of prudence by recommending the cultivation of good appearances and expressing his admiration for Pope Alexander VI and Ferdinand I of Spain as being the best liars of their time. 7In the late sixteenth century theorists all over Europe sought to join Machiavelli’s insights about the inner workings of state power to those of Tacitus in the light of conventional morality. 8In Italy it was the Piedmontese writer Giovanni Botero who, exploring these Tacitist perspectives in his Reason of State, expressed the fewest reservations about insisting on the propriety of a policy of state secrecy and misinformation. 9Florentine political theorist... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ARE THERE ECONOMIC RIGHTS? I 1]HE ISSUE OF whether there are any so-called " soia ~-~cono~ic r~~~ts," in addition to the so-called " civilpohtical nghts, · is not a new one. In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations app11oved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms that both those two types of claims are human rights. Since then some philosophers have been debating the (...) issue of whether claims to basic social-economic goods are rights at all. American Christians and theologians in general have not paid much attention to this until only recently, when the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops issued,a pastoral letter on Catholic social teaching and the U.S. economy (entitled Economic Justice for All), which gained much attention from the media. In this pastoral letter the U.S. Catholic bishops also affirm that every human being in every society has economic rights against all members of society, all private-sector institutions and government.1 As a Christian philosopher, in this paper I want to probe into the issues of whether there are economic rights from a Christian and philosophical perspective. This paper is intended to he both critical and constructive-on the one hand I shall criticize some positions which I find unconvincing, and on the other I shall attempt to articulate my own thought on this issue. Some clarification of terminology is necessary before I embark on my project. Ever since Wesley Hohfeld's monumental 1 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for AU: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, 1986), see sections 79-84. 703 704 PING-CHEUNG LO work in 1919 (Fundamental Legal Conceptions) it is a general practice among philosophers to distinguish claim-rights from liberty-rights. Throughout this paper, unless otherwise specified, the word "right" is used to designate claim-rights. Moreover, I am concerned only with moral rights rather than with legal rights, and largely with in rem rights (i.e., rights against individuals in,society or the world at large) rather than with in personam rights (i.e., rights against determinate individuals ). Therefore by "a right to x" I mean a morally valid or justified claim to x against individuals in society or the world at large as my entitlement or my due. Furthermore, the term " human right " is used to denote those moral rights that a person, simply as a human being, can have. They are usually supposed to include both civil-political rights (e.g., right to life, liberty, security) ·and social-economic rights (e.g., the right to food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, work, social security). As far as I know, there have been two major philosophical moves in criticizing the ideas of social-economic rights. The first one is set forth by Maurice Cmnston in the sixties.2 Besides giving a "political objection," he raises a three-fold "philosophical objection": social-economic rights do not possess the characteristics of (i) practicability, (ii) universality, and (iii) paramount importance, which he deems are the si,ne qua non of human rights. Though his criticisms are rather crude, most recent advocates of social-economic rights take them seriously and attempt to rebut his views.3 I do not have 2 Maurice Cranston, "Pope John XXIII on Peace and the Rights of Man," Political Quarterly 34 (Oct.-Dec. 1963), 380-90; "Human Rights, Real and Supposed," in Politioal Theory and the Rights of Man, ed. D. D. Raphael (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 43-53; "Human Rights: A Reply to Professor Raphael," in ibid., pp. 95-100. s D. D. Raphael, "Human Rights, Old and New," in ibid., pp. 54-67; David Hollenbach, Olaims in Oonftict: Retrieving and Renewing the Oatholic Human Rights Tradition (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), pp. 31-33; John Langan, "Defining Human Rights: A Revision of the Liberal Tradition," in Human Rights in the Americas: The Struggle for Consensus, ed., Alfred Hennelly and John Langan (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1982), ARE THERE ECONOMIC RIGHTS? 705 the time to go into these arguments here. I just want to,say that I find... (shrink)

I use the theory of the division of labor as a case-study in the logic of social explanation and to test the explanatory power of a new Aristotelian model for social theory. The classical political economists from Adam Smith to Karl Marx argue that the divisions of labor is both efficient and natural. I claim that this explanation suffers from a two-fold reductionism: the moral dimension of the division of labor is reduced to technical efficiency; and the (...) customary and stipulated dimensions of the division of labor are reduced to nature. This reductionism collapses two important Aristotelian distinctions: that between moral reason and technical reason ; and that between nature , custom , and deliberate stipulation . I revise these concepts in the light of modern natural, social and philosophical sciences into a framework for social theory: I show that, in human conduct, technical reason always presupposes moral reason; and I show that every social institution is the joint product of nature, custom, and stipulation: just as custom presupposes nature, so stipulation presupposes custom. I then use this framework to criticize Aristotle as well as classical political economy. By transcending the positivist dichotomy of ends and means, I restore moral reason to supremacy over technique. By transcending the Sophistic dichotomy between nature and convention, I restore custom to its rightful place at the center of social theory. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick provides a unique contribution to international studies, most especially to contemporary interdisciplinary studies of International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR). Peter provides a significant theoretical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of IL and IR not only as a critical thinker of modern law, but also as a critical thinker of the modern international. On the one hand, his supplementary critical legal thinking contributes to a ‘decolonial deconstructionist’ rethinking of the politics (...) of international law. His close reading of how modern international law (auto)grounds ‘itself’, for instance, offers a strident critique of the racist, imperial, and colonial lines of discrimination involved in the negative (auto)constitution of this (supposedly) universal legal being. On the other hand, he provides a conception of the ‘(inter)national’ which displaces conventional, modern understandings of the legal and political organization of ‘humanity’ and ‘the world’, problematizing their foundational assumptions and spatialized geometrical frames as being based on oppositional dualisms (‘inside/outside’, ‘national/international’, ‘empire/modernity’, ‘theological/secular’, etc.), while offering a deconstructionist engagement with the ‘constitutive outside’ of the modern (inter)national. As a form of postcolonial counter-archive, Peter’s work enacts a decolonial deconstruction of ‘our’ (inter)national ‘selves’, including the (inter)national commonality ‘itself’. Before an incalculable, quasi-ontological heteronomy, a dissymmetrical Law of originary sociability which I (re)articulate here with/as the ‘and’ of the world(s), Peter’s supplementary critical thinking of the (inter)national contributes to imagining the world, humanity, and our social being(s), including law and language, otherwise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking with Heidegger:Rethinking Environmental Theory and PracticeKevin Michael DeLuca (bio)Environmentalism is tired. It is a movement both institutionalized and insipid. The vast majority of Americans claim to be environmentalists while buying ever more SUVs, leaf-blowers, and uncountable plastic consumer goods. Indeed, environmentalism itself has become just another practice of consumerism, a matter of buying Audubon memberships, Ansel Adams calendars, and 'biodegradable' plastic bags with one's Sierra Club credit card. (...) As a practice of everyday life, environmentalism has devolved into another lifestyle choice.On the political front, carbon-copy blow-dried presidential candidates proclaim their allegiance to the environment, an allegiance that is more a sign of fealty to opinion polls than a concern with environmental issues. In the world of real-politic, environmental regulations are gutted as corporations write legislation for the politicians they have bought. Outspent and outmaneuvered, mainstream environmental groups preach at the altar of broken promises about the potential of lobbying and insider access while awaiting the blandishments of the next candidate. As [End Page 67] a political practice, mainstream environmentalism has degenerated into a marginal special-interest group.On the intellectual front, a confusing array of reform environmentalists, deep ecologists, social ecologists, ecofeminists, wilderness advocates, social justice activists, social constructionists, and Christian ecologists offer a cacophony of competing paradigms and programs while exchanging charges and countercharges of wrong-headedness and infidelity. If on the level of practice an exhausted environmentalism has achieved both institutionalism and irrelevance, intellectually environmentalism has reached several stasis points. This is crucial, for at a level that is unusual for social movements, environmentalism has always highlighted the importance of how we think about the environment, that ideas of nature are powerful because practices follow from ideas. In other words, how we think about nature guides how we act toward nature. In the midst of this melee I want to suggest we reconsider the work of Martin Heidegger.I want to think Heidegger in distress: in the distress of machination; in the distress of the technological enframing of the earth; in the distress of the environmental crisis. In rejecting a Heideggerian hermeneutics, a piety to textual exegesis, I hope to stress Heidegger in order to stress environmental theory. With few exceptions,1 two insufficient responses typify the reception of Heidegger in environmental thinking. One is to champion Heidegger as some proto-environmentalist. Certainly, quotes from such works as Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, "The Question Concerning Technology," "Building Dwelling Thinking," and "The Age of the World Picture" inspire such a reading. Such readings, however, present a simplified Heidegger. For example, a poor reading of an essay such as "The Question Concerning Technology" produces the conclusion that Heidegger was anti-technology.2 These misreadings are not merely accidental but a result of the goal of the citation. The challenge of Heidegger is not engaged to develop environmental theory; rather, Heidegger is cited to lend some borrowed legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise. The most prominent example of this move occurs in Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, wherein Heidegger joins a potpourri of thinkers, including Dogen, Job, St. Francis of Assisi, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thoreau, Chief Seattle, Herman Melville, John Muir, Aldous Huxley, Gandhi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stanley Diamond, and [End Page 68] David Brower from a host of traditions, including Taoism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Native American thought, Romanticism, and ecological science (1985, 79–108). The result is confusion, at best.On the other hand, in a second response Heidegger serves as a kind of bogeyman, a Nazi used to tar the more radical environmental groups. The syllogism is simple and simplistic: Deep Ecologists are bio/ecocentric; Deep Ecologists quote Heidegger; Heidegger was a Nazi; Therefore, Deep Ecologists are Nazis/fascists. (To push this thinking to its logical extreme, then, all nonanthropocentric thinking is fascist.) Both responses may be useful for polemics but serve to prevent a possibly productive exploration of Heidegger for the engagement of the difficult problems that have stumped environmentalism on multiple levels.Violating HeideggerAs a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:If “Reality is the Best Metaphor,” It Must Be VirtualMarguerite R. Waller (bio)What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?—Doug Coupland, Microserfs... we can look forward to a richly textured and complex cyberspace, where we are at all times human, and can become bits of pixel dust flying through a virtual landscape.—3-D, multiuser, interactive, on-line virtual reality producer“Avatars (...) are Next,” the June 1996 issue of Wired announces on its cover, above a glossy foldout of Bill Gates in bathing trunks floating on a lemon yellow air mattress in a sensuous Hockney-blue swimming pool. “Mr. Bill goes Hollywood! Special Gatesfold Issue,” reads the caption underneath the (photomontaged) naked torso. The United States Congress’s attempt in February 1996 to conceptualize the Internet as an incitement to indecent sexual conduct (in Section 507 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the so-called Computer Decency Act) is clearly the lampooned subtext of this juxtaposition of sexualized body with the concept of the avatar. The antithesis of sensuous, avatars are bandwidth-conserving, virtual figures that take the place of users’ physical bodies in the three-dimensional, interactive, multiuser virtual environments that software developers in 1996 insist will be the telos of the development of the World Wide Web. The Wired cover implies that the nerd community finds Congress’s association of digital media with sex ridiculous (however flattering they may find it to be constructed as sexually dangerous). Not unusually, sexuality is being invoked by the state as a justification for extending its own reach (and the corporate interests it represents).But the sex/gender politics of Net free speech advocates are not necessarily more progressive. As feminist commentator Laura Miller argues in “Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier,” the metaphor of a frontier beyond the jurisdiction of Congress, deployed by opponents of federal regulation, draws upon a conventional construction of gender that threatens to reinscribe women as victims, reinforcing “the power imbalance between the sexes, with its roots in the concept of women as property, constantly under siege and requiring the vigilant protection of their male owners” [53]. The unintended consequence of this conceptualization, she worries, is that “the threat of regulation is built into the very mythos used to conceptualize the Net by its defenders” [50].My worry, therefore, embraces both sides of the debate over free speech on the Net. The skirmish between Big Brother and the software pioneers seems to be shaping up rhetorically as a classic fraternal competition “between men” (Sedgwick). We may read it as a contest between fundamentally congruent “male” subject positions, both of which incline to disempower “female” subject positions and both of which stand to increase their [End Page 90] own political and economic capital by the appearance of a conflict. The power-producing relationality at play in this turf war, however, simultaneously threatens to subvert the claims of each position to its own, independent ontology. Both parties, therefore, can be expected compulsively to deny their relational status. John Perry Barlowe insists, in his “Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace”: “Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter. There is no matter here.”It is this more subtle metaphysical issue, the occlusion of relation, implicated in but not reducible to, the constructions of sexuality and gender deployed by both Netizens and Congresspeople, that I find the most pressing issue in designs, uses, and discussions of cyberspace. I will argue that, in fact, the current wave of Internet development (both practically and discursively) is in some sense driven by a desire to make cyberspace safe for essentialist subjectivities of whatever ideological/political persuasion. I will unfold this argument in terms of a certain notion of addiction. My interest is not “cyberaddiction” per se, in the sense of individuals who spend what they or their associates consider too much time on-line, but rather the construction of cyberspace—both rhetorically and electronically—as a clean, clear realm in which we can transcend positionality while remaining (or becoming more fully) “ourselves.” I am not, that... (shrink)

The volume starts with the paper of Lynn Maurice Ferguson Arnold, former Premier of South Australia and former Minister of Education of Australia, concerning the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) that was held from 25 May to 25 November 1937 in Paris, France. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the Nazi German and the Soviet pavilions directly across from each other. Many papers are devoted (...) to the interpretation of this opposition. Arnold’s paper considers the differences in the two totalitarian states’ architectural and design discourse styles. Although each of them communicated a totalitarian language of purposes, permissions, and boundaries, they essentially differed in the styles of discourse represented by the architecture and design of their respective pavilions. They were opposites of each other and the liberal ideals they contested. The internationalist viewpoint reflecting the multi-ethnic mix of the USSR is contrasted to the ein Volk homogeneity represented in the German pavilion. The Soviet pavilion opted for a utopian future to be arrived at by “benign” leadership, whereas the German pavilion anchored itself in the myth of Teutonic history with the nostalgic pride protected by the swastika-bearing eagle. Jean-Yves Béziau is best known as a logician and founder of Universal Logic. However, in this paper, he poses a new philosophical question: why philosophical discourse does not use images? The paper begins with a general analysis of different types of philosophical discourses. Then, he focuses on why images have been and are still rejected in philosophical discourse. He explains various ways to use images in a fruitful way to develop philosophical thinking and discourse and illustrates his view by providing several examples. He concludes with a promising programmatic declaration about founding a new journal entitled World Journal of Pictorial Philosophy to stimulate the usage of images for developing philosophical thinking. Although complaints about the obscurity of many philosophers’ discourse are widespread, Tatiana Denisova, ex-professor of the Surgut University and a research associate of the University of the Aegean undertakes a positive attitude to this problem. She explains that the reasons for the obscurity of philosophical texts, the subsequent complexity in communicating philosophers’ meanings and their eventual incomplete understanding is not a sign of their inferiority. On the contrary, it is a sign of the fruitfulness of philosophical discourse, which can generate new meanings. Thus, the darkness of philosophical discourse is like the life-giving chaos, and the obscurity that it inevitably contains can be the keeper of implicit meanings and even their generator. Katarzyna Gan-Krzywoszyńska and Piotr Leśniewski, authors of a monograph on Polish philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890 – 1963), make a comparative analysis of his educational style with that of Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921 – 1997). The authors highlight that these scholars have distinctly different backgrounds. The former was an educator, philosopher and a leading advocate of critical pedagogy connected with the dialogical Latin-American tradition. The latter was a philosopher and logician, a notable representative of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic with significant contributions to semantics, model theory and the philosophy of science. Despite their apparent difference, the authors identify some striking similarities regarding their attitudes towards education; notably, their approaches are essentially dialogical. Gilah Yelin Hirsch is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, educator, and filmmaker. In her experiential paper, he explains how and why she uses four channels of communication in her creative expression: writing, painting, filmmaking, and teaching, as dialogic inquiry. She considers that these channels compose a continuum of discourse styles, each reaching a different facet of kaleidoscopic consciousness. She claims that her choice of medium is prompted by a need to communicate her insights profoundly. Thus, for instance, she created painted allegories to express narratives based on dreams and visions emerging from her subconscious. Art and healing is another Tibetan-rooted type of discourse practised by the author. Creating and observing a healing image produces a positive psychophysiological change in both the artist and the viewer. The discourse here is tripartite between creator, image, and viewer. Filmmaking is another type of discourse she practices between the filmmaker/artist as shaman or healer and the viewer as respondent or participant. These films are meant to be experienced frame by frame, physically and emotionally in both the body and mind. Jocelyn Ireson-Paine is a cartoonist and programmer. His paper offers an original attempt to use category theory in cartooning. Category theory is a branch of mathematics that provides concepts and methods to describe general abstract structures in terms of a labelled directed graph called category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows (or morphisms or transformations or mappings). The author explores different ways to define “style” in art using category theory and a relational view of art. Moreover, he examines how “translation” (transformation) between styles could be defined and reveals the difficulties of how it could be implemented in a computer using special software. Jens Lemanski is a philosopher who has revived research in Arthur Schopenhauer’s legacy by exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. In this paper, he advances a new approach to eristic as an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to win an argument. The author attributes the origins of this view to Schopenhauer, suggesting a new reading of his work. According to the author, eristic is a prohibitive technique that takes effect when the norms of discourse ethics are transgressed and violated. Thus, eristic is viewed as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Roshdi Rashed is an authority on the history of Arabic mathematical sciences. Proceeding from Gilles-Gaston Granger’s definition of mathematical style, he studies the question of whether a mathematical work can be characterized by a single style or by a multitude of styles. This question is explored within the style of a single work, namely Menelaus’s Sphaerica, and through the study of the development of a single problem over time, namely the isoperimetric problem. He indicates Menelaus’s divergence from the Euclidean style of (plane and stereometric) geometry caused by the drop of the Parallel Postulate, which associated it with hyperbolic geometry. Hence, the author concludes that Menelaus’s Sphaerica incorporates the well-known Euclidean style with a variation of the non-Euclidean one. On the other hand, examining the isoperimetric problem reveals another interesting historical picture. A succession of different styles (cosmological, geometric, infinitesimalistic, style of the calculus of variations, of synthetic geometry) can be observed due to the transformation of the research object over time. Boris Shalyutin, a Russian social philosopher, and Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Kurgan Region, explores the origins of discourse in combination with the birth of society and law. He claims that legal discourse marks the historical emergence of discourse in general. Homo Juridicus generated Homo Sapiens, which have created new spheres of discourse, notably moral discourse and further philosophical, political, and scientific discourse. Petros Stefaneas, a logician, computer scientist and novelist, suggests an alternative to the traditional narratology approach for studying (interactive) social media discourse. He claims that style describes how the parts of a narrative are blended into a whole. The author relies upon Goguen’s and Harrel’s concept of style as a choice of blending principles and transfers to the study of the social media narratives elements from the methodology of studying Web-based collaborative search for mathematical proofs like those implemented within the Polymath project. The last paper belongs to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, a linguist, language revivalist, and proponent of a model of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, according to which Hebrew and Yiddish were the primary sources of Modern Hebrew. This paper explores the fascinating and multifaceted Yiddish language and its survival in Israeli. Yiddish is characterized by a unique style that embeds psycho-ostensive expressions throughout its discourse. The author highlights the cross-fertilization between Hebrew and Yiddish as it manifests itself in any aspect of the Israeli language. He claims that Yiddish survives beneath Israeli phonetics, phonology, discourse, syntax, semantics, lexis, and even morphology, although traditional and institutional linguists have been most reluctant to admit it. (shrink)

The identification of courts as “open” and “public” institutions is commonplace in national and transnational conventions. But even as those attributes are taken for granted, the privatization of adjudication is underway. This Article explores how—during the last few centuries—public procedures came to be one of the attributes defining certain decision-making institutions as “courts.” The political and theoretical predicates for such practices can be found in the work of Jeremy Bentham, a major proponent of what he termed “publicity,” a (...) practice he commended by detailing the architecture for various entities—from the Panopticon for prisoners to the Parliament for legislators and courts for judges. Bentham argued the utility of publicity in enhancing accuracy, public education, and judicial discipline. Moving forward in time, I examine various contemporary techniques in several jurisdictions that shift the processes of adjudication toward privatization. Included are the devolving adjudication to less-public government entities such as administrative agencies; outsourcing to private providers; and reconfiguring the processes of courts to render them more oriented toward settlement. For those appreciative of the role courts play in developing and protecting human rights, these new practices are problematic because adjudication can itself be a site offering opportunities to engage in democratic practices. The odd etiquette entailed in public adjudication under democratic legal regimes imposes obligations on government and disputants to treat each other—before an observant and often times critical public—as equals. Public and private power can be constrained by such performative requirements. When decision making takes place in public, the application of law to fact can engender normative contestation predicated on popular input. This claim of public adjudication’s democratic potential and utilities is, however, not an argument that the judgments provided and the norms developed will necessarily advance a shared view of the public welfare. Hence, while eager to re-engage Bentham, I offer different claims for publicity and less optimism about its consequences. (shrink)

Photo ID 222412412 © US Navy Medicine | Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT In a non-military setting, the answer is clear: it would be unethical to treat someone based on non-medical considerations such as nationality. We argue that Battlefield Triage is a moral tragedy, meaning that it is a situation in which there is no morally blameless decision and that the demands of justice cannot be satisfied. INTRODUCTION Medical resources in an austere environment without quick recourse for resupply or casualty evacuation are often (...) limited. The shortage extends not only to supplies like blood products and drugs, but physicians and other medical personnel. In the midst of a mass casualty scenario, such as a battle that includes intense ground fighting, the medical staff will stretch scarce resources and triage casualties according to specific criteria. Typically, they proceed by providing care for the most severely wounded first, referred to here as conventional triage. At times, though, the staff may reverse the triage so that soldiers with minor wounds can return to the fight. In a mass casualty situation, when medical personnel apply conventional triage and treat casualties from opposing forces, a dilemma may arise. We argue that it can be permissible for military physicians to prioritize their own soldiers over enemy combatants in a mass casualty triage, where reverse triage does not apply. The case we will focus on is as follows: Battlefield Triage: During combat operations on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, a compatriot soldier and an enemy combatant arrive at the compatriot soldier country’s medical treatment facility. Both have similar gunshot wounds to the abdomen, and they arrive with similar conditions. Both have low oxygen saturation and excessive blood loss. The sole physician only has enough time to stabilize one person. The scenario is brief, and we are aware that medical rules of eligibility will most often dictate how the physician proceeds,[1] but this scenario is useful in setting up the question we focus on in this paper: would it be wrong to favor the stabilization of a soldier just because the soldier is the physician’s compatriot? In other words, can nationality serve as an ethically justified tiebreaker in a situation such as Battlefield Triage?[2] In a non-military setting, the answer is clear: it would be unethical to treat someone based on non-medical considerations such as nationality. The AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics asserts that physicians have “ethical obligations to place patients’ welfare above their self-interest and above obligations to other groups.”[3] The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo affirms that “no motive, whether personal, collective or political, shall prevail against this higher purpose” of alleviating distress.[4] Physicians are taught early on that triage decisions must be medically indicated and made without consideration of factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, social status, and nationality. They are taught that public trust and obligations of justice grounded in equality demand that only medical indications be considered. But military physicians in a military setting are beholden to obligations, duties, and responsibilities as members of the military, and when these obligations, duties, and responsibilities conflict, as they do in Battlefield Triage, which loyalties win out and why?[5] Critics of partiality on national grounds argue that partiality undermines public trust in medicine and justice because everyone should be treated equally regardless of nationality.[6] Proponents of partiality argue that military obligations supersede equality and that justice requires partiality in such cases.[7] Despite the critics’ disagreement, both agree that there is a morally right, perhaps even blameless, course of action. Drawing on insights from virtue ethics, we argue that Battlefield Triage is a moral tragedy in which justice is unattainable and there is no action without moral cost. The assumption that there is a morally right choice is flawed. We argue that while no decision in this scenario is free from moral blame, there are reasons to favor treating one’s soldiers over enemy combatants. I. The Case Against Partiality There is a common assumption that there is a morally right or just decision in Battlefield Triage. A number of organizations and scholars claim that it is wrong for military physicians to favor their own soldiers on the grounds of nationality or some form of ‘group membership.’ (In a conflict involving service members from multiple nations working as a coalition, a soldier from an allied country may receive the same priority as the US service member due to ‘group membership.’) The World Medical Association’s WMA Declaration of Lisbon on the Rights of the Patient, which was reaffirmed in 2015, posits that, “[i]n circumstances where a choice must be made between potential patients for a particular treatment that is in limited supply, all such patients are entitled to a fair selection procedure for that treatment. That choice must be based on medical criteria and made without discrimination.”[8] This echoes what was set forth in Article 12 of the Geneva Conventions, which states that “[o]nly urgent medical reasons will authorize priority in the order of treatment to be administered.”[9] The argument for impartiality in Battlefield Triage is that every person is morally equal, and equality entails that medical distribution is, “based on a combination of medical need and urgency.”[10] This is in keeping with the bioethical principles that are generally applied.[11] II. The Case for Partiality On the other side, there are arguments that favoritism is the ethically right decision in Battlefield Triage.[12] The argument asserts that members of the military form a morally significant community of friends and participation in these relationships demands partiality. Just as parents have strong ethical duties to their children and not just any children, military personnel have ethical duties to their group, a group that involves an affirmation of mutual aid and support. Some have termed these ‘associative duties. According to Michael Gross, obligations of friendship, care, and solidarity “leave very little room for generally applicable principles of justice that would obligate a medic to treat enemy or non-compatriot wounded ahead of their compatriots.”[13] This is true in Battlefield Triage, but it may also be true even if the enemy’s soldier were more seriously wounded: “the ethics of small group cohesion, largely an ethics of care, mostly replaces the demands of impartial justice.”[14] In a more recent article, Gross explains that preferential treatment is ethically justified based on fighting capability and “the special obligations people owe friends, family, and, no less, comrades-in-arms.”[15] To not show partiality to the US soldier would be morally wrong on the grounds of friendship and mutual care.[16] III. The Moral Tragedy of Battlefield Triage Defenders and critics of Battlefield Triage favoritism based on nationality both frame their position as just or fair. For example, Justin List argues that physicians are “bound to practice medical neutrality,”[17] Marcus Adams denies that physicians “possess special ethical obligations” to enemy combatants because of their profession.[18] These perspectives assume that there is a morally right decision and that justice is attainable. The assumption that there is or can be a morally right Battlefield Triage decision, and we need to put our heads together to figure it out, remains strongly entrenched. However, the facts of the situation should give us pause; there are too many people and too few resources, and this demands a decision-making process that determines who will receive scarce resources. By its very nature, a battlefield triage decision has to be made based on some characteristic or value, a characteristic or value that will inevitably favor some at the expense of others. This is precisely why competing analyses “in the military context struggle to resolve these conflicts satisfactorily.”[19] Drawing on the insights of virtue ethics, we suggest that Battlefield Triage is a moral tragedy. Virtue ethics suggests that morality is about acting virtuously, which is to say that we should do what a virtuous person would do in the situation. Ethics is about figuring out how a just, wise, compassionate, loving, and fair person would act, and then doing that, as one grows in virtue. But life is not always clear cut, and it is possible that virtuous people may find themselves in a moral tragedy, a situation in which, through no fault of one’s own, a person must make a morally objectionable decision. After the action the virtuous person “emerges having done a terrible thing, the very sort of thing that the callous, dishonest, unjust, or in general vicious agent would characteristically do.”[20] Stated differently, a moral tragedy presents a virtuous person with two or more courses of action, all of which have a moral cost.[21] In Battlefield Triage, no matter how the physician goes about deciding, there is going to be defensible concern from those not saved. The fact that there are more people than can be helped fosters competing values in battlefield triage: maximize lives saved, treat people equally, treat the worse off, and support the war effort. Treating people equally may create tension between treating the worse off, maximizing lives saved, and supporting the war effort. Reverse triage is a case in point, as supporting the war effort conflicts with treating the worse off first, as is a fair lottery system since deploying a lottery may not maximize lives saved or support the war effort. There can be reasons why one person is selected over another, to be sure. Yet, there are reasons for making a decision, and that the decision is subject to legitimate moral concern is another. To recognize the moral tragedy of Battlefield Triage is to recognize the impossibility of acting blamelessly in the situation. In this situation, the virtuous military physician is going to have to sacrifice important values such as justice, compassion, and respect for others, even with a defensible criterion in hand. The physician will grieve this sacrifice accordingly. The physician may find her decision difficult or stressful, and rightly so, because of what her circumstances require of her. This kind of moral tragedy results “in actions which betray and violate the rights of persons to whom there may be a strong duty of care. When this happens, it properly triggers an appropriate moral emotion since our moral integrity has been violated and this affects how we think of ourselves and what we have become.”[22] Rather than view her triage decision as the morally superior choice, the virtuous military physician will view her decisions in these circumstances in a different light: it is the least bad option in a terrible situation, and she did something ethically problematic, something that is contrary to her moral character. She deeply regrets the circumstances in which she had to act. IV. Virtue Ethics A virtue ethicist has insight into how one should go about deciding what to do in a moral tragedy, although virtue ethics may not be as helpful as one may hope. The goal of the virtuous military physician in Battlefield Triage is to adopt the best course of action or the action that she feels she ought to do, all things considered. This does not make her choice devoid of serious wrongdoing—a decision must be made, but that does not make it just. The virtuous military physician will approach the situation with courage, responsibility, and insight. She will think about the decision carefully, wisely, and conscientiously; she will weigh the goods and harms of the choices before her, in conjunction with a proper conception of the good life, human worth, and understanding of her obligations to others—including chain of command, fellow soldiers, and the medical community. She is attuned to the value of human life and has a reasonable idea of the various ways her decisions will affect others. She recognizes that she is in this non-ideal situation through no fault of her own: she is not the one fighting in battles; she is serving her country as a physician, whose job it is to save lives, treat everyone justly, and promote military objectives. She regrets the decision she is forced to make in battlefield triage, acting “with immense regret and pain,” Hursthouse explains, “instead of indifferently or gladly.”[23] This is because, no matter what decision is made, the virtuous military physician “does something terrible or horrible,” something she otherwise would not do and is contrary to her values.[24] V. A Resolvable Moral Tragedy Instead of asking whether there is a morally right decision, in which a decision is morally blameless and above reproach, the virtue ethicist asks whether there is a decision with a convincing rationale, knowing that a decision can have a clear rationale but still be morally tragic. It is perfectly reasonable to think that different virtuous persons will arrive at different courses of action: “two virtuous agents, in the same situation,” Hursthouse writes, “may act differently” in irresolvable moral tragedies, in cases in which there is no clear course of action.[25] Because a person must act in a moral tragedy, one goal is to identify reasons for choosing the chosen action. Some decisions are clearly indefensible—treating neither the compatriot soldier nor the enemy combatant in Battlefield Triage would be wrong—and some decisions are more problematic than others. If the military physician selects to treat the soldier because she does not like the enemy combatant’s skin color, such a reason would be deeply problematic. But much of the debate over how to act in a moral tragedy is not over clearly indefensible or problematic criteria. Instead, the literature is largely about different standards or implementations of justice. Some scholars defend nation-impartial triage as right, while others defend nation-aware triage as right, and each argues that the other side is promoting an unjust or otherwise wrong solution to Battlefield Triage. We suggest that Battlefield Triage is a resolvable moral tragedy and that virtue ethics offers convincing reasons to prefer the treatment of the compatriot soldier rather than the enemy combatant on the grounds of national identity. Virtues are integral to living a good life, a flourishing life, but as Aristotle observed long ago, human beings are inherently social, interdependent and interconnected in profound ways.[26] This goes beyond the obvious fact that we need each other to survive day to day (one person makes clothes, another farms, and another makes tools); the claim is that a good or flourishing life depends in large part on one’s social network or community. This is why many of Aristotle’s moral virtues are other facing: justice, friendship, generosity, and magnanimity, to name a few. Courage, a typically self-facing virtue, is understood by Aristotle to be the virtue that regards one’s fear of death in battle, a battle fought on behalf of one’s city.[27] All of this remains true today. Namely, there is an important sense in which our community matters to our lives: it is easier to live a good, flourishing life if one is part of a good, flourishing community. Our community is made up of smaller groups, and it is more accurate to say that we are simultaneous members of different groups within a broader community. A person may be part of a family, friend group, research team, large state university, city, state, and nation. Groups can function well or not, as we all have experienced, and this suggests that there are virtues or excellences that groups can instantiate. Good groups are unified in purpose, with each member doing their duty alongside others for the attainment of that purpose. Good groups manifest solidarity among their members. Although Aristotle does not list solidarity as a virtue, a number of modern-day virtue ethicists have begun examining how group solidarity can be a virtue that contributes to a good or flourishing life.[28] Solidarity is not conceptualized as an individual virtue, a virtue possessed by a person in isolation of others; instead, it is a collective virtue, a virtue that is shared among members of a defined group with particular ends.[29] “A group has solidarity to the extent that its members are disposed to: (1) share values, aims, or goals; (2) care about those values, aims, or goals; (3) act in accordance with those values, aims, or goals; (4) trust the testimony of other group members with respect to those values, aims, and goals; and (5) feel a sense of belonging to the group.”[30] The virtue of collective or group solidarity involves individuals having special concern for each other, shared aims and values, trust, loyalty, and a sense of belonging with these specific others. There is a oneness to the group in the pursuit of a definite goal or purpose, involving mutual support and affirmation of each member. As such, the group has ends and goods above and beyond the good of each individual person. Sometimes solidarity requires personal sacrifice for the collective (for example, a father sacrificing food so his child can eat). The virtue of collective or group solidarity is important to the military and medical community at every level, and for clear reasons. In the military, there is a clear hierarchy of command, unity of purpose and end, mutual trust and support in complex settings, and so on. Soldiers need to know they can count on one another, and solidarity grounds a soldier’s ability to trust others and be assured of mutual aid. In medicine, solidarity maintains self-regulation of the profession, shared values and goals, as well as public support, not to mention that day-to-day operations require physician trust, engagement, and effort toward the ends of clinical care. Physicians need to work together, along with others, in pursuit of health, and disunity is sowed when there is mistrust, selfishness, or disengagement among the healthcare team and organization. Importantly, just as we are all members of various groups and hence may manifest group solidarity in different settings, the virtuous military physician instantiates collective solidarity with both the medical profession and the military. Her dual loyalty contributes to the moral difficulty of acting in Battlefield Triage. The military physician has competing obligations to distinct groups and cannot satisfy all obligations in Battlefield Triage. Solidarity with the military supports the consideration of favoring the soldier for reasons of national identity, whereas solidarity with the medical community does not. Something has to give, which is why it is a moral tragedy. The virtuous military physician, therefore, must weigh the costs of each course of action. To fulfill her obligations to the medical community would require that she does not use nationality and other non-medical considerations in Battlefield Triage. Since the soldier and enemy combatant are equally injured, justice would demand a random process, perhaps a flip of the coin. Although this may satisfy obligations the military physician has to the medical community, this would be costly to the physician’s military group. If word gets out that the physician decides who to treat based on a coin toss, soldiers, families, and citizens may become frustrated and angry. Soldier morale may go down if it becomes known that a coin flip led to the preventable death of a soldier and the saving of an enemy combatant who had killed (or attempted to kill) other soldiers. As Gross highlights, military solidarity involves a mutual aid promise that military personnel promise to help one another.[31] A military physician is part of the military and, as such, is part of the mutual aid promise, which would appear to be violated if the physician flips a coin. Treating a member of one’s own team may be psychologically more beneficial than treating an enemy combatant and may lead to less moral distress.[32] Finally, treating soldiers rather than enemy combatants promotes broader military and social aims, including returning soldiers to health, maintaining unity of purpose, and minimizing community suffering from a soldier’s death. Favoring members of one’s group, that is, triage based on nationality in Battlefield Triage, would fulfill obligations of military group loyalty, which is contrary to the values and duties of medicine. It does not seem as though showing favoritism in this particular situation is very costly to the medical community or general public, but this is because there is recognition that the physician is in the military. Medicine is impartial to non-medical indications partly because of fairness and to promote public trust in medicine. However, Battlefield Triage is unique, as medicine is being practiced in a non-public, wartime setting. In ordinary circumstances, a patient’s identity is irrelevant, and physicians ought not play favorites. Since Battlefield Triage is not an ordinary circumstance, decisions based on patient identity may not undermine public trust in medicine. In addition, it is contestable that fairness in Battlefield Triage requires that no consideration be paid to one’s nationality. Fairness is about giving each person their due, what is owed to them, and the case can be made that soldiers who place themselves in danger for the sake of the common good or a just cause are owed special attention when they suffer harm in the line of duty. In other words, soldiers voluntarily undergo risk to themselves for the greater good, and society owes them for this sacrifice. This plausibly includes preferential treatment in a situation such as Battlefield Triage. So, while the medical community affirms justice demands non-preferential treatment, the military community can affirm the opposite. The demands of fairness are unclear at best or in conflict in this situation: demands of physician justice decry favoritism, while demands of military justice support favoritism. Triage not based on nationality is arguably unfair and triage based on nationality may not undermine public trust, after all. All things considered, there is a clear rationale for favoring nationality-based preferential treatment in Battlefield Triage. Adopting a nationality-based preference in this situation is more defensible than not. This does not make such a decision ethically right or just. Preference based on nationality is the least bad decision, but it is not morally blameless. It involves one in a serious moral wrong, a wrong otherwise avoided and contrary to one’s character. The virtuous military physician is in a situation in which obligations conflict, and we disagree with Gross, who posits that care of fellow soldiers “is important to the near exclusion of all else.”[33] Gross fails to appreciate the collective virtue of solidarity as applied to those in medicine. The military physician has duties to fellow soldiers but also to fellow physicians, to the medical community, and humanity. To favor a soldier on grounds of nationality violates her duties and responsibilities to this latter group. She is involved in a moral tragedy and can only seek the most just action given the circumstances, yet, at least in virtue ethics, the action remains far from blameless. CONCLUSION We argue that Battlefield Triage is a moral tragedy, meaning that it is a situation in which there is no morally blameless decision and that the demands of justice cannot be satisfied. As such, the virtuous military physician incurs a moral cost to acting as she does—there is a moral residue. However, despite being a moral tragedy, there are clear reasons to act in favor of treating one’s own, considering group solidarity. As such, these kinds of tragedies are resolvable: virtuous military physicians should favor treatment of their own, although they would do so with sorrow. - [1] Militaries set forth medical rules of eligibility or guidelines used to determine whether a person qualifies for specific medical interventions or treatments in certain circumstances, and these guidelines are binding for a military physician. For example, despite opposition from medical organizations, militaries have adopted reverse triage guidelines for military physicians to follow. For ethical discussion, see Falzone, Elisabeth, P. Pasquier, C. Hoffmann, O. Barbier, M. Boutonnet, A. Salvadori, A. Jarrassier, J. Renner, B. Malgras, and S. Mérat. "Triage in military settings." Anaesthesia Critical Care & Pain Medicine 36, no. 1 (2017): 43-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.accpm.2016.05.004 [2] There are issues that are related to this, including the triage of civilians and allied soldiers. We set related issues aside for purposes of this paper [3] American Medical Association, Code of Medical Ethics: Current Opinions with Annotations, 2004–2005 ed. (Chicago, IL: AMA, 2004), 300. [4] American Medical Association, Code of Medical Ethics: Current Opinions with Annotations, 2004–2005 ed. (Chicago, IL: AMA, 2004), 300. [5] This is termed the “dual loyalty” dilemma in military medicine and has been described at length elsewhere: Institute of Medicine (US) Board on Health Sciences Policy. Military Medical Ethics: Issues regarding Dual Loyalties: Workshop Summary. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2008. Toward a Framework for Resolving Dual Loyalties. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK214853/ [6] See Kenneth G. Swan and K.G. Swan, Jr., “Triage: The Past Revisited,” Military Medicine 161:8 (1996): 448–452. https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/161.8.448; Jerome A. Singh, “American Physicians and dual loyalty obligations in the ‘war on terror,’” BMC Medical Ethics 4.4 (2003): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1186/1472-6939-4-4; Beam, Thomas E. "Medical Ethics on the Battlefield." Military Medical Ethics: Sect. IV. Medical ethics in the military. Medical ethics on the battlefield: the crucible of military medical ethics 2 (2003): 369-402; Hereth, Blake. "Health justice for unjust combatants." Journal of Military Ethics 20, no. 1 (2021): 67-81. https://doi.org/10.1080/15027570.2021.1949782. [7] See Adams, Marcus P. "Triage priorities and military physicians." In Physicians at war: The dual-loyalties challenge, pp. 215-236. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2008. Gross, Michael L. "Comradery, community, and care in military medical ethics." Theoretical medicine and bioethics 32 (2011): 337-350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-011-9189-6. Gross, Michael L. "The limits of impartial medical treatment during armed conflict." In Military medical ethics for the 21st century, pp. 71-84. Routledge, 2016. [8] World Medical Association, WMA Declaration of Lisbon on the Rights of the Patient. 5 December 2022, https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-lisbon-on-the-rights-of-the-patient/ [9] Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick in Armed Forces in the Field. 12 August 1949. https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.30_GC-I-EN.pdf. [10] List, Justin M. "Medical neutrality and political activism: physicians' roles in conflict situations." In Physicians at war: The dual-loyalties challenge, pp. 237-253. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2008. 240 [11] Beauchamp, T., and J. Childress. 2013. Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 7th ed. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. [12] Adams, Marcus P. "Triage priorities and military physicians." In Physicians at war: The dual-loyalties challenge, pp. 215-236. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2008. [13] Gross, "Comradery, community, and care in military medical ethics," 347. [14] Gross, “Comradery, community, and care in military medical ethics,” 349. [15] Gross, Michael L. "When medical ethics and military ethics collide." Narrative inquiry in bioethics 13, no. 3 (2023): 199-204. 202 https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/nib.2023.a924191 [16] Our argument draws on virtue ethics, from which care ethics derives, and it is worth clarifying how our argument relates to Gross’s. We do not think that the virtue of friendship grounds triage decisions, for we think it is unlikely that the physician and wounded soldier are friends. Instead, as explained below, we think the collective virtue of group solidarity better captures the moral significance of group loyalty and that Gross would agree with us. But since military physicians are part of distinct groups, with competing obligations, the military physician will be forced to sacrifice a value in battlefield triage cases. In other words, we think Gross downplays the dual group membership of a military physician. [17] List,”Medical neutrality and political activism,” 250. [18] Adams,”Triage priorities and military physicians,” 235. [19] London, Leslie, Leonard S. Rubenstein, Laurel Baldwin-Ragaven, and Adriaan Van Es. "Dual loyalty among military health professionals: human rights and ethics in times of armed conflict." Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 15, no. 4 (2006): 381-391. 383. [20] Hursthouse, R. On Virtue Ethics. OUP 1999. 74 [21] Nussbaum, Martha C. "The costs of tragedy: Some moral limits of cost-benefit analysis." The Journal of Legal Studies 29, no. S2 (2000): 1005-1036, 1007. [22] De Wijze, S. (2005). Tragic-remorse–the anguish of dirty hands. Ethical theory and moral practice, 7(5), 453-471, 457. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-005-6836-x [23] Hursthouse, 73 [24] Hursthouse, 81 [25] Hursthouse, 72 [26] Aristotle, Politics 1253a8. Reeve, C. D. C., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2017 [27] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. III.6.114a, 34-35. 2002, Nicomachean Ethics, Christopher Rowe (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press [28] Byerly, T. Ryan, and Meghan Byerly. "Collective virtue." The Journal of Value Inquiry 50, no. 1 (2016): 33-50. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-015-9484-y; Federico, Veronica. "Conclusion: solidarity as a public virtue." Solidarity as a Public Virtue (2018): 495-542. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783845290058. Rehg, William. "Solidarity and the common good: An analytic framework." Journal of Social Philosophy 38, no. 1 (2007): 7-21. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9833.2007.00363.x [29] Byerly and Byerly. "Collective virtue." 43 [30] Battaly, Heather. "Solidarity: Virtue or vice?." In Social virtue epistemology, pp. 303-324. Routledge, 2022. 304 [31] Ibid., 2011: 341 [32] It might be thought that displaying altruism by helping an enemy combatant at the expense of one’s fellow soldier may be psychologically satisfiying. For evidence that military physicians find it difficult to treat enemy combatants, see Lundberg, Kristina, Sofia Kjellström, Anders Jonsson, and Lars Sandman. "Experiences of Swedish military medical personnel in combat zones: adapting to competing loyalties." Military medicine 179, no. 8 (2014): 821-826. https://doi.org/10.7205/MILMED-D-14-00038. Lamblin, Antoine, Clément Derkenne, Marion Trousselard, and Marie-Ange Einaudi. "Ethical challenges faced by French military doctors deployed in the Sahel (Operation Barkhane): a qualitative study." BMC Medical Ethics 22 (2021): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-021-00723-2 [33] Ibid., 2011: 344. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of disalienation, (...) that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

Modern utilitarianism has its roots in the eighteenth century, its philosophical blossom in the works of Bentham and the Mills, and its practical fruit in the works of nineteenth‐century radical legal and political utilitarian reformers. Utilitarians held that pleasure, and hence too happiness, are sensations. Human beings are in effect mere pleasure or happiness receptacles or desire‐satisfying mechanisms. The idea of a science of happiness appealed to some economists and social theorists who rightly felt increasingly ill (...) at ease about measuring national welfare and progress in terms of growth in gross national product. The goal of profit maximization dominated economic science. One stimulus for the development of a putative science of happiness was dissatisfaction with economists’ attempts to evaluate the success of an economic system and the progress of a society by measuring gross national product. In a happy society alienation is minimal, and freedom and dignity are respected and preserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty (...) table, the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

This article offers a comparative study of the views of Alexis de Tocqueville and those of several Chinese thinkers of the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—primarily Gu Yanwu, Huang Zongxi, Wang Fuzhi—on the socio-political processes of centralization. My central claim is that their views of political centralization and of the decentralized polycentric society that preceded it in their respective countries exhibit a remarkable array of analogous structural features. More specifically, both Tocqueville and his Chinese counterparts perceive in centralization an (...) inherent unsustainability driven by its self-destructive nature: since the foundation and strength of statism depends on its social resources, the centralization of power inevitably results in the weakening of its own basis. I conclude that through their nuanced reinterpretation of self-interest, both parties advocate a “small-community-oriented communitarianism” instead of the increasingly centralized modern state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Appreciation of Arvind Mandair's Sikh Philosophy:Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing WorldJeffery D. Long (bio)"Sikhism," the Colonial Project, and Modernity1I do not use this adjective lightly, but in his brilliant volume Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022) Arvind-Pal Singh Mandair goes a considerable distance toward liberating sikhī—known more widely in the academic world as Sikhism—from the conceptual constraints that have kept it from (...) engaging with and informing global issues. In so doing, he does a service not only to the Sikh community and to sikhī itself, but to the world, for there is indeed much in Sikh thought from which the wider human community can benefit. By liberating sikhī from the constraining concept of religion, Mandair facilitates a process by which persons of any background can engage with gurmat ideas—that is, ideas drawn from the system of thought based upon the teachings of the Gurus of the Sikh tradition—and learn from their wisdom.Mandair skillfully deconstructs the concept of religion, building upon earlier work in which he demonstrates the colonial functionalities of this concept.2 When, through colonial knowledge-production processes, sikhī came to be conceived as a religion, Sikh thought was relegated to the realm of theology. This was a relegation, not an elevation, because under the dominant paradigm of modernity, theology is seen as a discourse that is relevant only to a specific religious community. It is thus perceived as lacking the universality [End Page 353] that is taken to inhere in the discourses of philosophy or science. When combined with the colonial situation of Sikhs under British rule, this relegation of Sikh thought to the realm of theology becomes a way of exerting power over the community. As Mandair explains,Once theology had become the primary regime of cultural translation, Sikh thinking was inevitably tethered to the social and political project of religious identification which was required primarily to facilitate governance of cultural differences or heterogeneity that characterized the indigenous populations [of India]. By doing so, it effectively locked Sikh activity within the confines of identity politics.(p. 10)Integral to British colonial policy in India was a project of defining communities, primarily on the basis of religion, but also deploying concepts such as caste and tribe. Through these definitions, the identities of Indians could be essentialized, and policies applied to them in ways that facilitated British dominance over Indian society.3Much has been written about the ways in which language is used to promote ideologies that serve to advance the power interests of some groups of people over others.4 No less an ideological mechanism than the Oxford English Dictionary has been brought to bear in the process of constraining sikhī and depriving it of the universal relevance that it ought naturally to possess. In Mandair's words, "By defining 'Sikhism' as the beliefs and practices of Sikhs, or as an Indian monotheistic religion founded in fifteenth-century India, the OED turns the Sikh aspect into a cliché—a religious type (monotheism), an ethnic type tied to a geographical location (Punjabi/North India) and a historical type (medieval India)" (p. 11).The damage that has been wrought by the modern colonial concept of religion globally is, of course, not limited exclusively to the Sikh community. It has been integral to the construction of a secular order in which what is regarded as religious thought is, again, relegated to a parochial realm of relevance only to members of specific communities. It further serves to marginalize these same communities, whose discourses come to be seen as lacking the universality of secular thought, which is presented as objective truth. As Mandair continues,The purpose of creating the modern category of 'religion' was to help authorize and naturalize secular rationality as the dominant form of modern consciousness, and as the essential language of conventional thinking, or 'common sense.' It is precisely this common sense which persuades us of the apparent naturalness of oppositions such as religion versus politics or materiality versus ideality, to give two well-known examples.(p. 11)To these two examples, one could add the opposition of religion and... (shrink)