Following the trend of sharing, and associating being on-line with being 'on-life', many people are now demanding the ownership and control of their data across all processing phases, including the erasure of their presence on the web. In Europe, recent proposals for regulation include an explicit 'Right to be Forgotten'; this right stated in the European Commission Proposal for Regulation COM 2011/12 does not emerge without controversy. It is being criticised on several grounds, including clashing with other rights, (...) such as freedom of expression, as well as setting the terrain for censorship. Besides the purely legal aspects of the proposed provisions, the chapters of this volume discuss how those legal provisions correspond in practice to worldviews and how individual and collective memory must be governed. They look into the deeper consequences of such provisions to construction of identity, culture and community formation, and how such a right affects how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember and forget. (shrink)

The debate on the right to be forgotten on Google involves the relationship between human information processing and digital processing by algorithms. The specificity of digital memory is not so much its often discussed inability to forget. What distinguishes digital memory is, instead, its ability to process information without understanding. Algorithms only work with data without remembering or forgetting. Merely calculating, algorithms manage to produce significant results not because they operate in an intelligent way, but because they “parasitically” exploit (...) the intelligence, the memory, and the attribution of meaning by human actors. The specificity of algorithmic processing makes it possible to bypass the paradox of remembering to forget, which up to now blocked any human-based forgetting technique. If you decide to forget some memory, the most immediate effect is drawing attention to it, thereby activating remembering. Working differently from human intelligence, however, algorithms can implement, for the first time, the classical insight that it might be possible to reinforce forgetting not by erasing memories but by multiplying them. After discussing several projects on the web which implicitly adopt this approach, the article concludes by raising some deeper problems posed when algorithms use data and metadata to produce information that cannot be attributed to any human being. (shrink)

Cultural heritage can offer tangible and intangible traces of the past. A past that shapes cultural identity, but also a past from which one sometimes wishes to detach oneself and which nevertheless needs to be remembered, even commemorated. These themes of memory, history and oblivion are examined by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his work La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Inspired by these ideas, this paper analyses how they are closely linked to cultural heritage. Heritage serves as a support for memory, (...) even if it can be mishandled, which in turn can affect heritage policies. Memory and heritage can be abused as a result of wounds from the past or for reasons of ideological manipulation or because of a political will to force people to remember. Furthermore, heritage, as a vehicule of memory, contributes to historical knowledge, but can remain marked by a certain form of subjectivism during the heritage and conservation operation, for which heritage professionals are responsible. Yet, the responsibility for conserving cultural heritage also implies the need to avoid any loss of heritage, and to fight against oblivion. Nonetheless, this struggle cannot become totalitarian, nor can it deprive the community of a sometimes salutary oblivion to its own identity construction. These theoretical and philosophical concepts shall be examined in the light of legal discourse, and in particular in Belgian legislation regarding cultural heritage. It is clear that the shift from monument to heritage broadens the legal scope and consequently raises the question of who gets to decide what is considered heritage according to the law, and whether there is something such as a collective human right to cultural heritage. Nonetheless, this broadening of the legislation extends the State intervention into cultural heritage, which in turn entails certain risks, as will be analysed with Belgium’s colonial heritage. (shrink)

According to Pessimism about moral testimony, it is objectionable to form moral beliefs by deferring to another. This paper motivates Pessimism about another source of moral knowledge: propositional memory. Drawing on a discussion of Gilbert Ryle’s on forgetting the difference between right and wrong, it argues that Internalism about moral motivation offers a satisfying explanation of Pessimism about memory. A central claim of the paper is that Pessimism about memory (and by extension, testimony) is an issue in moral psychology (...) rather than moral epistemology. That is because it is best explained by appeal to claims about the constitution of moral knowledge as a state of mind, rather than requirements on belief formation. The paper also provides reason to think that the focus on testimony, pervasive in the literature, is something of a red herring. (shrink)

Many philosophers endorse “exclusionism”, the view that no instance of relearning qualifies as a case of genuine remembering, and vice versa. Appealing to simulationist, distributed causalist, and trace minimalist theories of remembering, I develop three conditional arguments against exclusionism. First, if simulationism is right to hold that some cases of remembering involve reliance on post-event testimonial information, then remembering does not exclude relearning. Second, if distributed causalism is right to hold that memory traces are promiscuous, then remembering does (...) not exclude relearning. Finally, if trace minimalism is right to hold that vicarious experiences sometimes produce the minimal traces that ground remembering, then remembering does not exclude relearning. While advocates of these theories might incorporate additional conditions designed to accommodate exclusionism, the only reason they can appeal to in favor of doing so is intuition: neither the fundamental components of the theories nor the empirical results on which they are based provide a reason to endorse exclusionism. An investigation of exclusionism thus raises metaphilosophical questions, so far overlooked in philosophy of memory, about the appropriate role of intuition in theorizing about remembering. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s notions of epistemic things and historical epistemology . I argue that Rheinberger’s approach articulates a unique contribution to current debates about integrated HPS, and I propose some modifications and extensions of this contribution. Drawing on examples from memory research, I show that Rheinberger is right to highlight a particular feature of many objects of empirical research (“epistemic things”)—especially in the contexts of exploratory experimentation—namely our lack of knowledge about them. I argue (...) that this analysis needs to be supplemented with an account of what scientists do know, and in particular, how they are able to attribute rudimentary empirical contours to objects of research. These contours are closely connected to paradigmatic research designs, which in turn are tied to basic methodological rules for the exploration of the purported phenomena. I suggest that we engage with such rules in order to develop our own normative (epistemological) categories, and I tie this proposal to the idea of a methodological naturalism in philosophy of science. (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

Koriat & Goldsmith are right in their claim that the “ecological” and “traditional” approaches to memory rely on different metaphors. But the underlying ecological metaphor is notcorrespondence(which in any case is not a metaphorical notion): it isaction. Remembering is a kind of doing; like most other forms of action it is purposive, personal, and particular.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Grayson Douglas Browning (1929–2023)Gregory Pappas, David Hildebrand, and William T. MyersBrowning, Grayson Douglas was born on March 7, 1929, in Seminole, Oklahoma.He received his PhD from the University Texas, Austin, 1958, where he returned later in 1972 to become its Philosophy Department chairman for four years.He was president of the Southwestern Philosophical Association in 1977, of the Florida Philosophical Association in 1967, and of the Southern Society for (...) Philosophy and Psychology in 1972.He was not only a member of the Society for Advancement of America Philosophy; he encouraged all of his students to attend and become members of this society. Among these former students are Bill Myers, David Hildebrand, and Gregory Pappas.He thought that this was one of the best societies, not only because of its pluralism and scholarship, but because it was a community. He was right!He was the author of several books of philosophy, including Act and Agent and Ontology and the Practical Arena, and he co-edited Philosophers of Process (with William T. Myers). He also has published poetry in Voices, A Journal of Poetry and the Beloit Poetry Journal.In the last years of his life, Doug Browning was a retired Professor of Philosophy, living outside Georgetown, Texas, where he labored at length over poems and novels, staying up throughout the night reading, writing, listening to jazz, and smoking cigars, and enjoying life in his countryside hacienda with his beautiful wife, Becky. During that time, he managed to write and publish sixteen books of fiction. [End Page 106]For us (his former students), one of the most important philosophical contributions of Doug Browning was his insistence that if there is a key lesson from American Philosophy, it is the importance of lived experience ("La Vida") as the "starting point" of philosophical investigation.As he wrote in one of his last published essays:[T]he point is that, wherever one thinks we should start, we can't start with the world. We can't start with the world and we can't test our theories by testing them against the world. Whatever we take to indicate or to provide evidence of a "real" world apart from experience must be found, can only be found, in experience. It must be found in the glass of Barrilito, the aroma of a good cigar, conversation among friends, hotel hallways, cats, thunderstorms, oak trees, and all of the brazen and all of the unpretentious things that we encounter and live among in our day-to-day lives.1Gregory PappasTexas A&M UniversityDavid HildebrandUniversity of Colorado DenverWilliam T. MyersBirmingham-Southern Collegenote1. Douglas Browning, "Dewey and Ortega on the Starting Point," Pragmatism in the Americas, edited by Gregory Fernando Pappas (Fordham UP, 2011), p. 155.Copyright © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:News and ViewsMark Gonnerman Click for larger view View full resolutionWhen I think of Roger Corless, I think of the bristlecone pine trees in the White Mountains of east-central California, about an hour's drive from Bishop up White Mountain Road. These trees (Pinus longaeva) are the world's oldest living beings. The senior member of the stand in Patriarch Grove, named Methuselah, is more than 4,700 years old.It is not (...) because Roger lived an especially long life—he was granted only sixty-nine-and-a-half years of calendar time—that he and these trees fuse in my mind. While Roger was an old soul from an older world, this association arises from Roger's adherence to the kind of "become who you are" eccentricity celebrated by Henry David Thoreau and other sages who remind each of us to "step to the music" of "a different drummer."When visiting the bristlecones, one is impressed by the various odd poses struck by each tree. Of course no two are alike; each holds a unique gnarly stance that says, "You are among a community of nonconformists." These trees remind us that each being is a unique expression of Nature and ought to be honored as such.Thoreau does not use the word "eccentric" in Walden, but writes of extravagance instead:I fear chiefly lest my expression not be extra- vagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance! [End Page 155] it depends on how you are yarded.... I desire to speak somewhat without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments.A lover of words, as was Roger, Thoreau splits extravagance in two to highlight its root meaning: "to wander" (vagari) "outside" (extra). To learn the truth of matters requires the courage to follow one's own path, even when—especially when—it takes one beyond the pale. Only then might wanderers become convinced of those truths they know, for they have been encountered firsthand and tested, experimentally, in the realm of personal experience.When one sets about the challenging work of claiming a natural right to eccentricity, one discovers self-authenticating feedback loops that encourage further steps along an always unfolding, yet untrammeled path. It takes courage to stay in motion, for the way is often rough. People get lost—and found. One's own authentic way leads to wakefulness. This in turn enables recognition and enjoyment of other liberated beings and compassion for those who have yet to hear chanticleer crow (to stay with Thoreau) or the lion's roar (as Buddhists might say).As Mas Kodani, a Jodoshinshu minister in South-Central Los Angeles has observed, "One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks a path comes into being." This walk requires a balance of both confident perseverance and an ability to respond to ever-changing conditions. Lives of both the bristlecones and Roger demonstrate perseverance in spite of hostile habitats: the pines, rooted in sandstone and dolomite, hang on in a cold and dry climate at 11,200 feet; Roger made his way with difficulty in spite of challenges he faced as a gay, Buddhist-and-Christian intellectual in Durham County, North Carolina. When, after thirty years, Roger became an emeritus professor at Duke and relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, he found himself in a much more hospitable setting.It may seem strange to draw out this comparison of Roger and those ancient White Mountain pines, but when I first met those trees in the summer of 1998, they set a standard for authenticity that came to mind whenever Roger and I interacted. His extravagant accomplishments as a teacher, scholar, and person who lived a life of genuine service to others were attained through the real work of daily spiritual practice, critical reflection, and adherence to the truths—always plural for Roger—of which he had been convinced. I'll always be grateful for his inspiring example of a human life well lived. It... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Herb FingaretteMichael Nylan (bio)Over the years, several people have remarked to me that Herb "disappeared" or "disengaged" after his retirement. His standing, at the time of his retirement, was beautifully captured in the 1999 volume Rules, Rituals, and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette, edited by his student Mary Bockover.But remembering Herb Fingarette, I recall the first two times I spoke with him, by email and eventually in (...) person. I wrote, while preparing the Norton Critical Edition of the Analects, the brief sketch I had devised, mainly on the basis of Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, in which I described him as a New Confucian and a pragmatist. He promptly wrote back to deny both philosophical affiliations. (Hans Sluga's remarks below suggest that Herb did not see himself as a joiner or partisan.) But I got the rest right, apparently, as my sketch of him circled around the opening to his book, a work that changed many people's lives, including those of two friends of mine, Henry Rosemont and Roger Ames:When I began to read Confucius, I found him to be a prosaic and parochial moralizer. … Later, and with increasing force, I found him a thinker with profound insight and with an imaginative vision of man equal in its grandeur to any I know. … Confucius can be a teacher to us today—a major teacher, not one who merely gives us a slightly exotic perspective on the ideas already current. He tells us things not being said elsewhere; things needing to be said. He has a new lesson to teach.1Herb's contribution in that book lay mainly in his willingness to rethink Confucius from the ground up, "to make him new." To the day before he died, that was Herb, still evolving and reformulating his thoughts. One glimpses this in "Being Ninety-Seven," the documentary about Herb that his grandson Andrew Hasse directed and edited, one short clip of which has drawn no fewer than five million views on YouTube, under the title "The Meaning of Life: A Ninety-Seven Year Old Philosopher Looks at Life."I finally met Herb on a fine spring day in 2010, some three years after he had moved to Berkeley, when Henry Rosemont, Jr. happened to be in town. Henry insisted I meet Herb, and he was plainly immensely proud of being the first to write a good review of Herb's work, which so many [End Page 857] Click for larger view View full resolutionHerbert Fingarette, 1921–2018. Photo © Thomas H. Hahn.eminent Sinologists had panned (Herb being outside the field; Herb saying something that might force a change in their ways of thinking; Herb being so clear about his ideas that there was no academic obfuscation). Herb had always been one of the few gods in my academic pantheon, and I was frankly a bit scared to meet him and sound stupid. But Henry had a genius for bringing people together, and by the end of the first meeting Herb and I were well on our way to becoming fast friends. (It didn't hurt that Herb's only child, Ann Hasse, was about to marry one of the Berkeley colleagues whom I most esteem, Erich Gruen.)A few years later, after his wife Leslie died, I asked him, after a decent interval, whether writing so powerfully about the philosophy of dying had helped him when he was confronting it in the case of Leslie, his beloved wife and astute editor. He said quietly, "Not one bit," and from then on I knew I could absolutely trust him. For such a complex man, he was also a person who embraced radical honesty and full engagement, which meant that Herb, nearly always exquisitely polite, could on rare occasions burst forth with a snarky comment, when particularly frustrated with the world or its inhabitants. He was a human being keenly aware of the responsibility that survival brought, despite the frailties encountered when going through life. One felt always that one was conversing with a lifelong seeker after truths large and small, with the result that many a time he was impatient with my tendency... (shrink)

In India, Dalits faced a centuries-old caste-based discrimination and nowadays indigenous people too are getting a threat from so called developed society. We can define these crimes with the term ‘atrocity’ means an extremely wicked or cruel act, typically one involving physical violence or injury. Caste-related violence has occurred and occurs in India in various forms. Though the Constitution of India has laid down certain safeguards to ensure welfare, protection and development, there is gross violation of their rights such as (...) killing, murder, torture, burning, abduction, rape and molestation. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, “Dalits and indigenous peoples (known as Scheduled Tribes or adivasis) continue to face discrimination, exclusion, and acts of communal violence. Laws and policies adopted by the Indian government provide a strong basis for protection, but are not being faithfully implemented by local authorities.” Human rights issues are very often understood and analyzed from socio-political and cultural perspectives. Apart from such perspectives, the issue of human rights also can be analyzed from a strictly philosophical perspective, which implies that the idea of human rights is centered on the inspiration of human dignity. Several studies on the situation of human rights of Dalits in several parts of India show more reports on violation of human rights than on protection of them. Dalits are discriminated against, denied access to land, forced to work in degrading condition, and routinely abused at the hands of the police and higher-caste groups that enjoy state protection. For example, Dalit women are regularly subjected to sexual violence as a result of their lower caste status-often in response to their demands of basic rights. Hate crimes towards indigenous peoples is a daily reality in many countries across the globe. The challenge is to change such a dehumanized situation. The challenge is to each one of us that whether engaged in governance of the civil society or voluntarily engaged in social and economic development of society, one thing to remember is that leaving behind the vulnerable units of our society – Dalits and indigenous peoples – will not take us to a prosperous society. This paper is an attempt to study the situation of human rights of two most neglected segments of society namely, Dalits and STs as a serious international human rights issue. (shrink)

Professor Gostin is a leading authority on health law, whose writing and teaching are among the most authoritative in the United States, as exemplified by his recent work, Public Health Law: Power, Duty, Restraint. Gostin's article in this issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics pays homage to Jonathan Mann by expressing the debt he feels toward this extraordinary doctor and public health official with whom he had collaborated on several projects.As many will remember, Mann held high-level (...) positions at the Centers for Disease Control and worked on AIDS research in Central Africa before setting up the World Health Organization's Global Programme on AIDS, which he ran from 1986 to 1990. Thanks to his profound commitment and consummate communication skills, he achieved the unprecedented feat of raising the budget within two years to almost $100 million from the initial set-up of “himself, a secretary, and one typewriter,” as described by Daniel Tarantola. (shrink)

This essay reviews and evaluates the accomplishments of The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics over its initial fifteen years. It focuses on the origins, development, and expanding influence of FAB as a multidisciplinary organization of feminist bioethicists. Also noted are areas of bioethics that as yet have not been adequately addressed from feminist perspectives, including intersections between health and human rights, gender disparities in the treatment of chronic disease, health research priorities that shortchange women, HIV/AIDS proliferation among women (...) in the global South, the health needs of recent migrants, and the encroachment of corporate interests on bioethics. (shrink)

He describes his position as "neo-Carnapian", i.e. he is claiming that even if the question is meaningful, that doesn't mean it's worth looking into. He's probably right, in the sense that anyone can be right about a personal evaluative choice. And until I started questioning the belief that there is only one kind of physical process that could embody consciousness, I felt the same way myself. But the point about this thought experiment is that the current state of (...) cognitive science offers us two possible candidates for the embodiment of mind. And as Bickle points out, it seems like nothing we can imagine discovering in the future could settle this problem one way or the other. If this is true, this means that, strictly speaking, all this talk about being on the verge of a scientific understanding of consciousness is hype: No matter how close we get to solving the Chalmersian easy problems, we are getting nowhere nearer to solving the hard problem. If this is true, Cognitive Scientists ought to change their description of what they are doing, even if it cuts back on publicity and grant money. But I don't want to believe this, and I think the only way to avoid believing this is to discover the presuppositions that compel this belief, and see if we can change them. It's a dirty little job, but somebody has to do it, and philosophers seem less unqualified to attempt it than anyone else. Note, however, that I am not claiming we can use a thought experiment all by itself to find the answer, the way Searle claimed that the Chinese Room experiment supposedly proved that a computer couldn't be conscious. As RONALD LEMMEN points out, the fact that we can imagine something doesn't tell us anything about the world, only about our concepts of the world. Remember that the conclusion of my thought experiment was a question, not an answer. My only goal is to help clarify the question. (shrink)

The first section of this chapter illustrates that the pogrom in Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 has not been categorized sufficiently as a substantial milestone of right-wing violence in postwar Germany. This pogrom led to historically significant limitations in the right to asylum, ultimately resulting in a change to the German constitution. We propose to look at Rostock-Lichtenhagen as an example to explain that practices of remembering right-wing violence, a process that we describe with the term ‘Doing Memory on (...) right-wing violence’, is a central part of creating a society’s basic story. This basic story, in turn, contributes to how a society understands itself. In this chapter’s second section, we argue first that analyzing practices of memory of right-wing violence, be they acknowledging, forgetting or suppressing those practices, actually make it possible to even expose the persistence of the basic story as a central element of political culture. Second, we want to uncover how potential and publicly effective interventions of and changes to the basic story might look like. Here, we build on Habermas’ model of democracy, utilize Susan Bickford’s work on listening as an important element in her political philosophy and refer to Benjamin Barber, who articulates that a participatory democracy requires political listening. As a result, our chapter’s third section demonstrates how listening can be conceptualized from a supra-individual perspective and how questions that are critical of existing hegemonic structures can prioritize a focus on hegemonic (non)listening. Lastly, we will sketch out strategies to intervene in hegemonic (non)listening. These strategies connect theoretically with concepts of ‘counter publics’ and ‘opinion forming publics’ and reference, among others, the work of Seyla Benhabib and Iris Marion Young, thus enabling the creation and execution of resistance practices of Doing Memory on right-wing violence. (shrink)

The paradox asserts “to be a decent human being, you have to treat people like they're special; but to be a decent sociologist, you have to remember they're not.” How then can a sociologist be a decent human being? I distinguish between rights and other things, such as beliefs or tastes, and draw attention to how respect for rights is compatible with a focus on the typical in research.

In this investigation, I focus on individual memory behaviors for which we commonly blame and praise each other. Alas, we too often do so unreflectively. Blame and praise should not be undertaken lightly or without a good grasp on both what we are holding people responsible for, and the conditions under which they can be held responsible. I lay out the constructivist view of memory with consideration for both remembering and forgetting, and special attention to how we remember events (...) as well as whether we remember them. I generate seven defeasible generalized moral rules that should govern individual memory behaviors including remembering our own past wrongs, holding grudges, and creating positive as well as negative memories. By such means may we all remember and forget rightly and not for ill. (shrink)

The Bible recounts that in Eden, Adam gives names to all the animals. But those names are not only representations of the animals’ nature, rather they shape and constitute it. The naming by Adam contains in itself the divide between the human and non-human. Then, there is the Fall: Adam falls and forgets Being. Though he may still remember the names he gave to the animals in Eden, he is no longer sure about their meaning. Adam will have to (...) try to remember his own intentions. Through this effort he can also become aware of how he thinks, who he is, and what was the natural order he knew before the Fall. Medieval bestiaries tell us this story. Bestiaries are works of word play populated by animal figures. They depend on back-and-forth anthropomorphization, or circular metaphor. Animal figures are portrayed as both a mirror of human nature and a window on it. Bestiaries served as means for the moral education of human beings and, at the same time, a way to criticize the current state of humanity, including political and ethical habits. Within the moral irony of medieval bestiaries we can find the origin of the invented nature that modernity will try, subsequently, to insert into natural rights discourse through the teleological oxymoron of their naturalized and naturalizing counter-factuality. I will propose a historical-semiotic journey through the ironic representations of the human-beasts from the ancient world to contemporaneity. The proposal resulting from this cultural excursion is that the words included in the many national and international Rights declarations operate much like the names Adam gave to the animals and still more as they were re-read in medieval bestiaries, both textual and musical. So, can the words of Rights still serve as musical scores, open to an infinite play of re-signification? If we were able to overcome the modern culture/nature and human being/animal dualisms, we could cast, today as in the past, a zoological gaze on human rights by means of contemporary bestiaries and, in this way, perhaps find the gist of rights’ names and our ever regained and ever lost again humanity. (shrink)

I explore the impact of memory altering technologies in the science fiction drama (2016–2020) in order to show that unreconciled altered traumatic memory may lead to a dystopian breakdown of society. I bring Miroslav Volf's theological perspectives on memory into conversation with the plot of Westworld in order to reveal connections between memory altering technologies and humanity's responsibility to remember rightly. Using Volf's theology of remembering as an interpretive lens, I analyze characters’ inability to remember rightly while recalling (...) partial memories of their trauma. In virtue of this examination, I contend that memory altering technologies may inhibit individuals from relational processes of healing, such as forgiveness. Consequently, I argue that this study leads to a richer understanding of the potential that memory altering technologies have for undermining humanity's ability to interact in a relational capacity, specifically in terms of forgiveness. (shrink)

Many people, often students, appear apathetic because they do not know how to support human rights. In this paper, I explore a question that is part of a larger project helping people think through moral life in the age of human rights. What are appropriate contexts for invoking human rights? I begin with two assumptions: Our sense of common humanity is the source of human rights. There are situations where it seems we should disregard human rights out of common humanity. (...) Reflecting on two examples, I argue there is a class of harms where one should disregard human rights because one intends to be humane. I call this class “harms that exceed right”. I isolate two kinds of such harm: harms against relationship and harms against personhood. I conclude with a general point: human rights application should bear in mind an “adverbial consideration.” How we invoke human rights matters, and human rights should be invoked humanely. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.2 (2004) 188-193 [Access article in PDF] Response to June Boyce-Tillman, "Towards an Ecology of Music Education" Mark Garberich Michigan State University June Boyce-Tillman's "Towards an Ecology of Music Education" challenges the foundations of music education philosophy and its application to practice. Beginning with the identification and clarification of what are described as "subjugated ways of knowing," she advocates the restoration and application of (...) these approaches to instruction. She completes the description and definition of the interlocking [End Page 188] areas of musical experience by providing an actual project that exemplifies these tenets. I offer my humble appreciation of the attention she gives to the exploration of alternate approaches to music instruction and to the need for a clearer connection between community and individual and between culture and music education."Toward an Ecology of Music Education" is about values. Values may well be the defining word of this era in Western education and society. Changes in demographics, belief systems, and political dogma have de-stabilized the foundations of social and political frameworks, regardless of their efficacy. So, I would like to elaborate on the values represented in this paper, discussing them in relation to teaching, democracy, and diversity in music education. Values and Teaching Each of us carries our worldview into our work and we cannot deny our philosophical identity. However, the degree to which we allow our worldview to affect our teaching should be limited by the priorities of our instruction. Consider music education as having three broad perspectives: (a) purpose in society, (b) purpose for the individual, and (c) aesthetics (inherent value). The position of the three is not hierarchical and each can be considered apart from the others. We give evidence of our real motivation in music education by the emphasis we place upon each of these three. The aesthetically inclined find appeal in teaching for the inherent value in music. Those who strongly maintain a social agenda may be attracted by the possibilities of improving society as a whole through music education. Plato's view of music education was oriented almost exclusively toward his purposes for society. In his writing, any consideration of effect on the individual was only incidental to his primary concern of its effect on society.The true teacher, however, will always gravitate toward the purpose for the individual. A person is the source of his ideas, and does not the creator stand above his creation? Do music teachers teach music? No, they teach students about music. Though we cannot separate ourselves from our love of beauty of form and expression in music nor can we forget our personal commitments toward improving the world around us, yet we must remember that it is the individual student who is the focus of music instruction. If this is true, we can draw some conclusions about our right to bring about change.Do we have the right to proselytize individual students so that they might become adherents of our worldview? As an evangelical Christian, perhaps even a fundamentalist, I admit that I have observed changes in society over my lifetime with some sadness. It is difficult to see the country I love, which was founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, gradually losing touch with those principles. How will departure from those principles affect the direction and stability of the [End Page 189] nation founded upon them? As a teacher, however, I understand that it is my responsibility to teach students about music and that I have a responsibility to parents, who in a democratic society, hold responsibility not only for the spiritual, moral, and social education of their children, but also for the spiritual, moral, and social direction of a nation. Teachers are obliged to live as moral examples to students and to demonstrate values in their actions, but to consider the wishes of parents when it comes to the advancement of personal agendas. We do not have the right to encroach upon the mentoring relationship between parents and children. We must also be careful lest we... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Old Orders for New Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of HumanismCary Wolfe (bio)Luc Ferry. The New Ecological Order. Trans. Carol Volk. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.1Early on in The New Ecological Order, the French philosopher Luc Ferry characterizes the allure and danger of ecology in the postmodern moment. What separates it from various other issues in the intellectual and political field, he writes, is thatit can call (...) itself a true “world vision,” whereas the decline of political utopias, but also the parcelization of knowledge and the growing “jargonization” of individual scientific disciplines, seemed to forever prohibit any plan for the globalization of thought.... At a time when ethical guide marks are more than ever floating and undetermined, it allows the unhoped-for promise of rootedness to form, an objective rootedness, certain of a new moral ideal.[xx]As we shall see, for Ferry—a staunch liberal humanist in the Kantian if not quite Cartesian tradition—this vision conceals a danger to which contemporary European intellectuals are especially sensitive: not holism, nor even moralism, exactly, but that far more charged and historically freighted thing, totalitarianism. Ferry’s concern is that such “world visions,” incarnated in contemporary environmentalism in movements such as Deep Ecology and ecofeminism, threaten “[o]ur entire democratic culture,” which “since the French Revolution, has been marked, for basic philosophical reasons, by the glorification of uprootedness, or innovation” [xxi]. Ferry’s thesis—it becomes quite explicit in his comparison of environmental legislation under the Third Reich with tenets of Deep Ecology in the book’s second section—is that Deep Ecology and its ilk have moved in to occupy the space left open by the passing of the political imaginaries of fascism and communism, so that denunciations of liberalism (and its corollary in political praxis, reformism) may now be unmasked for what they are: critiques “in the name of nostalgia, or, on the contrary, in that of hope: either the nostalgia for a lost past, for national identity flouted by the culture of rootlessness, or revolutionary hope in a radiant future, in a classless and free society” [xxvi]. To which Ferry responds—literally—“Grow up!” Late in the book, he tells us that we must see through “the adult development of the secular and democratic universe” [137] by rejecting totalizing revolutionary visions of the sort purveyed by Deep Ecology, and by adhering instead to liberal reformism, “the only [End Page 21] position consistent with leaving the world of childhood” [138].Ferry is certainly right to draw our attention to the often uncritical nostalgia and romantic holism of some varieties of environmental thought—problems that have been noted before by critics from points on the map very different politically from Ferry’s avowed liberal humanism. And it is certainly understandable, given the historical context, that he would join a long list of other European intellectuals in pointing out the manifold dangers to democratic society of totalizing moral schemes—dangers often represented for liberal intellectuals like Ferry by the rise of the Greens in European politics. 1 We do well to remember, too (as Fredric Jameson and others have pointed out), that for European intellectuals such as Ferry, liberalism retains, for understandable historical reasons, a viability and a promise about which many American intellectuals are skeptical or even jaded. European intellectuals, conditioned by the experience of fascist authoritarianism and the strong but problematic presence historically of the Communist party in social and intellectual life, may find in liberalism a refreshing and indeed radical democratic openness and dynamism, while American intellectuals, conditioned to the absence of any other major political contenders, have long since grown accustomed to liberalism as the name for that “end of ideology” position which, as Jameson puts it, “can function more effectively after its own death as an ideology, realizing itself in its most traditional form as a commitment to the market system that has become sheer common sense and no longer a political program” [249, my emphasis].But in defending democratic difference, everything hinges, of course, on precisely how such terms are framed and how difference is articulated—an index of which often may be found in how its imagined... (shrink)

Si oblitus fuero tui, Jerusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea.” When Jerome commented on Ps. 136.5, he interpreted the passage allegorically. Sitting in exile by the waters of Babylon, the Israelites had hung their harps on the willows and, in a foreign land, would not sing the songs of Zion. Yet they refused to forget their origin, preferring, as King James's translators put it, that “my right hand forget her cunning.” Jerome observes that this is always the hand whose work (...) remembers the Lord. Yet clearly, by the early fifth century, the idea of manual dexterity had become a trope, a figure in some higher argument. Augustine compares the “lower gods”, reduced to performing menial tasks in the administration of the universe, to workers in the silversmiths' quarter through whose many hands a vessel passes before it is finished, even if it could have been perfected by any skilled member of their team. Slightly more pragmatically, Justinian's Digest mentions a piece of silver plate, brought on approval to a client's house by a uascularius but then inadvertently destroyed, as an instance actionable under the laws of contract. (shrink)

Introduction to Ethics: A Primer for the Western Tradition is designed for Introduction to Ethics courses which survey the history of ideas in the Western philosophical tradition. Introducing students to essential normative and meta-ethical distinctions both in regard to perennial primary sources and in abstract form, this book has been deliberately constructed in a style geared toward learning and remembering core material, while facilitating the comparison of ideas across the history of the Western tradition. Though this book may be used (...) as a standalone resource, optimally, this book should be used alongside primary source readings. -/- While respecting the depth of the standard historical divisions in Western philosophy, Introduction to Ethics: A Primer for the Western Tradition emphasizes the traditional metaethical concerns of philosophers to provide a philosophically robust understanding of: Goodness, Freedom, Friendship, Integrity, Happiness, and Human Excellence. This book also aims to present, with sufficient commensurability, normative ethical theories for students to consider as so many strategies for engaging in ethical decision-making and for performing ethically-minded actions. Philosophers discussed include, but are not limited to: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Augustine, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Bentham, J.S. Mill, and Nietzsche. -/- Introduction to Ethics: A Primer for the Western Tradition is designed to facilitate discussion and critical thinking in ethics by, for example, concisely presenting the central grounds for justification, such as, consequences, duties, and virtues and the central themes of contextualization, such as, cultural relativism, divine command theory, and nihilism, informing the Western philosophical tradition. Other notions discussed, central to moral psychology, moral social development, and ethics, in the Western tradition include: the relation between Reason and Passion, Emotion, Pleasure, Intuition, Attitude, Fate, Conscience, Personhood, Natural Law, the “State of Nature,” Responsibility, Rights, Justice, and Good Will. (shrink)

A general principle for good pedagogic strategy is this: other things equal, make the essential principles of the subject explicit rather than tacit. We think that this principle is routinely violated in conventional instruction in statistics. Even though most of the early history of probability theory has been driven by causal considerations, the terms “cause” and “causation” have practically disappeared from statistics textbooks. Statistics curricula guide students away from the concept of causality, into remembering perhaps the cliche disclaimer “correlation does (...) not mean causation,” but rarely thinking about what correlation does mean. The treatment of causality is a serious handicap to later studies of such topics as experimental design, where often the main goal is to establish (or disprove) causation. Much of the technical vocabulary of the language used in research design textbooks consists in euphemisms for specific causal relations, e.g, “latent variable,” “intervening variable,” “confounding factor,” etc. The multiplicity of terms used to refer to causation results in confusion and, in effect, may hinder understanding of the basic principles of research design. (shrink)

A contemporary of Krishnamurti, Ravi Ravindra explores Krishnamurti's assertion that the miracle of personal transformation can be linked directly to the art of seeing rightly.

According to rich views of consciousness (e.g., James, Searle), we have a constant, complex flow of experience (or 'phenomenology') in multiple modalities simultaneously. According to thin views (e.g., Dennett, Mack and Rock), conscious experience is limited to one or a few topics, regions, objects, or modalities at a time. Existing introspective and empirical arguments on this issue (including arguments from 'inattentional blindness') generally beg the question. Participants in the present experiment wore beepers during everyday activity. When a beep sounded, they (...) were to take note of the conscious experience, if any, they were having at the last undisturbed moment immediately prior to the beep. Some participants were asked to report any experience they could remember. Others were asked simply to report whether there was visual experience or not (and if so, what it was). Still others were asked about experience in the far right visual field, or tactile experience, or tactile experience in the left foot. A majority of participants in the full experience and the visual conditions reported visual experience in every single sample. Tactile and peripheral visual experience were reported less often. However, the proper interpretation of these results is uncertain. (shrink)

Until the beginning of the twentieth century Christianity, in order to proclaim its message, was based above all upon the word, the substance of prayer and preaching; certainly manuscripts, with the Scriptures and other fundamental texts, long secured the foundations of the faith, but before the advent of printing their diffusion and reception remained the prerogative of lettered elites, most often clerics such as the Benedictines (remember Umberto Eco's famous novel published in 1980, The Name of the Rose). Moreover, (...) the Catholic Church made extensive use of the image in the Middle Ages, above all in the gothic period, and created remarkable visual splendour in its holy places. Stained glass windows and paintings and sculptures with subjects from the Old and New Testaments reinforced the devotion and faith of the illiterate. It was only after 1450, with Gutenberg's invention of printing - which, moreover, immediately disseminated bibles, missals and prayer-books - that the text became a major means of transmitting the Christian message. From the sixteenth century onwards Protestant Calvinists (but not Lutherans or Anglicans) rejected religious imagery - even the crucifix - as a means of devotion, for they were considered idolatrous; on the other hand, the reformers, more than the Catholic Church, laid stress on the reading of biblical texts by the faithful, especially the Old Testament, henceforth much more widely distributed, thanks expressly to printing. Admittedly the word did not lose its rights; like Catholicism in its churches and cathedrals, the Reformation preached the Good Word in its temples. Yet paradoxically, the present return of the religious image - this time televisual - was to be first of all a Protestant occurrence, principally in the United States. (shrink)

Background: Medical confidentiality underpins the doctor–patient relationship and ensures privacy so that intimate information can be exchanged to improve, preserve, and protect the health of the patient. The right to information applies to the patient alone, and, only if expressly desired, can it be extended to family members. However, it must be remembered that one of the primary tenets of family medicine is precisely that patient care occurs ideally within the context of the family. There may be, then, certain (...) occasions when difficulties will arise as to the extent of the information provided to family members.Objectives: This study aimed to describe family doctors’ attitudes to confidentiality and providing patient information to relatives as well as their justifications for sharing information.Method: A descriptive postal questionnaire was self-administered by family doctors.Results: Of 227 doctors, 95.1% provided information to a patient’s family and over a third disclosed information to others without prior patient consent.Conclusions: The findings reveal that family doctors should pay more attention to their patients’ rights to information, privacy, and confidentiality, and reflect very carefully on the fine balance between this and the occasional need for the support and collaboration of family members in delivery of care. Emphasis should be placed on ethics and legal problems during undergraduate education and in-service training of doctors. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 209-229, June 2022.

In 1997 President Clinton apologized to the survivors of the U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study. Since then, two of his recommendations have received little attention. First, he emphasized the need to remember the shameful past so we can build a better future for racial'ethnic minority populations. Second, he directed the creation in partnership with higher education to prepare training materials that would instruct biomedical researchers on the application of ethical principles to research with racial/ethnic minority populations. This article (...) proposes the inclusion of these issues in the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. It asks, What is the right or good thing to do? What are our obligations to one another? Two challenges are examined: (a) Conducting research with African Americans without knowledge of bioethics specific to this population, and (b) the ethical dilemma of conducting research that does not adequately take into account the diversity within the Black population that is a contributing factor in health disparities. Training and policy recommendations responsive to President Clinton's Apology are presented. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Traditions and Tendencies:A Reply to Carine DefoortRein RaudIn 1899 William Aston, a British diplomat, published the first overall history of Japanese literature in English. In it, Japanese poetry is characterized as follows:Narrow in its scope and resources, it is chiefly remarkable for its limitations-for what it has not, rather than what it has.... Indeed, narrative poems of any kind are short and very few, the only ones which I (...) have met with being two or three ballads of a sentimental cast. Didactic, philosophical, political and satirical poems are also conspicuously absent. The Japanese muse does not meddle with such subjects, and it is doubtful whether, if it did, the native Pegasus possesses sufficient staying power for them to be dealt with adequately.([1899] 1977, p. 24)Nevertheless, Aston took it for granted that Japan had a literature and that one part of it was poetry, even if it did not quite live up to his expectations. Timothy Reiss, writing a century later, was not so generous: he argued that literature in the proper (i.e., his) sense of the word appeared in Europe in the seventeenth century "as part of a social solution to a crisis viewed explicitly at the time as at once logico-linguistic and sociopolitical" (1992, p. 5). As was fashionable at the time, Reiss' voluminous study also set out to prove that, once the crisis had been resolved, literature would also cease to exist.These two approaches can certainly be seen in the treatment of non-Western philosophical traditions as well. We might say that Aston's assessment of Japanese literature ("ingenious and inventive, but hardly capable of high intellectual achievement" [1899] 1977, p. 4) could perhaps be compared to the views of Christian missionaries and other early mediators of non-Western traditions, while the position of Reiss is similar to the position of those contemporary Western scholars who would like to reserve the right to define philosophy as narrowly as possible. In my comment earlier in this issue I tried to argue that neither of these positions, nor their derivates, is really satisfactory in the contemporary intellectual environment.In her thorough response, Carine Defoort has clarified most issues that provoked me in her initial article on this topic, particularly in emphasizing that her "family model" of philosophy is meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive. Nevertheless, I do find it a bit too pessimistic even as a description of the present situation, and I am also inclined to disagree with her certainty that "a world philosophy has not arisen and is not on the rise." Of course, a lot remains to be done in this area, but there is a clear tendency to the contrary, although this is perhaps due more to the contribution of Japanese rather than Chinese thinkers. A brief internet search reveals a considerable number of scholars who occupy professorial positions in philosophy (not Asian studies) departments at various universities around the world who list, for example, the Kyoto school philosophers or Dōgen in their research interests. Defoort as well does not have too high hopes of the Chinese tradition entering the field on a [End Page 661] more permanent setting because of the complexity of the language; on the other hand, not so many Western philosophers are proficient in Greek, either, but this is not perceived to be a major obstacle in their work. Moreover, although articles and books on Japanese thinkers sometimes appear that are on the naive side, relying on translations as they do, this situation does not necessarily have to stay the way it is.Nevertheless, Defoort is most certainly right in that the opposite number of philosophy departments, where Asian traditions are not considered to be proper philosophy, is, for the time being, much bigger. And some of them are in the most respectable institutions. However, when thinkers such as Jacques Derrida deny the status of philosophy to Chinese thought, one should remember that in many of these respectable institutions the label of "philosophy" is denied to the work of Derrida himself as well. If we refer to taijiquan not as taijiquan, period, but as "shadow-boxing," we have already granted... (shrink)

“A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history,” Mahatma Ghandi is often quoted as saying, and, one might add cheekily, but with unquestionable truth, so too a small group of determined historians. Burke may have counseled that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but the Irishman clearly gave memory greater credit than it deserves. Not only do we use the past by (...) many means and to many ends, but these means and ends necessarily color our view of the past, shape it, oftentimes constructing it forthright. And what is true for the layman may in fact be argued to be doubly true for the professional historian, his or her many years of considered disciplining notwithstanding. Being taught to be aware of our biases doesn't always help us overcome them, nor do we necessarily write about the past because we simply want to tell it “like it was.” Memory is fallible, and historical records incomplete – yes – but over and above these limitations, we often seek to recall the past and breathe new life into it for very particular reasons. Churchill knew this all too well. “History will be kind to me,” he wrote, “for I intend to write it.”. (shrink)

In 1989, the age of power political realism ended. The conditions were set to replace the prevailing Hobbesian model of peace by deterrence with the considerably more challenging Kantian model of peace by right. If, however, Huntington's paradigm of fighting civilizations were right, we would have to forget Kant and remember Hobbes. Sober rationality, healthy distrust, striving for power accumulation and all the other instruments from the realist's toolbox of political prudence are very well suited to facilitate (...) political self-assertion in an age of violently clashing cultures. However, this helplessness is not well grounded. Considering that from the very beginning liberalism is a theory of religious and ethical pluralism and well-experienced in dealing with problems of multiculturalism, it is at least possible to argue for a weak liberal universalism which provides normative foundations for a global order of peacefully living together. Of course, conceptual and moral modesty is crucial. If the human rights doctrine wants to defend its universal claim in the face of cultural diversity , it has to restrict itself to the conditions of esse: the pre-cultural and sheer natural conditions of human being and human coexistence. However, the formulation of the conditions of bene esse has to be left to culture and its authorities and belief systems which buttress a cultural constitution of meaning, both theologically and metaphysically. Traditional natural rights theory knew that both have to go together, and that the esse-enabling duties necessarily enjoy priority. No cultural conception of thriving life and existential significance can be accepted which contradicts the fundamental imperatives and conditions of pure human existence and coexistence. (shrink)

The article examines the contribution of the Italian journalist and historian Giampaolo Pansa to the Italian collective memory. The definition of the concept of "collective trauma", as well as "structural violence" is given. The work also deals with the consequences of the fascist regime on Italian identity, expressed in cultural trauma. A historiographical review of two books by J. Pansa, who made a great impression on the Italians, as he was the first to decide to tell about the mutual two-sided (...) arbitrariness of winners and losers that took place in Italy during the civil War of 1943–1945. For a long time it was forbidden to talk about this conflict in Italy about what the traumatized consciousness did not allow to remember. The silence that Italy was struck by eventually played a bad role for the Italians. Having abruptly left the fascist worldview, having abruptly changed their identity from totalitarian to democratic, the Italians were afraid to work through this trauma, not wanting to remember the lynching and arbitrariness committed by many of those who were considered and rightfully considered heroes. Moreover, many families who were associated with fascism or simply adhered to these views were afraid to talk about them because of the risk of retaliation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Genealogies of OppressionA Response to Ladelle McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A GenealogyChloë TaylorLadelle McWhorter introducesRacism and Sexual Oppression inAnglo-America with an account of her experiences during the days between the attack on and the death of Matthew Shepard. On sabbatical near Pennsylvania State University in October 1998, McWhorter describes following these events as they were covered by the media and discussed on a Penn State University (...) LGBT listserv. A day and a half after Shepard’s death, McWhorter attended a candlelight vigil organized by Penn State students. It was raining, only thirty people were present, their voices could scarcely be heard over the sounds of traffic, and the event risked being more disheartening than consoling. An attempt was made to salvage the vigil through song, and someone suggested singing “We Shall Overcome,” but none of the students knew the words. McWhorter realized that she was the only person present who could lead the group in a song that might bring a sense of hope and closure to the otherwise depressing gathering. However, as she describes, she was wary of calling “upon the memory and power of African American movements for justice and freedom in order to further the rights and interests, or at least comfort the fearful souls of nonheterosexual people” (10). She writes,It was important for Matthew Shepard to remain Matthew Shepard and Emmett Till to remain Emmett Till, two separate individuals whose living and dying are different events in human history. I believed it was important [End Page 207] to remember the differences between black and queer struggles, subcultures, and experiences of oppression.(9)McWhorter thus did not sing, and thegathering disintegrated without closure. Each one of us wandered away, carrying with us, not a sense that despite the violence and injustice all around us life can go on and love and respect do still exist—which is, I suppose, what the candlelight shining in the darkness at such vigils is intended to instil in us—but rather with that sense of futility and hopelessness that drizzle and senseless death inspire.(5)Despite her decision to not sing, McWhorter goes on to discuss not only the danger of Sameness that prompted her decision—the danger of homogenizing or identifying oppressions—but also the “twin danger” of Difference. As McWhorter argues, “If we maintain radical distinctions between political events, we may fail to see important overarching patterns and as a result miss opportunities to form and consolidate alliances that might counter the networks of power that oppress so many of us” (10–11).Although there are risks involved in emphasizing either Sameness or Difference, McWhorter notes that she had always been more worried by the dangers of Sameness. She attributes this intuition to her attraction to Foucault. The genealogical method is concerned with revealing discontinuities between experiences in diverse historical periods, undermining histories that impose homogeneity on the past. Pointing out historical disparities kindles hope for a different future and is thus an emancipatory task. McWhorter notes that Foucault is a “splitter” and not a “lumper” like Hegel or Plato. Despite her Foucauldian aversion to lumping, McWhorter writes that in the wake of that candlelight vigil and the more general political climate of the late 1990s in which allegiances between civil rights movements were being disavowed, she came to worry about that other danger, the danger of too much splitting. She wonders “whether, despite all the differences in experience and effect, it might not be the case that somehow these things are joined together, part of the same matrix of power, employing the same means, serving the same ends, shaping the same lives” (11). She notes, “It is that other danger and that other set of possibilities that have moved me to write this book, despite the risks such an enquiry inevitably runs” (11).The dangers of Difference are practical but also factual since, McWhorter argues, there are real similarities between the deaths of Shepard and Till that risk being overlooked. Most significant of these is that both young men were murdered for their sexual deviance: one for his homosexuality, the other for his insistence that... (shrink)

Remember how Kim Mental causation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993b) used to argue against non-reductive physicalism to the effect that it cannot accommodate the causal efficacy of the mental? The argument was that if physicalists accept the causal closure of the physical, they are faced with an exclusion problem. In the original version of the argument, the dependence holding between the mental and the physical was cashed out in terms of supervenience. Due to the work or Fine and others, we (...) have since come to realize that modal notions are not well-suited to perform the work of properly characterizing dependence. As a consequence of this, an increasingly larger community of contemporary metaphysicians prefer to spell out mental-physical dependence in terms of a non-causal and non-reductive notion called grounding, which is intended to target a particular sort of metaphysical relation that takes us from ontologically less fundamental features of the world to that which is more fundamental. In this paper I join forces with those who think that this shift in focus is on the right track. More specifically, I will argue that the grounding physicalist can solve the exclusion problem in a way that is preferable to the supervenience-based nonreductive physicalist solution, as well as in a way that is compatible with the externalist picture of the mental. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:It’s a Human Rights Issue!Daniela TrufferI was born in 1965 in Switzerland with a severe heart defect and ambiguous genitalia. The doctors couldn‘t tell if I was a girl or a boy. First they diagnosed me with CAH and an enlarged clitoris, and cut me between my legs looking for a vagina.Because of my heart condition, the doctors assumed I would die soon. After an emergency baptism, I stayed (...) in the hospital for three months. My mother would travel to the city as often as possible, though she was only allowed to see me through a glass window.When I was two months old, and still in the hospital, doctors opened my abdomen and found healthy testes, which they threw in the garbage bin. According to my medical records, my parents had not provided consent. Further tests showed I am chromosomally male.Later the “castration” was declared a “mistake”: one doctor said I was a boy with hypospadias. As they had already removed the testes, however, they would have “to continue this way and the small patient must be made a girl.”After three months, my parents were finally allowed to take me home.During my childhood, I spent a lot of time in doctor’s offices and hospitals, suffering countless examinations of my genitals and urethral opening. When I was two, our family doctor stuck his finger into my urethral opening; I was screaming very loud, my father says. My mother had to put me into warm water because every time I had to pee I screamed in pain. Later I was hurried to the hospital with a bad infection. Still today my urethra often hurts after going to the toilet.I knew early in my life that I was different.I learned fragments of the truth only after decades of ignorance and denial. I was lucky to obtain my medical records. The hospital initially told me they no longer existed. When I insisted, they eventually sent me some recent files pertaining only to care I received after I was an adult. I kept calling. Once I was put through directly to the archive, where I was told that indeed there were “lots of files on microfilm.” However, it was only when I threatened to return with a lawyer that the hospital sent me a large pile of printouts.Finally I had it in black and white: The doctors had systematically lied to my parents, instructing them to “raise me as a girl” and never talk to me or to anyone else about “the gender issue.” Asked if I could have children, the doctors told them it was “doubtful.” At seven, the doctors still claimed it had been necessary to “remove the ovaries,” and at fourteen told me that I didn‘t menstruate because my “uterus was very small.”Because of the castration, my bone growth was reduced. To this day, I have to deal with health problems like a ruined metabolism, recurring fatigue and vertigo, and osteopenia.I would eventually grow older than doctors had originally predicted. At seven, they decided to operate on my heart septum and valve. I went to the hospital for preparatory cardiac catheterization. However, because of an infection, doctors put off the procedure. Since I had already been admitted, they decided to “use the opportunity to conduct the genital correction already planned in 1965,” and shortened my micropenis to the size of a “very small clitoris,” allegedly with my consent.Fortunately they didn‘t amputate the glans, and I still have sexual feelings left. But I remember the pain and unease, and how I often ran home from [End Page 111] school crying. Today I have a lot of scar tissue, which often hurts and itches.After a few days I was brought back to the cardiologist for the catheterization, and a few months later heart surgery. The doctors saved my life and destroyed it in the same year.I spent my childhood in fear, isolation, and shame. When I had to see a doctor, I was always scared stiff, but I never cried, and endured everything without any protest. I felt sick days in advance, and in... (shrink)

Albert Schweitzer maintained that the idea of "Reverence for Life" came upon him on the Ogowe River as an "unexpected discovery, like a revelation in the midst of intense thought." While Schweitzer made numerous significant contributions to an incredible diversity of fields - medicine, music, biblical studies, philosophy and theology - he regarded Reverence for Life as his greatest contribution and the one by which he most wanted to be remembered. Yet this concept has been the subject of a range (...) of distortions and misunderstandings, both academic and popular. In this book, Ara Barsam provides a new interpretation of Schweitzer's reverence and shows how it emerged from his studies of German philosophy, Indian religions, and his biblical scholarship on Jesus and Paul. By throwing light on the origin and development of Schweitzer's thought, Barsam leads his readers to a closer appreciation of the contribution that reverence makes to current ethical issues. Whereas previous commentators have focused on "reverence for life" as a philosophical ethic located in that tradition, this book demonstrates that it is in fact Schweitzer's theology that provides the hitherto undiscerned foundation for his ethic. Even among those who herald Schweitzer as the one who brought "reverence" to Christianity, there exists a tendency to underemphasize how his thinking also developed from his pivotal encounter with Indian religions. As Barsam shows, it is impossible to grasp the nature and the significance of Barsam's contribution without addressing that link. Life-centered ethics - in the broadest sense - have continued to flourish, yet Schweitzer's pioneering contribution is often overlooked. Not only did he help establish the issue on the moral agenda, but, most significant, he also provided much sought after philosophical and theological foundations. Schweitzer emerges from this critical study of his life and thought as a remarkable individual who should rightfully be regarded as a moral giant of the twentieth-century. (shrink)

How a "right to die" may become a "coercive option".

In an article in this journal, Christopher Cowley argues that we have ‘misunderstood the special nature of medicine, and have misunderstood the motivations of the conscientious objectors’. We have not. It is Cowley who has misunderstood the role of personal values in the profession of medicine. We argue that there should be better protections for patients from doctors' personal values and there should be more severe restrictions on the right to conscientious objection, particularly in relation to assisted dying. We (...) argue that eligible patients could be guaranteed access to medical services that are subject to conscientious objections by: removing a right to conscientious objection; selecting candidates into relevant medical specialities or general practice who do not have objections; demonopolizing the provision of these services away from the medical profession. (shrink)

In opposition to the natural view that observer perspective memory is bound to be inauthentic, McCarroll argues for the surprising conclusion that memories in which the subject sees himself in the remembered scene are, in many cases, true to the subject’s original experience of the scene. By means of a careful reconstruction of his argument, this paper shows that McCarroll does not succeed in establishing his conclusion. It shows, in fact, that we ought to come to the opposed conclusion that, (...) while it may be possible in principle for observer perspective memory to be authentic, this is unlikely ever to happen in practice. The natural view, in short, is more or less right. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the ethical implications of genetic enhancement within the specific framework of the “child’s right to an open future” argument (CROF). Whilst there is a broad ethical consensus that genetic modifications for eradicating diseases or disabilities are in line with – or do not violate – CROF, there is huge disagreement about how to ethically understand genetic enhancement. Here, I analyze this disagreement and I provide a revised formulation of the argument in the specific field (...) of genetic enhancement. First, I argue that CROF is not in contrast with every kind of enhancement. I subsequently discuss whether CROF requires some moral obligations to enhance progeny. My argument is that parents do not have the moral obligation to open as many options as possible for their children. Rather, they should provide them with a reasonable range of opportunities. Finally, I contend that the moral obligations required by CROF are directly dependent on what Allen Buchanan calls the ‘dominant cooperative framework’ in a given society. I conclude by claiming that, at present, parents are not morally obliged to genetically enhance their children since a non-enhanced person already might have access to a reasonable range of opportunities. However, the moral obligation to enhance progeny might arise if a structural modification of the dominant cooperative framework occurs. (shrink)

Immigration restrictions violate the prima facie right of potential immigrants not to be subject to harmful coercion. This prima facie right is not neutralized or outweighed by the economic, fiscal, or cultural effects of immigration, nor by the state’s special duties to its own citizens, or to its poorest citizens. Nor does the state have a right to control citizenship conditions in the same way that private clubs may control their membership conditions.

In this paper, I defend what I call the ‘Inference Principle’. This principle holds that if an agent obtains some information legitimately, then the agent can make any inference she wants based on the information, without violating anyone’s right to privacy. This principle is interesting for at least three reasons. First, it constitutes a novel answer to the timely question of whether the widespread use of ‘data analytics’ to infer personal information about individuals is morally permissible. Second, it contradicts (...) what seems to be a common view of inferences’ ability to violate privacy rights. Third, it offers an account of the theoretically underdeveloped issue of what duties are engendered by the moral right to privacy with regard to inferred information. (shrink)