The state of political philosophy In this article we attempt to do what is by definition impossible: providing a complete picture of the discipline of political philosophy today. We start by presenting the three thematic subfields in which most research seems to be taking place: democracy (including such topics as deliberation, representation, radical democracy, republicanism, and populism), justice (which covers such diverse topics as capabilities, intergenerational justice, and linguistic justice), and what we call the ‘postnational constellation’. This latter subfield in (...) particular is growing ever larger. The context of globalization increasingly urges political philosophers to reformulate all classical questions about democracy and justice, as is visible in discussions about global justice, governance, cosmopolitanism, federalism, or the ‘commons’. After surveying the main themes of contemporary political philosophy, we discuss a number of methodological evolutions and controversies. We look for instance at the role of intellectual-historical research; not only does the quality and the quantity of such research continue to rise, it is also well-connected to contemporary debates and clearly inspires and refines these debates. Most attention, though, is given to the ongoing confrontation between ‘normative’ political theorists and so-called ‘realists’. The former believe that political philosophers should not just contemplate social and political reality, but should also propose guidelines for the (re)design of social institutions, and should maybe even actively contribute to realizing these proposals. ‘Realists’, by contrast, believe that political philosophy, as a branch of philosophy, should aim for insight in the dynamics of political action, in human relations and motivations as they become visible in politics, and in the role of the political sphere in society. We conclude our article with a critical note on the incompleteness of our survey. (shrink)

Our self-image is constructed in the interplay between man and culture. Religious traditions play a key role in this interplay; myths create meaning to the individual and to society at large. Sacred narratives provide man with patterns of behavior, how life should be lived. The other side of the picture is that identity and integrity may lead to intolerance, a dividing line between them and us: the most serious obstacle to peace and intercultural understanding. Religions can reinforce strong feelings of (...) humiliation, of being a victim. This, in turn, may lead to the splitting of humanity into good and evil; one group demonizes the other. This coupled with an idealized, wrathful and punitive deity or leader may lead to violence, and violence is sanctified. Religion may encourage feelings of humiliation, but it can also deliver an antidote. There are theological resources that can counter terror and violence. A merciful and compassionate God can replace a wrathful and punitive deity. A stage of faith known as gerotranscendence is characterised by “an increasing feeling of belonging to the universe”. Representatives of ‘glocal’ spirituality reject claims of exclusivity. A glocal perspective is crucial. What we need today is that a greater number of spiritual leaders stand up and insist on values that touch upon the sanctity of life. (shrink)

The author suggests a new model for interpretation of mystical experience, based on a fruitful combination of cognitive psychology and depth psychology. Offering a rather wide definition of mystical experience, the author then turns to two basic assumptions—a general systems approach and an organismic-holistic view of development. Hans Loewald's analysis of primary process cognition is combined with a multi-dimensional model of cognitive activity called "Interacting Cognitive Subsystems" , presented by John D. Teasdale and Philip J. Barnard. These two complementary theoretical (...) perspectives are applied to the analysis of both historical and contemporary examples of mystical experience, understood as a result of a dialectical interplay between these different coding systems, or the marriage between Ego and Id. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Johannes Duns Scotus (1266-1308) was one of the greatest medieval theologians. He joined the Franciscan order and soon stood out because of his acumen. The ideas he developed about the non-necessity of reality became very influential, also in Reformed theology. The life of Duns Scotus is difficult to reconstruct. This biography provides an overview of the state of research and therefore of the life of Duns in his native Scotland, England, where he was educated, France, where he taught, and Germany, (...) where he died. (shrink)

Professor Jeurissen’s paper contains some interesting insights, but is disappointing by its very high level of generality. The relationship between micro, meso and macro levels in business ethics is an elusive topic and I have doubts about the usefulness of stories with such a very comprehensive scope. What is challenging in the field of business ethics — at least in my opinion — is not so much general or methodological stories, but the presentation and treatment of particular issues. General stories (...) in this field mostly yield contestable or even doubtful statements expressing the benevolence of the author rather than the state of the world. (shrink)

The collapse of communism and the transition to a market economy and political democracy in Eastern and Central Europe have been accompanied by an outburst of nationalist and patriotic passions. Most commentators see this as a negative phenomenon, a narrow-minded reaction to the void after a long period in which politics was inspired by ideological excess, or a retreat toward a mythical past when confronted with a highly uncertain future. Others look at it in a more positive way: after all (...) those years of mindless abstractions, should we not welcome this return to concrete, tangible commitments? But of course, especially in the Balkans, nationalism is so tangible that we would rather have a void than this frightening concrete reality. From an ethical point of view, patriotism and nationalism are suspect because most moral philosophers would like authentic ethical rules to be inspired by universalistic schemes of thought. On their view, morality and ethics are rational matters and as such they are threatened by strong emotional attachments.Although I distrust all forms of fanaticism and romanticism, I would like to argue that the communitarian criticism against universalistic ethical and contractarian political theory should be taken seriously. At the same time, I believe that the reference to communitarianism cannot be a permit for irrationalism, the glorification of unquestioned tradition or the creation of scapegoats. In an unmitigated form, neither a strict universalism or contractarianism, nor a myopic communitarianism look very attractive. The former neglects the problem of the motivation of the actors, the latter can be suspected of underestimating or completely ignoring the question of pluralism in contemporary society. Therefore I would plead for an amended communitarianism, and I would like to show that patriotism has some very desirable consequences as well, especially for an individualistic society. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

In his Law of Peoples, Rawls severely restricts our duties of justice towards the global poor. Many of his critics have replied that there actually exists a global basic structure and that hence the difference principle applies on a global scale.However the shipwrecked of globalization do not contribute in any substantial way to the creation of global wealth. We show that Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan solution to this problem is unsatisfactory because it ignores scarcity as one of the circumstances of justice.If (...) the marginalized of progress want to raise a claim of justice rather than appeal to our beneficence, they can only do so on the basis of a principle of compensation: their fate has been deteriorated by the development of a global economy they did not ask for. Towards the end of the article we point at some typical blind spots in the treatment of these problems in the literature on international distributive justice: the idea that development problems can be solved merely by transfers of money and the presupposition that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. (shrink)

This article seeks to demonstrate that in his recent reading of the role of religion in the postsecular public realm, Habermas overlooks a most fundamental dimension of religion: its power to symbolically institute communities. For his part, Gauchet starts from a vision of religion in which this fundamental dimension is central. In his evaluation of the role of religion in postsecular society, he therefore arrives at results which are very different from those of Habermas. However, I believe that Gauchet too (...) underestimates the extent to which religion’s power of symbolic community institution has remained intact within modern, postsecular society. In support of this position, I show how relatively heterogeneous phenomena within Western societies, such as the renewed importance of religion in the public realm, the revival of certain forms of nationalism and the associated demand for recognition of group rights and hence for forms of legal pluralism, may prefigure a new transformation of the public realm. (shrink)

In this article, I define solidarity as the willingness to share with people we do not know personally but whom we consider to be equal to ourselves on the basis of some common feature allowing for identification. In the spirit of David Hume, I explain how identification can be developed through a learning process that leads us to ever more encompassing forms of sympathy. Then I show how solidarity, thus defined, is implemented in the institutions of the welfare state. Finally, (...) I present arguments for not making solidarity too much dependent on responsible behaviour. (shrink)

This article explores Schelling’s view concerning the eventual reconciliation of modern individuality and society. It is argued that in Schelling’s speculations on this subject, aesthetic models play a prominent role: on the level of society by expressing the need for a new mythology; on the level of the individual by formulating a normative ideal in which the individual is modelled after the work of artand its creator: the artistic genius. This normative view on modern individuality is quite ambivalent. It summons (...) the individual to abandon its individuality and to have it determined by universality. But, since Schelling wants the individual to be a real individuality, his position comes down to the quest for an “individual universal.” Relying on a close-reading of Schelling’s System des transzendentalenIdealismus, the Philosophie der Kunst, and the Stuttgarter Privatvorlesungen, the paradigm of this extraordinary position is shown to be the work of art. (shrink)

What makes the person truly human? This is the question that is systematically investigated by Vergote in this fine collection of papers. The integrating themes of the various studies reported here are the exploration of human experience, and the achievement of humanity by the individual. The main question is approached from a variety of angles and focuses on the central issues of human existence.

ABSTRACT One of the productive political-philosophical concepts Foucault developed is that of governmentality. According to Foucault, governmentality is in many respects the heir of pastoral power. However, Foucault has never conclusively demonstrated the genealogical link between pastoral power and governmentality. The hypothesis that I want to put forward is that the “missing link” in this genealogy should be situated in the governmental transformations that took place in the period of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, more specifically in the period of the (...) “confessionalization”. To substantiate this claim, I briefly discuss the ideal-typical relationship between pastoral power and governmentality while indicating how Foucault accounts for this relationship. I then criticise his account by showing that it fails to expose the genealogical link between pastoral power and governmentality. Finally, I show how, from a genealogical point of view, the confessionalization theory makes a convincing connection between the revival of pastoral power during the Reformation and the development of a “confessional governmentality” in which religious and secular authorities intersect. (shrink)

The general claim advanced in this article is that Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state traces two ideal-typically different power arrangements at the origin of the modern state, roughly referred to as ‘sovereign power’ and ‘governmentality’. They are ideal-typically different in that they operate according to a different logic, including different ends, means and modi operandi. The more specific claim, then, is that due to this different logic, their ever changing interpenetration on the level of the state is imbalanced. In (...) order for ‘governmentality’ to operate according to the law, it must be backed by the juridical frameworks provided by sovereign power, but then again these juridical frameworks prove inadequate and insufficient to curb ‘governmentality’s’ operational procedures as well as the modalities and intensities of its implementation. In other words, in his genealogy of the modern state, Foucault tracks down ‘governmentality’ as a distinctive form of power which, although intertwined with the state, cannot juridically be contained by the state. It cannot be appropriately restrained by its legal regulations and, as such, constitutes an excess vis-à-vis those regulations. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to focus on a central element in Gauchet s diagnosis of our age, namely the tension between human rights and democracy. Since the second half of the nineteen seventies, the era of departing from religion' (la sortie de la religion) has been completed, and we now find ourselves in a ‘society of individuals’ (la société des individus). This goes along with an eclipse of the state and of public reason: the waning concern for the (...) common good. The reason for the existence of politics and the state now seem to lie exclusively in their utility for individuals or interest groups within society. The symptom par excellence of this development is the human rights discourse. Gauchet s claim in this respect is that the unilateral emphasis on human rights threatens democracy as it inevitably obfuscates the necessary counterpart of the individual and its private sphere, i. e. the state. As a result, the individual loses track of its own ground of existence. From this viewpoint, democracy in the name of one of its major pillars (the rights of the individual) seems to destroy another major pillar (the state as the guardian of those rights). (shrink)

According to Gauchet we are living in a `society of individuals'. But a central term is missing from that formula, and not by any accident, for contemporary society has lost it from view: the term of the political. In sum, thus reads Gauchet's diagnosis, society today is haunted by a kind of individualism out of which no society can be conceived, as it obfuscates its political dimension. The aim of this article is to elaborate this diagnosis, and more specifically the (...) idea that there is no society, and therefore no individual either, without the political. In order to do so, I will explore the meaning of the formula `society of individuals'. Within the scope of this analysis, I shall primarily pay attention to the `primacy of the political' in Gauchet. To conclude, I will assess Gauchet's diagnosis, by fathoming in what sense contemporary individualism, besides being an `eclipse of the political', is also a threat to democracy. (shrink)

ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING EPISODES in Schelling’s philosophical development is the transition from the System des transzendentalen Idealismus to the Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie, the starting point of the identity system. Looking back on that latter text, Schelling in 1805 declares that “then to me the light went on in philosophy.” This sounds as if the preceding years of philosophical investigation, including the System des transzendentalen Idealismus that was written one year earlier, had to be considered merely propaedeutic (...) and that the Darstellung was his real entry into philosophy. Schelling maintained this view of his philosophical development and in the contemporary Schelling-Forschung scholars widely agree that the Darstellung, being the outset of the identity system, marks the birthplace of so-called absolute idealism—to which Hegel’s system of philosophy probably still is the most spectacular and successful heir. But if this common interpretation is true—and I would not deny it in the generality in which it is stated—then the question inevitably arises: what happened in the transition from the System des transzendentalen Idealismus to the Darstellung, and above all, what made this transition possible? What, in other words, caused the constitution of absolute idealism? (shrink)