Contemporary speculative fiction from the southern area of the Mediterranean is predominantly somber. It often describes worlds where political tyranny prevents the prospect of change, where the scars of the past keep cultures apart, and where technology is forced to harm nature and humanity because of the will of a minority in power. The emerging literary tradition of speculative fiction in this region has a rich history influenced by creative cultural and literary encounters, yet its ongoing contemporary development depicts a (...) protracted sense of crisis rife with dystopian anxieties even as it remains open to occasional utopian alternatives. This article reviews the literary expressions of crisis in selected novels from Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, where, in the last four decades, literary visions of a much-awaited cultural revival instead seek the reasons why change is still a distant prospect. While speculative literature often represents visions of the future, those from along the southern shores of the Mediterranean are laden with traumatic memories of the colonial past, the spleen of the postcolonial present, and the uncertainties of the future. (shrink)

This article engages Queer Theology in conversation with Naga Indigenous Theology. A Naga folk poem is employed to help navigate the intricacies of indigenous experiences and the questions of sexuality in Naga Indigenous Theology. I do this by engaging both Marcella Althaus-Reid and Wati Longchar in their Liberation Theology and move towards queering Longchar’s theology. Using the hermeneutical lens of Althaus-Reid, I demonstrate that there are possible avenues of queering Longchar’s theology. There is also the prerequisite of a justice lens (...) that demands a deconstruction of the colonial legacy in Indigenous Theology. This article shows that Naga Indigenous Theology rooted in Liberation Theology has a potential to propose a Queer Naga Indigenous Theology. (shrink)

Extant sociological theories of gendered power within marriage focus on how social forces—such as gender inequality—shape women’s power within already established partnerships and subsequently affect their risk of intimate partner violence. Yet, inequitable social forces similarly shape women’s life conditions prior to and during the marital transition, with implications for women’s power in marriage. In Myanmar, gender relations between women and men historically have been touted as equitable and advantageous to women. Rare qualitative data find that structural gender inequalities permeate (...) Myanmar society, and intersect with other social forces, to constrain women’s marital power. In particular, we argue that women’s transition into marriage is a critical period to assess how gendered social inequalities determine the future distribution of power within marital relationships. These premarital social processes result in a “preconditioning” of relationship dynamics from the onset of marriage, with long-term effects on women’s power within the relationship, and subsequent exposure to intimate partner violence. We encourage sociological work on gendered power in the family to systematically consider women’s premarital social conditions as predictors of women’s relative power in marriage, with implications for their health and well-being. (shrink)

Aristotle's brief accounts of some swifts and hirundines in Hist. an. 1.1 and 9.30 list several species whose identification has always been taken for difficult, and continues to vary from translation to translation. This note clarifies this small issue on the basis of Aristotle's text alone. I therefore assume that both passages, each introduced by a slightly different use of the term ἄποδες, offer sufficient information for recognizing the species in question. I will first translate and briefly comment upon the (...) passage from Book 1, then do the same with the text from Book 9. (shrink)

Plato’s Timaeus–Critias juxtaposes a long description of our universe in the making with a discourse on human nature. The latter, confined to Critias, flanks Timaeus’ full-blown cosmogony without clearly articulating how, if at all, do the apparently so different stories fit together. By contrast to many precedent efforts at articulating their relation, the article tries to take seriously Timaeus’ distinction between the two kinds of divinities, whereby he opposes celestial bodies together with the ensouled physical universe to the traditional gods. (...) It seems possible that the two kinds of gods correspond to the duality of human nature itself, and thus to its peculiar position at the juncture of the immortal and mortal parts of the universe. Plato’s recourse to gods distinct from the celestial objects of intellectual assimilation then has nothing to do with theology in some doctrinal sense, but serves to indicate a link between divine and human capacities of deliberation and practical action. Reread in this light, the story told by Critias and several passages from the speech of Timaeus indicate the limits of theoretical knowledge and point towards the problematic ontology of the deliberating mind and the puzzling status of artefacts including man and the universe. In this context, the article re-examines the issue of human civilization and war, and also the question of great cataclysms. Presented by Critias, these issues are revelatory of the Platonic conception of human city not as an expression of man’s natural gregariousness but as a carefully composed artefact. The article concludes that, under the overlays of pseudo-history and cosmology, Socratic colours may well be more prominent than we usually assume. (shrink)

Abstrakt/Abstract Na příkladu dvou myslitelů ze zcela odlišných období dějin filosofie lze předvést otázku nejobecnějších podmínek pravdivé řeči, které se projevují na pomezí sémantiky v užším slova smyslu a utváření širšího pojmu světa jakožto pojmu, k němuž patří vytyčení jasných mezí smysluplného vypovídání o tom, co je. Od této velmi obecné otázky se příspěvek obrací k užšímu tématu negace čili k pravidlům užití řeči, která je sice správná a v některých případech pravdivá, avšak postrádá svůj vlastní a specifický korelát v (...) plné osnově skutečnosti samé. Výchozími texty jsou zlomky Parmenidovy básně O jsoucím a její moderní výklady od čtení Russellova až po tzv. modální interpretaci, kladoucí důraz na motivy nutného jsoucího a nemožného nejsoucího, a dále pasáže z Wittgensteinova Traktátu i Filosofických zkoumání (§ 50). Podrobnější srovnání postoje obou myslitelů k negaci umožňuje prohloubit i rozšířit starší srovnávání Parmenidova argumentu o nemožnosti mluvit o tom, co není, a Wittgensteinova důrazu na nutnou existenci jednoduchých objektů. Choosing two thinkers from two entirely different periods of the history of philosophy, one can fruitfully illustrate the issue of the most general conditions of truthful speech, which take effect on the crossroad of the narrowly conceived semantics and a broadly construed concept of the world as a concept that implies the posting of neat limits of the meaningful linguistic articulation of what there is. From this very general issue, the article turns to the narrower question of negation, and thus of the rules of the use of the correct and sometimes true speech that, nevertheless, lacks its specific referent in the full structure of reality. The texts under scrutiny are the fragments of Parmenides’ poem On Being and its modern exegeses ranging from Russell to the modal interpretation that emphasizes the necessary being and the impossible not-being, plus passages from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and also his Philosophical Investigation (§ 50). A more detailed comparison of the attitude of both thinkers towards negation helps to both deepen and expand the earlier suggested parallel between Parmenides’ argument about the impossibility to speak about what is not and Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the necessary existence of simple objects. (shrink)

: The article discusses two issues implied by the structure of De caelo I.9: Aristotle’s further defence of the uniqueness of the universe and, in more detail, the general question of whether the cosmology of De caelo overlaps, or is even compatible, with Aristotle’s theology including the notion of the Prime Mover. It offers an analysis of several long-standing difficulties including the question of whether the lines 279a18–22 imply an external mover of the heavens. The negative answer that I will (...) defend does however not solve the problem of how Aristotle conceives the source of natural cosmic motion. In this respect, the article pays close attention to the peculiar conception of the animate supralunary matter and to De caelo II.3, 286a7–21 as a text that complements I.9 by relying on the holistic self-motion that implies no Prime Mover, but requires the separation of the supralunary and the sublunary spheres. The article also concludes that Arist otle, despite his rejection of the unceasingly revolving world soul, inherits some Platonic difficulties that arise once we make the notion of the divine life irreducible to divine thinking. (shrink)

[Aristotle on Movers and the Prime Mover].

The Intelligible Living Thing, posited as the model of our visible and tangible universe in Plato’s Timaeus, is often taken for a richly structured whole, which is not a simple sum of its four major parts. This assumption seems unwarranted – most specifically, the dialogue contains no hint at any complex intelligible blue print of the world as a teleologically arranged whole, whose goodness is irreducible to the well-being and individual perfection of its parts. To construe the rich structure of (...) the world is necessary insofar as the Demiurge creates material likenesses of the austere immaterial species. While the life forms included in our universe conform to their intelligible paradigms, this is not, strictly speaking, true about the considerations guiding the Demiurgic activity which gives rise to the universe itself, whose goodness is also to be measured by comparing it to the disordered pre-cosmic matter. The paper discusses several implications of this austere interpretation of the model and its role in creation. It suggests that the Forms that compose the model should be understood as abstract particulars rather than universals, and critically discusses the relation of Timaeus’ account to the so-called Principle of Plenitude. (shrink)

In the Philebus, Plato elaborates an image of our soul as a book where a scribe and a painter are constantly at work. This book examines the implicit premises of this image and aims at overcoming the general polarity of ancient phantasia and modern imagination.

This article presents a didactical concept for the development of disciplinary reading strategies with A-Level-Students in high schools. The basic idea comes from cognitive and learning psychology and has been transferred to subject-teaching-contexts in recent years. For the teaching of Philosophy, the authors diagnose the existence of a missing link between the challenges of a philosophical text comprehension that focus on primary understanding on the one hand and the methods offered on the other. They argue for the development of a (...) concept of reading strategies that takes into view three levels of text comprehension that are relevant for a philosophical understanding: the conceptual-semantic-level, the logical-pragmatic-level and the text-structural-level. Following a systematic presentation of the concept and its implementation options, the authors discuss possible connecting lines between the acquisition of philosophical reading literacy in schools and in introductory seminars at universities. (shrink)

The article discusses several possible interpretations of Socrates’ suggestion that we cannot “understand the nature of soul satisfactorily without understanding the nature of the whole” (Phaedrus 270c1–2). Against those who take the “whole” implied here for the cosmic whole, it argues that nothing in the Phaedrus justifies this interpretation. In the light of both Socrates’ conception of rhetoric in this dialogue and his image of the tripartite soul in the palinode, the “whole” whose knowledge is prerequisite to knowing the soul’s (...) nature is better understood as either the whole of the composed soul or the whole soul-body compound. The real problem of the passage, the article concludes, is that we lack any clear criteria that would enable us to decide between these two readings. At the same time, the dramatic progress of the dialogue makes it possible to argue that Phaedrus briefly misunderstands Socrates’ meaning by reading in it some cosmological connotations. This possibility notwithstanding, it is more likely that, from the perspective of the tripartite soul and its actions and passions, “the whole soul-body compound” and “the whole soul” are two equally defensible solutions to the puzzle. (shrink)

The paper comments and elaborates upon five pages of P. F. Strawson’s Individuals , together with his ‘Entity and Identity’ and ‘Universals’. The focus is on Strawson’s understanding of individual non-particulars as types or universals, and on his contention that the most obvious non-particular entities are the broadly conceived artefacts including the works of art. The narrow focus is on the implications of Strawson’s suggestion that ‘an appropriate model for non-particulars of these kinds is that of a model particular - (...) a kind of prototype, or ideal example, itself particular, which serves as a rule or standard for the production of others’ . The paper analyzes the relation between Strawson’s position and the issue of artefacts and their ontology. It also asks about some less obvious affinities between the problem of the non-particulars and Strawson’s concept of a person. (shrink)

In his 1906 book The problem of becoming and the notion of matter in Greek philosophy from its origins till Theophrastus, Albert Rivaud puts forward an entirely original (and nowadays largely forgotten) interpretation of the receptacle or chôra in Plato’s Timaeus. On his reading, Timaeus’ introduction of chôra signals the limits of the possibility to explain the formation of the cosmos by means of the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible. Opposing Aristotle and others in his wake, Rivaud firmly (...) rejects the understanding of chôra as matter, without however identifying it as space in the sense of a system of intra‑cosmic coordinates. Instead, he sees the receptacle as a notion borrowed from a philosophical system otherwise alien to Plato’s thought, namely the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus. Neither the atomistic void nor chôra are like the modern space ; rather, in virtue of evoking “the unchanging theater of all changes”, they are “like the chaos, immense, gaping, populated by the infinite crowd of forms”. Rivaud concludes that, by introducing chora as a notion irreducible to the concept of becoming, Plato recognizes that the cosmogonic processes cannot be fully explained either on the basis of the relation of the cosmos to its intelligible model or through the logic of opposites that governs all change in the sensible realm. At the same time, the introduction of chôra (described through a variety of mostly biological metaphors) marks the limits of the artisanal model preeminent in the Timaeus, a model that endows the cosmogonic story with a new transparency and ensures the teleological dimension of the fully formed universe. The aim of the article is to re‑evaluate Rivaud’s audacious reading of the Timaeus with an eye to larger issues pertinent to a variety of ancient cosmogonies. (shrink)

In dem folgenden Beitrag wird Drerups Vorschlag einer Koppelung des politischen mit dem wissenschaftlichen Kriterium zur Bestimmung von Grenzziehungen zwischen kontroversem und direktivem Unterrichten kritisch diskutiert. Der Autor identifiziert zum einen aus philosophischer Perspektive eine unzureichende epistemische und semantische Analyse des dem pädagogischen Ansatz zugrundeliegenden Verständnisses von ‚Kontroversität‘, das sich gerade auch auf die von Drerup selbst gesetzten politischen und epistemischen Prinzipien beziehen müsste. Aus didaktischer Perspektive kritisiert der Autor zum anderen, dass der pädagogische Ansatz ausschließlich von oben – also (...) entweder aus der wissenschaftlichen Beobachterperspektive oder von Seiten der Handlungsoptionen der Lehrkraft – über die Grenzziehungen mit Blick auf Themen, Fragen und Positionen auf der Gegenstandsebene des schulunterrichtlichen Diskurses befindet, statt die Lernenden als Subjekte der mit dem Thema nach den Grenzen der Kontroversität selbst aufgeworfenen Fragestellungen mitzudenken. (shrink)

En lisant la République et le Timée de Platon, ce livre propose une enquête sur les deux formes de temporalité irréductibles (celle de la cité armée, celle de l'âme immortelle) pour éclairer la question principale, celle de la nature et de la structure de l'âme, de la cité et du cosmos.

The article discusses two passages,Republic IX 571d6–572b1, andTimaeus71a3–72b5, where Plato does not use dream as a metaphor for the soul’s deficit in knowledge but, instead, focuses on the actual process of dreaming during sleep, and the origin and nature of the images involved. In both texts, Plato’s account is closely connected to the soul’s tripartition, with the resulting emphasis on reason’s capacity to control, and even to create, the dream images that influence the lower parts of the soul. While taking (...) a closer look at the differences between the two accounts (and, therefore, at the physiology of dreaming described only in theTimaeus), the article concludes that, despite these differences, both dialogues agree on the possible alliance between reason and dreaming, an alliance that presupposes a virtuous character and further reinforces the reason’s dominance over appetite.Republic IX and theTimaeusthus converge on the idea that dreams, in virtue of their continuity with waking thoughts, can convey and fortify a certain kind of knowledge, and especially self-knowledge, which is of an ethical rather than strictly epistemic relevance. This is also why Plato’s two accounts of rational dreaming anticipate the issue of our moral responsibility for the content of our dreams. (shrink)

[The fragmented reality of heterogenous ideas: Plato’s disturbing candour].

The article discusses the role of Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy in recent attempts to reformulate the critique of instrumental reason formulated by Max Horkheimer from a metaethical point of view. Here, the focus is on the determination of the relationship between normative and rational aspects with regard to the deontological conception expressed by the imperatives. Using the example of the differing readings of Christine Korsgaard and Konstantin Pollok on the relevance of the hypothetical imperative introduced by Kant in the second (...) section of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten for questions concerning metaethics and the theory of action, the author shows that Kant’s practical philosophy can be interpreted both as an affirmative theory and as a criticism of instrumental reason. With Pollok, the article argues on the one hand for a reading of Kant that emphasises the prevalence of the categorical imperative over the instrumental forms of action. Simultaneously, it points to the problems of relating Kantian theorems to the socio-philosophical problems of a critique of instrumental reason that takes an overarching view of philosophical, scientific and social developments. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe continued rise of socio-economic inequality over the past decades with its connected political outcomes such as the Brexit vote in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump are currently a matter of intense debate both in academia and in journalism. One significant sign of the heightened interest was the surprise popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-first Century. The book reached the top of the bestseller lists and was described as a ‘media sensation’, with Piketty himself as (...) a ‘rock star economist’. This paper, drawing from a major international and cross-disciplinary study, investigates the print media treatment in four European countries of economic policy proposals presented in Capital. Applying social semiotic and critical discourse analysis, we specifically focus on articles which are in disagreement with these proposals and identify five categories of counterarguments used against Piketty: authorisation, moralisation, rationalisation, portrayal of victimhood and inevitab... (shrink)

The paper reconsiders Aristotle’s criticism of Platonic forms as causes together with its wider implications for the differences but also similiarities between the two philosophers. Analyzing the relevant texts of Metaphysics A 9 and Generation and Corruption II, 9, where Aristotle addresses the hypothesis of forms as put forward in the Phaedo, it discusses two interpretative options : that Aristotle takes these forms for an imperfect anticipation of formal causes, and that he sees them as an aborted attempt at grasping (...) the efficient causation whose proper discovery Aristotle claims to be uniquely his own. Although both readings have their virtues and can be defended from the Aristotelian perspective, their check against the text of the Phaedo reveals that, in this context, efficient causation distinct from material causation is quite plausibly the issue Aristotle has in mind first and foremost. This, however, is only one side of Aristotle’s broader critical stance towards forms as causes : while he seems to detect a split in Plato’s own understanding of the relation between the forms and causation, he is equally critical of the craft-like model as personified by the demiurge of the Timaeus. However, other passages from the Metaphysics suggest that some features of precisely this model, once it is carefully stripped of its personal aspect, may ultimately bear on Aristotle’s own conception of efficient cause. (shrink)

Depuis des années, Anca Vasiliu poursuit un projet de relecture des textes anciens, y compris les dialogues de Platon, avec une attention particulière à ce qui se montre à travers la parole philosophique, non pas à titre de description, mais par l’agencement des logoi qui agissent sur l’âme qui les organise en s’organisant ainsi elle-même. Afin de situer son dernier ouvrage dans un contexte plus ample, mais important pour bien saisir la démarche de l’auteur, on doit rappeler que son intérêt (...) p... (shrink)

Il est question de la connaissance de soi telle qu’elle est recommandée et analysée par Socrate dans le Premier Alcibiade de Platon. Tout en prenant en compte le double contexte de la littérature grecque (et plus spécialement de l’OEdipe roi de Sophocle) et des autres dialogues (surtout du Phèdre), l’article reconstruit la série de tensions entre l’effort de fournir une définition générale de ce qu’est l’homme et la tâche de se connaître soi-même en tant qu’individu. Sans perdre de vue le (...) progrès de la division par laquelle Socrate arrive à cerner la source commune, mais difficile à décrire comme telle, de notre capacité épistémique et de la tempérance dans nos actions, il prête attention au redoublement répété d’une méréologie de l’homme et de l’âme par le vocabulaire de la puissance, voire du pouvoir politique. Apparaissent ainsi dans une lumière nouvelle les articulations du schéma de l’activité instrumentale (technê) et le modèle catoptrique, ainsi que le rôle de l’analogie et de la synecdoque comme des figures partagées par la pensée et par la parole qui essaient d’en offrir une sorte d’anatomie descriptive, destinée à suppléer la définition de l’homme en captant le reflet du divin en son âme. L’article conclut que l’ambiguïté de toute description d’un tel reflet ne diminue pas l’impact de l’analyse de l’âme par Socrate. (shrink)

This article aims to reconstruct and discuss a conceptual change from the discursive approach Habermas offered in ‘Between Facts and Norms’ to his statements about the status of dignity and rights in concrete ethical and political debates in his late work. In the latter, Habermas refers to a concept of dignity that goes beyond the discourse theory of law and democracy. He describes the philosophical and practical status of the embodied dignity of human beings by notions like ‘unavailabilty’ that correspond (...) to a philosophical tradition he had rejected in his earlier works. Therefore, the following article confronts the main philosophical argumentation of the middle and the late work of Habermas by focussing the variations of his post-metaphysical thinking about law, rights and dignity. (shrink)