ABSTRACT What has made progressives—self-styled champions of the people—the principal targets of populist resentment in contemporary politics? Perhaps it is progressives’ ambivalence about democracy, not merely the racist, sexist and nationalist passions that progressives prefer to blame. Indeed, one of the reasons that progressives find themselves under attack as out-of-touch elitists may be that they are out of touch with the nature and extent of their elitism. So long as progressives remain committed to enlightening the people as well as empowering (...) them, to bringing about social improvement as well as social justice, they are bound to express some discomfort with democracy, no matter how sincerely they may praise it. If they want to mount a more effective response to the populist challenge to progressive politics, then, they need first to acknowledge and address the sources of their ambivalence about democracy. (shrink)

This new translation of four revised radio interviews, conducted in December 2002 at France Culture with Elie During, is the best introduction to Stiegler's Time and Technics series. This collection includes a new interview conducted specially for this volume and an interview with Artpress from 2001. In Philosophising By Accident, Stiegler introduces some of the key arguments about the technical constitution of the human and its relation to politics, aesthetics and economics. He reads philosophical texts from the perspective of his (...) controversial thesis about the three types of memory and speaks about concepts central to his later works, such as synchrony/diachrony, grammatisation and the industrial temporal object. (shrink)

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

Reid's response to hume has traditionally been taken as begging all of hume's questions. One can, However, Find in reid an argument against hume's phenomenalistic skepticism. Reid's appeal to common sense is an attempt to call attention to the fact that we experience objects as external to us, Not as bundles of impressions. Still, Our access to these objects does arise out of sensations, Which are mental contents. Extending berkeley's idea of the "language of nature" reid suggests that language and (...) signification present apt theoretical models for explaining perception. Using this model, One can provide an answer to the argument from illusion. (shrink)

The cybernetic definition of a living individual proposed previously (Korzeniewski, 2001) is very abstract and therefore describes the essence of life in a very formal and general way. In the present article this definition is reformulated in order to determine clearly the relation between life in general and a living individual in particular, and it is further explained and defended. Next, the cybernetic definition of a living individual is confronted with the real world. It is demonstrated that numerous restrictions imposed (...) on the cybernetic definition of life by physical reality imply a number of particular properties of life that characterize present life on Earth, namely: (1) a living individual must be a dissipative structure (and therefore a low-entropy thermodynamic system out of the state of equilibrium); (2) spontaneously-originated life must be based on organic compounds; (3) evolutionarily stable self-dependent, free-living individuals must have some minimal level of complexity of structure and function; (4) a living individual must have a record of identity separated from an executive machinery; (5) the identity of living individuals must mutate and may evolve; (6) living individuals may collect and accumulate information in subsequent generations over very long periods of time; (7) the degree of complexity of a living individual reflects the degree of complexity of its environment (ecological niche) and (8) living individuals are capable of supple adaptation to varying environmental conditions. Thus, the cybernetic definition of a living individual, when confronted with the real physical world, generates most of the general properties of the present life on Earth. (shrink)

The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western (...) societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce. (shrink)

Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel -- Echoes: (...) after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy. (shrink)

Among the four components proposed by Sbarra and Coan to guide the research aimed at understanding the role of emotion in the connection between social relationship and health, I view the fourth one, labeled “transactional dimensions,” as offering particularly rich promises in this regard. To illustrate, I sketch the example of individual, interpersonal, and collective effects entailed by the process of social sharing of emotion. The example rests on the bidirectional flow of transactions that develops continuously between these three levels.

The term « subsidiarity » started to appear in managerial literature in the last few years, to advocate innovative managerial practices. The resurgence of this concept that originated from a political context can create problems. The goal of this paper is to expose the main difficulty of translating this concept from the political field to a corporate situation. Indeed, subsidiarity gives its inherent power back to the lower echelons of a political community. But the economic approach of organization theory assumes, (...) mainly by the means of agency theory, a top-down conception of the firm. Thus, it is not the lower echelons which delegates power to the higher echelons. Consequently, the subsidiarity principle seems not to be applicable to a corporate setting, unless we reverse the assumptions of economic approach of organization theory. Then, the principle of subsidiarity could be used as an illusion to con employees into believing they have legitimate power, in order to manipulate their freedom, and domesticate it for managerial ends. (shrink)

Abstract Viroli is right to draw a distinction between republican patriotism and nationalism. But in arguing that the former can correct the problems associated with the latter, he places too much trust in the descriptions of patriotism offered by republican theorists. In practice, republican patriotism has been almost as fierce and hostile to outsiders as nationalism. Patriotism might make us better citizens, but it will not make the world a more peaceful or generous place.

Discussions of objectivity often start from considerations about disagreement. We might ask why this should be so. It makes it seem as though disagreement were surprising, but there is no reason why that should be so (the earliest thinkers in the Western tradition found conflict at least as obvious a feature of the world as concord). The interest in disagreement comes about, rather, because neither agreement nor disagreement is universal. It is not that disagreement needs explanation and agreement does not, (...) but that in different contexts disagreement requires different sorts of explanation, and so does agreement. (shrink)

This paper takes a close look at Berlin’s claim that the emergence of Counter-Enlightenment pluralism marks a momentous historical watershed. It concludes that Berlin is right to draw our attention to the importance of this event, but that he seriously misinterprets its significance. He has good reason, in particular, to treat Herder as ‘the most formidable adversary of the French philosophes and their German disciples’, but not because Herder put a stop to the ancient creed of monism on which they (...) relied. For Berlin’s monistic interpretation of the French Enlightenment, I shall show, badly misrepresents that intellectual movement and its impact on the world. The great significance of Herder’s pluralist critique of the Enlightenment lies, instead, in the way in which it rehabilitates prejudice as a source of human virtue and creativity, a critique that directly attacks the core mission of the philosophes: to remove the obstacles to the gathering, preservation and dissemination of useful knowledge. (shrink)

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the elusiveness of fulfillment was a source of much perplexity. You believe that the possession of something that you desire will bring you fulfillment, but the acquisition of it leaves you dissatisfied. Arthur Schopenhauer said that this is because the objects of desire lack any intrinsic value. By contrast, Nietzsche argued that our experience of boredom reflects our desire to engage in a challenging form of activity.

The commentaries on our target article, reflect the multidisciplinary yet highly fragmented state of current studies of human social cognition. Progress in our understanding of the human social brain must come from studies that integrate across diverse analytic levels, using conceptual frameworks grounded in evolutionary biology.