"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature, but what we know about the origins and the workings of the human mind has changed drasti­cally since the late nineteenth century. If Dostoevsky was such a sensitive reader of the human condition, do his insights hold up to modern research? To judge just by the issue of the psychology of confession, the answer appears to be: yes. The work of Michael Tomasel­lo indicates that the human conscience (...) evolved in order to make people obey group norms. From this I draw the proposition that confession should be best directed to the group as a whole, and not to an individual. Judging by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and an assortment of characters in The Brothers Karamazov, this appears to be exactly how confes­sion works in Dostoevsky’s novels: sin is against all, so forgiveness must be from all. (shrink)

Antinatalism assigns reproduction a negative value. There should be fewer or no births. Those who say that there should be fewer births have been called conditional antinatalists. A better name for their view would be selective pronatalism. Those who say that there should be no births face two challenges. They must define the scope of their no-birth policy. Does it apply only to human or sentient beings or can it also be extended to all organic life, perhaps even to machine (...) consciousness? And whatever the scope, they have to justify the eventual extinction of humankind or other life forms, an inevitable consequence of unconditional antinatalism. Different axiologies and moral theories produce different responses to these challenges. It is argued that a two-value conflict-sensitive negative utilitarianism would produce a kind and reasonable justification for ending at least human and factory-animal reproduction. The conclusion is purely moral and supports only voluntary extinction for humankind. (shrink)

The article studies Foucault’s treatment of religious culture and some theological responses to his approach. Foucault examined some modern practices as exhibiting a ‘Christianization-in-depth’, as, for example, in the extension of confession as a continuing practice in recent and current political culture. Confessions of faith characterize both fascism and communism and the confessional form of the latter showed extensive debt to the legacy of eastern Christian practices. The Soviet hermeneutics of the self contrasted with the western form because the (...) self-knowledge of the former is not a western confession of desires and movements of the soul but, rather, coming to a clarity in grasping how one is regarded in the eyes of others. The continuing vitality of religious forms in contemporary experience shows itself in American apocalyptic creeds. Foucault’s critical analysis aids a self-understanding in three areas of religious activism: self-denial; the envisioning of sexuality; the aspirations toward community and friendship. (shrink)

In the criminal legal system, confessions have long been considered the ‘gold standard’ in evidence. An immediate problem arises for this gold standard, however, when the prevalence of false confessions is taken into account. In this paper, I take a close look at false confessions in connection with the phenomenon of testimonial injustice. I show that false confessions provide a unique and compelling challenge to the current conceptual tools used to understand this epistemic wrong. In particular, (...) I argue that we cannot make sense of the unjust ways in which false confessions function in our criminal legal system by focusing exclusively on speakers getting less credibility than they deserve. I conclude that the way we conceive of testimonial injustice requires a significant expansion to include what I call agential testimonial injustice – where an unwarranted credibility excess is afforded to speakers when their epistemic agency has been denied or subverted in the obtaining of their testimony. (shrink)

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive (...) but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. The book vividly illustrates the mixture of moods and motives that underlie the writing of autobiography: defiance and vulnerability, self-exploration and denial, passion, puzzlement, and detachment. Above all, Confessions is Rousseau's search, through every resource of language, to convey what he despairs of putting into words: the personal quality of one's own existence. (shrink)

Confessions of Love: The Ambiguities of Greek Eros and Latin Caritas, edited by Craig J. N. de Paulo, Senior Editor, et al. American University Studies Series, vol. 7: Theology and Religion. New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2011. Details: Collection of scholarly essays on love. Distinguished contributors include Roland Teske, S.J., Phillip Cary, Leonid Rudntyzky, Bernhardt Blumenthal, et al.

Despite the commonly held view that confessing to doping is morally right, few former elite athletes who have doped confess to doping. In this paper, I ask whether elite athletes who have d...

Dostoevskij’s underground parody of confession paradoxically recovers an Orthodox morality by constructing an unorthodox model of authority and authorship. The authenticity and authority of underground discourse are both contingent on self-conscious parody, which also mediates Orthodox community or sobornost’. This essay critically reconsiders ethical, aesthetic and cultural dimensions of the self-conscious interpolation of literary and religious discourses in Dostoevskij’s Notes from Underground. Arguing with and against Bakhtinian readings, it re-examines the underground narrator’s secularized, Romanticized sensibilities, cynical critique of humanism, sacrilegious (...) modes of laughter, usurpation of authority, internalization of dialogue, literary stylization and parody, aesthetic and moral self-critique, and, finally, insistence on “a new word.”. (shrink)

The ability of the Society of Jesus to engage in a broad and enduring tradition of scientific activity is here addressed in terms of its programmatic commitment to the consolidation and extension of the Catholic confession and its mastery of the administrative apparatus necessary to operate long-distance networks. The Society's early move into two major apostolates, one in education and the other in the overseas missions, brought Jesuits into regular contact with the educated elites of Europe and at the same (...) time placed the Society's missionaries in remote parts of the natural world. The modes of organization of travel and communication required by the Society's long-distance networks not only facilitated scientific communication and collaboration within the order, it also provided Jesuits with the resources they needed to engage successfully in 'ministries among the learned'. Evidence of a sustained attempt by Jesuit authors to assume the role of Kulturträger is found in the several genres of scientific publications that dominate the Society's scientific corpus. Thus the Society's early recognition of the "apostolic value" of scientific publications in recruiting friends and allies among Europe's intellectual elites, I argue, allowed a robust interest in natural knowledge to emerge as a legitimate part of the Jesuit vocation. (shrink)

"I confess — I took virtually every picture in this book with my compact camera!" Pros like Rick Sammon make their living with top-of-the-line dSLR cameras.

Exploring Augustine's Confessions as far more than autobiography, more than an elaboration and admission of guilt, more so than a chronicle and more precisely as the very act of coming into the truth in his heart, in front of God, in his confession, and in his public writings. His Confessions charts his becoming a witness to his self-witnessing, as his matter of testimony. Confession becomes an onto-existential practice. But, what is the mode or nature of the type of (...) confession at work when confession becomes ontological? Using Heidegger, the paper hinges on two poetic instances, one in Confessions, one in Being and Time, to develop an idea of ontology as testimony when being is a diligent witness to Being. It is confession as an admission of guilt insofar as being seeks absolution of its presumptions of being as a genus, as indefinable, and as the most self-evident concept, and being then acknowledges the question of Being. This acknowledgement of the obligation of the question is, then, a confession as a public declaration of faith, of the openness to question. The ontological project, for Heidegger, is then confession and testimony perhaps more fundamentally than Augustine’s Confessions, whose autobiographical detail and positing of the self as a relation to God must carefully elaborate itself so as not to be guilty of the offense of metaphysics. (shrink)

Delivered at the Collège de France between January and March 1980, the lectures entitled On the Government of the Living (Du gouvernement des vivants) seem to be the missing piece in the Foucauldian puzzle. Still unpublished, those eleven lectures were intended to set the theoretical foundation for the book announced as the fourth and last volume of the History of Sexuality, under the title Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair). This book, however, was never published, despite (...) the fact that his editor described it as the keystone for the entire History of Sexuality.1 The value of Michel…. (shrink)

(1993). Confessions of a Modest Bayesian. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 23, Supplementary Volume 19: New Essays on Metaphilosophy, pp. 315-337.

This article traces the evolution of auricular confession from its origins in the spiritual diakresis in the early desert tradition and argues that through the Celtic churches of Northern Europe the practice is introduced into the Western Church culminating in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. By developing the desert tradition of diakresis it will be argued that the Celtic system triumphed because of its stronger psychological verisimilitude compared to the Southern Mediterranean traditions of public one-off penance.

Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This paper focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the (...) recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect. (shrink)

This paper discusses the complex relationship of Reformed confessions and Reformed orthodox scholasticism. It is argued that Reformed confessions differ in genre and method from Reformed scholastic works, although such differences between confessional and scholastic language should not be mistaken for representing different doctrines that are no longer in harmony with each other. What is more, it is precisely the scholastic background and training of the authors of such confessions that enabled them to place their confessional writings (...) in the broader catholic tradition of the Christian church and to include patristic and medieval theological insights. Thus proper attention to their scholastic background helps to see that at least in some confessions the doctrine of predestination, for instance, is not as ‘rigid’ as one might think at first sight. In order to demonstrate that the doctrine of the Reformed confessions was much in line with the scholastic theology of Reformed orthodoxy, this paper discusses, after having explained the terms ‘Reformed orthodoxy’ and ‘scholasticism’, the early Reformed scholastic theologians Beza, Zanchi, and Ursinus, who also have written confessional texts. The paper also includes a more detailed discussion of the Belgic Confession and the scholastic background of the Canons of Dordt and the Westminster Confession, thereby focusing on the doctrines of God, providence, and predestination. (shrink)

This important new book examines in some detail the law relating to confessions, unlawful evidence, and the 'right to silence' in the police station. The author also looks at the principles which lie behind this branch of the law. As well as his close examination of the English position, the author also looks at alternative approaches taken by Scottish, Irish, Australian, Canadian, and American legal systems. There is no other book written in English which gives such systematic treatment to (...) this subject. (shrink)

This article analyzes articles appearing in True Story from 1920 to 1985 that concern women's grief after pregnancy and child loss. They are discussed as a historical link between nineteenth-century consolation literature and current psychological and academic discussions of grief. True Story is a confession magazine marketed for working-class women, whose reproductive losses have generally been minimized or ignored by previous literary and current professional and journalistic treatments of maternal grief. Articles are examined within the constructs of confession literature and (...) within the larger context of women's popular literature. Like working-class women's experiences of reproductive loss, these areas have been largely overlooked, dismissed, or denigrated by literary scholars and sociologists. The moral tone of True Story gives women's first-person narratives about infant death and pregnancy an ambiguous prescriptive quality, in that both self-empowerment and self-blame are recommended. True Story reinforces traditional notions of motherhood and femininity, but subtly challenges patriarchal class relations in American society. (shrink)

In "The History of Sexuality", Foucault maintains that "Western man has become a confessing animal" (1990, 59), thus implying that "man" was not always such a creature. On a related point, Wittgenstein suggests that "man is a ceremonial animal" (1996, 67); here the suggestion is that human beings are, by their very nature, ritualistically inclined. In this paper I examine this crucial difference in emphasis, first by reconstructing Foucault's "genealogy" of confession, and subsequently by exploring relevant facets of Wittgenstein's later (...) thinking. While there are significant correlations between Foucault and Wittgenstein, an important disparity emerges in relation to the question of the "natural." By critically analyzing this, I show how Wittgenstein's minimal naturalism provides an important corrective to Foucault's more extravagant claims. By implication, we see why any radical relativist, historicist, and/or constructivist position becomes untenable on Wittgensteinian grounds, even though Wittgenstein himself is often read as promoting such views. (shrink)

Lucas, Brian Review(s) of: Religious confession privilege and the common law, by Keith Thompson (Leiden: Matinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2011), pp.395, E135.00.

This paper reads through some contemporary literary critical problems and theorizing about textuality to Augustine's Confessions, to the enrichment, if not the ecstasy of both contemporary and medieval thinking. It shows that Augustine is both aware of much that passes as new in theorizing about language, and that his text is argumentatively and rhetorically structured to set difference at play. Like Augustine's writing, this article is a performance piece: besides arguing, it acknowledges; beside demonstration, it questions; besides telling, it (...) shows; it would not be called a study of textuality in Augustine, but a performance of textuality with (in) Augustine. (shrink)

These essays, along with several manuscripts published here for the first time, offer a more complete and highly defined picture than ever before of one of the ...

Augustine's Confessions is one of the most influential and most innovative works of Latin literature. Written in the author's early forties in the last years of the fourth century AD, they reflect on his life and on the activity of remembering and interpreting a life. Books I–IV are concerned with infancy and learning to talk, school days, sexual desire and adolescent rebellion, intense friendships and intellectual exploration. Augustine evolves and analyses his past with all the resources of the reading (...) which shaped his mind: Virgil and Cicero, Neoplatonism and the Bible. This edition, which aims to be usable by students who are new to Augustine, alerts readers to the verbal echoes and allusions of Augustine's brilliant and varied Latin, and explains his theological and philosophical questioning of what God is and what it is to be human. (shrink)

This article addresses two questions related to the discrimination of homosexuals in the British Armed Forces as illuminated in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the casesSmith and Grady v. the United KingdomandBeck, Copp and Bazeley v. the United Kingdom. First, how does the military organization obtain knowledge about its subjects? Two works by Michel Foucault concerning the thematic of confession—The Will to KnowledgeandAbout the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth—provide a (...) foundation for answering this question. Second, what happens when this knowledge obtained by the military organization comes into contact with the legal system? In relation to this question, Foucauldian theories of law are discussed, namely the so-called ‘expulsion thesis’ and ‘polyvalence theory’. It is argued that the production of knowledge in the context of these cases is intertwined with the technique of confession. However, the confession does not only operate at the level of the military organization but also as an internal practice of the individual. When this knowledge then encounters the legal system, it appears that the law puts up a certain resistance towards other forms of power, e.g. disciplinary power. It is argued that this resistance is due to the law’s ‘strategic openness’, i.e. the possibility to harness the law to different strategic purposes, due to which law can never be fully subordinated by external powers. (shrink)

College cheating is prevalent, with rates ranging widely from 9 to 95%. Research has been exclusively conducted with enrolled college students. This study examined the prevalence of cheating in a sample of college alumni, who risk less in disclosing academic dishonesty than current students. A total of 273 alumni reported on their prevalence and perceived severity of 19 cheating behaviors. The vast majority of participants report having engaged in some form of cheating during their undergraduate career. The most common forms (...) of cheating were “copying from another student's assignment” and “allowing others to copy from your assignment.” More students reported cheating in classes for their major than other classes. Males and females cheated at the same rates in classes for their major, and males reported higher rates of cheating than females in nonmajor classes. Respondents reported that their top reasons for cheating were “lack of time” and “to help a friend.”. (shrink)

Si l'on en croit Marcel Proust il faut admettre qu'on n'écrit qu'une seule œuvre. Mais alors on doit également accepter comme vraie l'inverse de cette proposition, notamment, si les préoccupations d'un auteur ne se suivent pas, si l'écrivain ou le philosophe voltige d'une fleur à l'autre, s'il se laisse tenter par mille aventures de l'esprit il peut à la rigueur mériter le titre peu flatteur de dilettante. La grandeur de toute œuvre de vie consiste dans sa profonde unité, unité qui (...) se forme derrière, ou si l'on veut au-delà des systèmes ou des théories. Heidegger nomme l'impenśe de l'auteur ce que Gide appelle la part du Dieu ou la part du diable. Mais l'impensé n'est le caché, le voilé que par rapport à ce qui est dévoilé, à ce qui est pensé. Il n'est donc autre que l'infra-structure. C'est à cette structuration alors que l'impensé doit son importance dans l'édifice de nos pensées. Autrement dit, les pensées claires ont leur racine dans le clair-obscur. Il y a toutefois un clair-obscur qui n'en est un que pour le lecteur. L'auteur y est plus à l'aise. C'est le domaine des confessions. Les confessions peuvent prendre des formes différentes, toutefois leur caractéristique générate permet de les distinguer des autres œuvres. Ainsi, quand un philosophe décide de publier son œuvre de jeunesse, dirions-nous, cela tombe dans la catégorie des confessions, tout comme les entretiens avec… et les testaments philosophiques. (shrink)

Chapter 1 Introduction How are participants associated with the eventualities they participate in? Are there events? Thematic roles? ...

In which a scientist searches for an empirical explanation for phenomenal experience, spurred by his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book--part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation--describes (...) Koch's search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest--his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work--to uncover the roots of consciousness. (shrink)

The government of Rwanda has pursued reconciliation with great determination in the belief that it is the only moral alternative to post-genocide social challenges. In Rwanda, communities must be mobilised and reshaped for social, political and economic reconstruction. This creates a rather delicate situation. Among other strategies, the state has turned to the concepts of confession and forgiveness which have deep religious roots, and systematised them both at the individual and community or state level in order to bring about reconciliation, (...) justice, social cohesion and ultimately economic development. In view of these strategies and challenges, some of the important questions are: Does forgiveness restore victims and empower them to heal their communities? What empirical evidence exists that religiously inspired justice and reconciliation processes after mass political violence make a difference? In what areas might the understanding of religious thought and activity towards transitional justice be deepened? These questions provide the backdrop against which I examine the case of post-genocide Rwanda in this article. A hermeneutic interpretative analysis is used to situate the phenomena of forgiveness, confession and social transformation within the specific context of post-conflict societies. (shrink)

In this landmark volume of contemporary communication theory, Ronald C. Arnett applies the metaphor of dialogic confession—which enables historical moments to be addressed from a confessed standpoint and through a communicative lens—to the works of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pointed to an era of postmodern difference with his notion of "a world come of age." Arnett’s interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s life and scholarship in contention with Nazi dominance offer implications for a dialogic confession that engages the complexity of postmodern narrative (...) contention. Rooted in classical theory, the field of communication ethics is abstract and arguably outmoded. In _Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility, _Arnett locates cross-cultural and comparative anchors that not only bring legitimacy and relevance to the field but also develop a conceptual framework that will advance and inspire future scholarship. (shrink)

Lyotard approaches his subject by returning to his earliest phenomenological training, rearticulating Augustine's sensory universe from a vantage point imaginarily inside the confessant's world, a vantage point that reveals the intense point of conjuncture between the sensual and the spiritual, the erotic world and the mystical, being and appearance, sin and salvation. Lyotard reveals the very origins of phenomenology in Augustine's narrative, and in so doing also shows the origins of semiotics to lie there.

This chapter contains sections titled: Uh, Because I Am a Buddhist Impermanence and Permanent Tattoos ‘No Self’ and Body Art as Self‐expression Suffering, the First Truth of Both Buddhism and Getting Tattooed Mindfulness of Ink.

994 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL i996 Gregory Schufreider. Confessions of a Rational Mystic: anselm's Early Writings. West Lafa- yette, IN: Purdue University Press, i993. Pp. 392. Cloth, $39.95- Paper, $15.95. In his Confessions ofa RationalMystic, Gregory Schufreider sets out to explain Anselm to a modern audience, while remaining loyal to the philosophical and theological outlook of his premodern author. Schufreider succeeds remarkably well in the first part of his task, as he explains Anselm's argument (...) to an audience unfamiliar with its historical context: medieval monastic life. To overcome the distance between Anselm and his modern audi- ence, Schufreider introduces four meaningful approaches to the interpretation of a text: the logical, the hermeneutical, the phenomenological and the deconstructive . Critical of the ahistorical rationality implicit in the logical approach to Anselm's "ontological" argument,.. (shrink)

Augustine’s Confessions would seem an unlikely work to feature in an introductory philosophy course: it appears to offer too much religion, too little philosophy. In fact, this work presents a series of reflections in which varied and interesting philosophical questions arise in the course of ordinary life. After defining the introductory course for which this work might be suitable, I explore its philosophical themes and extend a few suggestions for its use in the classroom. In closing I forward several (...) reasons why an instructor should consider including the book in an introduction to philosophy. (shrink)

In the first volume of the History of Sexuality , Michel Foucault states in passing that prostitution and pornography, like the sexual sciences of medicine and psychiatry, are involved in the proliferation of sexualities and the perverse implantation. Against an influential misinterpretation of this passage on the part of film studies scholar Linda Williams, this paper takes up Foucault’s claim and attempts to explain the mechanism through which the sex industry, and pornography in particular, functions analogously to the sexual sciences (...) in terms of the normalizing form of power that Foucault describes. Whereas Williams sets the question of prostitution aside, and argues that pornography must be a confessional discourse for Foucault, this paper argues that consumption rather than confession is the mechanism through which both prostitution and pornography deploy sexualities within a disciplinary system of power. (shrink)

This paper analyses the relationship between lack and possibilities of bearing witness in a post-historical context. We wanted to see how discussions about indeterminacy and testimony change the way in which we understand possibilities of truth in relation to the confessing subject. The limit of the language of testimony and memory generate experiences of incompleteness and inadequacy which make us negotiate the position of the confessing subject between an impossible historical truth and the non-discursive truth of revelation. We argued that (...) the resistance to representation which drives the language of testimony reflects the improper position of the witness between historicity and existence. There is always an already lost historical event that we have to testify for and that foreshadows possibilities of significance. The witness can only generate discourse from inside a dislocated position which also marks the understanding of revelation. (shrink)

As mainline Protestantism increasingly accommodates to contemporary cultural forms, the confessing movement of the United Methodist Church (and other traditions) has a key role to play, lifting high the rich canonical heritage of the church universal.

Starting from a recent discussion in the Netherlands about the application of the Pontifical Council for Social Communication for the Internet extension ‘.catholic,’ the author inquires into the meaning of confessing the catholicity of the church. He shows that ‘catholic’ is a title phrase, a descriptive term that often functions as a proper name. It is important to distinguish between both functions ; in the PCSC application ‘catholic’ functions, contrary to what its critics assume, as a proper name. In ecumenical (...) discussions, the main problem with catholicity is the Roman Catholic Church's alleged all-or-nothing approach to catholicity, in which it asserts its own catholicity while rejecting the claim that other churches are catholic. This approach, however, has been abandoned for a degrees of catholicity approach which allows the Roman Catholic Church to recognise the catholicity of Protestant churches. Finally, the author argues that confessing the catholicity of the church is rather like pledging ourselves to furthering this catholicity than like asserting that this catholicity has been achieved. (shrink)

This book probes the ethical structure of contemporary medicine in an argument accessible to lay readers, healthcare professionals, and ethicists alike.

Drawing on Austin’s speech act theory and on related theories of performativity and positioning, this article analyses the public confessions during the 1990s by three prominent state actors in Turkey about their direct involvement in state crimes against Kurds and left-wing political opponents. All three cases received significant media attention at the time. The aim of the article is not only to shed new light on those specific confessions by the perpetrators within the Turkish context, but also to (...) develop further theoretical insights into the phenomenon of public confessions as such. Whilst confessions of this kind are often welcomed and portrayed as truth-statements that are cathartic and enable society to move forward, this analysis demonstrates that the reality is often more complex as the confessions in question tend to go hand in hand with a disavowal of individual responsibility by the perpetrators involved. (shrink)

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive (...) but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. The book vividly illustrates the mixture of moods and motives that underlie the writing of autobiography: defiance and vulnerability, self-exploration and denial, passion, puzzlement, and detachment. Above all, Confessions is Rousseau's search, through every resource of language, to convey what he despairs of putting into words: the personal quality of one's own existence. (shrink)

"Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher’s Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men’s Sexuality" is the translation of a Japanese 2005 bestseller, "Kanjinai Otoko." Soon after the publication, this book stirred controversy over the nature of male sexuality, male “frigidity,” and its connection to the “Lolita complex.” Today, this work is considered a classic in Japanese men’s studies. The most striking feature of this book is that it was written from the author’s first-person perspective. The author is a (...) professor who teaches philosophy and ethics at a university in Japan, and in this book he talks about his own sexual fetishism, his feeling of emptiness after ejaculation, and his huge obsession with young girls and their developing female bodies. He undertakes a philosophical investigation of how and why sexuality took such a form within a person who had grown up as a “normal,” heterosexual man. This may be the first case in which a philosopher delves deep into his own sexuality and poses an ambitious hypothesis about the formation of male “frigid” sexuality, which might actually be shared by many “normal” men in our society in a hidden way. Reading this book, female readers will come to know, for the first time, some hidden aspects of male sexuality which men have skillfully submerged in a deep layer of their psyches. (shrink)

The Accra Confession was formulated and adopted by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Accra, Ghana, in 2004. This article traces the historical development of the Accra Confession and its continued impact on the present. It aims to show the confession as a Reformed response to 'empire'. The article explores the content, debates and challenges the Accra Confession offers to the notion of empire.

This article expands Michel Foucault's (1926-1984) reading of the 'confessions of the flesh' in handbooks of penance written during the central Middle Ages in the first volume La volonté de savoir of his (current) four-volume series Histoire de la sexualité. After the posthumous publication of the fourth volume Les aveux de la chair (2018), in which Foucault takes his analysis of the historical foundations of confessional practices in the late 12th century to the first half of the 14th century (...) even further back, to the 'confessions of the flesh' in the patristics of the 3rd to the 5th centuries, it has become sensible to illuminate Foucault's condensed reading of confessional scripts in La volonté de savoir itself. This exposition pertinently applies to Foucault's correct conclusion that sex was prioritised above all other 'sins', 'vices', and 'transgressions' in central Medieval confessional scripts; therefore, as he famously noted, becoming a 'seismograph of subjectivity in Christian cultures'. Against this backdrop, it is considered how thinkers from the central Middle Ages themselves reflected on the sacramentalisation of confession after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 - since Foucault himself did not substantially elaborate on it. The reflections of three philosophers from the central Middle Ages on the relation between sex, confession and absolution are subsequently presented as an expansion of Foucault's reading in La volonté de savoir. Firstly, Alan of Lille's (d.1203) interpretation of the Summae confessorum in his Liber poenitentialis is revisited, concluding that Lille's perspective was 'hermeneutical', in terms of his insistence that the confessor should adjust his interrogations according to seven Aristotelian topoi or detailed questions, designate the context in which the transgression occurred very thoroughly and 'actively participate' in the confessional act, rather than simply recording it. Lille's 'hermeneutical' approach to confession is also reflected in Robert Grosseteste's (ca.1168-1253) De modo confitendi et paenitentias iniungendi, in which a moderate phronetic approach allows for the full discretion of the confessor, rather than following the rigid prescriptions of the Summae confessorum only. Secondly, William of Auvergne's (ca.1180-1249) contribution to the interpretation of the Summae confessorum in his Poenitentia is indicated in his utilitarian ethics, in which the interests of the ethical 'other' is related to the confessing 'self': even though matrimony is for Auvergne the only realm where the other's interests are not necessarily compromised by sexual contact, several considerations regarding 'improper sex', precisely within matrimony, apply according to the relevant penitential guidelines. Thirdly, Paul of Hungary's (ca.1180-1241) De confessione is considered in terms of his reflections on 'paying sexual debt', and on the relation between regulated sexual release and the legitimacy of sexual gratification, again within the context of matrimony. CONTRIBUTION: This article contributes to Foucault-scholarship by elucidating and expanding Foucault's condensed reading of 13th-century confessional scripts in La volonté de savoir, with reference to the relevant texts of Alan of Lille (d.1203), William of Auvergne (ca.1180-1249) and Paul of Hungary (ca.1180-1241). (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to describe and reflect upon the concrete particulars of one academician's work as an expert ethics witness. The commentary on my practices and the narrative descriptions of three cases are offered as evidence for the thesis that it is possible to act honorably within a role that some have considered to be inherently illicit. Practical measures are described for avoiding some of the best known pitfalls. The discussion concludes with a listing of the distinctive (...) competencies and understandings that are useful in serving as an expert ethics witness. (shrink)

Previous studies have addressed many different kinds of confessions in police investigations – real, false, coerced, fabricated – and highlighted both psychological and social mechanisms that underlie them. Here, we focus on inadvertent confessions and admissions, which occur when a suspect appears to be confessing without being fully aware of doing so, or when police officers believe they have a confession or admission of guilt when in fact this is not the case. The goal of the study is (...) to explain when, how and why these confessions and admissions occur as well as how they are dealt with in two different jurisdictions, the United States and the United Kingdom. We use a discourse analysis approach because inadvertent confessions and admissions of guilt are the product of miscommunication – they happen because the speaker’s meaning and the hearer’s meaning are misaligned. The data consist of 50 interviews from the United Kingdom and 50 interrogations from the United States with both English-speaking and non-English speaking suspects. Our results demonstrate that inadvertent confessions can occur in both locales due to reliance on inference, which is inevitable since inference is the backbone of any human communication, as well as due to additional factors such as linguistic, cultural and procedural issues. We found that these phenomena are more frequent and less well controlled for in the United States context due to no systematic checking of understanding, adversarial questioning techniques and an absence of legal representation, and lack of professional, high-quality interpreting. We discuss the implications of our findings for current efforts to improve access to justice, custodial procedures and language services, and we make recommendations for the implementation of our research in professional practice. (shrink)

Simplifying somewhat, sonicists believe that works of music are individuated purely in terms of how they sound. For them, exact sound-alikes are identical. Stephen Davies, in his ‘Musical Works and Orchestral Colour’ ( BJA 48 (2008), pp. 363–375) took me to task for defending a version of sonicism. In this paper I seek to explain why Davies's objections miss their mark. In the course of the discussion, I make some methodological remarks about the ontology of music.