Levinas on the possibility and need for humanist ethics In Humanism of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas argues that it is not only possible but of the highest exigency to understand one's humanity through the humanity of others. In paperback for the first time, Levinas's work here is based in a new appreciation for ethics and takes new distances from phenomenology, idealism, and skepticism to rehabilitate humanism and restore its promises. Painfully aware of the long history of dehumanization that reached (...) its apotheosis in Hitler and Nazism, Levinas does not underestimate the difficulty of reconciling oneself with another. The humanity of the human, Levinas argues, is not discoverable through mathematics, rational metaphysics, or introspection. Rather, it is found in the recognition that the other person comes first, that the suffering and mortality of others are the obligations and morality of the self. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While the first generation of the so-called Frankfurt School has promoted a strong interconnection between social critique and knowledge of the social world, contemporary critical theory seems to consider that epistemological issues don’t deserve anymore consideration. Is it really possible to elaborate a convincing theory of social critique without taking seriously the various links between social critique and knowledge? This article argues that the answer is no. In a first step, it recalls the ways in which the philosophical debate (...) about social critique is currently articulated and how it disconnects social critique and knowledge. One of the reasons for such a disconnection relates to a vision of politics as consisting mainly in a conflict between normative principles, notably between conceptions of social justice. This vision of politics is criticized in the second step of this paper. A second reason, examined in the third part of the paper, relates to the risk of epistemic violence. The shared but questionable assumption is that any sociological or philosophical attempt to produce knowledge would necessarily lead to epistemic violence rather than to epistemic empowerment. (shrink)

Contemporary Nigerian society is in its doldrums as regards the culture of violence and distrust among peoples from various ethnic groups that make-up this nation. To an extent, religio-political reasons are fueling this culture of violence and distrust. The thrust of this paper is that: Christian military chaplains are stakeholders as promoters of peace and mutual co-existence in Nigeria with regard to controlling the culture of violence and disunity. The core of this thesis remains Jesus’ convictions concerning non-resistance to the (...) evil one as documented in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 38-42, and His life as the Peace-Builder. Therefore, contemporary Nigerian context calls for Christian military chaplains to be more conscious that being messengers of peace and promoters of peaceful coexistence in our country, they have ethical responsibility to build bridges to harmony. Since Christ (God) is love, the chaplains should rediscover the poetics of testimony as a principle for building and reconstructing paths that lead to mutual co-existence in view of encouraging the reign of justice, unity, and peace in Nigeria. (shrink)

This article argues that Bowers and Paternoster’s emphasis on a moral community marks an important step towards a more ethical and effective approach to anti-doping. However, it also argues that the authors’ proposed strategies undermine their stated goal of effectively engaging athletes as partners in anti-doping efforts and raise ethical concerns. Their proposed emphasis on exploiting shaming as a punishment and their general view of athletes as adversaries fosters mistrust between athletes and those who enforce the anti-doping rules. Instead, this (...) article describes a model for empowering athletes as stakeholders in anti-doping policy as a means to provide anti-doping rules with increased moral legitimacy among athletes. (shrink)

" Le besoin d'évasion écrit Emmanuel Lévinas, nous conduit au cœur de la philosophie. Il nous permet de renouveler l'antique problème de l'être en tant qu'être... " C'est dore que, dans ce texte, il choisit - à la faveur d'un thème fortement heideggerien - d'aller à la rencontre des questions qui, toujours, ont guidé sa quête : le besoin d'évasion n'est-il pas le propre d'un être fini? N'aspire-t-il pas à franchir les limites de l'être plutôt qu'à le fuir? Et (...) pourquoi l'être aurait-il besoin de sortir de soi? Sur tous ces points, la méditation d'Emmanuel Lévinas s'affirme ici souveraine et féconde. A s'y engager, tout lecteur se rapprochera de la vérité de son destin au cœur d'une modernité tragique et opaque. (shrink)

The distinction between rules and similarity is central to our understanding of much of cognitive psychology. Two aspects of existing research have motivated the present work. First, in different cognitive psychology areas we typically see different conceptions of rules and similarity; for example, rules in language appear to be of a different kind compared to rules in categorization. Second, rules processes are typically modeled as separate from similarity ones; for example, in a learning experiment, rules and similarity influences would be (...) described on the basis of separate models. In the present article, I assume that the rules versus similarity distinction can be understood in the same way in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and that a unified model for rules and similarity is appropriate. A rules process is considered to be a similarity one where only a single or a small subset of an object's properties are involved. Hence, rules and overall similarity operations are extremes in a single continuum of similarity operations. It is argued that this viewpoint allows adequate coverage of theory and empirical findings in learning, reasoning, categorization, and language, and also a reassessment of the objectives in research on rules versus similarity. Key Words: categorization; cognitive explanation; language; learning; reasoning; rules; similarity. (shrink)

La théorie deweyenne de la nature humaine permet de clarifier le sens du naturalisme deweyen ainsi que ses implications politiques. La première partie de l’article analyse la manière dont Dewey défend une conception processuelle, interactionnelle et intégrative de la nature humaine. La deuxième partie analyse la fonction classificatoire du concept de nature humaine et la troisième la manière dont Dewey attribue une fonction explicative à ce concept en discutant les références politiques conservatrices ou progressistes, voire révolutionnaires, à la nature humaine.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 60, Issue 2, Page 304-319, June 2022.

La mort, le temps : deux notions fondamentales qui parcourent toute l'œuvre d'Emmanuel Lévinas et qui, pour la première fois, sont ici précisément thématisées. À partir d'un dialogue serré avec deux contemporains d'envergure, Heidegger et Bloch, et quelques-uns des grands penseurs de la tradition, Aristote, Hegel et Kant notamment, le philosophe développe une formidable méditation qui propose d'éclairer les rapports noués dans la réflexion occidentale entre la mort et le temps. Ainsi, à la démarche heideggerienne qui entend penser le (...) temps à partir de la mort, il oppose l'idée que l'on peut inscrire la mort dans le tissu du temps. (shrink)

La pensée d'Emmanuel Lévinas a d'emblée été connue des philosophes et des universitaires, dès son premier ouvrage, La théorie de l'intuition chez Husserl, en 1930. Avec " Totalité et Infini " (en l963), il fut reconnu comme un innovateur puissant et originel pour son développement de la phénoménologie. Pourtant, plus récemment, l'immense intérêt du public pour Lévinas s'est déplacé, plutôt, vers les conséquences ou les marges de son projet initial. Ce déplacement a sa légitimité, prouvant au moins la pertinence (...) politique et religieuse de la parole la plus conceptuelle. Mais il nous a semblé aussi légitime, voire urgent, de restituer l'enjeu original de l'initiative de Lévinas : poursuivre la phénoménologie de Husserl, non pas en la déployant vers la question de l'être (comme le fit Heidegger), mais en lui assignant l'éthique comme philosophie enfin première. Bref, Lévinas fut d'abord un phénoménologue et apparaît aujourd'hui de plus en plus comme tel. Cinq textes inédits ou difficiles d'accès de Lévinas et treize études de phénoménologues ou d'historiens de la philosophie moderne permettent, ici, d'évaluer quel apport intime unit Lévinas au nouveau commencement que Husserl entreprit de donner à la philosophie. J.- L. M. (shrink)

In the early 1990s, W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm independently proclaimed that the humanities were witnessing a ‘pictorial’ or ‘iconic turn’. Twenty years later, we may wonder whether this announcement was describing an event that had already taken place or whether it was rather calling forth for it to happen. The contemporary world is, more than ever, determined by visual artefacts. Still, our conceptual arsenal, forged during centuries of logocentrism, still falls behind the complexity of pictorial meaning. The essay has (...) two parts. In the first, it tries to assess the exact meaning of the ‘pictorial’/’iconic turn’, and (re)places it into the context of Anglo-American visual studies and German Bildwissenschaften. It the second, it addresses the famous claim by the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius that ‘image sciences are easy’ by advocating for three ‘turns of the screw’ to make visual studies more difficult: a shift from iconology to symptomatology, a shift from extensive to intensive and a shift from the indicative to the subjunctive. (shrink)

Les soixante-dix nations : tel était le thème choisi par le 27e colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française. Quel sens prenait pour le judaïsme, conscient de procéder de l'Histoire sainte, sa présence à l'Histoire universelle, auprès des nations et parmi elles? Ce thème avait déjà été approché au cours de quatre rencontres précédentes. Le présent ouvrage reproduit les cinq " lectures talmudiques " qu'Emmanuel Levinas donna devant cet auditoire de 1981 à 1986. S'y ajoutent des textes consacrés à (...) l'exégèse rabbinique touchant l'amour du prochain et de l'étranger, au concept de " kénose ", mais aussi aux problèmes de l'intégration et de la distance que pose au judaïsme l'Europe issue du siècle des Lumières. Un débat réunissant en Hollande des penseurs juifs et chrétiens permet de souligner la féconde originalité, sur ce plan, de la pensée de Franz Rosenzweig. Et un entretien avec Françoise Armengaud aborde quelques thèmes essentiels de la philosophie juive dans le cadre de la philosophie générale. (shrink)

"Unforseen History covers the years of 1929-92, providing a wide overview of Levinas's work - especially his views on aesthetics and Judaism - offering examples of his precise thinking at work in small essays, long essays, and interviews." --Book Jacket.

Certain questions have recurred throughout the history of philosophy. They are the big questions-about happiness and the good life, the limits of knowledge, the ultimate structure of reality, the nature of consciousness, the relation between causality and free will, the pervasiveness of suffering, and the conditions for a just and flourishing society-that thinkers in different cultures across the ages have formulated in their own terms in an attempt to make sense of their lives and the world around them. The essays (...) in this book turn to the major figures and texts of the Buddhist tradition in order to expand and enrich our thinking on these enduring questions. Examining them from a comparative and cross-cultural perspective demonstrates the value of alternative ways of addressing philosophical problems, showing how different approaches can produce new and unexpected kinds of questions and answers. Engaging with the Buddhist tradition, this book shows, helps return philosophy to its practical as well as theoretical aim: not only understanding the world but also knowing how to live in it. Featuring striking and generative comparisons of Buddhist and Western thought, Philosophy's Big Questions challenges our thinking in fundamental ways and offers readers new conceptual tools, methods, and insights for the pursuit of a good and happy life. (shrink)

Building on prior research related to impact of information communication technology and operational risk management in the context of medium and small enterprises, the focus of this study was to investigate the relationship between ICT operational risk management and performances of MSEs. To achieve the focus, the research investigated evaluating models for understanding the value of ICT ORM in MSEs. Multiple regression, Repeated-Measures Analysis of Variance and Repeated-Measures Multivariate Analysis of Variance were performed. The findings of the distribution revealed that (...) only one variable made a significant percentage contribution to the level of ICT operation in MSEs, the Payback method. It may thus be inferred that the Payback method is the prominent variable, explaining the variation in level of evaluation models affecting ICT adoption within MSEs. Conclusively, in answering the two questions degree of variability explained and predictors, the results revealed that the variable contributed approximately 88.4% of the variations in evaluation models affecting ICT adoption within MSEs. The analysis of variance also revealed that the regression coefficients were real and did not occur by chance. (shrink)

The health and human rights movement (HHR) shows obvious signs of maturation both internally and externally. Yet there are still many questions to be addressed. These issues include the movement’s epistemological status and its perspectives of development. This paper discusses critically the conditions of emergence of HHR, its identity, its dominant schools of thought, its epistemological postures and its methodological issues. Our analysis shows that: (a) the epistemological status of HHR is ambiguous; (b) its identity is uncertain in the absence (...) of a validated definition: is it an action movement, an interdisciplinary field, a domain, an approach, a setting or a scientific discipline? (c) its main schools of thoughts are defined as “advocacists”, “ethicists”, “interventionists”, “normativists”; (d) the movement is in the maturation process as a discipline in which “interface”, “distance”, “interference” and “fusion” epistemological postures represent the fundamental steps; (e) parent disciplines (health sciences and law) competences, logics and cultures introduce duality and difficulties in knowledge production, validation and diffusion; (f) there is need to re-write the history of the HHR movement by inscribing it not only into the humanitarian or public health perspectives but also into the evolution of sciences and its social, political and economical conditions of emergence. The ambiguous epistemological status of this field, the need to re-write its history, the methodological duality in its research, the question of the competence of the knowledge validation, as well as the impact of HHR practice on national and international health governance are the challenges of its future development. To meet those challenges; we call for the creation and implementation of an international research agenda, the exploration of new research topics and the evaluation of the movement’s contribution to the national and global public health and human rights governance. (shrink)

Au cours des dernières années, un double phénomène autour des grands projets dits « de développement économique » a été observé. D’une part, les controverses socio-économiques et environnementales autour de ces projets se multiplient ; elles portent sur leurs aspects tant sociaux, qu’économiques, politique et environnementaux. Elles attirent l’attention des médias et des sciences sociales, qui interprètent et influencent la trajectoire de ces controverses en temps réel. D’autre part, ces cont...

Construction process stages are argued to be vulnerable to the prevalence of corrupt practices. However, the validity of this argument has not been empirically explored in the extant literature of construction management. Therefore, this study examines the stages of the construction process susceptibility to corruption and its most prominent forms of corrupt activities. A total of forty-four project-related professionals were involved in an expert survey to assess such susceptibilities and the criticality of the identified corrupt activities at each stage. A (...) comparative study of expert views from developing regions against experts from developed regions is conducted. Expert scoring results revealed that three stages are most susceptible, namely: project execution, pre-qualification and tender stages. Such results were confirmed by application of the Mann–Whitney U test statistics tool, showing wide disparities in seven out of eleven identical stages. This study is intended to incite polemic discussions and greater empirical, evidence-based research from scholars in both developed and developing countries. This study adds to the extant literature corruption-related works on the construction process through deeper understanding of the dynamic nature of corrupt practices involved in the stages of the construction process in developing countries. Practically, it intends to offer a veritable plethora of information on the critical stages of the construction process for industry practitioners, policymakers and anti-corruption bodies to careen their attention towards the fight against corruption. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay tracks Heidegger’s thought from 1919 forwards to the decisive years of his political engagement, on behalf of the Nazi movement. Part 1 tracks how the question concerning Being devolves into the implicitly identitarian question of who “we” are. Part 2 addresses the “existential” of Befindlichkeit which Heidegger in Sein und Zeit positions as prior to understanding, and examines his esoteric mode of writing as the means to cultivate a prerational Stimmung. Part 3 examines Heidegger’s response to his 1929–1930 (...) questions of “What mood must we awaken?... Who are we, then?” in the decisive years of the Gleichchaltung, showing how Heidegger’s thinking elevates to ontological primacy a discriminatory and identitarian decision concerning who “we” are as the German volk. Part 4 examines in this light the Heideggerian “end of philosophy” in what the Black Notebooks talks of in terms of a “metapolitics ‘of’ the historical people”. (shrink)

Beyond reasonable doubt, the influence of Western culture and civilizations has enervated traditional African family systems, and their functions as providers of social welfare. Hitherto, traditional African family and clan by extension served as the plausible medium by which Africans proffered solutions to those social, economic and other existential problems found within their communities. However, measuring and evaluating the successes of the various social welfare programs organized by the family and clan was a difficult task to achieve. It seems the (...) services rendered merely controlled the social problems but did not improve the standard of living of the victims. This paper seeks to critically analyse the traditional African family system and its role as a provider of social welfare and argues that it can complement the Western models towards holistic social integration. Thus this work adopts the theory of change as a tool for understanding how Western models of social welfare should be integrated with traditional African approaches to care for the ‘weak’ in the society. Advocating for a paradigm shift from the modern models of providing social welfare to the traditional African family and clan model is consequent upon the claim that the latter is more embracing in approach. (shrink)

Some theories assume that sentences like (i) with a presupposition trigger in the scope of a quantifier carry an existential presupposition, as in (ii); others assume that they carry a universal presupposition, as in (iii). No student knows that he is lucky. Existential presupposition: At least one student is lucky.Universal presupposition: Every student is lucky. This work is an experimental investigation of this issue in French. Native speakers were recruited to evaluate the robustness of the inference from (i) to (iii). (...) The main result is that presuppositions triggered from the scope of the quantifier aucun‘no’ are in fact universal. But the present results also suggest that the presuppositions triggered from the scope of other quantifiers depend on the quantifier. This calls for important changes in the main theories of presupposition projection. (shrink)

Poverty is a social problem. Its alleviation has been one of the major issues that occupy a significant place in the scale of preference of developmental policies of several nations, international organizations, church and other interested stakeholders. Thus, the thrust of this work centers on poverty alleviation strategies of selected Churches in Anambra State: namely how this institution participates in some economic activities, skill acquisition programmes, and empowerment programmes, among others in view of controlling the scourge of poverty. The research (...) methods employed here are: both qualitative and quantitative - survey and documentary research methods of data collection. The survey method collects data through designed research questionnaire and oral interview with some respondents respectively, while in qualitative approach is the content analysis of written sources such as books, journal articles and online sources that are relevant to the research. The findings of this research show that poverty is human-induced problem manifested in the mismanagement of resources and other forms of ills. Selected churches in Anambra State has reduced the effects of poverty through its collaboration with the State and Non-Governmental Organizations in poverty reduction programmes. (shrink)

Festival is a performative dimension of cultural praxis that strengthens bonds of cohesion in society. Festivals are also an integral part of religious praxis. They have the potentiality of bringing its adherents and non-adherents together thus creating and sustaining social communion among them. This reality of sustaining social communion confirms an important function of religion in society with particular reference to its social integrative effects. Therefore, this article assesses how religious festival, Christmas, fosters social integration among Igbos in Nigeria. On (...) a related note, many Igbos, see Christmas festival as unique occasion for them to visit their communities; attend meetings of their associations and/or town unions and consolidate family ties. These are opportunities for building social integrations, otherwise denoted as social communion in this research. This work makes use of critical analysis of relevant texts and questionnaire survey methods as means of gathering materials and data for this research. In view of understanding how Christmas festival aids social communion among the Igbo ethnic group, the theories of structural functionalism, social capital and social integration are being utilised as theoretical frameworks for this study. Finally, this study avers that religious festival cements social communion between the Igbos in Calabar Metropolis and their ancestral communities. (shrink)

Kwasi Wiredu, arguably the most influential African philosopher, has proposed a democracy by consensus as an alternative to the majoritarian democracy African countries inherited from their colonial masters. His proposal has generated a lot of debates, and these debates have spanned several aspects of his proposal. In this paper, I focus on the debate regarding his attribution of immanence to the practice of consensus in traditional African social relations. Bernard Matolino has recently written an article defending Wiredu's employment of the (...) word immanence in describing the traditional African attitude to social relations. In this article, I find Matolino's defense to be unsustainable. (shrink)

Being and Nothingness argues that in the master–slave dialectic Hegel had a ‘brilliant insight’ contra solipsism, to the effect that each self-consciousness depends on other consciousnesses. Against Hegel, however, Sartre claims that the separation of the for-itself remains an insurmountable ‘scandal’ and that collectivity can at best exist as a ‘de-totalised totality’, never as Subject. In a confrontation with Hegelian Sittlichkeit, Notebooks for an Ethics extends this analysis to the historical modalities of the mutual recognition of freedoms. A ‘concrete ethics’ (...) must be ‘revolutionary socialist’, centrally concerned with ‘the dialectic of the ends and means of revolution’. Finally, Sartre’s analysis of the dialectic of society and the state in the Critique of Dialectical Reason explains why sovereignty can never be the embodiment of an imaginary Subject. Sartre thus ultimately occupies a highly distinctive middle ground between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s critique of Hegel. A fulcrum of the argument, focused on Notebooks for an Ethics, consists in a comparison between Sartre and Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours. (shrink)

A comparação das traduções latina e holandesa do original perdido de La Recherche de la Vérité par la lumière naturelle permite concluir a presença de uma ocorrência notável do termo “consciência” nesse diálogo póstumo de Descartes. Essa ocorrência permite responder às interpretações que põem em questão a existência de uma invenção cartesiana da consciência moderna, bem como esclarecer o que aproxima e separa, ao mesmo tempo, Descartes de La Forge e Malebranche no que concerne à significação do termo consciência. Este (...) estudo visa, enfim, reavaliar a importância filosófica desse diálogo de Descartes. (shrink)