The aim of this paper is to explore the issue of the relationship between philosophy, critical commentary as Blanchot practises it and the literary work of art. I take issue with Gerald Bruns’ claim in Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy in which Blanchot’s critical practice is contrasted to philosophy. The “refusal” of philosophy attributed to Blanchot by Bruns is a subtle affair, as I indicate in readings of “Literature and the Right to Death” and The Space ofLiterature. Blanchot’s critical (...) commentary remains faithfuI to the literary work of art only insofar as he tolerates a paradox that pertains to the peculiar ontological or trans-ontological status of the literary work of art. In attempting to bear witness to the work of art insofar as it problematizes and even exceeds ontology, Blanchot can indeed be said to refusephilosophy insofar as it resists the impulse to resolve paradox.Cet article cherche à explorer les enjeux relatifs aux rapports qu’entretiennent la philosophie, le commentaire critique tel que le pratique Blanchot et I’oeuvre d’art littéraire. J’engage un débat autour de la déclaration de Gerald Bruns, dans Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy, où la pratique critique de Blanchot est mise en contraste avec la philosophie. Le «refus» de la philosophie que Bruns attribue à Blanchot est une question subtile, tel que je I’indique dans des extraits de «La Littérature et le droit à la mort» et L’Espace littéraire. Le commentaire critique de Blanchot ne demeure fidèle à I’oeuvre d’art littéraire que dans la mesure où il tolère un paradoxe relatif au curieux statut ontologique ou trans-ontologique de l’oeuvre d’art littéraire. En cherchant à saisir l’oeuvre d’art en tant qu’elle problématise etmême excède I’ontologie, on peut en effet prétendre que Blanchot refuse la philosophie dans la mesure où celle-ci résiste au désir de résoudre le paradoxe. (shrink)

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences and better gin. One reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no one seems to know what to do about. Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels (...) compelled to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it is too late. Or, he has to move. (shrink)

Public reason liberals expect individuals to have justificatory reasons for their views of certain political issues. This paper considers how groups can, and whether they should, give collective public reasons for their political decisions. A problem is that aggregating individuals’ consistent judgments on reasons and a decision can produce inconsistent collective judgments. The group will then fail to give a reason for its decision. The paper considers various solutions to this problem and defends a deliberative procedure by showing how it (...) incentivizes information sharing and leads to outcomes most acceptable to the group members. (shrink)

Can a group be morally responsible instead of, or in addition to, its members? An influential defense of corporate responsibility is based on results in social choice theory suggesting that a group can form and act on attitudes held by few, or even none, of its members. The members therefore cannot be (fully) responsible for the group’s behavior; the group itself, as a corporate agent, must be responsible. In this paper, I reject this view of corporate responsibility by showing how (...) it pays insufficient attention to individual agency. By accounting for group members’ strategic behavior, we shall see how they control collective attitude formation and are therefore responsible for their group’s behavior. (shrink)

Institutions promoting republican freedom as non-domination are commonly believed to differ significantly from institutions promoting negative freedom as non-interference. Philip Pettit, the most prominent contemporary defender of this view, also maintains that these republican institutions are neutral between the different conceptions of the good that characterise a modern society. This paper shows why these two views are incompatible. By analysing the institutional requirements Pettit takes as constitutive of republican freedom, I show how they also promote negative freedom by reducing overall (...) interference. To avoid this result, republican institutions must be more restrictive and require that citizens conform to a life of political engagement. But then republican freedom will not be a neutral ideal. Rejecting negative freedom therefore means sacrificing neutrality. (shrink)

According to group-agent realism, treating groups as agents with their own intentional states, irreducible to those of the group members, helps us explain and predict the groups’ behavior. This paper challenges this view. When groups judge logically interconnected propositions, group members often have incentives to misrepresent their beliefs of propositions they care less about in order to increase the probability of their groups adopting their view of propositions they consider more important. Aggregating such untruthful judgments may lead to the group (...) forming false beliefs. Treating groups as agents will then not help us explain or predict their behavior. (shrink)

An influential view in the ethics of self-defence is that causal responsibility for an unjust threat is a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. In this article, I argue against this view by providing intuitive counterexamples and by revealing weaknesses in the arguments offered in its favour. In response, adherents of the causal view have advanced the idea that although causally inefficacious agents are not liable to defensive harm, the fact that they may deserve harm can justify harming them (...) in the course of defending oneself. I argue that this strategy is ad hoc and leads to more problems than it solves. Once we allow normative facts outside our account of liability to affect a person's moral protection against harm, the lieability verdicts cannot tell us whether there is a relevant moral asymmetry between the victim and the target of defence. In conclusion, the causal view is wrong and causal responsibility for an unjust threat is not a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. (shrink)

The distinction between the personal and the subpersonal is often invoked in philosophy of psychology but remains surrounded by confusion. Building on recent work by Zoe Drayson, this paper aims to help further improve this situation by offering a satisfactory explication of the distinction that remains close to Dennett's original intentions. Reasons are offered for construing the distinction as applying to representational (as opposed to worldly) items, for not building contested theoretical assumptions into it, and for taking it to apply (...) in the first instance to descriptive statements and only derivatively to explanations. An explication of the distinction that accords with these points is then developed, according to which the distinction should be drawn in terms of what personal and subpersonal-level statements are ‘transparently about’. The theoretical role of this explication is discussed, and potential objections are addressed. (shrink)

‘Bill Scheuerman’s ‘The End of Law’ offers a compelling case for the claim that Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory is not authentically democratic. This does not entail, however, that Schmitt’s views are of no relevance for understanding the contemporary crisis of democracy. Schmitt’s arguments offer a blueprint for the populist-authoritarian subversion of democracy. Defenders of democracy are therefore well-advised to engage with Schmitt’s ideas.’.

The coronavirus pandemic made the biopolitics of infection control the core object of states around the world. Globally, states governed spheres usually free of state control, implementing various restrictions, closing down society in the process. This is possible due to the state's capacities to act through and over society, grounded in the state's powers. I argue that while the pandemic has led to useful and interesting state-centric Foucauldian literature on the politics of COVID-19, this literature has not fully taken the (...) theoretical lessons of the pandemic into account. Explicating these lessons, I discuss how the pandemic invites us to reconsider the Foucauldian approach to the state. The purpose of this article is to combine the Foucauldian theory of power with a Weberian state theory based on Michael Mann's work on the state and the sources of power, so to lay the foundations for a Weberian-Foucauldian theory of the state. (shrink)

Positive political theorists typically deny the possibility of collective agents by understanding aggregation problems to imply that groups are not rational decision-makers. This view contrasts with List and Pettit’s view that such problems actually imply the necessity of accounting for collective agents in explanations of group behaviour. In this paper, I explore these conflicting views and ask whether positive political theorists should alter their individualist analyses of groups like legislatures, political parties, and constituent assemblies. I show how we fail to (...) appreciate the significance of strategic voting and agenda control by treating groups as agents. I, therefore, conclude that positive political theorists should cling to their individualist approach and maintain that groups are not agents. (shrink)

We study first-order concatenation theory with bounded quantifiers. We give axiomatizations with interesting properties, and we prove some normal-form results. Finally, we prove a number of decidability and undecidability results.

Children of prisoners are often negatively affected by their parents’ incarceration, which raises issues of justice. A common view is that the many negative effects associated with parental imprisonment are unjust, simply because children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed or unjustly punished by their parents’ incarceration. We argue that proposals of this kind have problems with accounting for cases where it is intuitive that prison might create social injustices for children of prisoners. Therefore, we suggest that in addition to the (...) question of whether children of prisoners are impermissibly harmed, we should ask whether the inequalities that these children endure because of their parent’s incarceration are objectionable from a social justice perspective. To answer this latter question, we examine the negative effects associated with parental imprisonment from the perspective of luck egalitarianism. We develop a luck egalitarian account that incorporates insights from the philosophy of childhood. On our account, children of prisoners might endure two different types of objectionable inequalities, since they are often deprived of resources that are important for ensuring fair equality of opportunity in adulthood, but also because they are likely to suffer inequalities in terms of childhood welfare. After defending this account, we explore its implications for policy. (shrink)

Exploring Textual Action questions how we analyse works of art after the performative turn and shows how the interplay of performativity (textual action), space and topography, and the converging of genres and art forms is essential in modern drama, theatre, prose fiction, poetry and film. The volume also fosters a keen concern for the development of congenial theory. Its 14 detailed essays analyse works of art ranging from Balzac, Melville and George Eliot, to Breton, Kafka, Benjamin, Blixen and Woolf; and (...) from W.C. Williams, Bresson and Scorsese, to Sarraute, Duras, Reygadas, Dumont and Waltz. The approach of these studies discloses the art works as creative and dynamic utterances with active and shaping forces so powerful, and consequential, that they have the potential to transform human perception and blur clear distinctions between art and "real" life. Using an alternative and dynamic method and suggesting a direction towards the detailed analysis of literature, art, media and culture, Exploring Textual Action addresses current debates within the humanities. (shrink)

In her latest book _Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence_, Cécile Fabre suggests that the deception of third parties during an infiltration operation can be justified as a foreseen but unintended side effect. In this essay, I criticize this view. Such deception, I argue, is better justified paternalistically as a means of preventing third parties from becoming wrongful threats. In the second part of the article, I show that Fabre ignores an important moral complication in (...) deception operations where agents intentionally allow others to be harmed as a means of protecting a secret. I argue that intentionally allowing harm to others as a means is a particularly problematic mode of agency which must be addressed in a normative account of espionage. (shrink)

Review of Peter Winch, Spinoza on Ethics and Understanding.

Given resource constraints in healthcare, demands justice and equity require the constant development of material principles for resource distribution. In many cases, such material principles are formulated as mid-level principles, well-adapted to handle healthcare distribution but suffering from aspects outside the healthcare context that affect their application. In healthcare, factors outside the healthcare system will sometimes affect patients’ equal opportunity to receive treatment and achieve health. Examples of such factors might include an individual’s economic means, the cost of drugs, geography, (...) etc. This article explores whether the formal equality principle could help us address such problems. It is argued that the traditional (thin) formal equality principle can aid in priority setting, both as a heuristic tool to aid in consistency and also in handling under-determined cases. However, it appears to be too ‘thin’ to handle problems caused by factors outside the healthcare context. In the article, I explore a more robust version of the formal equality principle and argue that such a principle can be used to address such cases. However, even a more comprehensive formal equality principle will need to consider whether some other actors have a moral responsibility to address the problem or whether the issue could be solved more effectively by others. Furthermore, such a principle needs to consider whether the opportunity cost of achieving ‘thick’ formal equality is acceptable, given the material principles of distribution. (shrink)

This edited collection provides insight into understanding architecture and urban design as technology. In order to understand how and why we live in built environments, we are in need of a conceptual framework that takes into account what role architecture as technology plays in our being and becoming in the world.

je älter, desto frommer? Diese Frage prägt die religionsinteressierte Altersforschung in vielfältiger Hinsicht. Angesichts der demographischen Entwicklung ist sie gerade für die christlichen Kirchen von großem Interesse. Der Bedeutung und den Mustern und Strukturen von Religion im Alter geht diese Studie deshalb nach. Ihr liegt ein Religionsverständnis zugrunde, das die Ganzheitsdimensionen des Lebens in den Mittelpunkt stellt und den wesentlichen Fokus auf die Frage nach dem Sinn des Lebens richtet. Neben der Identifikation von (religiösen) Sinndimensionen im Alter in der Rekonstruktion (...) von Einzelfällen wie fallübergreifenden Strukturen bildet die Erarbeitung eines dem Forschungsgegenstand adäquaten und praktisch-theologisch fundierten Designs der empirischen Studie einen gewichtigen Schwerpunkt. Damit trägt die Arbeit einerseits dem zukunftsrelevanten Thema der Religion im Alter, andererseits dem Desiderat konzeptionell überzeugender empirischer Forschung in der Praktischen Theologie Rechnung. Das macht sie interessant sowohl für die religiöse Altersforschung im Speziellen wie die praktisch-theologische Religionsforschung im Allgemeinen. (shrink)

Desde la antigüedad hasta hoy, la tradición vitruviana ha dominado los modos en que se ha entendido el oficio de la arquitectura y la figura del arquitecto en Occidente. Esta tradición hace de la arquitectura una práctica necesariamente relacionada con la edificación. Sin embargo, en los tiempos en que Vitruvio escribía su De Architectura, diferentes nociones sobre el oficio permeaban tanto en escritos dramáticos y filosóficos como en el sentido común de la época. En Cicerón y Eurípides, pero sobre todo (...) en Plauto, encontramos arquitecturas cuyos objetivos se alejaban del arte y se acercaban a la política, y arquitectos con habilidades que tenían menos que ver con la técnica, y más con la prudencia. Con ayuda del pensamiento aristotélico, veremos que estas figuras no eran meros caprichos dramatúrgicos ni moralistas, sino que poseían un fundamento epistemológico y práctico, que encontraba en la arquitectura un modo de pen- sar y de actuar más allá de la proyección y construcción de edificios. (shrink)

Focusing on the multi-dimensionality of interactional settings, this study analyzes how the material world is a significant factor in the sequential co-production of the video-taped doctor—patient interactions. The analysis shows how a material artifact, the patient's file, is relevant in two ways: a) as a device which is employed in the sequential organization of the interaction. The patient's file is being used in the contexts of topic development and topic change. b) The file with its specific physical and symbolic features (...) is being co-produced and contested by both actors as a knowledge reservoir. Further inspection of the interactions in concert with theoretical reflections of the role of space and materiality suggests that interactions should be interpreted as happening in spatially arranged constellations of material objects and actors. In these both rigid and flexible constellations boundaries are established, access is distributed, and meaning is solidified. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore how a social learning environment can be constructed that uses IT and the Internet. Based on interviews and observations made during two experiments concerning IT and senior citizens in Denmark, the article examines how these experiments make the link between senior citizens and the Internet. In particular, the cases show how IT, as it is used in the social experiments, can be applied to construct empowerment properties and thereby enable “active citizenship” for seniors.

Republicans consider freedom as non-domination an attractive political ideal for a modern pluralistic society that cannot be found in liberalism. This book shows how this view is untenable. By analysing freedom as non-domination as it is understood by contemporary republicans, the book rejects the widely held view that this freedom concept is superior to liberal understandings of freedom as non-interference. In fact, setting up institutions to promote non-domination is shown to also promote non-interference. The book demonstrates how it is the (...) focus on making an ideal suitable for a modern society that leads republicans to a view of freedom with no normative insight that cannot also be found in liberalism. However, the book also shows how republicans can adjust their freedom ideal so that it actually offers a distinctly republican contribution to political philosophy. By understanding freedom to require that citizens commit to an especially high level of political participation to deny powerholders opportunities to act against the common good, republicans can reject liberalism and freedom as non-interference. But this freedom ideal does not respect the many citizens in a modern society whose conceptions of a good life do not involve such a high level of political engagement. Republicans therefore face a dilemma: They can promote a freedom ideal suited for modern conditions, but they then end up endorsing a liberal theory promoting freedom as non-interference. Alternatively, they can promote a distinct freedom ideal, but this ideal will be unsuited for a modern society. (shrink)