In his texts, Józef Tischner referred to significant problems characteristic of the end of the communist regime and the first years of the liberal-democratic system in Poland. He tried to understand, among other things, the sources of Polish society’s disappointment with their regained political and economic freedom. This article discusses the late period of Tischner’s life and work, when his philosophy was heavily influenced by the ideas of Charles Taylor. On the one hand, the author analyzes Tischner’s attitude toward (...) the concept of ordinary life, while on the other, Tischner’s understanding of solidarity combined with the concept of the spirit of capitalism. The article shows numerous similarities and significant differences between the way of thinking of both philosophers. The former concern above all the consentaneous assessment of the disappearance of heroism in liberal-democratic societies, while the latter concern the discrepancies in the assessment of the possibility of fully implementing the idea of solidarity in these societies. (shrink)

A short reflective piece on the occasion of Charles Taylor's 85th birthday.

Metaethics tends to take for granted a bare Democritean world of atoms and the void, and then worry about how the human world that we all know can possibly be related to it or justified in its terms. I draw on Wittgenstein to show how completely upside-down this picture is, and make some moves towards turning it the right way up again. There may be a use for something like the bare-Democritean model in some of the sciences, but the picture (...) has no standing as the basic objective truth about the world; if anything has that standing, it is ordinary life. I conclude with some thoughts about how the notion of bare, “thin” perception of non-evaluative reality feeds a number of philosophical pathologies, such as behaviourism, and show how a “thicker”, more value-laden, understanding of our perceptions of the world can be therapeutic against them. (shrink)

The Role Ethics of Epictetus: Stoicism in Ordinary Life offers an original interpretation of Epictetus’s ethics and how he bases his ethics on an appeal to our roles in life. Epictetus's role theory is a complete ethical theory, one that has been both misunderstood and under-appreciated in the literature.

This essay argues that Montaigne and Emerson share not only a literary style and a form of skepticism, but also a moral project, namely—to borrow a concept from Charles Taylor—the affirmation of ordinary life. Moreover, Montaigne and Emerson approach this project in fundamentally the same way: rather than offering readers discursive arguments, they attempt to reform readers’ imaginations. Finally, recognizing the poetic nature of their respective affirmations of ordinary life allows us to appreciate how their seemingly (...) dogmatic claims regarding human equality and the human good are compatible with their shared form of skepticism. (shrink)

Aristotle is right to argue that the best life is a life of unimpeded activity, but I believe he went wrong in thinking that ordinary human life is, or must be, far removed from the best life. To establish this claim, I offer a historical explanation of what unimpeded activity involves. I use the class of art patrons in Renaissance Florence to show how mathematical skills acquired in everyday life can be applied to widely (...) differing tasks. As patrons extend their mathematical skills, their activities become more self-realizing and hence more continuous in Aristotle's sense. I argue that the activities of the Florentine patron class, to be sustained over time, require many of Aristotle's virtues. Examples like this show, I argue, that reasonably unimpeded activity is an important human good and that it is genuinely desirable to, and within the grasp of, ordinary people, even those who initially claim no interest in virtue. (shrink)

A dirty hands case is justified, obligatory or permissible, and morally wrong. It is argued that dirty hands are conceptually unproblematic and that they are instances of ordinary evaluative phenomena. Some ordinary cases of moral conflict are like dirty hands in that they are entirely justified, yet regrettable. The analysis shows that such cases involve double counting––the disvalue is counted once and overridden in the act‐guiding evaluation, and counted again later as the object of the moral emotions and (...) as being a disvalue. In addition, dirty hands are cases in which what is morally required is also immoral, and therefore regrettable. Shows that ethical theories can and should account for the existence of moral choices involving acts that are justified, even obligatory, yet nevertheless wrong, shameful, and regrettable. (shrink)

According to David Lewis, the predicate ‘knows’ is context-sensitive in the sense that its truth conditions vary across conversational contexts, which stretch or compress the domain of error possibilities to be eliminated by the subject’s evidence. Our concern in this paper is to thematize, assess, and overcome within a neo-Lewisian contextualist project two important mismatches between our use of ‘know’ in ordinary life and the use of ‘know’ by ‘Lewisian’ ordinary speakers. The first mismatch is that Lewisian (...) contextualism still overgenerates the error possibilities which cannot be ignored in a given context, since it is oblivious to the distinction between ‘invented’ and ‘discovered’ possibilities. The second mismatch is a full-scale one: an adequate account of knowledge attribution is not exhausted by the subject’s negative capacity of pruning branches off the tree of counterpossibilities. We therefore introduce a new vector of value, which explains how ‘know’ comes in degrees: the satisfaction of ‘know better’ is made to depend on the capacity of imagining possibilities connected in a relevant way with the subject’s beliefs. (shrink)

There is an abiding scepticism in normative theory that individual responsibility for global injustice lies outside commonsense moral thought because it is not grounded in an intuitive conception of human agency. Despite the grim realities of injustice in an interconnected world, this scepticism holds that human beings cannot properly internalise a nonrestrictive view of responsibility because it cuts against their experience of agency in the world. Against this view, this article argues that individual responsibility for the realisation of global justice (...) is supported by a pervasive, and socio-politically influenced, feature of the phenomenology of agency: moral imagination. Moral imagination connects actions which are within the domain of an ordinary life to larger projects of social and political change. Since there is no compelling reason for the scope of those projects to be restricted, there is an accessible understanding and experience of the phenomenology of agency which grounds individual global responsibility in the real world. I call this a dynamic phenomenology of agency. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Eric Santner’s psychoanalytic reinterpretation of the crucial symbol of Judaism – yetziat mitzrayim, the getting out of Egypt – as “the Exodus out of our own Egyptomania.” Formulated in his book on Rosenzweig and Freud, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, it appears in all Santner’s later works concerned with political theology, where “Egyptomania” stands for everything that overburdens human life with an excessive “signifying stress” or “ex-citation,” weighing it down with the impossible demands (...) of the ultimate metaphysical self-justification and the interpellating call to sublimity. Contrary to Hegel’s definition of Judaism as “the religion of the sublime,” Santner consequently champions the opposite view, according to which the Abrahamic revelation forms the first religion of radical desublimation that blocks the vertical transport into the extraordinary “beyond” and focuses instead on the immanent transcendence as the radical otherness of the neighbour/stranger in the world. The Exodus, therefore, is to be understood not as an exit out of the world, following the call of the otherworldly God, but precisely the other way round: as an exit of the Egyptomaniac metaphysical paralysis, where “Egypt” represents an impasse of the self-negating life which cannot tolerate its finite condition and invents a sublime alibi in a false promise of immortality. (shrink)

The Varnished Truth gives us a careful, spirited, and fresh look at the multi-layered subject of deception and truth-telling in everyday life.

As a speculative and abstract discipline, philosophy is traditionally considered to be in dialectical tension with physical experience and daily practice. In contrast to this conventional and idealistic perspective, and in line with aesthetics as embodied knowledge, this article attempts to show that not only do we constantly think via gestures, movements, and physical experiences but also that there is no need to disconnect a concept from practice. Passing from Wittgenstein’s idea of “form of life” to the pragmatist aesthetics (...) initiated by Dewey’s idea of “art as experience,” I propose an analysis of the philosophical framework of postmodern dance (Yvonne Rainer) and of Happenings (Allan Kaprow), in order to underline the theoretical and conceptual research that is already at work in the field of contemporary art practice, the latter being understood as a sensorial dimension intrinsically linked to ordinary life. My general argument is that gestures, which are an inescapable and vital part of everyday life, can be foregrounded by certain artistic practices without corrupting or theatricalizing their ordinariness. (shrink)

By understanding the sense in which Sextus thinks reason is deceptive we may clarify his attitude towards ordinary life. The deception, like that of the Siren's song, is practical rather than epistemic. It is not a matter of leading us to assent to false or unjustified conclusions but is rather a distraction from, or even corruption of, ordinary life.

What might we learn if the study of ethics focused less on hard cases and more on the practices of everyday life? In Everyday Ethics, Michael Lamb and Brian Williams gathered some of the world's leading scholars and practitioners of moral theology (including some Georgetown University Press authors) to explore that question in dialogue with anthropology and the social sciences. In a field largely begun by Michael Banner, contributors engage with and extend his ideas of ethics as it is (...) practiced in daily life. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, these scholars analyze the ethics of ordinary practices--from eating, learning, and loving the neighbor to borrowing and spending, using technology, and working in a flexible economy. Along the way, they consider the moral and methodological questions that emerge from this interdisciplinary dialogue and assess the implications for the future of moral theology. (shrink)

Janina Bauman was a sociologist of everyday life. Her autobiographical texts, Winter in the Morning (1986), A Dream of Belonging (1988), and the synthetic volume Beyond These Walls (2006), manage a kind of personal poignancy combined with world-historic content and attention to the detail of everyday life that sets her work apart. This essay responds to these attributes and offers a contribution to her remembrance as a writer, an actor in and observer of everyday life in Warsaw (...) and Leeds across the 20th century. (shrink)

Schizophrenia involves significant disturbances to inter-subjective experience, the complex nature of which have become an increasingly important area for research in the philosophy of psychiatry. In “Schizophrenia as a Problem of Other Minds,”, Brighupati Singh offers a thought-provoking contribution to this trajectory by engaging Stanley Cavell’s idea of skepticism: the recognition that ordinary life is inherently fragile, and that the affective attunement between self and other is something that can be undone. Through detailed ethnographic and literary studies, primarily (...) undertaken in the Department of Psychiatry at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, Singh demonstrates how patients with... (shrink)

Discusses the nature of power, describes its psychological and social aspects, and speculates about the relationship between power and freedom.

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 3 Seiten: 364-368.

We invited five Cavell scholars to write on this topic. What follows is a vibrant exchange among Paola Marrati, Andrew Norris, Jörg Volbers, Cary Wolfe and Thomas Dumm addressing the question whether, in the contemporary political context, Cavell’s skepticism and his Emersonian perfectionism amount to a politics at all.

We occupy a fascinating moment in time when the trajectory of technological development is throwing into doubt the certainty of understandings of the boundary between the human and the technological. Perhaps one of the key contributions that industrial designers have made to humankind has been the way in which they have made the extraordinary potentiality of technology seem utterly ordinary: they call it the humanisation of technology (ICSID 2008). Designers, however, seem to be in something of an intellectual spin; (...) they have done little to mollify the projection of these times as extraordinary and without precedent in the trajectory of the human species. Rather than adding to the many who call for discontinuity, a speculative design scenario is presented taking impetus from the opportunity for designers to reconsider the essential principles that underpin their intellectual community. The scenarios explore how it will be necessary to find a means to analyse the human and the technological without seeking closure through outmoded forms of material and representational analysis. If designers can reveal borders and epistemic heterogeneity to be matters of conceptual and rhetorical convenience, then they might act upon a strategy that understands materiality to be tied to a new form of intellectual complexity in keeping with these times. In that way, it will become possible again for industrial designers to lead the discussion of humanity and technology in a single and productive conversation. (shrink)

Drawing on recent theories and debates concerning the everydayness of non-artistic and even private aesthetic experiences, this article aims at differentiating new ways of dealing with revulsion at the intersection of negative and everyday aesthetics, as another manner of extending or transcending the scope of traditional art-oriented aesthetics. The paradigms that I will trace in the history of negative aesthetics are not mere occurrences of disgust or repulsiveness in art and in everyday life, but ways of addressing the repulsive (...) in relation to the culturally variable scope of art and aesthetics. Besides the classical paradigm that associates repugnant subjects with their pleasure-inducing imitations in art, and the transgressions of modern and contemporary art that increasingly shocked their audience, revulsion can also be regarded as a form of displeasure linked to the quotidian, yet aesthetically relevant forms of life. By virtue of this ordinary nature, which is not unfamiliar to other (non-Western) cultures, revulsion could be placed at the core of everyday aesthetics, since it confirms both the transition from contemplation to action in recent aesthetics, that is, the practical preoccupation with the aesthetic quality of living, and the broader redefinition of aesthetics in terms of sensory reactions. (shrink)

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a (...) person’s life. Studies 2a–b found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear. (shrink)

It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important. Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful (...) life does need valuable projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the ordinary life. (shrink)

A leading ethicist offers a theological guide to thinking Christianly about the ordinary nature of everyday life.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.Karl marx’s distinction between interpreting the world and changing it points by extension to the state of contemporary philosophy and psychiatry. The 1990s resurgence of interdisciplinary work in this area was driven equally by phenomenological scholarship and by initiatives in analytic philosophy. The former reflected the focus in phenomenology on ‘what it is like’ to experience a given mental symptom with the aim of reconstructing the (...) life-worlds of people experiencing mental disorders, while the latter reflected directly or indirectly the influence of J. L. Austin and others from... (shrink)

Just how ordinary was everyday life during normalization in Czechoslovakia? In their discussions of the lives of “ordinary people,” historians have underplayed the fear and secrecy present in the daily experiences of Czechs and Slovaks in the late communist period. In linking writings by dissidents to Czech and Slovak oral histories in the collections of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, I seek to problematize the dissident/ordinary person dichotomy used in recent historiography, and argue (...) that the chasm between these two apparently opposite groups has been exaggerated. Through an analysis of the themes of family, education and mobility, I will show that domestic life was not an escape from politics, but was in itself politicized. From audiovisual interviews, I will glean normalization-era memories of the need for what Václav Havel called “silence” and “mystification”-in the classroom, in the pub and in the home. (shrink)

The life of Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) provides an invaluable lens through which to view mid-Victorian science. A biographical approach makes it clear that some well-established narratives about this period need revising. For example, Hooker's career cannot be considered an example of the professionalisation of the sciences, given the doubtful respectability of being paid to do science and his reliance on unpaid collectors with pretensions to equal scientific and/or social status. Nor was Hooker's response to Darwin's theories either straightforward (...) or contradictory; it only makes sense as carefully crafted equivocation when seen in the context of his life and career. However, the importance of Hooker's life is ultimately its typicality; what was true of Hooker was true of many other Victorian men of science. (shrink)

This book explores the aesthetics of the objects and environments we encounter in daily life. Thomas Leddy stresses the close relationship between everyday aesthetics and the aesthetics of art, but places special emphasis on neglected aesthetic terms such as ‘neat,’ ‘messy,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘lovely,’ ‘cute,’ and ‘pleasant.’ The author advances a general theory of aesthetic experience that can account for our appreciation of art, nature, and the everyday.

In ordinary life we think that we know many things about the world. I know that I am sitting here. I know that it is not raining. I know that Reagan is President--and many more interesting things. We also think that we know things of a more general sort, e.g., that there are tables, chairs, physical objects, other people. Most of the time, we believe that we have good reasons for our beliefs. Descartes, Hume and Russell, however, as (...) a result of philosophical reflection, discover that we cannot know, nor do we have any good reason for our beliefs. ;Thomas Reid and G. E. Moore reject the sceptic's negative conclusions. They think scepticism is absurd, ridiculous and contrary to common sense. It is contrary to what we believe in ordinary life. These commonsense philosophers do not find the sceptical arguments compelling. They argue that scepticism is not as well supported as the ordinary view that we do know. ;A large part of my dissertation is a defense of scepticism against these commonsense philosophers' objections. I argue that Reid and Moore fail to appreciate the power and significance of scepticism. They fail to understand the relation between philosophical scepticism and ordinary life. A proper understanding of Humean scepticism thwarts any attempt to argue from ordinary life against scepticism. ;Still, I argue that Hume was concerned, indeed distressed, by the conflict between scepticism and ordinary life. But he does not think that conflict casts doubt on the truth of scepticism. I argue that Hume feels "philosophical melancholy" over his discoveries about human nature and the human condition. But his distress is totally at the philosophical level. That is because the recognition of the conflict between ordinary life and philosophical reflection is distressing at the philosophical level. I argue that Hume is right to feel the distress that he does, but I also maintain that he should be dissatisfied with his negative appraisal of our epistemic position, just as we are. ;Reid and Moore are right to be dissatisfied with scepticism, even though their attempts to legitimize that dissatisfaction fail. Their failure to appreciate the nature and importance of scepticism, however, is instructive because it forces us to explain why there is thought to be a problem about knowledge. They force us to express what is indeed difficult to express, namely, what it is that we want to understand when we undertake a philosophical investigation of knowledge. . . . UMI. (shrink)

Bringing together a genealogy of authors, concepts, and aesthetic case studies, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on ordinary aesthetics by focusing on the tensions that are intrinsic to walking as a fundamental embodied action in everyday urban life. These tensions concern the movement of walking itself and its relation to one’s surroundings, but it also concerns a certain complementarity between home (familiarity) and wandering. Experiencing space and thresholds that disrupt one’s relationship with home and the (...) everyday can be understood as part of a modern “anti-home” tendency that lies at the core of several artistic and aesthetic practices. On the other hand, the study of walking and its relationship with the ordinary has also been enhanced and complexified by the mediation of images and technologies of reproduction. Approaching the paradoxes and ambiguities of everydayness from the perspective of walking allows us to better understand the ordinary as an in-between concept composed of evidence and mystery, familiarity and strangeness. Walking itself, as an ordinary element of life, is an unstable stabilisation, an unconsciousness that may become awareness, an immersive action that knows interruptions, a way of repeating paths that can also lead to detours and discoveries. (shrink)

If genuine political activity can only be undertaken by citizens in the public sphere in a nation-state, what of stateless people today – asylum seekers and refugees cut adrift on the high seas? This is what is at stake in Hannah Arendt’s political theory of necessity. This article reconsiders Arendt’s notion of the Greek oikos (household) as the sphere of necessity with the aim of challenging the idea that there is a condition of necessity or mere subsistence, where life (...) is reduced to satisfying basic biological needs. For Arendt, the Greek oikos is the model that provides the inspiration for her theory because necessity activities were kept quite separate from action in the polis. The ordinary and the undistinguished happen in the oikos and its equivalent, with the polis being reserved for extraordinary acts done for glory without any regard for life. The exclusionary nature of this theory of the polis as action has, at best, been treated with kid gloves by Arendt’s commentators. With reference to Heidegger on the polis and Agamben’s notion of oikonomia, I endeavour to show that the so-called ordinary is embedded in a way of life that is extraordinary and the key to grasping humanness. (shrink)

What if depression, in the Americas at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to biochemical imbalances? This article seeks alternatives to the medical model found in most depression memoirs by considering how the epistemological and methodological struggles faced by a scholar of the African diaspora confronted by the absent archive of slavery are relevant to discussions of political depression. Combining scholarly investigation and (...) personal memoir, Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother exemplifies feminism’s affective turn not only by bringing personal narrative into scholarship, but by seeking reparation for the past in the affective dynamics of cultural memory rather than in legal reform or state recognition. Stubbornly refusing to find solace in an African past before slavery, though, Hartman provides a model of emotional reparation in which feelings of loss and alienation persist. Her work suggests the relevance of political depression to both the ordinary life of racism and to what gets called clinical depression. (shrink)

The author is in essential agreement with Tallis, that when we only deploy one mode of interpretation, ie the scientific mode, we lose the fundamental realities of human experience, including the experience of free will, on which, ironically, scientific practice depends. Tallis’s philosophical stance is compared to that of Owen Barfield and his work on free will is placed within the context of his other books. A sense of wonder is common to all of them.

The big issues of medical ethics are more in the news than ever before. And yet they remain as stubborn and often as incendiary as ever. This book claims that in an effort to deal with the issues, mainstream philosophers have arbitrarily omitted many ethically relevant features in order to reduce the central problems to more tractable technical puzzles. The most gratuitous omissions have been the patient's point of view on the problem; the patient's ordinary life, which provides (...) the wider context for his point of view; and the ordinary language and concepts by which the patient tries to make sense of the problem. (shrink)

The later Wittgenstein famously holds that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense. Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to create an ‘ideal’ language so as to produce a ‘real’ understanding in the first place; its aim must be to remove particular misunderstandings by clarifying the use of our ordinary language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein opposes both the sublime terms of traditional philosophy and the formal frameworks (...) of modern logics---and adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own philosophizing. However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach: his philosophical remarks frequently remain enigmatic, and many of the terms Wittgenstein coins appear to be highly technical. Thus, one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on philosophical jargons might not be turned against his own practice. The present essay probes the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 sketches Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special role that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 reconstructs Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls perspicuous representation, and argues that this method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly stated, but mediated through well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 discusses how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial terminologies and grammars in philosophy and science. (shrink)

This article starts from the premise that the ordinary is the mystical. It does so by delving into the dynamic relationship between Spirituality and Public Theology against the backdrop of Christianity’s societal roles. It explores how Christian theology extends beyond private faith to address broad societal issues. Through a critical examination of Public Theology’s distinct contributions to contemporary discussions, the article emphasises the necessity of engaging Spirituality – with its focus on the divine-human relationship into this discourse.Contribution: This synthesis (...) aims to enrich our comprehension of Christianity’s impact on public life, advocating for a faith that actively contributes to societal transformation across diverse contexts. (shrink)

The concept of the ordinary, along with such cognates as everyday life, ordinary language, and ordinary experience, has come into special prominence in late modern philosophy. Thinkers have employed two opposing yet related responses to the notion of the ordinary - scientific and phenomenological approaches on the one hand, and on the other, more informal or even anti-scientific procedures. Eminent philosopher Stanley Rosen here presents the first comprehensive study of the main approaches to theoretical mastery (...) of ordinary experience. He evaluates the responses of a wide range of modern and contemporary thinkers and grapples with the peculiar problem of the ordinary - how to define it in its own terms without transforming it into a technical (and so, extraordinary) artifact. (shrink)