Argues that Americans have found that economic abundance is not fulfilling in itself, and suggests ways to change how we think about money and the simple life.

Despite the United States' economic abundance, "the good life" has proved elusive. Millions long for more time for friends and family, for reading or walking or relaxing. Instead our lives are frantic, hectic, and harried. In Graceful Simplicity, Jerome M. Segal, philosopher, political activist, and former staff member of the House Budget Committee, expands and deepens the contemporary discourse on simple living. He articulates his conception of a politics of simplicity--one rooted in beauty, peace of mind, appreciativeness, (...) and generosity of spirit. (shrink)

This volume consists of nine essays on the political teaching of such Muslim philosophers as al-Kindi and al-Razi, as well as the more familiar al-Fârâbî, ...

Mathews, Race This essay - appearing in two parts - examines aspects of the early and middle phases of the episcopate of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, in the context of a wider study of responses to Catholic social teachings in Victoria between 1891 and 1966. Part I dealt mainly with Mannix's significance and early life, and the focus in Part II is on the episcopate up to and including the onset of the Great Depression.

While the value of early detection of dementia is largely agreed upon, population-based screening as a means of early detection is controversial. This controversial status means that such screening is not recommended in most national dementia plans. Some current practices, however, resemble screening but are labelled “case-finding” or “detection of cognitive impairment”. Labelled as such, they may avoid the ethical scrutiny that population-based screening may be subject to. This article examines conceptualizations of screening and case-finding. It shows how the definitions (...) and delimitations of the concepts (the _what_ of screening) are drawn into the ethical, political, and practical dimensions that screening assessment criteria or principles are intended to clarify and control (the _how_ of screening, how it is and how it should be performed). As a result, different conceptualizations of screening provide the opportunity to rethink what ethical assessments should take place: the conceptualizations have different ethico-political implications. The article argues that population-based systematic screening, population-based opportunistic screening, and case-finding should be clearly distinguished. (shrink)

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) ne cesse de fasciner ses lecteurs, par les controverses internes de ses ecrits. Dans une societe mondialisee, confrontee regulierement aux extremismes religieux qui tentent d'imposer leur vision du monde par la violence, peut-on encore entendre son verdict dans les Lettres ecrites de la Montagne : "La Religion est utile et meme necessaire aux Peuples"? Devant les theories de la laicisation, developpees dans une perspective de secularisation a sens unique, orientees vers l'expulsion de la religion de la (...) sphere publique, la relecture de la pensee politique de Rousseau est indispensable pour elaborer un contrat social acceptable par tous. La contribution du philosophe de Geneve a une analyse critique du theologico-politique, et son opposition aux perspectives atheistes de ses contemporains, est d'un grand interet dans le debat autour de la laicite des Etats postmodernes. En effet, le paradoxe, qui traverse la pensee de Rousseau, trouve son point culminant dans sa controverse avec les encyclopedistes sur le lien entre la politique et la religion. Plus que tout autre philosophe des Lumieres, Jean Jacques Rousseau eclaire la comprehension des defis que posent a notre temps la relation du politique et du religieux. (shrink)

This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally (...) and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, for example,whomto test,whento offer the tests, andhowto explain and perform them. This article explores the role and practice of this form of judgment, emphasising its political and ethical nature. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and patients, and draws on the theories of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

The author describes Heller’s concept of ethics as a “quasi-sphere” intersecting with various fields relating to human relationships. Special attention is paid to the axiological aspects of her concept of ethics and the relationship between virtues and responsibility. The author also seeks to show how Heller integrated a traditional philosophical question—the relationship between “is” and “ought to be”—into her concept of “radical philosophy” at an earlier stage in the development of her philosophy. She initially considered the relationship between “is” (...) and “ought to be” to be contrasting. Later, when she had come to accept the political model of liberal capitalist society, the ideal of all-compassing equality became the ideal of “equality of opportunities”. The author interprets this shift as one in which the relationship becomes continual. He is also critical of Heller’s underestimation of the effect the “social a priori” has on the possibilities of human life. (shrink)

This article integrates previously missing components of government quality into the governance-piracy nexus in exploring governance mechanisms by which global obligations for the treatment of IPRs are effectively transmitted from international to the national level in the battle against piracy. It assesses the best governance tools in the fight against piracy and upholding of intellectual property rights (IPRs). The instrumentality of IPR laws (treaties) in tackling piracy through good governance mechanisms is also examined. Findings demonstrate that: (1) while all governance (...) tools under consideration significantly decrease the incidence of piracy, corruption-control is the most effective weapon; (2) but for voice and accountability, political stability and democracy, IPR laws (treaties) are instrumental in tackling piracy through government quality dynamics of rule of law, regulation quality, government effectiveness, corruption-control, and press freedom. Hence, the need for a policy approach most conducive to expanding development is to implement an integrated system of both IPRs and corollary good governance policies. Moreover, our findings support the relevance of good governance measures in developing countries wishing to complement their emerging IPR regimes. (shrink)

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 relates to ending hunger, achieving food security and improving nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture. The SDGs mention only a few political indicators and SDG2 in particular is largely devoid of political considerations to end hunger and achieve food security. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen famously observed the absence of famine in democracies, suggesting that a democratic system provides checks and balances that prevent famine. His observation has elicited further debate and triggered empirical studies in (...) recent years. Going beyond Sen’s hypothesis, this essay examines other political factors that would explain vulnerability to famine and that need to be addressed more explicitly in SDG 2 and similar initiatives. By taking the case of pastoralists in the Afar region of Ethiopia, this research explores selected political determinants of vulnerability to famine. The Eritrea-Ethiopia war and the ensuing border closure have had a detrimental effect on the livelihood of pastoralists in Afar – many pastoralists were deprived of a market and a reliable source of income. In addition, Afar pastoralists were sidelined from the informal salt sector on which they used to rely. The state facilitated this expropriation, leaving pastoralists even more vulnerable to famine. I argue that political considerations are crucial in successfully ending hunger and achieving food security. The essay uses a qualitative case study design and is based on a PhD dissertation. (shrink)

This collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of Ai Weiwei's thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The short quotations presented here have been carefully selected from articles, tweets, and interviews given by this acclaimed Chinese artist and activist. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art (...) and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections. Together, these quotes span some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei's eventful career--from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011--providing a window into the mind of one of the world's most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists. (shrink)

The political passages in Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge are an integral part of his arguments against ‘objectivism’ and/or a post-critical, personalist, fiduciary and fallibilist philosophy. This paper elaboratesthe social and political implications of Polanyi’s emphasis upon acceptance of one’s situation and the exercise in it of a sense of responsibility to transcendent ideals, as against attempts to start with a clean slate, to overcome all imperfections and to find some simple rule for political policy. Prescriptive duties and rights, (...) and mutual trust and solidarity, are the bases of politics, anti responsible action must start with them. But much of modern politics expresses a Gnostic impatience of our created and finite existence which results in arbitrary commitment to some radical and destructive ideology. (shrink)

In chapter one I firstly critique some contemporary family-resemblance approaches to the category woman, and claim that they do not take sufficient account of dis-semblance, that is, resemblances that people have in common with members of the contrast category man. Second, I analyze how the concept of woman is semantically contestable: resemblance/dissemblance structures give rise to vagueness and to borderline cases. Borderline cases can either be included in the category or excluded from it. The factors which incline parties in a (...) dispute about membership to include or exclude depend on metaphysical, ethical, or political background assumptions. In chapter two, I begin by considering the harms suffered by transgender persons through “misgendering”, the deployment of gender terms which inflict psychological harms upon transgender persons, place them in situations of injustice, or diminish their self-respect. Such deployments are morally contestable: they can be challenged on ethical grounds. Several characterisations of the term ‘woman’ proposed in the feminist literature are critiqued from this perspective. In chapter three, I elaborate a broadly liberal approach to gender pluralism. The approach involves: i) the public toleration of gender practices and beliefs which contest prevalent gender norms; and ii) state-gender neutrality. Public toleration allows gender non-conforming practices and beliefs within public space. State gender-neutrality consists mainly in the removal from law and government policy of provisions which assume compliance with prevalent conceptions of gender. (shrink)

What I suggest we can see in this brief overview of the literature is an extensive interpenetration on both sides of these debates between scientific, political, and social values. Important shifts in political and social values were of course occurring over the same period, some of them in parallel with, and perhaps even contributing to, these transitions I have been speaking of in evolutionary discourse. The developments that I think of as at least suggestive of possible parallels include (...) the progressive encroachment of public values into the private domain of post-World War II American life, the cold war, the rise of consumerism, and the flowering of what Christopher Lasch calls a “narcissistic individualism.”35 In popular language, the 1960s gave birth to the “me” generation. Perhaps the most tantalizing analogue is suggested by Barbara Ehrenreich's argument for the emergence of a new meaning of masculinity — an ideal of masculinity measured not by commitment, responsibility, or success as family provider, but precisely by the strength of a man's autonomy in the private sphere, his resistance to the demands of a hampering female.36 It is tempting to speculate about possible connections between changes in scientific discourse and developments in the social and political spheres, but such connections, however suggestive, would clearly have to be demonstrated.For now, however, I want to focus on another kind of change —a transformation not so much in the social or political sphere as in the scientific sphere. I make this turn, or return, in support of a more complex account of scientific change that incorporates reverberations within the scientific communty along with social and political changes.In the 1960s, all of biology was undergoing a major transformation in direct response to the dramatic successes of molecular biology. These successes seemed to completely vindicate the values on which the molecular revolution was premised — namely, simplicity and mechanism. Following the victory of Watson and Crick, and of others after them, the fever of that endeavor swept through biology leaving in its wake a new standard of science, and of scientific discourse — one predicated on clarity, simplicity, and analyzability; on the definition of legitimate questions as those capable of clear and unambiguous answers. Every biological discipline felt it — even evolutionary biology, which in some respects was at the furthest pole. Perhaps precisely because it seemed conceptually so remote, evolutionary biology may have felt it most of all. Lewontin inadvertently provides us with some direct support for this view. Indeed, he begins his introduction to Population Biology and Evolution with the following remarks: The twenty years since World War II have seen a vindication in biology of our faith in the Cartesian method as a way of doing science. Some of the most fundamental and interesting problems of biology have been solved or are very nearly solved by an analytic technique that is now loosely called “molecular biology.” But it is not specifically the “molecular” aspect of biology of the last twenty years that has led to its success. It is, rather, the analytic aspect, the belief that by breaking systems down into their component parts, by simplifying them or using simpler organisms, one can learn about more complex systems. As it happens, the problems that were attacked and are being attacked by this method lead to answers in terms of molecules and cell organelles.... There is a host of problems in biology, however, that has been much neglected in these twenty exciting years, because the answers to them cannot be meaningfully framed in molecular and cellular terms.37Lewontin is referring, of course, to problems in evolution. The remainder of his remarks is devoted to an argument for the applicability of the method, if not the content, of molecular biology to these problems. He writes, “It is not the case that molecular biology is Cartesian and analytic while population biology is holistic. Population biology is properly analytic and operates, within the framework of its own problems, by the process of simplification, analysis, and resynthesis.”38 With these remarks, he leads into the criticism of the “holists” who have “held up progress.”This new ethic of simplicity, clarity, and mechanism — embodying the very virtues lauded by Williams — was explicitly carried into evolutionary biology in the name of scientific progress. As it happened, the values implied also fit conveniently well with other values — each set of values providing crucial support for the other.However substantive the scientific gains may have been in some respects, the net effect of this ethic has also been a systematic “perceptual bias” — a bias with profound practical consequences for the entire program of methodological individualism in evolutionary biology, if not elsewhere as well. It may well be that the whole is equivalent to the reconstituted aggregate of its parts, if, in the process of aggregation or summation, all possible interactions among the parts are included. But if certain kinds of interactions are systematically excluded, our confidence in that program necessarily founders. My claim here is that such systematic exclusion does occur, and that it occurs on a number of different levels. To briefly review the interlocking kinds of “bias” that I see occurring in practice, I suggest the following schematic listing:On the most general level: The ethic of simplicity — the privileging of certain values, even certain methodologies, as having an a priori superior claim to scientific credibility.Only slightly less general, and crucially related, is the equation of “scientific” with “tractible”: Given the techniques of analysis available, the equation of science with what we can do inevitably leads to a systematic technical bias favoring simplicity. That is, because we don't know how to model complex dynamics, nonlinear interactions are systematically biased against because of the limitations of our technical know-how. The consequences of this equation of the scientific with the tractible are greatly compounded by the additional equation between what we can do and what is — that is, by our temptation to confuse tractibility with reality.Finally, and also closely related, a further kind of elision occurs even within the confines of tractibility. This kind of elision — taking the form almost of inferring tractibility from one's prior assumptions of what is real — is exemplified by the history of a mathematical ecology of mutualism. Even when mutualism can be introduced into the same technical machinery, it is still not pursued. The basic assumption is that competition is what is real, not because it is easier to model, but because it is what we expect. When the actual difficulties of modeling competition are then in turn suppressed, as in the Robert May story, what we have, given the temptation to equate the tractible with the real, is the possibility of a truly self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

This Introduction presents the seven closely interlinked papers that explore the theme of this Special Issue, and one of the enduring existential questions for International Relations: the nuclear...

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that (...) design embodies implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life. (shrink)

The main thesis of my article is that the viability of the European Union does not depend so much on its political structure as on its being anchored in a culture-based public sphere and on the establishment of a cultural European citizenship. The public sphere could be defined as an unique world, characterized by consensus and cooperation, in which only public goods can be sought and acquired, or as an unique world, characterized by rivalry and competition, in which everyone (...) could pursue their private interests, but only if there is a consensus regarding an objective and fair procedure. In any way, we cannot speak of a pluralism of public spheres - like the black public sphere, the LGBT public sphere, etc. - but (at the most) a plurality of interests represented in the public sphere, under the reserve of respecting a fair procedure, which allows the expression of axiological judgments. The EU needs a progressive citizenship, from civil citizenship to cultural citizenship, depending on the acquired skills, behavior and virtues. One deserves cultural citizenship and have the right (or, perhaps the privilege) to manifest - in the public sphere - a way of life and a cultural identity only if promote authentic values: virtues, rationality, free will etc. The problematic aspects of the European media sphere are obstacles on the way to establishing an authentic European cultural citizenship. They can be kept under control by assuming a healthy reactionary attitude and associating every element of change and contingent progress (speed, reductive simplicity, user's solitude, pictoriality, lateralness, data overload, immediacy, segmentation, social amnesia, etc.) with an element of moderation and equilibrium. Only thus can the media contribute in the making of a viable union of the European peoples, grounded on a well articulated European cultural citizenship. (shrink)

Should scientists value simple theories? Is fruitfulness an important criterion to assess scientific theories? What role moral, social, and political values should have in the assessment of scientific theories? In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of science in studying how cognitive and non-cognitive values influence and should influence the assessment and comparison of scientific theories. While cognitive values (such as simplicity and fruitfulness) are features of scientific theories that are indicative of the truth (...) or empirical adequacy of theories, non-cognitive values are moral, political, social, and economic values. Understanding the roles of values in science is a particularly urgent issue. Clarifying the importance of cognitive values is important in order to be able to make accurate comparisons of scientific theories. Understanding the influence of non-cognitive values on science is crucial because moral, social, and political values are involved in many stages of research, such as decisions on methodologies and allocation of funds. Since these decisions affect all the members of the society (scientists, non-experts, and political institutions), understanding the impact of non-cognitive values on these choices is of primary importance. Although a large body of literature has investigated the roles of cognitive and non-cognitive values in theory appraisal, several questions remain to be analysed. In this dissertation, I address four questions by using two main methods, namely the analysis of case studies from evolutionary psychology and the experimental method. First, while philosophers have clarified the importance and roles in theory appraisal of some cognitive values, little or no attention has been paid to other values. In this dissertation, I have started filling this gap by formulating a clear explication and a simple strategy to be employed in theory appraisal for one of the values that have attracted little attention, namely fruitfulness. I have explicated fruitfulness as the ability of programs to extend their content and suggested considering research questions and discovery heuristics to assess this ability. Moreover, I have used my account to assess the fruitfulness of evolutionary psychology. Second, some philosophers of science argue that cognitive values are desirable and relevant to the assessment of theories because they are indicative of the truth or empirical adequacy of theories. However, why is it so? In my dissertation, I develop a context-sensitive approach to values and I argue that in order to understand the ground for the desirability of cognitive values and make an accurate appraisal of theories, we have to consider specific factors of the context in which theories are assessed, such as the availability of methodologies and the way cognitive values are interrelated to each other in that context. Third, philosophers have traditionally argued that the influence of non-cognitive values on scientific reasoning threatens the epistemic authority of science. I have challenged this view and argued that some non-cognitive values can play a cognitive role in science, i.e., they can be epistemically beneficial to the assessment of scientific theories. On the basis of a case study (the account of human mating in evolutionary psychology), I have argued that feminist values have positively contributed to theory appraisal in various ways, such as by raising sensitivity to evidence that was neglected because of gender bias. Fourth, some philosophers have argued that non-cognitive values play a legitimate role in cases of inductive risk, namely cases in which scientists may wrongly assess scientific hypotheses (e.g. accepting a hypothesis that should be rejected) because of some uncertainty due to mixed results or disagreement on the reliability of methodologies. Mistakes can have consequences that can be morally or economically undesirable and non-cognitive values, some philosophers argue, provide the standards to evaluate and compare these possible consequences. However, little is known on how - specifically - non-cognitive values influence this evaluation. To address this issue, I have conducted an experimental study clarifying how personal features, political values, and specific aspects of a risk (e.g. the chance of incurring Type I vs. Type II errors) determine people’s reasoning about cases of inductive risk. On the basis of these results, I have discussed recent institutional calls for the need to align research agendas and technological development to citizens’ values, needs, and expectations. (shrink)

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the (...) myriad things, and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history. (shrink)

By resorting to the spiritual autobiography of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, an important religious and cultural personality of the 20th century, the author tries to emphasise the aspects of political theology that defined her way of acting and thinking and to show how she understood the relationship between religion and politics. Topics like poverty, love, giving, peace, sacrifice or responsibility are presented as keywords in the understanding of a complex vision with interdisciplinary relevance, while the two levels of (...) poverty, namely the material one, often accompanied by physical pain, maladies and other types of suffering, and the spiritual one, that is not necessarily related to the lack of basic material needs and can be found even in developed countries like the United States of America or Japan, are seen through the lenses of political theology. The author shows that, by finding practical bridges between spirituality and politics and by using as sources of inspiration not only Christian thinkers, but also thinkers from other religions, like Ghandi, the Albanese militant accomplished her vocation and also offered important and perennial principles which can help in the understanding of the contemporary world and in finding solutions to some of its crises. Although her message is a sort of combination between theology and social life, the political accents, sometimes theoretical, at other times practical, are important and can be used today for the development of a sustainable discourse for both the theological and the political sphere. CONTRIBUTION: The article brings into attention a spiritual autobiography that was not valorised properly by the contemporary research and in the same time offers an inter-disciplinary approach with ecumenical value. (shrink)

This collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of Ai Weiwei's thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections. Together, these (...) quotes span some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei's eventful career-from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011-providing a window into the mind of one of the world's most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists. Ai Weiwei is one of China's most influential and inspiring figures. Artist, architect, curator, and activist, he has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government's stance on human rights and democracy. (shrink)

In _Elementary Aspects of the Political_ Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action (...) in the constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal. (shrink)

The human history has evidenced a great number of systems of hierarchy and power, various manifestations of power and hierarchy relations in different spheres of social life from politics to information networks, from culture to sexual life. A careful study of each particular case of such relations is very im-portant, especially within the context of contemporary multipolar and multicultural world. In the meantime it is very important to see both the general features, typical for all or most of the hierarchy (...) and power forms, and their variation. This set of issues has been treated by a series of international conferences titled ‘Hierarchy and Power in the History of Civilizations’ held in 2000–2006. Most articles of this volume were originally presented at the 4th conference of this series (Moscow, 2006). Needless to mention that all those presentations have been substantially re-worked for the publication in this volume. Notwithstanding the fact that the relations of hierarchy and power are rele-vant for all the spheres as they penetrate the whole of social life, establishing a sort of framework for the human agency, they are naturally most visible in the political sphere. They existed long before the formation of the earliest states – ethologists maintain that complex systems of hierarchy and power can be found among many highly organized animals. Yet, this was with the formation of the state and civilization when the power and hierarchy relations acquired their mature forms. Although ancient and medieval systems of government and domination always attract special attention, contemporary systems are much closer for every scholar. At the same time relations of power and hierarchy in the modern political world system demonstrate a great number of variants, levels and dimensions. In the present edited volume we only focus on three aspects of this important subject. These are revolutionary transformations (in the broad sense of this notion), violence, and globalization. Each volume section is devoted to one of those themes. (shrink)

Although they have a religious origin, the terms quietist and quietism have generally been used in the anglophone world in the context created by the French Revolution, which made them expressions of political abuse. Examination of classic instances of their use shows that in fact they were terms of psychological abuse, signs that men and women of political commitment could not understand, let alone accept, others who were not committed to one side or other in the revolutionary struggle. (...) This paper takes issue with the egregious simplicity of that that attitude, while exploring aspects of the Idealist tradition in German philosophy which, also emerging from the challenge of the French Revolution, found positive terms and complex human explanations for behaviour that held back from definite political commitment. It concludes by suggesting the terms quietist and quietism have become redundant in a world that has moved on from a crude clash of revolution versus reaction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Conflict, Culture, Change: Engaged Buddhism in a Globalizing WorldMarwood Larson-HarrisConflict, Culture, Change: Engaged Buddhism in a Globalizing World. By Sulak Sivaraksa. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005. 145 pp.Sulak Sivaraksa's Conflict, Culture, Change is a useful if uneven collection of essays that touch on many of the basic aspects of Engaged Buddhism. The book does not make an original contribution to the field, yet it serves as a good (...) introduction to the tenets and practice of socially responsible Buddhism.Though not as prolific as Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama, Sulak Sivaraksa's contributions as a grassroots organizer and spokesperson are widely recognized, and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his resistance to Thailand's military dictatorship. His few books bear witness to the ways that he and similar peacemakers have found innovative methods to prevent globalization from destroying traditional ways of life.It does not seem entirely relevant to criticize a book that is so well intentioned and written by such an exemplary human being. Nonetheless, Conflict, Culture, Change is an odd collection of essays. Most have been published elsewhere, and taken together they tend to be repetitive. They are loosely grouped into three sections; the first two—"Peace, Nonviolence, and Social Justice" and "Simplicity, Compassion, and Education"—lay out a range of ways that classic Theravada Buddhist values could bring sanity to a world out of balance, discussing global conflict, nonviolence, reconciliation, consumerism, and environmentalism. What ties them together is the use of Buddhist ideas to analyze and respond to current problems, but the ensuing discussion does not progress beyond an introductory level. While it is certainly true that the onslaught of capitalism is traceable to the three poisons (greed, hatred, and ignorance) and that sincere humility on the part of world leaders would help facilitate global diplomacy, [End Page 166] this kind of analysis will probably not convince anyone who is not already a fellow traveler.Indeed, some scholars have waited for the leaders of Engaged Buddhism to articulate a more consistent philosophical basis for their praxis. In some ways, this criticism is ironic. After all, the energies of Engaged Buddhism are appropriately directed toward action and not theory, and Sivaraksa and others rightly criticize the single-minded pursuit of meditation unless it is balanced by an active response to social problems. Sivaraksa is careful to balance these dimensions, arguing that either one without the other is unable to bring about real change. He also combines classical Buddhist concepts with modern approaches—liberation theology, for example. What is needed, in this regard, is a more sustained exploration of where precisely traditional Buddhism can be supplemented by modern critical discourse without losing its nature as a dharma-based soteriology. On the other hand, if Sivaraksa's book were more focused on practical steps and concrete agendas, it could have served as a blueprint for organizers. That it does neither philosophy nor pragmatics limits its shelf life.A third section, "Culture and Change," is the book's most coherent, focusing on Thailand and the rise and fall of its dictatorships and the decline of Thai Buddhism. Sivaraksa's many stories attest to an all-too-common dynamic in South Asian Theravada countries: monks becoming politically powerful and their spiritual discipline waning. Sivaraksa also finds reason for hope: some Buddhists have remained true to the values of simplicity and humility, and new movements have arisen to help the old culture resist the new. At times his descriptions seem, at least to the Western reader, to border on a romantic nostalgia for an agrarian, temple-centered past, when monks were the revered authorities in their villages and families sent their sons to be ordained early. Now, he points out, many monks have VCRs and air conditioning and sleep on "soft, fluffy mattresses." Sivaraksa's book vividly conveys the cultural memory of rural Thailand to the West, and one would want all CEOs of multinational companies to read these stories before they set about modernizing the Thai countryside. Yet modernity cannot be uninvented; there can be no return to the simplicity of yesterday. After an extended chapter describing how the Thai elites' fascination... (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

Novel, as a literary genre, is described as the expression of events and emotions by using unconventional methods and techniques; beyond this, novek is also a subject of sociology. For this reason, writers have used the art of the novel as a way of expressing the pain experienced by the individual and its social dimensions. One of these writers is Mourid Barghouti (d. 2021), who was born in Palestine in 1944 and studied English Language and Literature at Cairo University. Banned (...) from entering Palestine in 1967 when he graduated from the university, and exiled from Egypt for criticizing Anwar al-Sādāt's (d. 1981) visit to Israel, Barghouti lived in exile for 17 years in various Arab and European countries away from his wife and child. Barghouti, who returned to Palestine 30 years after his departure, wrote a novel called I Saw Ramallah. This novel was first published in 1997, and he expressed his homesickness and the experiences of the Palestinian people after the occupation. Divided into nine chapters, consisting of 220 pages and translated into many languages, the novel shows the drama of many Palestinians who entered the British mandate after World War I, whose lands were occupied with the establishment of Israel in 1948, and who was forced to leave their homeland. In this sense, the novel I Saw Ramallah reflects both the expatriation of Palestine and the author. In this study, the work named I Saw Ramallah was elaborated in terms of technique in order to determine to what extent the author used the rules of the art of the novel, and thematically which subjects were handled in the novel. It is understood that the name of the novel was chosen to reflect the content by making use of the symbolic value of the place. This novel is seen as an autobiographical novel type, due to the author’s narrator technique used and the author tells his own life. The author's entry into Palestine is used as the objective tense of the novel; the author, with recollections and connotations in objective time, conveyed his experiences by using the flashback method. Events that contain enough sadness have been tried to be conveyed as they happened by mentioning time, place and individuals in order to awake the reader's feelings. Although the events in the novel are listed non-chronologically, when the whole novel is examined, it is seen that the author writes his experiences within the framework of the days he spent in Ramallah and the memories that they remind him of, and in the order in which they come to mind. In almost all of the novel, classical Arabic is preferred. The novel has avoided as much forced expressions and literary expressions that enlarge or reduce events as possible. Although it is impossible to claim that he is completely impartial as a Palestinian, it is seen that the author describes the events with the simplicity of a Palestinian citizen, away from political conflicts as much as possible and in a natural language. It is possible to say that the dominant use of critical style in the novel as the experiences of a writer suffered living abroad throughout his life, shaped his perspective on life and its reflection on the novel. The main topic of the novel is the absence from home. In addition, those killed far away from their homeland, Jewish settlement, the effect of Jewish occupation on the social life, the Oslo Agreement and the role of the phone in the life of the expat are handled as sub-themes. Although the novel named I Saw Ramallah is mostly close to daily or commemorative works and does not fully fit in the definitions of novel art as it emerged in the West, it includes the style of novel art at a certain level. It is seen that the novel has an important place in terms of raising awareness on the Palestinian issue in the Arab and Islamic world. The novel I Saw Ramallah, which was awarded The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature by the American University in Cairo in 1997, is likely to have received this award because of its thematic aspect rather than its stylistic aspect. Considering this award that the novel won against its peers and the considerations we mentioned during the technical and stylistic analysis we made about the novel, it is seen that the art of the novel in Arabic literature is still in the development stage. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 417-418 [Access article in PDF] Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, editors. Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 290. Cloth, $78.50. Paper, $26.95.The current anthology presents an important contribution to the study of Spinoza's relation to Jewish philosophy as well as to contemporary scholarship of Spinoza's metaphysics and (...) class='Hi'>political theory.In the opening essay, Lenn Goodman takes upon himself the ambitious task of evaluating Spinoza's positions as to several central disputes throughout the history of philosophy. In this rich and extensive essay Goodman argues that Spinoza's radical rationalism makes him pursue syntheses between traditionally opposed poles. Lee Rice's article, "Love of God in Spinoza," carefully analyzes Spinoza's concept of love and suggests the existence of three kinds of love parallel to the three kinds of knowledge. Warren Montag addresses the unresolved issue of Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah. Montag sides with Deleuze against the association of Spinozism with the Neo-Platonic theory of emanation, arguing that unlike the Neo-Platonists and Kabbalists, Spinoza's view of God rules out any hierarchy, and does not assume a descent from primal simplicity into complexity. Edwin Curley contributes a beautiful reading of the story of Job and of Maimonides' interpretation of the story. Curley follows Maimonides' discussion of the various positions regarding the question of divine providence and his attempt to identify the speeches of the characters of the book of Job with each of these positions. Following a sensitive consideration of various attempts to [End Page 417] recover Maimonides' own rather concealed view about providence, Curley concludes that "[W]hatever you think Maimonides' final word on Job is, our examination of him certainly supports [Spinoza's] claim that [Maimonides] reads Scripture in terms of Platonic or Aristotelian speculations" (170).Warren Zev Harvey's essay addresses Spinoza's most neglected work, the Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language. Apart from providing an outline of Spinoza's work as a Hebrew grammarian ("a noun-intoxicated grammarian") and pointing out some of Spinoza's more eccentric views about the nature of the Hebrew language, Harvey makes a compelling case for the importance of the book for the study of Spinoza's metaphysics. He points out a fascinating analogy which Spinoza draws between the parts of speech: (proper) noun, adjectives, and participles, and Spinoza's key metaphysical terms: substance, attributes, and modes. (Think about the weighty implications of this analogy for Curley's interpretation of the substance-mode relation.) According to Harvey, Spinoza's claim that all Hebrew words are derived from nouns is a linguistic parallel to Spinoza's pivotal metaphysical doctrine which makes all things be in the substance (or God). Kenneth Seeskin's article discusses the views of Maimonides and Spinoza on the question of creation and God's relation to the world. Seeskin reconstructs an interesting critical dialogue between these two philosophers. According to Seeskin, both philosophers held that an effect must be similar to its cause. Maimonides' commitment to Negative Theology and to the denial of any common measure between God and finite things forced him to deny causal or explanatory relation between God and the world. What Maimonides can suggest instead is rather to prove that the emergence of the world ex nihilo and according to the divine will, is possible, and even likely given certain astronomical facts of medieval science. Thus, Maimonides would hold that "although we have grounds for believing that creation occurred, we will never be in a position to say how" (120). For Spinoza, such a view constitutes nothing but a "sanctuary of ignorance." Thus, according to Seeskin, Spinoza affirms a clear causal relation between God and the world of finite things insofar as God is said to explain the world. While I tend to agree with most aspects of this analysis, it is important to note that Spinoza also claims that "between the finite and infinite there is no relation" (Letter 54). This... (shrink)

The emphasis that the modernity gives to disengagement and beginning leads one to think that the modernity itself is in fact a culture that initiares crisis. Even if there is no initial crisis, it can be created through the ambivalent nature of modernity. Behind the concept of crisis lies the notion that history is a continuous process or movement that opens the door to nihilistic understanding which stems from the idea of contemporary life and thought alienation through the pessimistic meaning (...) of the word. There is a dialectical relationship between the ideas of modernity and progress, and the decadence, and the main theme of Nietzsche's philosophical career. Since the death of Hegel, who made the idea of crisis plausible, everything is nothing but a counter-movement not only in Germany, but also in Europe. The first of these counter-movements is romanticism with its objection to the mind which is liberated from the bonds of tradition. The main thesis of the present article is, between reactiveness of romanticism -on the surface- and the modernity; from one side romanticism's consuming modernity, which is its mirror image, while at the same time feeding from it and modernity's manipulating the ideas developed against it and monopolizing them thanks to its ambivalent nature. For this purpose, following an an anti-enlightenment thinker Nietzsche's, anti-romantic footsteps which at the same time feeds from the romantic heritage, an attempt will be made to analyze the relationship between modernity and romanticism. Another goal of this article is to allow a comparison of how the intellectual development in the West finds its response on the modernization process of our country by probing how the modernization experience of early period Islamist's who experienced this process in a feeling of "backwardness" and with a wounded consciousness and anxiety has led to a shallow romantic worldview. SummaryRomance and romanticism are the main topics of this article. Romanticism is a period, whereas romance is a spiritual attitude not limited to this period, therefore, even today it’s existence is felt. In other words, it is not specific to the Germans. This term is often used to correspond to certain aspects of European intellectual life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for instance between 1790 and 1850. In its extremely diverse definitions, the most "romantic" definition in our opinion, belongs to Novalis: “I'm romanticizing by giving a high meaning to ordinary things, a mysterious reputation to the ordinary, the honor of the unknown to the known, an infinite look to the finite.” The rejection of existing social reality, the experience of loss, the melancholic longing and the search for loss are the main components of the romantic motive. This study is based on the argument that there is a dialectical relation between romanticism and modernity, which is known as an opposing movement against enlightenment thought. The intellectual feature, which contains the opposite of modernity itself, makes this argument plausible. In addition, the view of modernity as a crisis culture due to the emphasis on disengament and beginnings offers us the possibility to establish a relationship between modernity, which accepts itself as decadence, and romance. Behind the concept of crisis lies the idea that history is a continuous process or movement opening the door to the nihilist understanding in which modern life and thought are alienated in a pessimistic sense. Thus, Allan Megill defines historicism as a prerequisite for nihilism. According to the author, Prophets of Extremity, if the history has no direction to be changed, maintained or lost when wandering in history, it also cannot have a "crisis". The suggestion of "God is dead" is the most concise expression of this crisis. In this crisis state of nihilism, it is a completely forlorn condition of living in the present. Today, which is in the absolute forlorn state; the savior declares his belief that he is devoid of all sorts of features, things that let us reconcile with the current situation of things. In the face of this situation, when people see that the present becomes completely forlorn, they move in two opposite directions with a desire to regenerate culturally: They either have to go back to the past or head for the future. However, every attempt to determine what the future or the past posess will require them to be real, belonging to the present. This will return us to the forlorn state. Nietzsche embraces both opposing sides, but does not attempts choose between them. This is the place where Nietzsche dictates that today is corrupt taking a radical attitude against romanticism fed by the notion of crisis. The fact that modernity has given up its critique of reason, which is revealed by its dialectic, had a great influence on Nietzsche's putting distance between himself and romantics. That is to say, in response to enlightened thought, although romantics speak of unity, apparently, they could not prevent emergence of emotion against mind, local against the universal, individual against social, in other words, the emergence of the second values, which they believed that these were belittled and despised by Enlightenment. Therefore, romantics seem like they could not save themselves from being caught in the web of dialectics in the account they entered that is based on the subject-object distinction in cartesian thought. It is because modernity acts with the consciousness that the life is established on the occurrence and decadence. Based on this, we can say that decadence is inevitable. This decadence (distortion) from the outside may be through movements developed against it, or experienced within itself (even if no one attempts to destroy it). Modernity, with the awareness that it cannot escape from the decadence, wants to arbitrate itself by turning this decadence in its favor by manipulating it. In other words, the modernity dramatizes the feeling of crisis considering itself decadence and the seemingly contradictory ideas of avant-garde and decadence become almost synonymous. It must be the reason why Nietzsche identifies modernity with decadence Modernity manages to put the decadence in its body at the center of attraction by producing self-opposing movements, monopolizing and manipulating. In short, both romanticism and avant-garde movements are the movements that are emerged not against modernity but from itself. Just like an apple worm, they both consume modernity and feed on it. They act as a mirror. Although they seem to criticize, as movements that have emerged from it, they allow the modernity to complete and correct the deficiencies. As a result of this, we can say that romantic critical movements are developed against the world and are shaped by modernity, beginning with the idea of enlightenment, and moved forward in the track of modernity.While romanticism developed in the West as opposed to modernity, in Ottoman-Turkish thought, it was seen as the rhetoric of retardation and regretting of backwardness from civilization. It is inevitable that the experience of modernization in a sense of backwardness, with a wounded consciousness and urgency, will open up space for romance. In our modernization adventure starting with Tanzimat, it is a fact that there has not been a drastic reckoning due to Enlightenment on an intellectual basis, industrialization on an economic basis, programs of revolutionary and nationalist formations on a political basis. Therefore, in Turkish thought, it is not possible to talk about a critical tradition developed against modern paradigm. The status of being audience to what was being experienced in Europe, resulting from superiority was transformed into grudge due to the defeats in the military field. Due to the decadence experienced in the present, inability to find the solution to the problems of its age, melancholic state of mind because of being stuck in the golden age experienced in the past, in the case of a preference, led to a romantic world view because of the appeal of its simplicity to imitate what was once lived in the past. Thus, it is very natural that the direction of Namık Kemal, the cult personality of Islamist-Turkish thought, is towards the past even when talking about progress and civilization. Seeing the 19th century Europe as a re-implementation of ideas and institutions that are actually Islamic, Namık Kemal, in our opinion, showed us a clear example of a typical Islamist romanticism and an example of occidentalist approach regarding that the West learned the civilization from Muslims. In fact, the exact equivalent of this approach displayed in Turkish cogito without even knowing that it is romantic, emerging in the personality of Namık Kemal and in the feeling of backwardness,with a hectic and injured consciousness, is kitschization. So much so that, the state of being kitsch also explains the current situation of Islamic geography which is far from creating a tradition for at least a century, and it clearly tells the usual romantic end. (shrink)

Modernity is marked by the advent of technologies capable of storing data almost indefi­nitely. On the other hand, the data collection takes place without the conscious permission of the users. The storage and collection of personal data is a potential problem, since the digital footprint of a person on the Internet has an impact on the social and political rep­resentation of the individual, its perception by other actors. Compromising the content of a digital footprint can expose information that is (...) not intended for others. There is cur­rently an increasing trend of misuse of stored data, both by criminals and by companies that use the data for sale or surveillance. The need to control how data is collected, stored and used leads to the emergence in the academic literature and the legal field of the “right to be forgotten”, which allows a person to actively moderate the process of collecting and storing data, to participate in determining the circle of those to whom they can be accessed, and delete personal data. The adoption of such a right not only allows the state to influence the collection and storage of data, regulating interactions through law-making activities, but also to realize the potential of an autonomous individual. The prospect of legislating the right to be forgotten has sparked debate in the academic and professional community about the destruction of the free marketplace of ideas and the imposition of political censor­ship on the Internet. The article deals with the philosophical, ethical and political founda­tions of the right to be forgotten. The article substantiates the conclusion that the right to be forgotten has a positive heuristic potential, but at the same time it has conceptual flaws, and is also not able to completely correct the current situation of data processing. However, the implementation of the right to be forgotten in the future can have a beneficial effect on the current situation in the field of collection and storage of personal data. (shrink)