Nietzsche put Jesus’ historical crucifixion at the center of philosophy to exile the notion of a transcendent God from philosophy. Discarding theology as metaphysics and replacing it with an anthropology of how human persons become divinized, Nietzsche contributed to unearthing the scapegoating mechanism as a god-making device at the center of human culture. Nietzsche’s focus on the murder of God, rather than Their death, suggested Girard’s martyrdom’s crucial role in the foundation and the preservation of culture. Following Girard, I read (...) the madman’s parable of God’s death in The Joyous Science alongside paragraph 1052 of The Will to Power, where Nietzsche recognized that the difference between Dionysos and the Crucified can only be seen clearly from the perspective of Calvary. (shrink)

Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memorypresents a panpsychist ontology. Bergson pushes the dualism of mind and matter to breaking point. Matter is reconceived as the sum of all images. Idealism and deterministic materialism are bypassed. We get an indeterministic and emancipative model of the world. The idea that matter is inherently creative and endowed with both perception and memory is highly relevant today. Materiality, far from being dead or passive, is equipped with agency. Bergson’s themes coincide with the concerns of contemporary (...) New Materialism. Authors working in the latter school explicitly cite Bergson as a key influence. Bergson can help us understand what “newness” means in New Materialism. That being said, recent scholarship has pointed to certain unpalatable political implications of Bergson’s works, in particular the anthropological premises of Two Sources of Morality and Religion. In my article, I seek to address such critiques. In my view, by reading Bergson ontologically as a New Materialist process philosophy, some of the unfortunate cultural and ideological presuppositions Bergson did not reflect upon may be ameliorated to a great extent. (shrink)

Despite the current theoretical developments regarding the proof of facts in law, it is still an open problem to offer an adequate reconstruction of a logic of evidence. This paper presents some preliminary ideas for such a reconstruction. Starting from the assumption that the produc-tion and evaluation of certain evidence in a legal process has already been completed, it examines which candidates would be suitable as basic principles for a logic of evidence. The similarities and differences of the resulting system (...) with other modal logic systems with which it appears to have analogies, in particular alethic logic, deontic logic, epistemic logic, and the logic of truth, are examined. (shrink)

The article argues that most of today’s social theories tend to look at social phenomena in ways that lead to a conflation of what is human and what is social, or to disconnect one from the other. They remove the Third as an emerging effect (therefore included) of social relationality which is generated not only by the contributions of the terms of the relations but by a plus which is the reciprocity effect of the relation itself. In this way, the (...) ontologically constitutive relationality of the social in which the Third resides is obliterated. This outcome is both a reflection and a regenerator of most of the human crises that we experience today in social life. To get out of these crises, relational sociology proposes to go beyond the monistic and dualistic semantics of the Third by adopting a relational cultural matrix capable of connecting the human and the social, while maintaining their distinctions. The basic thesis is that a social form is human if and to the extent that the social relations that compose it are produced by subjects who mutually orient themselves on the basis of the superfunctional sense that exists in the Third generated by their relationship. (shrink)

The existence of otherness as a social category is the result of a specific configuration of power relations. One way to maintain this configuration and exert control over subjectivities defined as "others" is to exclude them from participation in the production of knowledge, depriving them ofthe resources to understand themselves and the world and the words to describe their social experience. In this sense, the epistemic injustice, produced by exclusion from the system of knowledge production, constitutes a powerful instrument to (...) control power relations and to maintain the subordination of minorised subjectivities. At the same time, the production of analysis by oppressed subjectivities constitutes a form of resistance to the control of the knowledge production and to the control of subjectivities themselves; since this production has a liberating function from oppressive systems and is able to reveal the implicit power dynamics within the production of knowledge. (shrink)

Most analyses of international wildlife law focus on the specifics of implementing particular policies, while there is less engagement with the fundamental philosophies underpinning international conventions. In this article, I argue that a philosophical analysis can achieve a deeper understanding of IWL by helping to identify, assess and compare worldviews reflected in these instruments. Additionally, a philosophical analysis can make visible how international wildlife conventions shape human perceptions of and attitudes towards nature. Based on these premises, I subject two international (...) wildlife conventions that are central to wildlife management in Europe, namely, the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, to philosophical scrutiny. I argue, first, that the philosophical underpinnings of these instruments are in contention, indicating that their policies might well counteract each other. Second, I postulate that the broad significance of this contention is that the resulting ambivalence when IWL instruments are involved in the same conversation and about the same territoriality results in such high discretional powers for states that they stop being bounded by the conventions’ substratum and can limit themselves to only following the formalities. (shrink)

The memory of a violent past and forgiveness become intertwined when seeking to heal that past, as forgiveness is presented as a redemptive and transforming element, capable of putting an end to spirals of violence. For this purpose, the past must be remembered correctly, truthfully and impartially, so that the present can be healed and the future filled with possibilities. Faced with the temptation of revenge, it is necessary to foster a love from the place in which one decides to (...) love and forgive their enemies, which will allow those fears that gave rise to past violence to be dismantled, since in love there is no fear. (shrink)

During the second half of the 20th century, two theories of the Other have been developed that seek to overcome the nationalist conception that identifies it with an element outside the community, and whose existence it threatens: tolerant liberal multiculturalism and Lévinas’ and Derrida’s ethics of difference. According to Slavoj Žižek, the first notion operates as the other side of a nationalist libidinal logic and the second implies an understanding of the other incapable of subverting the symbolic authority that defines (...) it. To address both, Žižek resorts to a Lacanian interpretation of the Other as the basis for developing a political subversion of symbolic authority that allows for an encounter with the monstrosity that [...] characterizes the authentic other’s otherness. (shrink)

Tracheostomy with invasive ventilation may be required for the survival of patients at advanced stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In Japan it has been shown that a proactive approach toward TIV may prolong the survival of ALS patients by over 10 years by preventing the lethal respiratory failure that generally occurs within 3-5 years of the onset of the disease. Measures to prolong life expectancy without foregoing quality of life have produced better results in Japan than in other developed countries. (...) This ‘Japanese bias’ has been attributed to socio-cultural and religious factors as well as to the availability of material resources in Japan. In this article, we use the concepts of onozukara in kadō and amae to illuminate features of patient care that may contribute to this ‘Japanese bias’. (shrink)

There is currently a trend to see the rewriting of sports rulebooks as almost the only way to remedy perceived imperfections in the youth sport system. The trend can be seen in many sports programmes and has generated heated debate. The article adds to the debate by analysing a proposal to review the Catalan Basketball Federation’s regulations for biddy basketball, and it puts forward a pedagogical proposal comprising two objectives: to identify the aspects that define the idea of participating in (...) this particular area of the youth sport system, and to understand the role of technique in the biddy basketball rule book. At a philosophical level, the article also identifies the main factors that ensure players improve their game technically. Finally, going beyond biddy basketball as such, the article suggests how to improve youth sport at an organizational level and in technical and pedagogical terms. (shrink)

The philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel made repeated efforts throughout his career to address the crisis of modern culture by drawing on a wide repertoire of scholarly discourses and imaginative fictions. An overlooked and unique feature of his early works include humorous vignettes and free-verse poems in pseudonymous pieces published in the avant-garde journal Jugend. In later writings, he advances his own life-philosophy through an idiosyncratic use of Goethe’s scientific, autobiographical, and literary works in an attempt to articulate what is (...) distinctive about the modern worldview. Focussing on these lesser-known writings reveals the tragi-comic character of his approach to modern individuality in a variety of cultural spheres, and in the life of theory itself. Like Simmel’s vitalist quest for the archetype or “primary phenomenon […] of the idea of Goethe” and in his formulation of “the values of Goethean Life”, this essay offers a kind of theorizing about the “spiritual meaning of Simmelian existence” in its many forms of expression. Although Simmel’s ideas may seem antiquated to us now, recovering what might be called his ‘theory-fictions’ is essential if the humanities and social sciences are to address the most pressing problems we face in the 21st century. (shrink)

Social suffering has become in the past decades a key topic in various disciplines of the humanities, leading to a number of debates on its status within social analysis and normative philosophy. Problems of this sort are especially relevant in view of the fact that experiences of suffering have become a central figure of political life in many parts of the globe. This introduction provides an overview of these discussions and presents the articles included in this special issue.