SUMMARYIt lies in the biblical line of thought that cultic sacrifices to God are made superfluous by human love of God and the neighbor. But is it possible to completely get rid of any sort of sacrifice in interhuman love relationships? With reference to texts by Kierkegaard and Levinas, this article discusses the paradigms of love as self-sacrifice, love as self-giving, and the double bind between the two. Part I clarifies that their affirmation of self-sacrificial love is to be read (...) against the backdrop of their critique of selfish sacrificial love that has not the power to renounce itself, even if the relation will be the other's ruin. Part II explains why proclaiming one's love as self-sacrifice means misunderstanding oneself, the other, and the relation between self and other. The result is that unselfish love cannot adequately be captured in terms of sacrifice at all, since it turns its logic ‘A sacrifices B to C for the sake of D’ upside down. In contrast, the logic of gift leads into surplus despite loss. Yet, in Part III it turns out that we cannot ‘sacrifice’ the notion of sacrifice in the name of love. Not only is there a hidden gift in sacrifice , but also a sacrifice in the gift of love . This has interesting implications for the debate on gender, including a self-critical impetus reminding the feminist movement of the fact that it is wrong to conceive of women as purely passive victims of male manipulation. The highly ambiguous role that the ‘self’ is playing in its self-sacrifice is worth being reconsidered. (shrink)

How can we, in our times, understand the biblical concept that human beings have been created in the image of an invisible God? This is a perennial but increasingly pressing question that lies at the heart of theological anthropology. Humanity in God's Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration clarifies the meaning of this concept, traces different Jewish and Christian interpretations of 'humanity in God's image', and re-considers the significance of the imago Dei in a post-Holocaust context.

Vertrauen kommt vor allem dann zum Vorschein, wenn es nicht mehr selbstverständlich ist. Claudia Welz untersucht die Bedeutung, Formen und Grenzen des Vertrauens in Versuchungssituationen.

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort: Introduction: A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics Stefano Micali: Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology René Rosfort: Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics Mads Peter Karlsen: The Past >Has Us Before We Have.

This article explores various scenes of shame, raising the questions of what shame discloses about the self and how this self-disclosure takes place. Thereby, the common idea that shame discloses the self’s debasement will be challenged. The dramatic dialectics of showing and hiding display a much more ambiguous, dynamic self-image as result of an interactive evaluation of oneself by oneself and others. Seeing oneself seen contributes to the sense of who one becomes. From being absorbed in what one does, one (...) might suddenly become self-aware, shift viewpoints and feel pressed to put on masks. In putting on a mask, one relates to oneself in distancing oneself from oneself. In being at once a moral agent and a performing actor with an audience and norms in mind, one embodies and transcends the social roles one takes. In addition to the feeling of shame, in which the self finds itself passively reflected, the self’s active reflections on its shame are to be taken into account. As examples from Milan Kundera, Shakespeare’s King Lear, a line from Kingsley Amis, a speech by Vaclav Havel and Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments indicate, self-presentation in the public and the private sphere is a complex hermeneutical process with surprising twists. (shrink)

"This book originates from a conference ... which took place at the Danish National Research Foundation's Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, on December 4-5, 2008... The articles collected ... are not proceedings but a selection of re-written texts from the conference including additional texts by authors invited to contribute to the book"--Page V.

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDas Thema des vorliegenden Artikels ist das Gewissen als Instanz der Selbsterschließung. Der Artikel wird durch drei Fragen strukturiert: Erstens, wer oder was ist die erschließende Instanz? Zweitens, wie geht die Erschließung vor sich? Und drittens, was wird über das Selbstsein erschlossen? Diese Fragen werden am Beispiel der Beiträge von Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard und Martin Heidegger untersucht. Deren Texte stehen in einem Rezeptionszusammenhang und haben Implikationen, die theologisch und anthropologisch relevant sind. Um den Manifestationen des Gewissens in der menschlichen (...) Erfahrung auf die Spur zu kommen, wird den drei genannten Leitfragen entsprechend bei allen drei Autoren erstens der Ursprung der im Gewissen vorgehenden Selbsterschließung, zweitens die Art und Weise der Selbsterschließung und drittens der erschlossene Inhalt eruiert. Dies geschieht in drei Schritten: Zunächst in textnahen Einzeldarstellungen , dann im kritischen Vergleich und schließlich in der Diskussion kontroverser Punkte . Zur Diskussion gestellt wird 1. der methodische Zugang zu Fragen der Selbsterschließung, 2. die Bestimmung und Bewertung der durch das Gewissen erschlossenen ›Schuld‹ und 3. das Verständnis der Freiheit oder Unfreiheit des Menschen.SUMMARYThe article focuses on conscience as an instance of self-disclosure. The article is structured by three questions: First, who or what is performing the disclosure? Second, in what ways is the self-disclosure enacted? And third, what is disclosed about selfhood? These questions are examined with respect to the contributions by Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger. Their works stand in a line of reception and have implications that are theologically and anthropologically relevant. In order to find out how conscience manifests itself in human experience, the texts will be analyzed with regard to the origin and/or subject of disclosing, the mode of disclosure, and the disclosed content. The investigation proceeds in the following steps: Part I is dedicated to the differing descriptions of conscience and introduces the texts of the individual authors. Part II offers a brief comparison of their approaches. Part III is an attempt to formulate and discuss the controversial points. The issues to be discussed are, first, the methodological approach to questions of self-disclosure; second, the definition and evaluation of the ›guilt‹ disclosed by conscience; and, third, the understanding of human freedom or unfreedom. (shrink)

This article investigates difficulties in defining the concept of God by focusing on the question of what it means to understand God as a ‘person.’ This question is explored with respect to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, in dialogue with Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas. Thereby, the following three questions regarding divine ‘personhood’ come into view: First, how can God be a partner of dialogue if he at the same time remains unknown and unthinkable, a limit-concept of understanding? (...) Second, if God is love in person and at the same time a spiritual reality ‘between’ human agents, in what ways are his personal and trans-personal traits related to each other? Third, what exactly is revealed through God’s ‘name’? By way of an inconclusive conclusion, divine personhood is discussed in regard to prayer, where the problems of predication that arise in third-personal speech about God are linked with the second-personal encounter with God. (shrink)

Editorial for issue 28 of Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 'Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Memory'.

I. Ethics, media, monstration -- II. Memory, forgetting, and the misuse of images -- III. Religious heritage in humanism, modernity, and postmodernity -- IV. Jewish thought after the Shoah.

It is not a coincidence that we often use acoustic metaphors in order to describe the relation between interiority and exteriority. The sense of hearing can be understood as the door to the soul, b...

This article explores imagination as a means of ethical re-orientation in the aftermath of atrocity. The discussion of the problem of evil is based on Hannah Arendt’s critique of Kant and her notion of ‘rootless’ rather than ‘radical’ evil. On this basis, the orienting potential of visual images is investi­gated with regard to images of violence in the media on the one hand, and, on the other, with regard to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Then the role of verbal and mental (...) images of humanity or inhumanity is discussed with reference to the Holocaust survivor Jorge Semprun’s testimony in his book Literature or Life. Finally, the biblical motif of the human being created in the image of an invisible God, the imago Dei, comes into view as an exemplary image of humanity that appears in a framework of interpretation where the invisible is mediated with the help of verbal, visual and/or mental images. (shrink)

This chapter examines Soren Kierkegaard's writings about and related to phenomenology. It evaluates whether Kierkegaard's account of religious life can be considered a phenomenology of religion, and reviews arguments for and against interpreting Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist. The chapter also explores the relation between Kierkegaard and phenomenology by examining the influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Kierkegaard, and by comparing Edmund Husserl's and Martin Heidegger's forms of phenomenology to that of Kierkegaard.

This article explores the ethical implications of the dialectics between the human being’s visibility and invisibility by means of a phenomenological approach: In what ways can ›human dignity‹ be experienced, and to what extent does it, as a normative notion, transcend its possible givenness to experience? While there is a consensus that the requirement of respect is implied in this notion, it is controversial how this requirement is realized and fulfilled. Kierkegaard’s ethics of loving vision and Sartre’s description of the (...) objectifying gaze inform a discussion of the feeling of shame: can it protect the dignity of the other person? The following three levels of argumentation will be taken into account: An exchange of glances denoting reciprocal recognition can, on the level of factuality, count as the condition for the subjective constitution of human dignity insofar as it can be experienced in actual contexts of interaction. In a legal context, the constitutional principle of all people’s invisible, inviolable dignity, which is the source of their rights and deserves protection regardless of people’s characteristics and behavior, must be defended against the idea that human dignity is nothing but a contingent, self-posited norm or gradual attribute. The theological dimension of human dignity is considered in regard to its non-empirical ground and destination and to the question of whether human dignity persists post mortem. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 1 Seiten: 363-378.

The article draws from a personal clinical experience of two suicides, not far removed from each other in time. The first patient was a 33-year-old intellectual suffering from depression with narcissistic traits but no psychotic elements, while the second patient was a 21-year-old student with a manifest psychotic episode behind him and with characteristics of post-psychotic depression at the time of suicide. The two suicides had very different impacts on the therapist: the first left open some “space” for reflection, communication, (...) and working-through, while the second closed such a “space,” leaving only a tiny door to the existential roots of human beings and suffering. The therapist was able to find some “shelter” by talking to supervisors, colleagues, and friends in the first case; in the second, the only possible “shelter” was glimpsed in the philosophy of groundlessness (Ungrund) of the Russian existentialist Nicolai Berdyaev. The personal experiences of the therapist, along with some theoretical interpretations of the after-effects of both suicides, are presented using a psychodynamic and existential–phenomenological understanding of the therapeutic relationship with a psychotic and a non-psychotic patient. The main dilemmas exposed by a patient’s suicide, especially if the patient suffers from psychosis, are difficult to deal with in the usual clinical settings and call for resources beyond it. The authors propose that these can be found in philosophical and theological insights. (shrink)

Editorial for issue 29 of Scandinavian Jewish Studies, 'The Problem of Evil and Images of Humanity'.

This paper develops the thesis that personal identity is neither to be taken in terms of an unchanging self-sufficient ‘substance’ nor in terms of selfhood ‘without substance,’ i.e. as fluctuating processes of pure relationality and subject-less activity. Instead, identity is taken as self-transformation that is bound to particular embodied individuals and surpasses them as individuated entities. The paper is structured in three parts. Part I describes the experiential givenness of conflicts that support our sense of self-transformation. While the first part (...) develops an inter-subjective topography of emotional movements, the second part pays attention to their temporal dimension. We work with conflicts and get transformed by them also in the way we remember them. Part II focuses on the process of self-understanding that accompanies conflicts and their metamorphosis in memory. Part III compares and discusses different models of a ‘relational ontology’ of the person, which question the idea that we are defined only by how we define ourselves—just as they question the idea that one’s identity is independent of how one relates to one’s having changed. (shrink)

Pedagogically speaking, how can we best transform a student’s understanding of the environment? To move students to action, and to inspire sustainable lifestyles, environmental educators would do well to consider personal pedagogical approaches, as opposed to merely presenting scientific facts about climate change and species extinction. In this paper, we present the power of myth as a compelling option. We expand on prevailing pedagogies of myth, such as Matthew Farrelly’s approach, and argue that mythical stories taken from Nordic folk traditions, (...) the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran can enhance environmental education by introducing multiple alternative ways of relating to nature, facilitating mutual teacher-student reflections, and by building more responsive relationships with fauna and flora. Building upon Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory, we contend that the process of imagining sustainable worlds is facilitated by engagement with mythical stories and that the counter-productive imposition of worldviews on students is minimized through critical discussions of relevant learning materials. (shrink)

Die {raquo}Revolution der Denkart{laquo} hat nicht nur den Anlauf genommen, welchem sie ihren Namen verdankt.! Gezahlt werden noch weitere Umstellungen der Theorie bildung als bloG die kopernikanische Kants. Hier interessieren gleich zwei. Die eine liefert den Gegenstand, die entsprechende, RevolutionPhanomenologie.

Slurs are derogatory terms targeting individuals and groups of individuals on the basis of race, nationality, religion, gender or sexual orientation. The aim of my paper is to propose an account of appropriated uses of slurs – i.e. uses by targeted groups of their own slurs for non-derogatory purposes, as in the appropriation of ‘nigger’ by the African-American community, or the appropriation of ‘queer’ by the homosexual community. In my proposal appropriated uses are conceived as echoic, in Relevance Theory terms: (...) in-groups echo derogatory uses in ways and contexts that make manifest the dissociation from the offensive contents. I will show that the echoic strategy has interesting advantages over alternative theories, and especially over Anderson and Lepore’s deflationary strategy. (shrink)

What distinguishes evils from ordinary wrongs? Is hatred a necessarily evil? Are some evils unforgivable? Are there evils we should tolerate? What can make evils hard to recognize? Are evils inevitable? How can we best respond to and live with evils? Claudia Card offers a secular theory of evil that responds to these questions and more. Evils, according to her theory, have two fundamental components. One component is reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm -- harm that makes a life indecent and (...) impossible or that makes a death indecent. The other component is culpable wrongdoing. Atrocities, such as genocides, slavery, war rape, torture, and severe child abuse, are Card's paradigms because in them these key elements are writ large. Atrocities deserve more attention than secular philosophers have so far paid them. They are distinguished from ordinary wrongs not by the psychological states of evildoers but by the seriousness of the harm that is done. Evildoers need not be sadistic:they may simply be negligent or unscrupulous in pursuing their goals. Card's theory represents a compromise between classic utilitarian and stoic alternatives (including Kant's theory of radical evil). Utilitarians tend to reduce evils to their harms; Stoics tend to reduce evils to the wickedness of perpetrators: Card accepts neither reduction. She also responds to Nietzsche's challenges about the worth of the concept of evil, and she uses her theory to argue that evils are more important than merely unjust inequalities. She applies the theory in explorations of war rape and violence against intimates. She also takes up what Primo Levi called "the gray zone", where victims become complicit in perpetrating on others evils that threaten to engulf themselves. While most past accounts of evil have focused on perpetrators, Card begins instead from the position of the victims, but then considers more generally how to respond to -- and live with -- evils, as victims, as perpetrators, and as those who have become both. (shrink)

One way to silence the powerless, Langton has taught us, is to pre-emptively disable their ability to do things with words. In this paper I argue that speakers can be silenced in a different way. You can let them speak, and obscure the meaning of their words afterwards. My aim is to investigate this form of silencing, that I call retroactive distortion. In a retroactive distortion, the meaning of the words of a speaker is distorted by the effect of a (...) subsequent speech act by a different speaker. After introducing this notion, I explore some reasons why retroactive distortions can be difficult to challenge and argue that, besides constituting a communicative injustice, they can eliminate topics from public consideration and therefore erode public debate. (shrink)

The article introduces the problematics of the classical two-valued logic on which Western thought is generally based, outlining that under the conditions of its logical assumptions the subject I is situated in a world that it cannot address. In this context, the article outlines a short history of cybernetics and the shift from first- to second-order cybernetics. The basic principles of Gordon Pask’s 1976 Conversation Theory are introduced. It is argued that this second-order theory grants agency to others through a (...) re-conception of living beings as You logically transcending the I. The key principles of Conversation Theory are set in relation to the poetic forms of discourse that played a key role in art as well as philosophical thinking in China in the past. Second-order thinking, the article argues, is essentially poetic. It foregoes prediction in favour of the potentiality of encountering tomorrow’s delights. (shrink)

The editorial introduces issue 21.1 of Technoetic Arts via a critical reflection on the artificial intelligence hype (AI hype) that emerged in 2022. Tracing the history of the critique of Large Language Models, the editorial underscores that there are substantial ethical challenges related to bias in the training data, copyright issues, as well as ecological challeges which the technology industry has consistently downplayed over the years. -/- The editorial highlights the distinction between the current AI technology’s reliance on extensive pre-existing (...) human-generated data for pattern recognition and the performative process inherent in art practice. Patterns of creative output can be replicated without a thorough understanding of underlying concepts. In contrast, the performative process of art practice, as explored through the conceptual frameworks of creativity by Noam Chomsky, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Roger T. Ames and with reference to an earlier publication of the editorial’s author, creates concepts and continually ‘strives to extend itself towards the unknown.’ -/- Following this introductory section, the editorial provides an overview of the ten articles featured in this issue of Technoetic Arts. The first four texts engage with emerging technologies from various perspectives in art and design. The subsequent six articles, part of a special section titled 'Perspectives from Chandigarh,' reflect a quest for meaningful existence within colonial, patriarchal, and biopolitical structures that frame everyday practices of exclusion and oppression. (shrink)

Statements such as “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful” sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used (“beautiful”, “elegant”, “dynamic”, etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive (...) to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including “beautiful” appeared more contradictory than those including “elegant” and “dynamic”, pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers’ consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty. (shrink)

El artículo realiza una exploración inicial acerca de las políticas archivísticas en la provincia de La Pampa, que –en el periodo considerado– guardan una estrecha relación con las políticas culturales. En primer lugar se repasan los conceptos de política cultural y política archivística; en segundo lugar se presentan rápidamente algunas características de las políticas culturales en la provincia de La Pampa y en tercer lugar nos detenemos en las instancias referidas a las prácticas, disposiciones e iniciativas en relación al Archivo (...) Histórico Provincial, principal espacio de desarrollo de las escasas políticas existentes en la materia en la provincia. Se sostiene que en general la gestión del AHP surgió en vinculación a políticas culturales que a principios de la década de 1970 adherían a una noción antropológica de la cultura y se asociaron a una serie de prácticas y políticas destinadas a desarrollar investigaciones para identificar procesos históricos específicos y supuestos rasgos que caracterizarían a la identidad regional, o pampeanidad. En la provincia, las prácticas y políticas archivísticas han permanecido asociadas a esa mirada y con cada vez menor cantidad de recursos para su funcionamiento. (shrink)

Addressing studying as a distinct educational concept and phenomenon in its own right, the essays in this volume consider study and studying from a range of perspectives. Countering dominant educational discourses, which place a heavy emphasis on learning and instruction, the contributors explore questions such as: What does it mean to study something? How is studying something different from being taught about it, or learning something about it? What does the difficulty demanded by study mean for the one who studies (...) and for the teacher? What mode of existence does study induce? The book highlights the significance of study not only, or even primarily, for its educational outcome, but as a human activity. (shrink)