El presente artículo da cuenta de la reflexión de Hannah Arendt sobre los campos de concentración y exterminio de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, a los que considera la principal institución del poder organizado. Su análisis gira en torno a los campos como espacios en los que se experimenta con la vida de los hombres y donde se demuestra, a su vez, que todo es posible. Este artículo pone el acento en la mirada filosófica de la autora, que vislumbra estos espacios (...) de excepción como la aniquilación del ejercicio político a partir del quiebre de la esfera pública. This article deals with Hannah Arendt´s work on Second World War concentration and extermination camps, which she considers the main institution of organized power. Her analysis focuses on concentration camps as life-size experiments on human beings’ lives, whereby it is made clear that anything can happen. This article highlights the author’s philosophical perspective on this subject, which presents these spaces of exception as involving a hiatus in the public sphere and therefore annihilating the possibility of political practice. (shrink)

Este artículo revisa el proceso histórico de la ‘Conquista del desierto’ y la existencia de campos de concentración para indígenas en Argentina a través de una lectura de hermenéutica filosófica. El objetivo del artículo es interpretar el periodo y el uso de campos como instancias que configuraron la diferenciación del pueblo mapuche como sujeto racializado en la sociedad argentina. Los resultados de la exposición muestran que la marginación del cuerpo mapuche ocurre por el registro de excepciones y que aquella es (...) disputada por sujetos mapuche. This paper reviews the historical process of the ‘Conquest of the Desert’ and the existence of concentration camps for indigenous people in Argentina. The research is conducted through philosophical hermeneutics. The objective of the paper is to read the period and the use concentration camps as instances that shaped the differentiation of the Mapuche people as a racialized subject in Argentine society. The results of the argumentation show that marginalization of the Mapuche body occurs through the registration of exceptions, which is disputed by Mapuche subjects. (shrink)

This article explores the dream descriptions submitted in 1973–1974 by former Polish prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp in response to a questionnaire sent out by Polish psychiatrists. These descriptions are being investigated as testimonies that represent the Auschwitz inmates’ experiences commonly regarded as “unspeakable.” Not only the dream experience itself, but also the respondents’ attitudes toward and beliefs about dreams are taken into consideration in an attempt to understand the impact of the Holocaust on the survivors. Their (...) general inability of comprehending the Auschwitz and post‐Auschwitz dreams seems to be the most important and significant aspect of their testimonies. The experience of dreams as completely strange and astonishing phenomena is being explained in this article in connection with the respondents’ ability and inability to recover from their Holocaust trauma. (shrink)

This paper discusses the politics of remembering and the representation of the Holocaust in Polish contemporary art referring to the Lego Concentration Camp by Zbigniew Libera. The paper presents the ways in which Libera’s work challenges the traditional ways of representing the Holocaust and how it engages with issues such as the relation between atrocity and aesthetics. The associations brought to this mode of representation by the notions of game and toys and whether theatricality and play are in (...) dialogue with or violate the historical experience of the Holocaust is also discussed. The paper investigates the specificity of the Polish context in the way the Holocaust is approached and the reactions these artistic attempts raise in the public. Do the unconventional and shocking representations help understand the Holocaust or do they create the opposite effect of misguided and trivialised reading of history? (shrink)

Writing about testimonies from the concentration camps poses a fundamental problem to those who undertake this task, for one cannot lightly broach the still-living history of the Nazi camps. Auschwitz “is not a subject for a colloquium” or, at least, not a subject like others. For the deportees themselves, speaking up is not easy. In whose name can they speak, in the name of what can they remember, how can they say it and to whom? Such are the first (...) questions which arise like so many obstacles to communication. How to express the inexpressible? Such is the problem lying at the heart of all the testimonies, inasmuch as their credibility but also their possibility of existing depend on it. As Yves Reuter points out, the question of form appears in its most crucial aspect here: Neither history nor textual theory can overlook the concentration camp testimonies, extreme discourses of an extreme experience. To be concerned with form is not at all secondary. The obsessive “how to say it” of the accounts in this case seems of capital importance to me. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est issu de la thèse soutenue par Robert Sommer à l’Université Humboldt de Berlin en 2006. Il s’agit d’un travail entièrement original sur un sujet absent de la recherche, à l’exception de l’enquête pionnière de Christa Paul en 1994. Mais avant la somme de Robert Sommer on ne disposait d’aucune étude systématique de cette ampleur. C’est chose faite avec la minutie et la rigueur adéquates au genre. Par un décret du 9 septembre 1939, Reinhard Heydrich, chef de l’Office (...) central de l... (shrink)

Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, a literary sensation upon its publication in Australia in August 2018, deserves a place alongside classics of the prison writing genre. At the same time, it contains important lessons for everyone thinking about power in the contemporary world. In particular, it prompts to reconsider the kind of power that is exercised in camps, where it comes from and how it could be resisted.

The essay thematises the question of care in conditions of total power – not merely _extra muros_, in the everyday life of the Third Reich, but in its most radical articulation, the concentration camp. Drawing inspiration from Todorov’s work, the essay engages with Levinas, Agamben, Derrida and Nancy, to investigate Heidegger’s determination of _Da-sein_’s horizon through a solitary confrontation with death. Drawing extensively on primary testimonies, the essay shows that when the enclosure of the camp became the (...) _Da _of existence, care assumed a radical significance as the link between the death of another and the death of oneself. In the face of an apparatus of total power and its attempt to individuate and isolate death, the sharing of death in the figure of care remained one’s most inalienable act of resistance and the last means to hold on to death as something that could be truly one’s own. (shrink)

Among the hundreds of sites that housed survivors of Nazi persecution who came to Sweden in the spring and summer of 1945, one of the largest was at the small village of Öreryd. Between June 1945 and September 1946, around a thousand Jewish and non-Jewish Polish survivors came to this site, where they were expected to stay only until they were well enough to return to their home countries or migrate elsewhere. This article contributes to filling a gap in refugee (...) history in Sweden, dealing with how survivors experienced Swedish refugee camps and shaped the refugee camp environment on their own terms. Thinking with Peter Gatrell’s framework of ‘refugeedom’, a wide range of sources have been examined for insight into how Polish survivors in the Öreryd refugee camp navigated the precarity and uncertainty of their existence as survivors and refugees in Sweden and endeavoured to shape their immediate and future lives. (shrink)

Most commentators have focused on ethical dilemmas and the idea that they were core to the actions of and decisions by Jewish doctors in SS concentration camps and ghettos during the Holocaust. While I recognize Jewish doctors did face ethical dilemmas, in this article, I shift my attention to include two other significant factors: choiceless choices, defined by the eminent Holocaust historian Lawrence Langer as “crucial decisions [that] did not reflect options between life and death, but between one form (...) of abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim’s own choosing,” and the human condition, whereby decisions and actions were triggered by personal traits and past experiences in response to particular situations and circumstances. Inherent in all three factors is the tenaciousness of reality and how the abhorrent conditions, immorality, inhumanity and evilness cast a shadow over every moment of the Jewish doctor’s life. My thesis is that decision-making was not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional. For the Jewish doctor every incident became a source of dread and tragedy. They were often not trained to treat some diseases or perform surgery and lacked experience to work in such conditions and cope emotionally and psychologically. I will attempt to show that how a person responds to an ethical dilemma is based on his or her own experiences and reasoning, and how they reacted to sudden and inexplicable incidents that threatened life or impacted survival induced abnormal actions and decisions. As Jewish doctors they were driven to be healers, to be normal, but they were forced by circumstances to kill or become perpetrators, acting abnormally. Tragically the abnormal became the norm. The Jewish doctors were professionally trained and culturally socialized to continue their roles as doctors. Nevertheless, they were human and were driven by the innate will to live. (shrink)

To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning.

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

Victoria Camps analiza en estas páginas la fragilidad de una ética que nace y se desarrolla con el triunfo del pensamiento liberal. La defensa de las libertades individuales, de donde emanan los derechos humanos, potencia los intereses privados frente al interés público. Desde esta perspectiva, una ética liberal es tolerante y laica, carece de dogmas, se nutre de principios abstractos, aceptados en teoría, pero con escasa incidencia en la práctica, como lo muestran la impotencia frente a la corrupción y las (...) dificultades para educar cívicamente y construir una moralidad pública. Como es habitual en otras publicaciones de la autora, su interés parte de las teorías filosóficas que han estructurado el pensamiento moral contemporáneo pero no se limita a elaborar un discurso circunscrito al debate académico. Le importa mostrar la relevancia de la filosofía para abordar las debilidades ético-políticas de nuestro tiempo. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker's meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, 'expressivists' have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe 'meaning' more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes (...) as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. (shrink)

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have discovered that they have a lot to learn from, or at least to ponder about, fiction. Many metaphysicians are attracted to fiction as a model for our talk about purported objects and properties, such as numbers, morality, and possible worlds, without embracing a robust Platonist ontology. In addition, a growing group of philosophers of mind are interested in the implications of our engagement with fiction for our understanding of the mind and emotions: If I don’t believe that (...) Anna Karenina exists, can I really pity her, or hope or desire that she extricate herself from her tragic situation? And why is there no “morality fiction,” analogous to science fiction? I suspect that philosophers have been especially comfortable thinking about fiction because it seems, at least prima facie, to employ the imagination in a way that conforms to a standard model of the mind. Specifically, contemporary philosophers tend to think of imagination as a form of mental pretense. Mental pretense can take two main forms: a cognitive attitude of supposing a set of propositions to be true (make-believe) or else an experiential state of imaging a scenario as if it were before one (imaging). Much of our pretense intertwines the cognitive and experiential modalities, of course. But both share a crucial common feature: all of one’s imaginative effort is invested in pretending that certain contents obtain. In this sense, we can understand imagination as the “offline” simulation of actual beliefs and perceptions (and perhaps other attitudes as well), where we analyze these in the normal way, as states individuated by their attitude and representational content. While I share the burgeoning interest in fiction, I want to suggest that we also have a lot to learn from poetry, and in particular from poetic metaphor. I will argue.. (shrink)

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language (...) can be classified as valid or invalid. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science. (shrink)

Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the (...) respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricted it, should be viewed as a fully general constraint on concept possession and propositional thought. For (a) even well formed but (...) semantically cross-categorial strings often do possess substantive inferential roles; (b) hearers exploit these inferential roles in interpreting such strings metaphorically; (c) there is no good reason to deny truth-conditions to strings with inferential roles. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of 'concept', it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the (...) potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active. (shrink)