After introducing the new field of cultural evolution, we review a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that culture shapes what people attend to, perceive and remember as well as how they think, feel and reason. Focusing on perception, spatial navigation, mentalizing, thinking styles, reasoning (epistemic norms) and language, we discuss not only important variation in these domains, but emphasize that most researchers (including philosophers) and research participants are psychologically peculiar within a global and historical context. This rising tide of (...) evidence recommends caution in relying on one’s intuitions or even in generalizing from reliable psychological findings to the species, Homo sapiens. Our evolutionary approach suggests that humans have evolved a suite of reliably developing cognitive abilities that adapt our minds, information-processing abilities and emotions ontogenetically to the diverse culturally-constructed worlds we confront. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Electrifying when first delivered in 1973, legendary in the years since, Dieter Henrich's lectures on German Idealism were the first contact a major German philosopher had made with an American audience since the onset of World War II. They remain one of the most eloquent explanations and interpretations of classical German philosophy and of the way it relates to the concerns of contemporary philosophy. Thanks to the editorial work of David Pacini, the lectures appear here with annotations linking them (...) to editions of the masterworks of German philosophy as they are now available. Henrich describes the movement that led from Kant to Hegel, beginning with an interpretation of the structure and tensions of Kant's system. He locates the Kantian movement and revival of Spinoza, as sketched by F. H. Jacobi, in the intellectual conditions of the time and in the philosophical motivations of modern thought. Providing extensive analysis of the various versions of Fichte's Science of Knowledge, Henrich brings into view a constellation of problems that illuminate the accomplishments of the founders of Romanticism, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, and of the poet Hölderlin's original philosophy. He concludes with an interpretation of the basic design of Hegel's system. (shrink)

Within the last decade, thousands of studies have described communication processes in and between organisms. Pragmatic philosophy of biology views communication processes as rule-governed sign-mediated interactions (rsi's). As sign-using individuals exhibit a relationship to following or not-following these rules, the rsi's of living individuals dier fundamentally from cause-and-effect reactions with and between non-living matter, which exclusively underlie natural laws. Umwelt thus becomes a term in investigating physiological influences on organisms that are not components of rsi's. Mitwelt is a term for (...) the investigation of all rsi's of organisms. Living organisms are never solus ipse subjects of semioses, but share common sets of rules and signs. Life depends decisively on symbiotic communities. Serial Endosymbiotic Theory proved that the evolution of the eukaryotic super-kingdom was a merger of anchestral bacteria. The integration of bacterial genomes into eukaryotic genomes was also a step from analog to symbolic genetic codes. Now we know, that so-called ‘junk DNA’ has higher order regulatory functions on genome architecture and protein coding DNA plays only the role of a structural vocabulary. (shrink)

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to understand (...) the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

Steven Rose's book is essentially a plea for considering the variety and complexity of life and against simplistic reductions of human and animal behavioral phenomena to single genetic causes.

We briefly review the long-standing ideas about the use of synchronicity in the brain, which rely on Donald Hebb's views on cell assemblies and synaptic plasticity. More recently the distinction among several timescales in the description of neural activity has become a focus of theoretical discussion. Phillips & Singer's target article is criticized mainly because it does not distinguish these timescales properly and hence does not really address the questions so intensely debated today.

Manfred Eigen employs the terms language and communication to explain key recombination processes of DNA as well as to explain the self-organization of human language and communication: Life processes as well as language and communication processes are governed by the logic of a molecular syntax, which is the exact depiction of a principally formalizable reality. The author of the present contribution demonstrates that this view of Manfred Eigen’s cannot be sufficiently substantiated and that it must be supplemented by an approach (...) based on linguistic pragmatics. (shrink)

Although Weber's path-breaking work on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has received much attention ever since it first appeared in 1904-5, recent research has uncovered important new aspects. This volume, the result of an international, interdisciplinary effort, throws new light on the intellectual and cultural background of Weber's work, debates recent criticism of Weber's thesis, and confronts new historical insight on the seventeenth century with Weber's interpretation. Revisiting Weber's thesis serves to deepen our understanding of Weber as (...) much as it will stimulate further research. (shrink)

Using samples from three diverse populations, we test evolutionary hypotheses regarding how people reason about the inheritance of various traits. First, we provide a framework for differentiat-ing the outputs of mechanisms that evolved for reasoning about variation within and between biological taxa and culturally evolved ethnic categories from a broader set of beliefs and categories that are the outputs of structured learning mechanisms. Second, we describe the results of a modified “switched-at-birth” vignette study that we administered among children and adults (...) in Puno, Yasawa, and adults in the United States. This protocol permits us to study perceptions of prenatal and social transmission pathways for various traits and to differentiate the latter into vertical versus horizontal cultural influence. These lines of evidence suggest that people use all three mechanisms to reason about the distribution of traits in the population. Participants at all three sites develop expectations that morphological traits are under prenatal influence, and that belief traits are more culturally influenced. On the other hand, each population holds culturally specific beliefs about the degree of social influence on non-morphological traits and about the degree of vertical transmission—with only participants in the United States expecting parents to have much social influence over their children. We reinterpret people's differentiation of trait transmission pathways in light of humans' evolutionary history as a cultural species. (shrink)

The article discusses topics in the context of contemporary legal argumentation. It starts with a sketch of the development of topics from ancient times until the present day. Here the author focuses on the theory of the German legal philosopher Theodor Viehweg, which was most influential to legal argumentation in the 20th century. Then a modern concept of topics is introduced and finally the author discusses the role of topics in contemporary legal argumentation. In this part the distinction between topoi (...) in the weak sense (practically all argumentation schemes) and in the strong sense (specific legal topoi as listed by Gerhard Struck in 1971 is introduced. The author argues that Viehweg’s claim that topics plays an important role in legal argumentation is problematic, because topoi in the weak sense are certainly of high importance, but this is almost trivial. Topoi in the strong sense on the other hand are only of minor importance for legal practice. What characterises legal discourse much more is a set specific pragmatic discourse rules, discussed at the end of the paper. (shrink)

Although stakeholder theory is widely accepted in environmental disclosure research, empirical evidence about the role of stakeholders in firms’ disclosure is still scarce. The authors address this issue for a setting of carbon disclosure. Our international sample comprises the Carbon Disclosure Project Global 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 350 reports from 2008 to 2011, resulting in a total of 1,120 firms with 3,631 firm-year observations. The authors apply Tobit regressions to analyze the relationship between carbon disclosure and the relevance of (...) the following stakeholder groups: government, general public, media, employees, and customers. Our results confirm that in addition to carbon performance, all stakeholders are associated with carbon disclosure. Only one stakeholder group acts as a moderator for the relationship between carbon performance and carbon disclosure. Furthermore, the authors find that carbon performance but not the affiliation to a carbon-intensive industry acts as a moderator between stakeholder relevance and carbon disclosure. (shrink)

The Gift of the Other brings together a philosophical analysis of time, embodiment, and ethical responsibility with a feminist critique of the way women’s reproductive capacity has been theorized and represented in Western culture. Author Lisa Guenther develops the ethical and temporal implications of understanding birth as the gift of the Other, a gift which makes existence possible, and already orients this existence toward a radical responsibility for Others. Through an engagement with the work of Levinas, Beauvoir, Arendt, Irigaray, and (...) Kristeva, the author outlines an ethics of maternity based on the givenness of existence and a feminist politics of motherhood which critiques the exploitation of maternal generosity. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts (...) and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the contributors to this volume come together from a diverse range of backgrounds to analyze, critique, and envision alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. They engage with the hyper-incarceration of people of color, the incomplete abolition of slavery, the exploitation of prisoners (...) as workers and as “raw material” for the prison industrial complex, the intensive confinement of prisoners in supermax units, and the complexities of capital punishment in an age of abolition. (shrink)

BackgroundReflexive pitch perturbation experiments are commonly used to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying vocal motor control. In these experiments, the fundamental frequency–the acoustic correlate of pitch–of a speech signal is shifted unexpectedly and played back to the speaker via headphones in near real-time. In response to the shift, speakers increase or decrease their fundamental frequency in the direction opposing the shift so that their perceived pitch is closer to what they intended. The goal of the current work is to develop (...) a quantitative model of responses to reflexive perturbations that can be interpreted in terms of the physiological mechanisms underlying the response and that captures both group-mean data and individual subject responses.MethodsA model framework was established that allowed the specification of several models based on Proportional-Integral-Derivative and State-Space/Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) model classes. The performance of 19 models was compared in fitting experimental data from two published studies. The models were evaluated in terms of their ability to capture both population-level responses and individual differences in sensorimotor control processes.ResultsA three-parameter DIVA model performed best when fitting group-mean data from both studies; this model is equivalent to a single-rate state-space model and a first-order low pass filter model. The same model also provided stable estimates of parameters across samples from individual subject data and performed among the best models to differentiate between subjects. The three parameters correspond to gains in the auditory feedback controller’s response to a perceived error, the delay of this response, and the gain of the somatosensory feedback controller’s “resistance” to this correction. Excellent fits were also obtained from a four-parameter model with an additional auditory velocity error term; this model was better able to capture multi-component reflexive responses seen in some individual subjects.ConclusionOur results demonstrate the stereotyped nature of an individual’s responses to pitch perturbations. Further, we identified a model that captures population responses to pitch perturbations and characterizes individual differences in a stable manner with parameters that relate to underlying motor control capabilities. Future work will evaluate the model in characterizing responses from individuals with communication disorders. (shrink)

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors—as an evolutionary by-product—the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in (...) rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world. (shrink)

Drawing on recent findings in the cognitive and neurosciences, this article discusses how people manage to predict each other’s actions, which is fundamental for joint action. We explore how a common coding of perceived and performed actions may allow actors to predict the what, when, and where of others’ actions. The “what” aspect refers to predictions about the kind of action the other will perform and to the intention that drives the action. The “when” aspect is critical for all joint (...) actions requiring close temporal coordination. The “where” aspect is important for the online coordination of actions because actors need to effectively distribute a common space. We argue that although common coding of perceived and performed actions alone is not sufficient to enable one to engage in joint action, it provides a representational platform for integrating the actions of self and other. The final part of the paper considers links between lower‐level processes like action simulation and higher‐level processes like verbal communication and mental state attribution that have previously been at the focus of joint action research. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

Karl Polanyi and Max Weber held radically different views of liberal capitalism, but they also came to differ in significant respects with their brothers Michael Polanyi and Alfred Weber. The first section provides an overview of some critical moments in the history of liberal capitalism as perceived by some historical witnesses. The second treats the views of the Weber brothers on the world economy before 1914. The third deals with Max Weber's overlooked treatment of G. F. Knapp's once famous state (...) theory of money. The fourth turns to the circle of cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian intellectuals who passionately debated the future of liberal capitalism and almost all of whom became political refugees. (shrink)

Denis Nobel looks at four important misinterpretations of molecular biology concerning evolutionary processes and demonstrates that the new synthesis today looks rather outdated. The modern synthesis is nearly 80 years old. The proponents who worked out the modern synthesis had no access to the current knowledge on cell biology, genetics, epigenetics, RNA biology and virology. Therefore this contribution adds several aspects which Nobel’s article does not explicitly mention, providing some examples for a better understanding of evolutionary novelty.

Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and (...) bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger. (shrink)

Chisholm's two theories of self-consciousness (before and after 1976) are interpreted and evaluated as well motivated, powerful and instructive attempts to avoid circularities while preserving the phenomenon. They are criticised because of correlative shortcomings: The essentialistic theory allows only the formulation and the ascription of self-consciousness in the first person perspective; the second (epistemic) theory is restricted to the ascription of self-consciousness to others. The first theory suffers furthermore from a hidden circularity whereas the second needs an extension that leads (...) into an infinite regress. (shrink)

Chisholm's two theories of self-consciousness (before and after 1976) are interpreted and evaluated as well motivated, powerful and instructive attempts to avoid circularities while preserving the phenomenon. They are criticised because of correlative shortcomings: The essentialistic theory allows only the formulation and the ascription of self-consciousness in the first person perspective; the second (epistemic) theory is restricted to the ascription of self-consciousness to others. The first theory suffers furthermore from a hidden circularity whereas the second needs an extension that leads (...) into an infinite regress. (shrink)

Irigaray's early work seeks to multiply possibilities for women's self-expression by recovering a sexual difference in which male and female are neither the same nor opposites, but irreducibly different modes of embodiment. In her more recent work, however, Irigaray has emphasized the duality of the sexes at the expense of multiplicity, enshrining the heterosexual couple as the model of sexual ethics. Alison Stone's recent revision of Irigaray supplements her account of sexual duality with a theory of bodily multiplicity derived from (...) Butler, Nietzsche, and certain German Romantics; but to the extent that Stone maintains the primacy of sexual duality, her revision fails to address the claims of multiplicity on their own terms. In this paper, I interpret a passage from Marcel Proust's novel, Sodom and Gomorrah, in order to develop an alternative theory of sexual difference in which sexual duality is affirmed in relation to a third, unsexed but sexual force which multiplies the possibilities for sexual pleasure beyond heterosexual coupling. Proust's emphasis on sexed ``parts'' rather than sexed morphologies is generative of maximally diverse combinations, all of which are equally natural and equally enhanced through artifice. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – (...) I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

ResumoNo presente texto (“O Eu de Fichte”), no qual identifica duas épocas distintas na história da filosofia concernente ao desenvolvimento da teoria da consciência, D. Henrich volta-se, após caracterizar os componentes de cada período, à teoria da consciência do primeiro Fichte, o da Doutrina da Ciência de 1794, pondo ênfase sobre algumas aporiaspresentes nessa sua primeira formulação, na medida em que Fichte foi o primeiro a encarar o problema da consciência em sua perspectiva, no fundo, mais agônica, deixado sem (...) tratamento pela tradição da filosofia pré-kantiana e kantiana. AbstractIn the present text (Fichte’s Self), in which he identifies two distinct epochs in the history of philosophy concerning the development of the theory of consciousness, D. Henrich turns, after characterizing the components of each period, to the theory of consciousness of the first Fichte, that of the Doctrine of Science of 1794, placing emphasis on some of the aporias present in his first formulation, insofar as Fichte was the first to face the problem of consciousness in its essentially more agonistic perspective, left untreated by the tradition of pre-Kantian and Kantianphilosophy. (shrink)

In this essay, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s Institution Course Notes to clarify Patrick Wolfe’s claim that, for settler colonialism, “invasion is a structure, not an event.” I also engage critically with colonial assumptions in Merleau-Ponty’s own work, including his Eurocentric response to questions such as: “[I]s there a field of world history or universal history? Is there an intended accomplishment? A closure on itself? A true society?” In this essay, I ask different questions – with Merleau-Ponty, against him, and beyond (...) him. I neither defend Merleau-Ponty against his own worst self nor disown him as “bad” philosophical kin. Rather, I learn what I can from Merleau-Ponty for a critical phenomenology of settler colonialism and for amplifying movements to transform and abolish settler colonial structures at the level of thought, being, and politics. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

The world as we know it is structured by intersecting forms of systemic violence. It might seem obvious that this violence calls for critique. But this essay experiments with another, more radical possibility inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist poethics and by abolitionist refusals of critique as an end in itself and a substitute for collective action. To what extent might phenomenology, even in its most critical form, be so deeply invested in the Kantian tradition of transcendental critique (...) that it confirms the logic of the world as we know it? And how, if at all, might a praxis of phenomenology beyond critique imagine and affirm a poethical world in which entanglement, indeterminacy, and simultaneity generate virtual possibilities for being, knowing, and doing beyond and against racial violence? (shrink)

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this paper, I analyze the harm of solitary confinement from a phenomenological perspective by drawing on Husserl’s account of the essential relation between consciousness, the experience of an alter ego and the sense of a real, Objective world. While Husserl’s prioritization of transcendental subjectivity over transcendental (...) intersubjectivity underestimates the degree to which first-person consciousness is constitutively intertwined with the embodied consciousness of others, Husserl’s phenomenology nevertheless provides a fruitful starting-point for a philosophical engagement with the psychiatric research on solitary confinement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Calvin's Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Calvin's Two Kingdoms by Matthew J. TuiningaGuenther ("Gene") HaasCalvin's Political Theology and the Public Engagement of the Church: Calvin's Two Kingdoms Matthew J. Tuininga CAMBRIDGE: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. 258 PP. £69.99 / £27.99In recent years, a vigorous debate has arisen within Reformed circles concerning the nature of the two kingdoms theology of John Calvin. Although all recognize (...) that Calvin articulated a distinction between the spiritual kingdom of the church and the political kingdom of the state, there is disagreement over [End Page 211] the nature of the engagement of Christians with the temporal kingdom and over what should guide the state in enacting civil justice and order.The Kuyperian Neo-Calvinist movement holds a transformationalist understanding of the engagement of members of the spiritual kingdom with all vocations and spheres of life. Alternatively, two kingdoms Reformed theologians, such as David VanDrunen and Michael Horton, argue that the Reign of Christ is confined to the spiritual kingdom and must not be brought to bear directly on the temporal kingdom. Matthew Tuininga's book supports the latter view in his exposition of Calvin's political theology. Tuininga argues that Calvin articulated a sharp distinction between church and political society, such that politics is seen not as "a means of transforming society into the kingdom of God according to the dictates of Christian scripture, but as an endeavour to secure temporal order and civil righteousness in accord with reason, natural law, and the virtues of charity and prudence" (1).Tuininga begins by situating Calvin and his two kingdoms theology in their historical and political context, indicating Calvin's concern for the autonomy of church contra government interference. The central chapters (3–6) present the eschatological basis for Calvin's two kingdoms doctrine and detail the development of this theme in Calvin's thought. The Kingdom of God is identified with the church and its spiritual authority. It is distinct from the state's temporal authority, whose role is to maintain civil righteousness and order. To support this distinction between the mandate of the two kingdoms, Tuininga presents in chapter 7 the novel, and debatable, claim that Calvin holds to two covenants of God with Israel: the covenant of grace made with Abraham and confirmed at Sinai and the narrower covenant of the law for Israel's national life, in which God's blessings and punishments were conditional on Israel's obedience and disobedience. Although this legal covenant—with its earthly and temporal character—is embedded in the broader covenant of grace, it is abolished with the fulfillment of the covenant of grace in the coming of Christ. Only the covenant of grace—with its heavenly, inward, and spiritual character—remains in force for God's people today.Chapter 8 argues that Calvin's views on the mandate of the magistrate to protect religion and enact public justice is based not on appeals to scripture but to reason, the evidence of national laws, and natural philosophy. In chapter 9 Tuininga unfolds the implications of Calvin's two kingdoms theology for Christian political involvement in society. And in his conclusion, Tuininga unfolds numerous ways that this two kingdoms theology can guide contemporary Christians' engagement with modern liberal democracies.This work is a welcome exposition of Calvin's political theology to support the two kingdoms theology. However, in addition to the novel, and debatable, claim that God made two covenants with Israel, this reviewer finds that Tuininga's exposition fails to incorporate key points in Calvin's thought: the failure of civil rulers' to enact natural law faithfully and consistently (2.2.13, 23; 3.14.2), [End Page 212] the description of the calling of civil authority as "holy and lawful before God … the most sacred and by far the most honorable of all callings" (4.20.4), and Calvin's claim that the best rulers are those governing according to both tables of the Decalogue (4.20.9–11). Nevertheless, this book is an important contribution to the ongoing debate and should be widely read.Guenther ("Gene") HaasRedeemer University CollegeCopyright © 2018... (shrink)

In Otherwise than Being, Levinas writes that the alterity of the Other escapes “le flair animal,” or the animal’s sense of smell. This paper puts pressure on the strong human-animal distinction that Levinas makes by considering the possibility that, while non-human animals may not respond to the alterity of the Other in the way that Levinas describes as responsibility, animal sensibility plays a key role in a relation to Others that Levinas does not discuss at length: friendship. This approach to (...) friendship addresses a gap in Levinas’ work between the absolute Other for whom I am responsible and the “brother” who is my political equal. (shrink)

: Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, Guenther argues that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. Guenther calls this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.