The gist of Edward Said’s attack on Israel is that Zionism is racism. The very appearance of his essay in a special issue devoted to racism is an interesting fact in itself. But the fact that the editors up until now received no responses to Said carries special significance. It signals, or can be read as signaling, that the literary-critical establishment has reached a consensus and that liberal supporters of Israel in our discipline have retreated from the field.I may be (...) wrong about this, of course, for other explanations are possible, but Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s observations a year later on that special issue would seem to reinforce my view. Baker describes Said’s method as aiming “to prove that ‘A’ is as good as ‘B’ and to induce shame in defenders of ‘B’ who have made other axiological choices.” Baker protests against this method, however, since it gives too much play to “B,” so that “it is difficult to hear a Palestinian voice separate from the world of Jewish discourse.” Then he adds in parentheses: “”2 In Baker’s language, only Jews are likely to disagree, and these “Jews,” conceived as a unitary group, are a client state and are compared by means of allusion to the corrupt, libidinous king who executed the true prophet , the herald of Jesus. These comments are remarkable in any context, but especially so in a forum on racism. Robert J. Griffin is a lecturer in English at Tel Aviv University. He is currently working on two books, one on Samuel Johnson and one on literary historiography. (shrink)

Edited by Svetla S. Griffin and Ilaria L.E. Ramelli. Harvard University Press, Hellenic Studies 88, 2019, ca 600 pages. ISBN-10: 0674241320; ISBN-13: 978-0674241329. Contributors: Luc Brisson, Kevin Corrigan, John Dillon, Harold Tarrant, John Turner, John Finamore, Ilaria Ramelli, Karla Pollmann, Carlos Lévy, Lenka Karfíková, Pauliina Remes, Mark J. Edwards, Pier Franco Beatrice, Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Aaron Johnson, Dimka Gocheva, Olivier Dufault, and Robert Hannah.

David R. Griffin’s new Whitehead’s Radically Different Post-modern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007) contains a chapter-long Whiteheadian response to several criticisms I have leveled against process theology. While encouraging his attempt to promote Whitehead as a preferred alternative to foundationalist modernism and postmodernism, I undertake to rebut Griffin’s arguments through discussions of the following topics: the one and the many (which Whitehead does not treat adequately), the finite (...) versus infinite character of God, creation ex nihilo, the nature of determinateness and the need for every determinate thing to have a creator, the applicability of the Ontological Principle to explaining a complex of first principles, the inclusion of time within ontological eternity, the goodness versus wildness of God, the nature of religious experience, and the uses of religious language. (shrink)

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource exit from (...) dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

The republican tradition has long been ambivalent about markets and commercial society more generally: from the contrasting positions of Rousseau and Smith in the eighteenth century to recent neorepublican debates about capitalism, republicans have staked out diverse positions on fundamental issues of political economy. Rather than offering a systematic historical survey of these discussions, this chapter will instead focus on the leading neo-republican theory—that of Philip Pettit—and consider its implications for market society. As I will argue, Pettit’s theory is even (...) friendlier to markets than most have believed: far from condemning commercial society, his theory recognizes that competitive markets and their institutional preconditions are an alternative means to limit arbitrary power across the domestic, economic, and even political spheres. While most republican theorists have focused on political means to limit such power—including both constitutional means (e.g., separation of powers, judicial review, the rule of law, federalism) and participatory ones (democratic elections and oversight)—I will examine here an economic model of republicanism that can complement, substitute for, and at times displace the standard political model. Whether we look at spousal markets, labor markets, or residential markets within federal systems, state policies that heighten competition among their participants and resource exit from abusive relationships within them can advance freedom as non-domination as effectively or even more effectively than social-democratic approaches that have recently gained enthusiasts among republicans. These conclusions suggest that democracy, be it social or political, is just one means among others for restraining arbitrary power and is consequently less central to (certain versions of) republicanism than we may have expected. So long as they counteract domination, economic inroads into notionally democratic territory are no more worrisome than constitutional ones. (shrink)

The concern of this work is with developing an alternative to standard categories in theology and philosophy, especially in terms of how they deal with nature. Avoiding the polemics of much contemporary reflection on nature, it shows how we are connected to nature through the unconscious and its unique way of reading and processing signs. Spinoza's key distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata serves as the governing framework for the treatise. Suggestions are made for a post-Christian way of understanding (...) religion. Robert S. Corrington's work represents the first sustained attempt to bring together the fields of semiotics, depth-psychology, pragmaticism, and a post-Monotheistic theology of nature. Its focus is on how signification functions in human and non-human orders of infinite nature. Our connection with the infinite is described in detail, especially as it relates to the use of sign systems. (shrink)

Commercial republicanism is the idea that a properly-structured commercial society can serve the republican end of minimizing the domination of citizens by states (imperium) and of citizens by other citizens (dominium). Much has been written about this idea in the last half-century, including analyses of individual commercial republicans (e.g., Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant) as well as discussions of national traditions of the same (e.g., in America, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Italy). In this chapter, I review five kinds of (...) arguments that have been historically offered for how commercial society so understood advances the republican ideal of non-domination: first, by simply realizing non-dominating relationships in the marketplace itself (Instantiation); second, by encouraging the growth of a wide middle class that can offer a counterweight to other, dominating classes (Internal Check-and-Balance); third, by increasing the wealth and power of republics vis-à-vis other, dominating states in the international arena (External Check-and-Balance); fourth, by helpfully nurturing bourgeois-civic virtues in republican citizens (Cultivating Virtue); and finally, by transforming dangerous passions into more readily regulable, even socially beneficial material interests (Sublimating Vice). I end the chapter by briefly considering commercial republicanism’s prospects as a continuing research program. (shrink)

Bitterly anti-Marxist though it was, fascism now appears to have been in some sense revolutionary in its own right, but this raises new questions about the meaning of modern revolution. In a recent essay Roger Griffin, a major authority on fascism, challenges Marxists and non-Marxists to engage in a dialogue that would deepen our understanding of the relationship between the Marxist-communist and fascist revolutionary directions. Although he finds openings within the Marxist tradition, Griffin insists that, if such dialogue (...) is to be possible, the Marxists must give up any a priori claim to the unique validity of the Marxist revolutionary project. However, Griffin’s way of framing the issues proves too limited, first because his understanding fascism as revolutionary is not rich enough, but also because he too often forces his argument to make the fascist revolution seem the archetypal 20th-century revolution. The alternative starts with a deeper understanding of the basis of the fascist claim to be spearheading, as Marxism could not, a revolutionary departure appropriate to contemporary challenges and possibilities. In asking about the commonality of the fascist and Marxist revolutions, Griffin convincingly accents a certain mode of historical consciousness that seemed to warrant a totalitarian direction. But the historical sense he draws from Walter Benjamin, and then attributes to Marxism and Leninism, misconstrues the area of commonality. Through a different way of conceiving fascism as revolutionary, and of understanding fascist-communist convergence, we can challenge the Marxists more deeply — but also suggest the basis for a more fruitful mode of dialogue around fascism, Marxism and modern revolution. (shrink)

The story of this book of 'materials on Ludwik Fleck' is also the story of the reception of Ludwik Fleck. In this volume, some essential materials which have been produced by that reception have been gathered together.

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organizing forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretive methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? This is the first book (...) that seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects. (shrink)

This book presents Robert S. Hartman’s formal theory of value and critically examines many other twentieth century value theorists in its light, including A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, Brand Blanshard, Paul Edwards, Albert Einstein, William K. Frankena, R.M. Hare, Nicolai Hartmann, Martin Heidegger, G.E. Moore, P.H. Nowell-Smith, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Charles Stevenson, Paul W. Taylor, Stephen E. Toulmin, and J.O. Urmson.

This edition of the Handbookfollows the first edition by 10 years.

In the wake of both the semiotic and the psychoanalytic revolutions, how is it possible to describe the object of religious worship in realist terms? Semioticians argue that each object is known only insofar as it gives birth to a series of signs and interpretants (new signs). From the psychoanalytic side, religious beliefs are seen to belong to transference energies and projections that contaminate the religious object with all-too-human complexes. In Nature's Religion, distinguished theologian and philosopher Robert S. Corrington (...) weaves together the concept of infinite semiosis with that of the transference to show that the self does have access to something in nature that is intrinsically religious. Corrington argues that signs and our various transference fields can and do connect us with fully natural religious powers that are not of our own making, thereby opening up a path past the Western monotheisms to a capacious religion of nature. With a foreword by Robert C. Neville, Nature's Religion is essential reading for philosophers of religion, scholars of the psychology of religion, and theologians. (shrink)

Numerous labor-management issues possess ethical dimensions and pose ethical questions. In this article, the authors discuss four labor-management issues that present important contemporary problems: union organizing, labor-management negotiations, employee involvement programs, and union obligations of fair representation. In the authors view, labor and management too often view their ethical obligations as beginning and ending at the law''s boundaries. Contemporary business realities suggest that cooperative and enlightened modes of interaction between labor and management seem appropriate.

Semiotic theory, which has restricted its focus largely to human forms of significations, is transformed by Robert S. Corrington into a semiotics of nature itself. Corrington situates the divide between "nature naturing" and "nature natured" within the contest of classical American pragmaticism and postmodern psychoanalysis. At the heart of this new metaphysics is an insistence that all signs participate in larger orders of meaning that are natural and religious. Meanings embodied in nature point beyond nature to the mystery inherent (...) in positioned codes and signs. (shrink)

The various cosmological proposals by Einsteinian relativists seek to show the structure of the world as a consequence of the basic notions of relativity. In particular, the irrelevance of the state of motion of an observer to his description of the fundamental laws of nature is to be maintained. Furthermore, gravity is understood as being a description of the fact that particles move along certain minimal paths in non-Euclidean space. In this theory, the effect of one material particle on another (...) particle in the old-fashioned sense of gravitational attraction becomes indirect; that is, a particle moves on a minimal path in a space having a degree of curvature dependent on the material entities which exist in it, rather than having its path bent by the attraction between it and other material bodies, all of them existing in an absolute or receptacle-like space. (shrink)

The United States Constitution was written for the purpose of establishing an effective but limited national government, a government that would be capable of dealing with national and international problems, but that would not be able to violate the traditional liberties of the people. Thus, the Constitution was, and is essentially a practical-juridical document. One should not expect to find there pronouncements about the nature of man, society, law, or the state, such as are often found in many other national (...) constitutions and international conventions. Nevertheless, several important characteristics of the Constitution—indeed its most important characteristics—are clear and admirable applications of the natural law. The principal drafters of the Constitution believed that God, in creating the universe, implanted in the nature of man a body of law to which all human beings are subject, which is superior to all manmade law, and which is knowable by human reason. Thus, the natural law of the American founders was traditional natural law as understood and expounded by classical and Medieval writers and carried forward in the English common law, and not the “Enlightenment” versions in vogue in eighteenth-century Europe. The classical-traditional natural law understanding of Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and other leaders of the Philadelphia Convention are reflected in the three most important characteristics of the Constitution: the principle of limited government; the principle of subsidiarity (in both political and larger societal matters); and the practice of guaranteeing traditional rights, and only as against government. (shrink)

Nature’s Sublime provides a radical new vision of infinite nature and its deepest aesthetic dimensions as they are encountered by finite human sign users. Rather than looking to religion for healing and salvation, Nature’s Sublime argues that the arts provide a deeper relationship to the vast depths of nature.

Rawls offers three arguments for the priority of liberty in Theory, two of which share a common error: the belief that once we have shown the instrumental value of the basic liberties for some essential purpose (e.g., securing self-respect), we have automatically shown the reason for their lexical priority. The third argument, however, does not share this error and can be reconstructed along Kantian lines: beginning with the Kantian conception of autonomy endorsed by Rawls in section 40 of Theory, we (...) can explain our highest-order interest in rationality, justify the lexical priority of all basic liberties, and reinterpret Rawls’ threshold condition for the application of the priority of liberty. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Kantian reconstruction will not work within the radically different framework of Political Liberalism. (shrink)

The drama of the unfolding of the spirit, Corrington argues, is one of the most powerful struggles within the human process. The spirit is in and of nature and can never lift the self outside of nature. For Corrington's ecstatic naturalism, there is no realm of the supernatural, only dimensions and orders within nature.

With the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls not only rejuvenated contemporary political philosophy but also defended a Kantian form of Enlightenment liberalism called “justice as fairness.” Enlightenment liberalism stresses the development and exercise of our capacity for autonomy, while Reformation liberalism emphasizes diversity and the toleration that encourages it. These two strands of liberalism are often mutually supporting, but they conflict in a surprising number of cases, whether over the accommodation of group difference, the design (...) of civic education, or the promotion of liberal values internationally. During the 1980’s, however, Rawls began to jettison key Kantian characteristics of his theory, a process culminating in the 1993 release of Political Liberalism and completing the transformation of justice as fairness into a Reformation liberalism. -/- Reconstructing Rawls argues that this transformation was a tragic mistake because it jeopardized the most important features of his theory, viz. the lexical priorities of right, liberty, and fair equality of opportunity as well as the difference principle. Controversially, this book contends that Rawls’s so-called “political turn,” motivated by a newfound interest in diversity and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has pushed liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. The book then demonstrates that the central elements of justice as fairness can only be defended within the context of a Kantian Enlightenment liberalism and that Rawls’s hope for a more pluralistic grounding for his theory, endorsed by a wide variety of belief systems present in modern democratic societies, is illusory. -/- Reconstructing Rawls is the first book to systematically compare Rawls’s and Kant’s theories and the first to offer an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism. By doing so, it gives us both the vision of a liberal world order—“a republicanism of all states, together and separately,” as Kant put it—and a mode of justification addressed to all men and women, not as members of particular nations, races, and faiths, but as human beings, as citizens of the world. In short, it reclaims Rawls for the Enlightenment. (shrink)