This article brings out ethical aspects arising in Plato’s classical critique of narrative and imitative art in The Republic, especially when it comes to reading stories about the past. Socrates’s and Glaucon’s most important suggestion, I argue, is to cultivate an ethical consciousness where one ought to see the distinctions between how the real and the imaginary in narratives are to be conceived, and what that insight ethically demands of the reader. Taken as an ethical insight for the reader when (...) engaging in narrative understanding, this should be to resist the temptation to think that past suffering and misery as told in a story can be read analogously to narratives having a tragic plot. The article clarifies the meaning of Plato’s critique through the ideas of Simone Weil, Emmanuel Lévinas and Iris Murdoch. These existential moral philosophers work towards having an ethical consciousness in one’s personal relationship with stories of our lifeworld. (shrink)

In European philosophies of history, the linear paradigm that has prevailed for centuries as a derivative of Christian salvation history (Heilsgeschichte), ultimately lost its monopoly with the arrival of the “post-age.” The result of this has been that ideas that have survived on the margins, even the cyclical interpretation of time attached to religious traditions, now seem capable of outliving the short-lived belief in continuous progress. According to the cyclical view of history, those who came last will leave first, with (...) those who came first leaving as the last adherents of the driving force of Western rationalization. Thus, within a century, beginning with World War 2, a major turning point has been crossed: Socialism was the first to disappear, and it looks like Secular Liberalism will be the next; then Protestantism, followed by Islam, and so forth. As seductive as these images may appear, they only mirror an auto-destructive thread at the very center of Europe’s troubled Geist. But can anything be done to save the most important European values, and specifically, the ethical drive to say “no” to power, which is perhaps the most important legacy of monotheism? Either as a self-limitation from within powerful institutions or as a mode of resistance on the margins of powerful developments—there is a strong adherence to the good (often named God) that helps people and communities survive their diasporic state. I will present this kernel of ethical monotheism by two relatively unknown twentieth-century examples of “diasporic knowledge”: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), in which she recorded her observations of the devastating effects of empires on Yugoslavia, and two poems by Rosario Castellanos, who decades before the debate on postcolonialism voiced the concerns of displaced indigenous cultures in her Mexican homeland. I suggest that, paradoxically, attention to diasporic voices is one way of realizing the spirit of European self-limitation that is so much needed today to prevent further damage to our societies and environment wrought by the excessive drive for progress fostered by an unethical monorationalism. (shrink)

The suffering of nonhuman animals has become a noted factor in deciding public policy and legislative change. Yet, despite this growing concern, skepticism toward such suffering is still surprisingly common. This paper analyzes the merits of the skeptical approach, both in its moderate and extreme forms. In the first part it is claimed that the type of criterion for verification concerning the mental states of other animals posed by skepticism is overly (and, in the case of extreme skepticism, illogically) demanding. (...) Resting on Wittgenstein and Husserl, it is argued that skepticism relies on a misguided epistemology and, thus, that key questions posed by it face the risk of absurdity. In the second part of the paper it is suggested that, instead of skepticism, empathy together with intersubjectivity be adopted. Edith Stein’s take on empathy, along with contemporary findings, are explored, and the claim is made that it is only via these two methods of understanding that the suffering of nonhuman animals can be perceived. (shrink)

The Anthropocene marks a moment of wild destratification of the planet that requires analysis of the relations between geologic forces and social practices. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of strata is examined in order to develop a geophilosophy for the Anthropocene. Establishing a model of strata that conjoins earth and social flows together into planes of interrelated production highlights how the fossil substratum subtends contemporary forms of social relations. Stratifications, it is argued, are planes of social reproduction that both constrain and (...) are expressive of possible modes of expression. If power, according to Foucault, is a relation between forces, geosocial strata conceptualizes how stratifications organize and capture forces into political geology. Concentrating on diagramming moments of crossing strata, it is suggested that Anthropocene geopolitics needs to be located at the intersection of geosocial formations and processes of fossilization, rather than through a new assemblage of planetary scale. (shrink)

This paper introduces Simone Weil’s notion of reading and some of its implications to education. Weil’s philosophy, in particular her notion of attention has caught interest of some education scholars; however, the existing studies are still underdeveloped. Introducing Weil’s notion of reading, which has not been studied almost at all by educationists but its significance is well-recognized by Weil scholars, I intend to set forth a more nuanced understanding of Weil’s attention that is necessary to further discuss Weil’s potential contribution (...) to education research. Attention to other people, hence love of others, is reframed as “reading better.” We read better not simply by purifying our reading through detachment and self-negation, which is how the notion of attention is often understood and thus found problematic, but by incorporating multiple perspectives and finding balance among them. Learning to read better, then, is not merely inward effort of detachment done through introspection, but it also necessarily involves outward effort of working with other people and the world. It is through interacting with others, we may learn our own readings, recognize others’ readings, and seeking for just balance among them. This latter element which has been greatly dismissed is indispensable for any serious discussions of Weil’s philosophy in education. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the motif of abandonment that runs through the ethics of Simone Weil. In doing so, as a conceptual lens, I make use of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of abandonment. Taking my cue from Weil’s hesitations concerning baptism, I examine her stance as a case of either sacrifice or exception, of ambiguity or indifference. Subsequently, I use Weil’s hesitations to examine an interconnected sequence of soteriology and metaphysics, following Church and potentiality, World and actuality, and The Kingdom (...) and contingency. This allows me to explore the themes of writing and life. A crucial role is reserved for the Parable of the Sower, and how it discriminates between the saved and the damned. (shrink)

In his 1985 book on philosophy and atheism, the Canadian thinker Kai Nielsen, a prolific writer on the subject, wonders why the philosophy of religion is ‘so boring’, and concludes that it must be ‘because the case for atheism is so strong that it is difficult to work up much enthusiasm for the topic.’ Indeed, Nielsen even regards most of the contemporary arguments for atheism as little more than ‘mopping up operations after the Enlightenment’ which, on the whole, add little (...) to the socio-anthropological and socio-psychological accounts of religion provided by thinkers like Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, as any ‘reasonable person informed by modernity’ will readily acknowledge. On this view, the answer to Kant's question – ‘What may we hope?’ – does not gesture towards a resurrection and personal immortality, but instead to the death of religious discourse itself: I think, and indeed hope, that God-talk, and religious discourse more generally, is, or at least should be, dying out in the West, or more generally in a world that has felt the force of a Weberian disenchantment of the world. This sense that religious convictions are no longer a live option is something which people who think of themselves as either modernists or post-modernists very often tend to have. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis introduction sets a framework for the special issue on Education and Hope which contains a selection of papers presented at the 16th Conference of the International Network of Philosophers of Education. It sketches the issue of how education and hope are closely intertwined notions. This introduction also gives an overview of the articles included in this issue and how they are thematically arranged. In a short conclusion the issue of hope is related to the issue of speed and slowness.

Believers regularly refer to God as “forgiving and merciful” when praying for divine forgiveness. If one is committed to divine immutability and impassability, as Maimonides is, one must deny that God is capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving manner. If one rejects divine impassability, maintaining that God has a psychology, as Muffs does, one must reckon with biblical depictions of divine vengeance and rage. Such depictions suggest that while being capable, in principle, of acting in a forgiving way, (...) God has a difficulty to manage God’s anger and do so in practice. Employing a Wittgensteinian perspective, I argue that utterances, e.g., “God merciful and gracious, slow to anger. . . forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin”, need not be understood as involving mistaken or confused descriptions of God’s nature and manner of acting. Rather, they can be understood as speech-acts of various types and functions: mystical, theurgic and others, that purport to bring about or transform various states of affairs in this world and/or beyond it. As such, they can function as non-semantic instruments that purport to elevate the believer to the “upper worlds”, or as anger-management devices that purport to help God implement His second order desire to act in a forgiving manner, despite His difficulty to do so. (shrink)

This essay turns to the late thought of Martin Luther King Jr. to bring matters of faith back into debates about dissent in liberal democracies. Drawing on unpublished speeches as well as scholarship in Black theology, religious studies, and political theory, I contend that the post-1965 King is not as interested in moral or pragmatic principles as many democratic theorists think. The late King’s movement, I argue, is animated by what Black liberation theologian James Cone calls “black faith.” Manifesting Jesus’s (...) liberating love—a love that the late King believes already transformed and was still transforming the world—this movement with the poor and dispossessed is caring yet forceful, quotidian yet spectacular, and nonviolent yet revolutionary. Foregrounding the late King’s black faith and the movement it animates, I conclude, opens up new horizons for theorizing dissent. (shrink)

For Simone Weil the invocation of ‘rights’ to address extreme human suffering–what she calls ‘affliction’–is ‘ludicrously inadequate’. Rights, Weil argues, invite a response, whereas what the affli...

This paper deals with the issue of self-determination and agency in moral action. On the one hand, it seems that where possible, the moral agent should use their practical reason to identify what it is right for them to do, and act accordingly; on the other hand, this seems to leave little room for the agent to decide for themselves how to act, where this is often said to be a marker of freedom and how the will is exercised. In (...) response to this difficulty, Ruth Chang has argued recently that at least some reasons themselves need to be seen as being created through an act of will. Looking at the work of Iris Murdoch, it is argued that this response is problematic. At the same time, it is also argued that Murdoch can provide a fruitful way of dealing with this problem through her account of the imagination. This gives a role to the will of the agent, not in creating reasons, but in attuning us to those reasons, thereby locating the will within practical reasoning itself and showing how the authority of the good can be made compatible with human freedom. (shrink)

Argues against the rationality of self-concern. Non-instrumental interest in my own well-being is not justified by the fact that it is mine. This follows from the metaphysics of first-person thought, as thought about the object of immediate knowledge. The argument leaves room for rational self-interest as a form of self-love that is justified, like love for others, by the fact of our shared humanity.

Through writings of Simone Weil and Michel Foucault, the article explores the notion of education as the formation of the attending and attentive subjects. Both writers have in different ways acknowledged the important relation between attention and the self. While Weil develops a spiritual form of attention, an attention which can be trained in any form of serious studying, aiming at dissolving the illusion of the self, Foucault understands attention as an important aspect in the Greek notion of the care (...) of the self, which was developed outside of and due to the limitations of pedagogy aiming at a self-attentive self-formation. Both non-egotistic notions of attention address ethical and educational dimensions of human subjectivity. Foucault’s notion is anti-institutional and Weil’s notion is non-formative. As such, both perspectives inform educational thinking and practice by highlighting attention as a crucial aspect of both the active and the contemplative subject. (shrink)

In today’s world we appear to place a premium on happiness. Happiness is often portrayed, directly or indirectly, as one of the key aims of education. To suggest that education is concerned with promoting unhappiness or even despair would, in many contexts, seem outlandish. This paper challenges these widely held views. Focusing on the work of the great Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, I argue that despair, the origins of which lie in our reflective consciousness, is a defining feature of human (...) life. Education, I maintain, should not be seen as a flight from despair but as a process of deepening our understanding of suffering and its potentially pivotal role in our humanisation. In developing these ideas, I draw on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death and Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, among other sources. (shrink)

This paper argues that the influential French thinker, Simone Weil, has something distinctive and important to offer educational and ethical inquiry. Weil’s ethical theory is considered against the backdrop of her life and work, and in relation to her broader ontological, epistemological and political position. Pivotal concepts in Weil’s philosophy – gravity, decreation and grace – are discussed, and the educational implications of her ideas are explored. The significance of Weil’s thought for educationists lies in the unique emphasis she places (...) on the development of attention, a notion elaborated here via the key themes of truth, beauty and love. (shrink)

Among the most neglected of Albert Camus? literary works is his play The misunderstanding. Composed while Camus was in exile in occupied France, and first performed on stage in 1944, The misunderstanding depicts the events that unfold when a man returns, without declaring his identity, to a home he left 20 years ago. Unrecognized, he is killed by his mother and sister for financial gain. This article draws on ideas from Emmanuel Levinas in identifying and discussing some of the key (...) ethical and educational themes in the text. It is argued that the forms of misunderstanding evident in Camus? play mirror those exhibited in pedagogical institutions such as schools. The misunderstanding demonstrates that what is often missing in our communicative relations is careful attention to the Other. Camus does not offer us any easy way out when confronting the impossibility of fully knowing ourselves and others; instead, he shows that we must acknowledge the suffering this brings and take responsibility for it. (shrink)

What might it mean to engage in an educative struggle with death? Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich helps us to answer that question. Tolstoy’s story depicts the life of a man who, when suddenly faced with the prospect of his own death, is at first unable to comprehend the reality of his situation. He is angry, fearful, and disgusted. As he gradually comes to terms with his mortality, he undergoes a harrowing process of transformation, at the heart of (...) which lies the development of his capacity for attention. Drawing on ideas from the French philosopher and pedagogue Simone Weil, it is argued that Ivan’s experience is consistent with the passage from ‘gravity’, through the void of intense suffering, toward a state of grace. (shrink)

Gilligan's understanding of moral reasoning as a kind of perception has its roots in the conception of moral experience espoused by Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch. A clear understanding of that conception, however, reveals grave difficulties with Gilligan's descriptions of the care perspective and justice perspective. In particular, we can see that the two perspectives are not mutually exclusive once we recognize that attention does not require attachment and that impartiality does not require detachment.

Moral perception is typically understood as moral properties perception, i.e., the perceptual registration of moral properties such as wrongness or dignity. In this article, I defend a view of moral perception as a process that involves imaginative apprehension of reality. It is meant as an adjustment to the dominant view of moral perception as moral properties perception and as an addition to existing Murdochian approaches to moral perception. The view I present here builds on Iris Murdoch’s moral psychology and holds (...) that moral perception is an imaginative exploration of the particularity of concrete objects of moral reality (e.g., persons, situations, and events), rather than a registration of moral properties. I argue that such imaginative apprehension includes direct and reflective uses of imagination and that this process grounds experiential moral knowledge that serves the ultimate role of moral perception: getting a better grip on concrete objects of moral reality. (shrink)

Sophie-Grace Chappell’s recent book Epiphanies is wide-ranging and illuminating, just like its central subject. One basic motif is the ubiquity of value and value expe- rience in the ethical life: we are immersed in a value-laden reality and morality is rooted in this often epiphanic value experience. This results in an emphasis on a broad receptiveness to the surrounding world. One possible pitfall of such an approach could be the reduction of human beings to ethically passive perceivers, waiting for epiphanies (...) to strike them. However, I think such a reading of Epiphanies would be incorrect. Chappell realizes how the ethical life entails more than just passive reception and contemplation; that both the passive and the active parts of the ethical life are important and related. In this article, I aim to avoid the suggested misreading by focussing on one phenomenon that is a good illustration of this interrelation and that is strongly related to epiphanies: creativity. (shrink)

In several posthumously published writings about the differences between humans and animals, Rush Rhees criticises the view that human lives are more important than (or superior to) animal lives. Rhees' views may seem to be in sympathy with more recent critiques of “speciesism.” However, the most commonly discussed anti-speciesist moral frameworks – which take the capacity of sentience as the criterion of moral considerability – are inadequate. Rhees' remark that both humans and animals can be loved points towards a different (...) way of accounting for the moral considerability of humans and animals that avoid the problems of the capacity-based approaches. (shrink)

We are all creative now. Where once creativity was thought to be the preserve of the arts and humanities, we now find creativity has become a ubiquitous aim of higher education in the twenty-first century. Our ills will be resolved as long as we can release our latent creativity and perform. The discourse of higher education strategic management now sees an apparent paradoxical coupling of notions such as creativity, performance, blue skies with targets, outputs and productivity. In the midst of (...) such active creativity-making it is worth asking ourselves some basic questions regarding the nature, purpose and desirability of such forms of creativity. Who is served by the renewal of a discourse of creativity? Does it exist in practice? How do we know it when we see it? Is it good? Where and how might it happen? In this article Alison Phipps returns to some early stories and myths of creativity from the arts and humanities and considers the elements of fire, water, earth and especially air and their symbolic status in sourcing creativity. In order to offer counter-stories to those which may chock the flourishing of learning she draws on alternative metaphors, parables and imagery and considers the kinds of futures which may be worth creating. These elements provide understandings of creativity as resourcing life, ordering the myths of human endeavour and education. This article draws on work by Heidegger, Irigaray, Carson, Ingold, Brueggemann and Barnett. In particular, it considers work of anthropology, poetry and theology which offers singular, disciplined perspectives on the possibilities for creativity and the heavy, determined work which accompanies its apparent ease and flow. (shrink)

Against the easy presupposition that such a thing as ‘democratic taxation’ not only exists but is also practicable, this paper points to the dilemma posed by what I call ‘quantifiable action.’ The essay develops an approach to theorizing the place of taxation in political theory that counters trends in fiscal sociology, political science, and liberal theory by highlighting how taxation presumably violates the requirement that self-government includes an absence of instrumental rationality on the part of democratic citizens. For this reason, (...) taxation presents a persistent problem for any concept of self-government, and may usefully be regarded as a technology of the self, conventional with democracy but at most ambiguous in its capability to be genuinely democratic, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Against the easy presupposition that such a thing as ‘democratic taxation’ not only exists but is also practicable, this paper points to the dilemma posed by what I call ‘quantifiable action.’ The essay develops an approach to theorizing the place of taxation in political theory that counters trends in fiscal sociology, political science, and liberal theory by highlighting how taxation presumably violates the requirement that self-government includes an absence of instrumental rationality on the part of democratic citizens. For this reason, (...) taxation presents a persistent problem for any concept of self-government, and may usefully be regarded as a technology of the self, conventional with democracy but at most ambiguous in its capability to be genuinely democratic, both theoretically and practically. (shrink)

Workplace spirituality deals with paradoxes. This concept has been taken on board since the late 1980s, but very few human resource managers have realised that workplace spirituality could make an essential contribution to a better understanding of workplace and corporate reality. Increasing numbers of academic papers are being published on this subject but mere remain many grey areas for researchers. The aim of this paper is to use Simone Weil’s philosophy as a reading grid to get an insight into workplace (...) spirituality as a new paradigm of management. Initial studies attempting to apply Weil’s philosophy to management highlight the necessity for all the actors within the organisation to define their job tasks and contents according to their own way of thinking. Our interpretation of Weil’s philosophy also sheds light on the impossibility of dissociating thinking and acting and reminds us that work is done to nourish both the body and the soul. By concentrating on the spirituality of work, we can establish new links between ethics and human resource management. (shrink)

J. M. Coetzee's trilogy of novels with Jesus in their titles, published between 2013 and 2019, has bewildered many reviewers. This essay review proposes that that bewilderment stems from a misconception of the novels’ allegorical dimension and of the possible meanings evoked by their titles. The trilogy is the consummation of Coetzee's meditations on analogy and linguistic skepticism; on the ontological status of fictions; on the eschatological impulsion of writing; and on memory's capacity for true recognitions that have no empirical (...) basis. The trilogy presents us with a world that affirms a purely immanent life. Coetzee tests this world dialogically by subjecting its self-identical “here” to the nonidentical repetitions of analogical thought, through which an “elsewhere” impinges on the “here.” The trilogy's deepest questions turn on the metaphysical scope of this “elsewhere”: that is, on whether the vertiginous depths of analogy participate in an underlying substrate of meaning, recognizable as “the Word of God.”. (shrink)

Simone Weil's ideas on affliction and sacrifice have been interpreted by some as though they are the product of psychological problems. I will approach her writings on necessity and affliction through G. M. Hopkins' little prose masterpiece. Later I will suggest that she may be profitably related to some French spiritual writers in the 17th Century, who develop a link between the necessity of offering sacrifice to God and the radical contingency of created existence.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

In recent commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, a distinction is commonly drawn between ‘proper’ and ‘selfish’ forms of self- love. In arguing that not all vices of self-focus can be captured under the heading of selfishness, I seek to distinguish selfishness from self-centredness. But the latter vice has a far more handsome cousin: proper self-focus of the kind necessary for ‘becoming a self’. As various feminist thinkers have argued, this will be missed if we valorise self-sacrifice too uncritically. But (...) nor need the latter concept be ditched. By distinguishing varieties of self-sacrifice, we can see the importance of avoiding the all too easy slide from proper self-sacrifice to outright self-annihilation. And we can discover that this avoidance is aided by recognising a kind of pride as part of true self- love. (shrink)

The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific shifts (...) in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do. (shrink)

The experience of feeling safe even in the midst of trials and temptations seems to be a central feature of the Christian faith. In this article I will try to solve some possible difficulties in understanding this kind of absolute safety by discussing some problems noted by philosophers in connection with the related statements by Socrates that a good man cannot be harmed, and by Wittgenstein that he sometimes feels absolutely safe, that nothing can injure him whatever happens. First, I (...) will investigate whether there is an invalid prediction implied in this feeling of absolute safety: how can someone know that nothing will hurt him or her? Second, I will examine whether this experience of complete safety is dependent upon impossible requirements, such as to be a good man or an impeccable Christian. Third, I will consider the character of the people who claim absolute safety as portrayed by different philosophers: do these people really need to be so cold and inhumanly detached from the world for them to be able to say that nothing can hurt them? I will argue that if, instead of asking how someone can claim absolute safety, we ask to what someone commits him- or her-self in making this claim, these difficulties disappear. (shrink)

With this article, I wish to introduce the concept of ‘faith envy’. From time to time, both believers and non-believers envy those who have faith or more faith. People envy, for example, Muslims or Charismatics for the significance and certainty of their convictions in their lives. I propose using ‘faith envy’ as an angle to investigate faith and religious language. This perspective opens up important new questions about faith. If we look at faith from this angle, we see aspects of (...) faith that remain obscure in many debates on religion, aspects beyond historical or factual matters. Firstly, I explore what it is exactly that is envied in faith envy. Secondly, I argue for the use of the concept ‘envy’ rather than ‘jealousy’ or ‘admiration’ in this context. Thirdly, I indicate how using the concept of faith envy may open up new theoretical perspectives on faith and in particular the nature of religious language. I show how the lives and works of Sören Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Simone Weil are illuminated by looking at them as people who envy faith. I conclude this article by providing some impressions of what novel perspectives using the concept of faith envy may bring to light. (shrink)

In order to articulate an account of erotic love that does not attempt to transcend its personal features, Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum lean on the speeches by Aristophanes and Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium. This leads them to downplay the sense in which love is not only for another person, but also for the good. Drawing on a distinction between relative and absolute senses of speaking about the good, I mediate between two features of love that at first may seem (...) irreconcilable. The first is the sense in which love is deeply personal in character. The second is the sense in which we in love come to articulate ethical demands. With the help of the Diotimian ascent of love that Socrates presents in his speech, I submit that these two can come together in the realization that our personally conditioned responses in love are transformed to accommodate demands that carry an unconditional meaning. (shrink)

On Simone Weil’s “Pythagorean” view, mathematics has a mystical significance. In this paper, the nature of this significance and the coherence of Weil’s view are explored. To sharpen the discussion, consideration is given to both Rush Rhees’ criticism of Weil and Vance Morgan’s rebuttal of Rhees. It is argued here that while Morgan underestimates the force of Rhees’ criticism, Rhees’ take on Weil is, nevertheless, flawed for two reasons. First, Rhees fails to engage adequately with either the assumptions underlying Weil’s (...) religious conception of philosophy or its dialectical method. Second, Rhees’ reading of Weil reflects an anti‐Platonist conception of mathematics his justification of which is unsound and whose influence impedes recognition of the coherence of Weil’s position. (shrink)

D. Z. Phillips is widely assumed to have held that Christian immortality has no reality outside of language. The author challenges that assumption, demonstrating that Phillips wished to show that contemporary analytic philosophy distorts the reality that immortality has for believers. While most philosophical accounts of Christian immortality depend upon terms that have little religious significance, Phillips offered accounts that stress the centrality of that significance. The author gives an account of the sort of philosophical attention that Phillips gave to (...) Christian immortality and demonstrates Phillips’ lament for both the lack of this sort of attention in contemporary philosophy as well as the loss of certain ways of living that exemplify a belief in eternal life with God. (shrink)

Most contemporary political theories of sovereignty – from Giorgio Agamben to Achille Mbembe – have argued that the emergency powers claimed by the Bush administration under the auspices of the War on Terror epitomized what Carl Schmitt calls a state of exception. If so, I argue, perhaps it is time for new visions of sovereignty to emerge, ones attendant to the eccentricities of the present conjuncture. Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring are but two obvious examples of counterpublics that (...) seem to have presented new modalities of sovereign life worth reflecting upon. Hardly states of exception, these are scenes of sovereignty that are more fraught and precarious, more democratic. I argue that the theories of sovereignty of George Bataille and Frantz Fanon may hold clues for coming to terms with these new sovereign scenes. Though often under-emphasized in the scholarly literature on Bataille and Fanon, for both thinkers sovereignty is a condition of existence, an expression of a surreal mode of esthetic experience and poetic beauty. I argue that drawing attention to the comparison of the political thought of Bataille and Fanon, and especially to the value of surrealism for contemporary political theory generally, holds promise for those of us interested in challenging the Schmittian consensus. At stake is a refreshed understanding of sovereignty, not as norm or exception, but as a condition of political life lived by everyday subjects caught in a surreal state in-between. (shrink)

Both Simone Weil and John McDowell analogize value or meaning to sensations such as colour or heat, and this analogy is a strategy for resisting anti‐realism. However, McDowell's analogy tacitly accepts the very dualism which he is criticizing, while Weil's analogy is both more naïve and more radical than his. Like McDowell, Weil argues that virtuous character is the actualization of a second nature, but she emphasizes the role of the body in this process. Fully trained, the agent's body is (...) a transparent medium through which she reads circumstances – and through which the circumstances, clearly perceived, express themselves in action. (shrink)

This essay thinks through Nanguo Ziqi’s famous “I lost myself” (wu sang wo 吾喪我) remark in the Qiwulun 齊物論 in light of Weil’s notion of decreation. The desire to undo the self is paradoxical, and most philosophical interpretations of the Zhuangzi passage try to avoid the paradox of “I lost myself” by positing various levels of self. Weil’s decreation embraces the paradox, and thereby helps clarify how Nanguo’s “I lost myself” connects with his subsequent metaphor of pipes of Heaven. More (...) broadly, this essay is a first step in drawing together these two uniquely unsystematic and paradoxical thinkers. (shrink)

The body is the canvas on which the female experience is painted and through which female identity is often understood. The female body is a slate on which a patriarchal story has been written, scarred onto the flesh. For Simone Weil metaxu was simultaneously that which separated and connected, so for instance the wall between two prison cells cuts off the prisoners but was also the means by which they communicated by knocking on that wall. Could the body be that (...) metaxu all at once separating us and connecting us to the Divine? The nature of metaxu is that it offers a route not just for the individual soul but for the souls of others to travel. If all peoples renounce their outer shell – and by this I do not mean their bodies but rather the bodies or clothes or ideals written upon those people by patriarchy or capitalism or colonialism – if those real bodies come to the broken body of Christ [which is stripped and scarred] standing in solidarity with and mimicking this broken body, without the things which have been put upon their bodies but with scarred flesh showing, then this is where metaxu is possible for here we see a renouncing of ‘self’ as created by patriarchy and all that is left is a space that is the place where we are authentically self and God dwells. (shrink)

This article attempts to elucidate the ethical meaning behind the words ‘the ethics of self’ and ‘an ethical self’, particularly in the light of Noddings’ ‘ethical self’, in order to show the relevance of these terms to the practice of ethical caring. It examines the relationship that Noddings believes exists between one’s actual self and the vision one has of one’s ideal self. I attempt to draw out a meaning derived from the texts in which this concept has been captured, (...) while at the same time juxtaposing the concept ‘ethic of care’ from my own research, together with the meaning given by philosophers Peta Bowden, Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil, who have written on the subject, albeit indirectly in some instances. A participant in a colleague’s research on care and patient satisfaction used similar expressions, and gave the impetus for this article. (shrink)

Businesses have long been admonished for being unduly focused on the pursuit of profit. However, there are some organizations whose purpose is not exclusively economic to the extent that they seek to constitute common good. Building on Christian ethics as a starting point, our article shows how the pursuit of the common good of the firm can serve as a guide for humanistic management. It provides two principles that humanistic management can attempt to implement: first, that community good is a (...) condition for the realization of personal good, and second, that community good can only be promoted if it is oriented towards personal good. To better understand which community good can favor personal good and how it can be achieved, we examine two recent humanistic movements—Conscious Capitalism and Economy of Communion—that strive to participate in the common good. From the analysis of these two movements, we identify a shared managerial willingness to adopt the two principles. Moreover, we also reveal that Conscious Capitalism and Economy of Communion present different ways of linking community good and personal good, and therefore, different means exist for firms to participate in the common good. (shrink)

In Authority and Estrangement Richard Moran takes some rather illuminating steps towards getting rid of the Cartesian picture of self-knowledge. I argue, however, that Moran’s crucial distinction between deliberative and theoretical attitude is seriously contaminated by that traditional picture.

There is much that I admire in Richard Moran's account of how first‐person authority may be consistent with self‐knowledge as an achievement. In this paper, I examine his attempt to characterize the goal of psychoanalytic treatment, which is surely that the patient should go beyond the mere theoretical acceptance of the analyst's interpretation, and requires instead a more intimate, first‐personal, awareness by the patient of their psychological condition.I object, however, that the way in which Moran distinguishes between the deliberative and (...) the theoretical attitudes is ultimately inconsistent with a satisfactory account of psychoanalytic practice; mainly because, despite Moran's claims to the contrary, such a distinction is still inspired by a Cartesian picture of the self. I argue that, in the light of his distinction, Moran may emphasize that an agent's psychological dispositions should be permeable to her decisions and projects, but is forced to reject the idea that permeability could go the other way too. I explore Bernard Williams' notion of acknowledgment and Simone Weil's distinction between two notions of necessity, in order to articulate a notion of receptive passivity which may help us to characterize this second direction of permeability. I finally outline why receptive passivity (and, thereby, the double direction of permeability) is crucial in order to identify the goal of psychoanalytic treatment and, derivatively, to understand how a certain kind of awareness may have a significant therapeutic effect. (shrink)