Using Peter Wirzbicki's Fighting for the Higher Law as its analytic starting, this review essay considers the place of antislavery in the developments of American philosophy. Wirzbicki considers the role of African American Transcendentalists and their appeal to a “higher law,” a concept articulated significantly by a diverse group of thinkers associated with Transcendentalism. By 1850, such thinkers appropriated aspects of British and continental idealism, especially the relationship between “understanding” and “Reason,” to aggressively attack human chattel bondage. In doing so, (...) they not only reflected the tenets of America's broader intellectual ethos (i.e., notions of democracy) but also cultivated the ground for philosophy in the postbellum period. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men with Muskets, Women with Lyres: Nationality, Citizenship, and Gender in the Writings of Germaine de StaëlSusanne HillmanOn 23 May 1812 Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), Europe’s best-known enemy of Napoleon Bonaparte, set out from her estate on Lake Geneva to escape to England. In her reminiscences, she reflected on the pivotal event as follows:[A]fter ten years of ever-increasing persecutions [...] I was obliged to leave two homelands as a (...) fugitive, Switzerland and France, by order of a man less French than I. For I was born on the banks of the Seine, where his only claim to citizenship is his tyranny. He saw the light of day on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa’s savage sway. His father did not, like mine, devote his fortune and his sleepless nights to defending France from bankruptcy and famine; the air of this beautiful country is not his native air; how can he understand the pain of being exiled from it, when he considers this fertile land only as the instrument of his victories. [End Page 231] Where is his patrie? It is any country that accepts his domination. His fellow-citizens? They are whatever slaves obey his orders.1In this passage, de Staël deliberately links nationality and citizenship. In her view, citizenship status was acquired simply by being born on French soil. Her family’s tireless labors on behalf of the nation added another irrefutable proof of Frenchness. In addition, growing up in France and breathing the country’s invigorating air had created an emotional attachment that a person raised elsewhere simply could not fathom. We thus have a triad of birth/service/sentiment that connects the deserving individual to his or her nation (in this case la grande nation).In this essay I explore de Staël’s understanding of the twin concepts of nationality and citizenship through the lens of gender. Nationality and citizenship were of perennial concern to her thought, partly because of the turbulent times she lived in, partly because of her personal experience in exile. Influenced by history and literature, she early on admired the gallant men with muskets who heroically sacrificed their lives for the glory of the nation. But it was the exceptional women with lyres who were destined to act as the nation’s unifying agents by recreating the gallants’ deeds in writing. By imagining the nation these women fulfilled the supreme task of citizenship. In what follows I will argue that de Staël conceived of the ideal citizen as a woman writer or artist who served her nation by inspiring its members with enthusiasm and virtue.2 In elaborating her view of the superior woman as citoyenne and national muse she made an important contribution to the debate on the nation and the citizen.The only daughter of Louis XVI’s finance minister Jacques Necker and the salonnière Suzanne Curchod-Necker, of Genevan and Vaudois citizenship respectively, de Staël gained fame and notoriety through her brilliant conversational talents, political intrigues, and unconventional relationships with famous men. Though she considered herself a “true Frenchwoman” (véritable française),3 she was a citizen of Geneva and a Swedish subject by marriage, at least until 1803 when she took advantage of the Code Civil [End Page 232] and officially claimed French citizenship.4 Considering this multiplicity of conflicting loyalties, it is not surprising that her major writings reveal a sustained preoccupation with these issues.Despite their undeniable significance for early nineteenth-century European intellectual history, historians have so far devoted scant attention to de Staël’s writings. In fact, in the US, Staëlien studies have largely been dominated by literary criticism and theory.5 This has had the effect of prioritizing her novels over her non-fiction, downplaying the historical context of her oeuvre and, most grievously, ignoring de Staël’s historical contribution to socio-political thought.6 As a result of the complex ways in which her personal experience informed her writing, her oeuvre is best examined as a unified, though certainly inconsistent, whole. Her writings were rarely “products of intense deliberation, but rather reflections... (shrink)

Long claimed to be the dominant conception of practical reason, the Humean theory that reasons for action are instrumental, or explained by desires, is the basis for a range of worries about the objective prescriptivity of morality. As a result, it has come under intense attack in recent decades. A wide variety of arguments have been advanced which purport to show that it is false, or surprisingly, even that it is incoherent. Slaves of the Passions aims to set the record (...) straight, by advancing a version of the Humean theory of reasons which withstands this sophisticated array of objections. Schroeder defends a radical new view which, if correct, means that the commitments of the Humean theory have been widely misunderstood. Along the way, he raises and addresses questions about the fundamental structure of reasons, the nature of normative explanations, the aims of and challenges facing reductive views in metaethics, the weight of reasons, the nature of desire, moral epistemology, and most importantly, the relationship between agent-relational and agent-neutral reasons for action. (shrink)

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau's political theory. Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau (...) squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable. (shrink)

There are some verses in the Qur'an that can be understood at first glance to mean that Allah Almighty knew certain things afterwards. Based on such verses, it has been claimed that Allah Almighty knew the voluntary acts of the slaves afterwards. This view, whose historical origin goes back to Cehmiyya, is defended by Abdülaziz Bayındır today. Adopting an approach that understands and explains the verses he refers to as the main reference on the subject, Abdülaziz Bayındır argues that the (...) thirty-first verse of the chapter of Muhammad and other verses with a similar notion indicate that Allah does not know beforehand the optional actions of His servants. In this study, the rational and narrative evidences that Bayındır presented as a justification for his views were examined within the framework of the basic procedural principles of the science of tafsir. In our study, the method of analysis and criticism has been adopted. While interpreting the verses that Bayındır examined as a basis for his thesis, the method he put forward was verified through different verses, and it was seen that this method did not offer an accurate and authentic methodology of understanding and interpretation. It has been seen that the verses that Bayındır put forward as a basis for his thesis do not indicate that Allah knows the voluntary actions of the servants afterwards, but that he reveals what he knows in his pre-eternal knowledge. (shrink)

Based on an extended fieldwork, the paper discusses the construction of identity in a Brazilian quilombo - a term originally used by the Portuguese authorities to juridically define the flights of the Brazilian slaves. Appealing to a Constitutional Article granting the property of the land to the descendant of the fugitive slaves, the people of Frechal (Maranhão) obtained - after complex events overshadowed by tension and violence - the expropriation of the land bought by an entrepreneur of São Paulo (...) with the precise intent to forcibly expel the local population. Founding their right on an idea of cultural authenticity and mobilizing a symbolism capable of legitimating their claims and of giving them a legal weight, they transformed themselves from object of slavery, discrimination and racism to ethno-political subjects. Proceeding from the analysis of this paradigmatic case, the article shows how the term quilombo can be "re-semanticized" in order to be applicable to the contemporary situations of the Afro-Brazilian population. The actuality of the word, transferred from its original juridical meaning of colonial matrix, is founded on the idea that the quilombo s are not isolated survivals of the past to honor in the memory of the heroes that fought against slavery. Rather they represent true projects of a new political order, nuclei of the contemporary resistance founded on the collective property of the land. As such the quilombos are considered as real counterpoints to the neoliberal expansion in the rural areas. (shrink)

In the Roman world, slavery played a crucial role. Besides private slaves, owned by individual masters, and—from the beginning of the Principate—imperial slaves, who were the property of the emperors, there were also the so-called public slaves: non-free individuals who were owned by a community, such as the Roman people as a whole in Rome, or the citizen body of a colony or a municipium in Italy or in the provinces. Public slaves in Rome were employed for numerous public services (...) and acted under the authority of the Senate as assistants to public magistrates, officers or priests. Similarly, in Italian and in provincial cities, they juridically depended on the decisions of local councils and performed various activities within the civic administration, beholden to the magistrates. (shrink)

A battle is raging for the soul of America, and it is of critical interest to the survival of freedom world-wide. Our nation is surrendering its fundamental values of individual responsibility and self determination. Domestically we exchange our privacy and autonomy for the chimera of security; internationally we abdicate our ability to act in our national interest. Why are we squandering the precious jewels of the greatest political experiment in human history? What actions can thoughtful citizens take to protect and (...) regain their personal freedoms? This important collection of essays is supplemented by lengthy appendices containing the primary reference materials that underlie the author's bold assertions. Readers will fearlessly explore the modern plague of collectivism, especially as embodied by the United Nations; learn the true political, historical, and spiritual roots of the September 11th attacks; revisit the Waco massacre without averting their glance; witness the cynical manipulations of the civilian disarmament movement; and be invited to contemplate the role of transcendent values in the battle to preserve and maintain freedom. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate a new and influential interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the slave revolt in morality. This interpretation was first proposed by Bernard Reginster and has since been extended by R. Lanier Anderson and Avery Snelson. Citing textual evidence from Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, these scholars have argued for the counterintuitive view that nobles, not slaves, instigated the slave revolt in morality. This is because Nietzsche says that nobles create (...) new values, introduces priests as nobles, and claims that priests began the slave revolt. However, against this new approach I argue that these scholars neglect important evidence from these same texts in which Nietzsche claims that the psychologically slavish can also create values, assumes that politically subordinated nobles can lose their psychological nobility, and asserts that the slave revolt was instigated by psychologically slavish priests. I also argue that these scholars ignore Nietzsche’s related claims that the priestly peasant Luther renewed the Jewish slave revolt against re-ascendant Roman nobles and that the plebeian philosopher Socrates led a slave revolt in morality against the Athenian nobles. Thus, it turns out that none of the leaders of the slave revolt were noble and that one of them was not even priestly. I conclude with a defense of the traditional and straightforward view that Nietzsche always conceived of the slave revolt in morality as an act of revenge by oppressed people who are politically and psychologically ignoble. (shrink)

Sex determination offers an opportunity to address many classic questions of developmental biology. In addition, because sex determination evolves rapidly, it offers an opportunity to investigate the evolution of genetic hierarchies. Sex determination in Drosophila melanogaster is controlled by the master regulatory gene, Sex lethal (Sxl). DmSxl controls the alternative splicing of a downstream gene, transformer (tra), which acts with tra2 to control alternative splicing of doublesex (dsx). DmSxl also controls its own splicing, creating an autoregulatory feedback loop that ensures (...) expression of Sxl in females, but not males. A recent paper1 has shown that in the dipteran Ceratitis capitata later (downstream) steps in the regulatory hierarchy are conserved, while earlier (upstream) steps are not. Cctra is regulated by alternative splicing and apparently controls the alternative splicing of Ccdsx. However, Cctra is not regulated by CcSxl. Instead it appears to autoregulate in a manner similar to the autoregulation seen with DmSxl. BioEssays 25:1–4, 2003. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The compensatory‐justice justification of affirmative action requires a comparison of the actual world in which the injured person lives with a relevantly similar possible world in which this person lives but where the unjust injuring act never occurred, in order to identify the degree of harm brought about by the unjust injurious act. The problem is that some unjust injuring acts, particularly acts of slavery, led to intercourse and the later creation of the ancestors of many members of minority groups. (...) Hence, there is no possible world in which these individuals exist and in which the injustice, e.g., slavery, did not occur. As a result, the counterfactual test does not allow us to measure or even understand the existence of a compensatable injury to these persons. I provide an inheritance‐based account of compensation that escapes this. (shrink)

In this article, we present participatory action research as a radical act of humanity: a direct response to real dehumanization of vulnerable communities. We argue, as an enactment of critic...

Examination of Sophocles’ Antigone reveals how the corpse remains a historically, culturally and politically inscribed subject. To leave Polynices’ corpse, by Creon’s decree, to the open air to be consumed by carrion is e!ectively to erase Polynice’s status as an Athenian citizen and transubstantiate the materiality of the corpse into one that is immaterial and non-human – that of a slave. Antigone’s refusal to leave the unburied remains of her brother - a refusal that has been traditionally romanticized as (...) an act of rebellion against authoritarian control - circumscribes and rei”es class boundaries between the free, the civilized, and the unfree, uncivilized slave. In e!ect, Polynices’ unburied body unearths the ways in which a “western, hegemonic canon” has e!ectively buried a history of chattel slavery that has made much of this cultural output possible. An engagement with particularly notable ruminations on Antigone, such as Hegel’s and Derrida’s, serves to exemplify how the “gure of Antigone has been appropriated in ways that consolidate, rather than disrupt, a tradition of thought that evades its own implication in slavery and colonialism. (shrink)

In What Is Literature? Sartre claims, "One does not write for slaves."1 This takes place in the context of an argument Sartre makes in claiming literature is an appeal to the freedom of others.2 Furthermore, the acts of reading and writing are collaborative occasions that invent and re-invent the world by disclosing it and creating it.3 It is important to be precise about what Sartre believes must be presupposed in order for literature to function. The force of committed literature is (...) not propaganda that attempts to control the reader; it only comes about from the a priori existence of free subjects. Thus, Sartre notes, "The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to... (shrink)

This paper adopts a legal perspective to counter some exaggerations of today’s debate on the social understanding of robotics. According to a long and well-established tradition, there is in fact a relative strong consensus among lawyers about some key notions as, say, agency and liability in the current use of robots. However, dealing with a field in rapid evolution, we need to rethink some basic tenets of the contemporary legal framework. In particular, time has come for lawyers to acknowledge that (...) some acts of robots should be considered as a new source of legal responsibility for others’ behaviour. (shrink)

This book examines slavery and gender through a feminist reading of narratives including female slaves in the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and early Christian texts. Through the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, the voices of three enslaved female characters—the female slave who questions Peter in Luke 22, Rhoda in Acts 12, and the prophesying slave of Acts 16—are placed into dialogue with female slaves found in the Apocryphal Acts, ancient novels, classical texts, and images (...) of enslaved women on funerary monuments. Although ancients typically distrusted the words of slaves, Christy Cobb argues that female slaves in Luke-Acts speak truth to power, even though their gender and status suggest that they cannot. In this Bakhtinian reading, female slaves become truth-tellers and their words confirm aspects of Lukan theology. This exegetical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary book is a substantial contribution to conversations about women and slaves in Luke-Acts and early Christian literature. (shrink)

In recent years, some scholars and prominent political figures have advocated the deepening of North American integration on roughly the European Union model, including the creation of new political institutions and the free movement of workers across borders. The construction of such a North American Union, if it included even a very thin trans-state citizenship regime, could represent the most significant expansion of individual entitlements in the region since citizenship was extended to former slaves in the United States. With such (...) a possibility as its starting point, this article explores some striking parallels between the mass, legally prohibited movement across boundaries by fugitive slaves in the pre-Civil War period, and that by current unauthorized migrants to the United States. Both were, or are, met on their journeys by historically parallel groups of would-be helpers and hinderers. Their unauthorized movements in both periods serve as important signals of incomplete entitlements or institutional protections. Most crucially, moral arguments for extending fuller entitlements to both groups are shown here to be less distinct than may be prima facie evident, reinforcing the case for expanding and deepening the regional membership regime. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OwlJohn HollanderOwlNow that the owl-light—in the time between Dog and wolf, as some call it—ends, we wait As you alight on an unseen Branch to interrogateThe listener and the rememberer; Lost outlines heighten—as last colors fade— The sounder darkness you confer Upon the spruce’s shade.Deluded by the noonlight’s wide display Of everything, our vision floats through thin Spaces of ill-illumined day: How we are taken inBy what we take (...) in with our roving eyes! Your constant ones, if moved to track or trace, Take their head with them, lantern-wise Taking heed, keeping faceIn the society of night, and keeping Faith with the spirit of pure fixity That sets the mind’s great heart to leaping At what you more than see. [End Page 163]Medusa’s visage gazed our bodies to Literal stone unshaded: your face, caught In our glance widely eyes us through, Astonishing our thought. You who debated with the nightingale The rectitude of northern wisdom, cold Against the love-stuff of the tale The laid-back south had told; And yet who stood amid the lovely, thick Leaves of the ivy, while in all their folly The larks and thrushes sought the prick And berries of the holly; You who confounded the rapacious crow Thus to be favored by the great sky-eyed Queen of the air and all who know, Now ever by her side; With silent wing and interrogative Cry in lieu of a merely charming song, You sound the dark in which you live Perched above right and wrong. Resonance is not vacancy: although He could hear nothing in your hollow howls But woe and his own guilt, Thoreau Rejoiced that there were owls. Scattered and occasional questionings With here and there too late a warning shout, Wisdom arises on the wings Of darkness and of doubt. Where in day’s vastnesses does truth reside? In noon’s uncompromising light and heat When even our own shadows hide Under our very feet? Or in the hidden center of the quick Resilient dark on which your narrowed sight So pointedly alights to pick Not the day, but the night, [End Page 164] Its fruitful flower, petaled a hundredfold? Oh it is there, truth, with the poor blind prey Trembling with prescience or cold Waiting for how your way Of well-tuned suddenness and certitude Tight-strung and execution highly wrought Leads to the pounced-on object, food For something beyond thought, By overlooking nothing, overseeing In all the stillness hidden, tiny motions Squirming with the life of being Inferences and notions. With patient agency the beak and claws Of fierce sublime awareness pluck it clean Deriving what for us are laws Governing the unseen. Under torn canvas we put out to sea Trusting, though puzzled by what glows above, To something like philosophy To be the helmsman of Life (but whose life?). Your lessons of the land, Down-to-tree, then, if not -to-earth, indict Our helplessness to understand Just what we are at night. Immensities of starlight told us lies Of what and where we are; but, we allow, Drunk with the Milky Way, our eyes Are on the Wagon now, Fugitive slaves, leaving despair for dread As if in search of the cold, freeing North, Keep gazing steadily ahead Keep on Keep knowing forth You urge us, as your silences address The power that Minerva chose you for: Great-winged, far-ranging consciousness Now come to rest in your [End Page 165] Olympian attentiveness that finds The affrighted heartbeat on the ground, perceives The flutter of substances, the mind’s Life in the fallen leaves.John HollanderYale UniversityCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The article offers a fundamental comparison between a passage in the dialogue of Methodius of Olympus calles De libero arbitrio, and one in the Hexaemeron of George of Pisidia. The starting point is represented by a description of the stormy sea, contained in the De libero arbitrio. After a poetical scene full of epical elements , Methodius gives us an original representation of the sea: as the servant can't refuse to obey his master and mumbles by himself, so the sea (...) has to restrain its anger and remain in its limits, even if it wants to be free. According to Job 38.11, it is forced to sacrifice its will, because there is a divine power that governs the universe. This passage may have influenced the composition of George of Pisidia. In fact, in his Hexaemeron the poet has come to personify the sea, first of all, with the image of a fugitive slave, then with a Bacchante who, taken by an impulse, wishes to go beyond the limits, and finally, with a female slave who is dragged away; this is created to support the conception that nature, in spite of natural impulse, is not independent and free, but is governed by God. Even if George of Pisidia inserts in his scene more details, the comparison of the sea with human subjects and the impossibility for it to be free refer to Methodius' passage. That the poet knew Methodius' writings is confirmed by one of his epigrams, in which he praises the bearing of the style of Methodius' works, based on evident lines of reasoning and divine inspiration. (shrink)

This engagement with Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that Germanic kings settled as political authorities in fiscal lands, and granted districts to some of the loyal members of their entourage over which they exercised power. This process relates to the fact that kings preserved fiscus-taxes, but that system had already deteriorated and finally disintegrated in the sixth century. In the long run, the problem was expressed in an organic crisis of the ruling class. In consequence, popular revolts (...) against taxation ensued. These revolts are an indicator that the collapsed ancient machinery of domination was not replaced by another in the short term, thus giving way to a political vacuum. The fugitive slaves or serfs reflected in the laws are an indicator pointing in the same direction. Under these conditions free peasant-communities multiplied. These events take us to the concept of peasant-mode societies that Wickham contributes to our understanding of the period. Despite the importance he attaches to this concept, he observes nuances; not in all regions, he claims, did peasant-logic prevail. The evidence allows us, on the contrary, to extend the scope of the concept and to establish a single theoretical basis for the construction of the feudal system on a European scale. (shrink)

Stigmata and grammata in the accounts of miraculous cures at Epidauros. A new semantic and clinical analysis The accounts of miraculous cures at Epidauros have been the object of many interpretations and have led to numerous speculations concerning the pathologies described therein. Thus, up to the present, the termes and were interpreted especially as tattoos of fugitive slaves. By placing the words in a medical context, and through a double semantic and pathological analysis, it has been possible to propose (...) a retrospective diagnosis of the ailment afflicting two patients of the god Asklepios. The place of this account among the iamata is once again fully justified. (shrink)

In this book Feinberg presents seven essays that explore various topics in law, morality, and political theory. The first two essays deal with questions about the relationship between morality and legal theory. The first essay, on natural law jurisprudence, offers a compact introduction to the debate between legal positivists and natural law thinkers. Focusing on the fugitive slave cases during the American Civil War, Feinberg argues that the unquestionable immorality of slavery suggests the illegitimacy of laws institutionalizing it, (...) and thus at least in extreme cases the legitimacy of a law can turn on the morality of the institutions it serves. (shrink)

One of the most remarkable features of the language of early Greek writing is a pervasive rhetorical strategy which consists in personifying objects for the purpose of identifying humans closely associated with them. Such ‘speaking objects’ have no Semitic parallel; how, then, is their conventional status in the Archaic Age to be explained? This article first considers the formulaic language of speaking objects, which is no straightforward transcription of speech, and seeks to explain where it comes from. It then turns (...) to the question of why writers employed the curious strategy of personification by setting it in the broader context of early Greek writing and literature. Variously analogous to herms, slaves and skytalai, speaking objects are shown to have been conceived as messengers acting on behalf of their senders by not speaking in their name. (shrink)

In his book Slaves of the Passions, Mark Schroeder defends a Humean theory of reasons. Humeanism is the view that you have a reason to X only if X‐ing promotes at least one of your desires. But Schroeder rejects a natural companion theory of the weight of reasons, which he calls proportionalism. According to it, the weight of a reason is proportionate to the strength of the desire that grounds it and the extent to which the act promotes the object (...) of that desire. In this paper, I aim to do three things: (1) to show why Schroeder's arguments against proportionalism do not refute it; (2) to identify the real trouble with proportionalism; and (3) to suggest a better way of understanding it (preferentialism). According to this theory, the overall strength of reasons is determined by the agent's preferences. (shrink)

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act legislation has established the US as a global humanitarian leader on the issue of human trafficking. Through the use of formulaic victim narratives, appeals to masculinist protection, and invocations of slave abolitionism, legislators frame the law as a work of compassion and protection of migrant people. On the other hand, legislators often take a suspicious and unsympathetic approach to irregular migrants. This article describes the humanitarian posture adopted by the US in relation to anti-trafficking, (...) contrasting it with an anti-immigration sentiment, evidenced in two attempts to limit or rescind the benefits of anti-trafficking legislation for migrants. When considered together the humanitarian and anti-immigration focus of anti-trafficking law and policy make for an internally inconsistent approach to tackling trafficking. (shrink)

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. (...) This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen. (shrink)

In the colonial period since 1492, the colonial masters of Europe sent perpetrators within the colonised territories to other colonies where they became slaves – forced migration and diaspora. These slaves started a new life and became, like Cain’s children, the ancestors of a few notable families – a typical postcolonial situation of creating hybrid identities where East met West in Africa to procreate. The question this article asks is the following: how can one link migration and diaspora to Cain’s (...) situation? Cain’s punishment was twofold: the earth would no longer yield to him any fruit, and he would become a fugitive and a wanderer. It is as if the first logically led to the second in the Hebrew text. Cain’s vulnerability had a positive effect, so that later on in the story he seemed to have settled and procreated to the extent that his children became founders of arts, science and technology. The LXX partly solves this contradiction by making Cain physically handicapped with trembling and groaning. Significantly, in both traditions he is said to leave the presence of the deity to live elsewhere where he would not be confronted with either the deity or his parents. In both instances, a migration is clearly taking place with the implication that once being branded a perpetrator one can no longer reside within the community or society in whose midst the transgression took place. The perpetrator is removed from the victims and the latter need no longer confront him or her. This article will subsequently consider the following: the value of migration in the biblical text, the significance of Cain moving away from his clan and deity, and the effect of settling elsewhere. (shrink)

The four essays collected in this dossier are directed upon the contemporary understandings of blackness, as an ontology, a phenomenology, or a historicity. In the order of their presentation they encompass and situate what seems first to limit black being or overflow it, but which, when questioned, that is, disclosed, or unconcealed, does not fit into this logos, nor is ordered by it, even making what is most discernable about blackness in its past, future, or present, seem imaginary, moored in (...) a non-present,and presence, but in ways which make the non-being that marks blackness as sign, affect, or speaking being, unthinkable except as an appearing, a manifestation, an identity.As a dossier directed upon the present philosophical understanding of blackness, each paper seeks to unanchor blackness from the meanings and presuppositions that it normally calls forth. Beyond what is discernable, or ready-made, each paper addresses structures that make (and have made) blackness discernable as the always given to be seen, as meaningless speech, as pathology, as a concept beyond reason.The dossier opens with a question: what kind of disturbance does blackness present to being? Why does it seem to madden reason, or call forth frenzy? In Calvin Warren’s essay, “The Karen Call,” what comes into correlation with blackness are various kinds of emergency that structure white thought and presence but that belie witnessing and intelligibility, and in whose chain of significations can be discerned an ontological privilege that constitutes the world. To appear emergent, it seems, all blackness has to do is become one with the myth that bans or compromises it; a manifestation in which subject-object relations are already polarized by the dangers that deploy it in dramas of emergency. Once blackness becomes emergent, there is no escape, for it comes up against what Warren, reading Heidegger against the grain, suggests is a racial destiny of Being. To appear black is forthwith to resemble an es gibt that is indissociable from threat, falsehood, fantasy, and obliteration. To that extent, blackness attests to a kind of ontological emergency without surcease or hope, and one whose trace remains in every moment or glimpse; whose technical modality and structure always returns us to the call that is neither speech nor gaze, word nor symbol, but represents an extimacy that is undeconstructable, beyond utterance, meaning, or reparation.Such extimacy seems to induce a crisis in the philosophical notion of being itself. In Axelle Karera’s essay, “Paraontology,” the question asked is why blackness cannot be contained or fitted into ontology itself; or, if philosophy is ontology, why does blackness seem to signify an irreducible resistance to it?How does such resistance occur? If blackness can only be presented as “paraontology,” a word that seems to shelter ontology at the same time as it presents the search for a new order of being, what does the para teach us about blackness as disorder, resistance, or identity? What is its philosophical genealogy and affiliation, and why does the para itself seem to never get beyond its own conciliation, or filiation to philosophy, whose ordering and racist historicity thereby remains the seme and mark of the para as interval, trope, and index? Or, put more simply, can blackness ever resist its own resistance as trope, conjuncture, or representation? Retracing that genealogy through the work of Oskar Becker, Karera uncovers a surreptitious repetition in black uses of the word, in whose weave can be discerned a fascist interference that not only undermines the fugitivity of the resistance so claimed, but one that unwittingly repeats a fascist ontology of world, history, and being.1 It’s a startling, deeply disturbing claim. But the apparent echoing of the Heideggerian bell in black significations of ontology suggests that what is being reabsorbed here is not so much a radical difference but a concept that remains justified and in fee to, pardoned and annulled by, a white notion of being. What, then, can it mean to think blackness as para? Nothing more than a philosophical confusion that confuses l’être qui fuit, that is, the lack that Lacan says cannot be completed or resisted, for an appositional fantasy of displacement. Here everything that is deemed black has to be made meaningful in apposition to ontology, but everything that is black must also, it seems, always return apposition to the white para of ontology; to be black and appositional would, it seems, produce only the disavowal of the philosophical genealogy that always already determines it.One would be right to distrust such claims—the moralism of the refusal, and the scandal of the faux resistance by which the para hides behind its own whited-out screen.In the third contribution to the dossier, the question asked is what would it mean for blackness to repair itself, to let go or retrieve and so redeem its own historical conjuncture? How do we refer to an irreparable past, that is, a past that keeps on coming back, but one that has no sign or signified, no memory that can recapture or reveal it, or simply rejoin us to it without remainder? Rinaldo Walcott’s essay, “‘Retrospective Significance,’” revisits the reparations debate as a question of black being. Instead of repair, he finds desolation and emptiness, or what he calls a staggeringly incoherent rhetoric of coherency. It’s a paradox that addresses what it means to remember or to forget a nothing; if blackness is nothing, how does one reconnect with it, bond with it, compensate it in its historic devastation? What would it mean to receive meaning from such devastation, to express it if this nothingness is absolute, or absolutely valueless? If ontology is a structure, then blackness, Walcott suggests, expresses nothing less than a “slave-ness” that continues to confront and disturb us absolutely, irrevocably. As such slave-ness is the trace that remains as a sign of the irreparable. As a trace, and not a sign, slave-ness becomes the primordial signifier of being, nation, history, and diaspora. But it is what makes it irrecuperable that defines its value and difficulty for the very language of reparation. Walcott pursues this difficult, enigmatic thread through the work of black thinkers on diaspora and identity. He concludes: black being cannot be dissociated from the disturbance it offers value, conscience, and any thought of alterity.The final and fourth contribution returns to the question of blackness as the trace or thread (the monstration) of being. How does one follow the thread (montrer) of blackness if it is always already withdrawn from being? David Marriott’s essay, “Ontology and Lalangue,” evokes Lacan’s concept of lalangue in pursuit of this enigmatic equivocation between letter and signifier, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Showing how both discourses have sought to master this exorbitance as master and/or free it as slave, I show how blackness is extinguished by the very words used to precipitate it into being. The slavish audacity of this lalangue is then shown to disarticulate, or more exactly, withdraw from ontology, but only so that whiteness can be presented and proclaimed all the more as the un-representable truth and logic of Dasein. This way of excluding blackness while preserving whiteness is not only central to philosophical and psychoanalytic understandings of language, Marriott argues, but this way of manifesting itself without manifesting itself is also crucial to the racialization of the logos as such.What is essential here is the way a meaning that is beyond meaning or representation is inserted into a problematic of mastery and servitude that advances-conceals a racial genealogy but in ways that makes the being of blackness an enigma. As such, blackness becomes an exorbitance that is always effaced in its monstration. More, its revelation must necessarily be unrecognized as the very locus of knowledge and truth. In that sense, what would it mean to figure, or to speak, this n’est pas without the consolation of being, meaning, truth, or logic? What would it mean to represent it as situated or defined by the language of ontology? Is black speaking being always in a relationship to and simultaneously the manifestation of a lalangue of lalangue? (shrink)

Joel Feinberg : In Memoriam. Preface. Part I: INTRODUCTION TO THE NATURE AND VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1. Joel Feinberg: A Logic Lesson. 2. Plato: "Apology." 3. Bertrand Russell: The Value of Philosophy. PART II: REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 1. The Existence and Nature of God. 1.1 Anselm of Canterbury: The Ontological Argument, from Proslogion. 1.2 Gaunilo of Marmoutiers: On Behalf of the Fool. 1.3 L. Rowe: The Ontological Argument. 1.4 Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Five Ways, from Summa Theologica. 1.5 Samuel (...) Clarke: A Modern Formulation of the Cosmological Argument. 1.6 William L. Rowe: The Cosmological Argument. 1.7 William Paley: The Argument from Design. 1.8 Michael Ruse: The Design Argument. 1.9 David Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2. The Problem of Evil. 2.1 Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Rebellion. 2.2 J. L. Mackie: Evil and Omnipotence. 2.3 Peter van Inwagen: The Argument from Evil. 2.4 Michael Murray and Michael Rea: The Argument from Evil. 2.5 B. C. Johnson: God and the Problem of Evil. 3. Reason and Faith. 3.1 W. K. Clifford: The Ethics of Belief. 3.2 William James: The Will to Believe. 3.3 Kelly James Clark: Without Evidence or Argument. 3.4 Blaise Pascal: The Wager. 3.5 Lawrence Shapiro: Miracles and Justification. 3.6 Simon Blackburn: Infini-Rien. Part III. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: ITS GROUNDS AND LIMITS. 1. Skepticism. 1.1 John Pollock: A Brain in a Vat. 1.2 Michael Huemer: Three Skeptical Arguments. 1.3 Robert Audi: Skepticism. 2. The Nature and Value of Knowledge. 2.1 Plato: Knowledge as Justified True Belief. 2.2 Edmund Gettier: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? 2.3 James Cornman, Keith Lehrer, and George Pappas: An Analysis of Knowledge. 2.4 Gilbert Ryle: Knowing How and Knowing That. 2.5 Plato: "Meno". 2.6 Linda Zagzebski, Epistemic Good and The Good Life. 3. Our Knowledge of the External World. 3.1 Bertrand Russell: Appearance and Reality and the Existence of Matter. 3.2 René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. 3.3 John Locke: The Causal Theory of Perception. 3.4 George Berkeley: Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. 3.5 G. E. Moore: Proof of an External World. 4. The Methods of Science. 4.1 David Hume: An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 4.2 Wesley C. Salmon: An Encounter with David Hume. 4.3 Karl Popper: Science: Conjectures and Refutations. 4.4 Philip Kitcher: Believing Where We Cannot Prove. Part IV: MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE. 1. The Mind-Body Problem. 1.1 Brie Gertler: In Defense of Mind--Body Dualism. 1.2 Frank Jackson: The Qualia Problem. 1.3 David Papineau: The Case for Materialism. 1.4 Paul Churchland: Functionalism and Eliminative Materialism. 2. Can Non-Humans Think? 2.1 Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 2.2 John R. Searle: Minds, Brains, and Programs. 2.3 William G. Lycan: Robots and Minds. 3. Personal Identity and the Survival of Death. 3.1 John Locke: The Prince and the Cobbler. 3.2 Thomas Reid: Of Mr. Locke’s Account of Our Personal Identity. 3.3 David Hume: The Self. 3.4 Derek Parfit: Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons. 3.5 Shelly Kagan: What Matters. 3.6 John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Part V: DETERMINISM, FREE WILL, AND RESPONSIBILITY. 1. Libertarianism: The Case for Free Will and Its Incompatibility with Determinism. 1.1 Roderick M. Chisholm: Human Freedom and the Self. 1.2 Robert Kane: Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes. 2. Hard Determinism: The Case for Determinism and its Incompatibility with Its Incompatibility with Any Important Sense of Free Will. 2.1 James Rachels: The case against Free Will. 2.2 Derk Pereboom: Why We Have No Free Will and Can Live Without It. 3. Compatibilism: The Case for Determinism and Its Compatibility with the Most Important Sense of Free Will. 3.1 David Hume: Of Liberty and Necessity. 3.2 Helen Beebee: Compatibilism and the Ability to do Otherwise. 4. Freedom and Moral Responsibility. 4.1 Galen Strawson: Luck Swallows Everything. 4.2 Harry Frankfurt: Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. 4.3 Thomas Nagel: Moral Luck. 4.4 Susan Wolf: Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. Part VI: MORALITY AND ITS CRITICS. 1. Changes to Morality. 1.1 Joel Feinberg: Psychological Egoism. 1.2 Plato: The Immoralist’s Challenge. 1.3 Friedrich Nietzche: Master and Slave Morality. 1.4 Richard Joyce: The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality. 2. Proposed Standards and Right of Conduct. 2.1 Russ Shafer-Landau: Ethical Subjectivism. 2.2 Mary Midgley: Trying Out One’s New Sword. 2.3 Aristotle: Virtue and the Good Life. 2.4 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. 2.5 Plato: Euthyphro. 2.6 Immanuel Kant: The Good Will and the Categorical Imperative. 2.7 J.S. Mill: Utilitarianism, Chapters 2 and 4. 2.8 W. D. Ross: What Makes Right Acts Right? 2.9 Hilde Lindemann: What Is Feminist Ethics? 3. Ethical Problems. 3.1 Kwame Anthony Appiah: What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? 3.2 Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence and Morality. 3.3 John Harris: The Survival Lottery. 3.4 James Rachels: Active and Passive Euthanasia. 3.5 Mary Anne Warren: The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. 3.6 Don Marquis: Why Abortion Is Immoral. 4. The Meaning of Life. 4.1 Epicurus: Letter to Menoeceus. 4.2 Richard Taylor: The Meaning of Life. 4.3 Richard Kraut: Desire and the Human Good. 4.4 Leo Tolstoy: My Confession. 4.5 Susan Wolf: Happiness and Meaning. 4.6 Thomas Nagel: The Absurd. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass (1817?–1875) is a monumental American figure. As a runaway slave and leading black thinker, speaker, and writer in the abolitionist movement and during Reconstruction and its tragic collapse, his legacy in American history is singular. His ideals and scorching criticisms have marked American political thought about democracy, religion, race, racism, liberty, and equality. American political parties claim him, especially the Republican Party, with which he has an early connection and which has used his figure as cover for (...) their less than egalitarian projects, as do different ideological camps. One can find accounts of Douglass as an existentialist, revolutionary, proto-libertarian, liberal, civic republican thinker. His North Star continues to guide those who welcome its light, although it may lead them down different political-ideological paths.In all of this, one can imagine that those not familiar with the details of Douglass’s narratives and deeds might, in the context of all of that national hagiography, lose track of the fact that he was a black man. Frederick Douglass was a black man born into slavery, survived that brutal regime for twenty-one years, and then escaped and became a principal leader of the American abolition movement and leading black political thinker. Shortly after escaping slavery, he wrote his first famous autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and subsequently two more, in addition to volumes of speeches, articles, and a novel. It is as if his monumentality, like marble, alabaster, or bronze—the stuff of civic memorials—would obscure that irreducible fact in its grand monotones.Nick Brommell’s The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass reminds readers that that irreducible fact is a nontrivial, essential element of Douglass’s life and work. Bromell argues that this includes the political theory, a product of Douglass’s black political philosophy that runs through it all. He contends that Douglass argued for an inclusive conception of personhood and active citizenship, which America’s founding public philosophy, distorted by white supremacy, purposefully did not. Its elements include a defense of the moral personhood of blacks and their full and equal citizenship and a view of political community enlivened by group solidarities and active citizenship in defense of justice.In the course of his analysis, Bromell, a literary theorist, draws on an assortment of contemporary philosophical, rhetorical, and political theories, all of which have a critical theoretical bent, to explicate Douglass’s ideas. This method bears fruit in an instructive analysis of the rhetorical structure of Douglass’ his arguments. Brommell’s analysis of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom usefully explains how it stands out, not only in terms of updated autobiographical details, but also style and analytical and argumentative intent. This is a reading that other scholars have pioneered, but his rhetorical analysis fleshes out, for example, the role of moral sentiments, care, and intimate and social relations in Douglass’s narrative.A central feature of Bromell’s analysis is that Douglass employs what he and others call a “fugitive rhetoric” that comprises an emphasis on the perspective of his and other black Americans’ standpoints, the holding of opposite ideas in tension, and the use of the rhetorical technique “chiasmus,” where a statement is repeated in reverse order in successive phrases or clauses. It is an illuminating analysis, but Bromell goes further by claiming that Douglass was committed to the tenets of contemporary standpoint epistemology. Douglass certainly referenced and employed his experience and viewpoint as a black man and former slave in his work, just as he directly addressed the viewpoints and interests of black Americans. However, whether this means that Douglass was committed to the set of ideas that we now call standpoint epistemology is another matter. This concern applies to Bromell’s reading of Douglass’s method of holding seemingly contrasting ideas in tension and his use of chiasmus. Contemporary philosophical theories of chiasmus carry particular metaphysical and epistemological implications, and those theories might shed light on Douglass’s political projects. However, their incidental utility does not mean they definitively describe Douglass’s intent or public philosophy. This is a specifically important point because those theories lead to subjective conceptions of truth, especially relating to ethics and politics, while Douglass, as Bromell recognizes, repeatedly and emphatically endorsed what he took to be universal normative truths.In the same vein, Bromell makes several additional claims regarding the conceptual distinctiveness of Douglass’s view of power, dignity, rights, and citizenship. Douglass employed conceptions of each and other important ideas specific to his style, approach, and ends. As other black political thinkers did before him, he used these concepts to condemn slavery, racism, and the hypocrisy of American Republicanism and Christianity to assert the equal moral personhood and dignity of blacks and demand equal rights and citizenship. Bromell rightly emphasizes the role of “power,“ as an individual capability, in Douglass’s view of natural rights, moral dignity, and citizenship. It is an emphasis that is in keeping with both Douglass’s personal narrative and his national political projects. Douglass did not think that Americans—that Black Americans or abolitionists—should passively wait for deliverance from either God or national political leadership. Likewise, Bromell is correct to push back on reductions of Douglass’s views to Lockean, Rousseauian, or Kantian interpretations. Douglass is more than an incarnation of standard deontological, liberal, or civic republican philosophy. As a nineteenth-century black radical thinker, he stood in relation and contributed to those moral and political philosophical traditions. However, Bromell’s claim that Douglass’s conceptions of power, natural rights, and citizenship are conceptually distinct from the large host of major philosophical, theological, and political theoretical accounts that preceded him and influenced those ideas in his time is suggestive but not decisive.Like other writers and theorists before him, Bromell offers us another Douglass—as a black critical political theorist. This is a testament to the fecundity of Douglass’s black political-philosophical legacy. It is a legacy that leads to competing interpretations of him; all the same and for all their differences, his scorching prophetic vision of liberty, equality, citizenship, and progress unites them all. (shrink)

Psychopaths appear to be ‘creatures apart’ – grandiose, shameless, callous and versatile in their violence. I discuss biological underpinnings to their pale affect, their selective inability to discern fear and sadness in others and a predatory orienting towards images that make most startle and look away. However, just because something is biologically underpinned does not mean that it is innate. I show that while there may be some genetic determination of fearlessness and callous-unemotionality, these and other features of the personality (...) may arise from developmental failures in the interpersonal reception of their emotions, needs and their sense of self. One is unlikely to be able to own inner experiences if shamed for having them, or if, having them, one does not know how to regulate and soothe. So psychopaths may learn to attend away and suppress them. Rather than a fully inherited difficulty, they may have become unable to reflect on inner states, so meta-emotions and self-reflective emotions like guilt and shame do not fully arise. They retain enough sensitivity to know their difference, and hide. I suggest that psychopaths are characterised by a nested sense of self, arising from the surprising effect of shame on these seemingly shameless characters. They do not have an integrated sense of self across context or across time or in relation to a generalised social other. With a nested sense of self, diminished intensity and scope of affective experience (in both directly experienced and vicarious forms) they lack textured access to a personal, owned and integrated past. Thus they lack the kind of access to the past required for a motivationally compelling planning of the future. They lack the emotional investment in the future that enables us to overcome the motivation to act opportunistically and myopically. These individuals live strangely in time. They have a fugitive sense of self and live nimbly among many pasts. They present an elegant and coherent mask to the person they are addressing in the moment and generate possible futures without conviction. (shrink)

Does action always arise out of desire? G. F. Schueler examines this hotly debated topic in philosophy of action and moral philosophy, arguing that once two senses of "desire" are distinguished - roughly, genuine desires and pro attitudes - apparently plausible explanations of action in terms of the agent's desires can be seen to be mistaken. Desire probes a fundamental issue in philosophy of mind, the nature of desires and how, if at all, they motivate and justify our actions. At (...) least since Hume argued that reason "is and of right ought to be the slave of the passions," many philosophers have held that desires play an essential role both in practical reason and in the explanation of intentional action. G. F. Schueler looks at contemporary accounts of both roles in various belief-desire models of reasons and explanation and argues that the usual belief-desire accounts need to be replaced. Schueler contends that the plausibility of the standard belief-desire accounts rests largely on a failure to distinguish "desires proper," like a craving for sushi, from so-called "pro attitudes," which may take the form of beliefs and other cognitive states as well as desires proper. Schueler's "deliberative model" of practical reasoning suggests a different view of the place of desire in practical reason and the explanation of action. He holds that we can arrive at an intention to act by weighing the relevant considerations and that these may not include desires proper at all. (shrink)

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain thinking (...) activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

Perhaps everything we think, feel, and do is determined, and humans--like stones or clouds--are slaves to the laws of nature. Would that be a terrible state? Philosophers who take the incompatibilist position think so, arguing that a deterministic world would be one without moral responsibility and perhaps without true love, meaningful art, and real rationality. But compatibilists and semicompatibilists argue that determinism need not worry us. As long as our actions stem, in an appropriate way, from us, or respond in (...) some way to reasons, our actions are meaningful and can be judged on their moral merit. In this highly original work, Nomy Arpaly argues that a deterministic world does not preclude moral responsibility, rationality, and love--in short, meaningful lives--but that there would still be something lamentable about a deterministic world. A person may respond well to reasons, and her actions may faithfully reflect her true self or values, but she may still feel that she is not free. Arpaly argues that compatibilists and semicompatibilists are wrong to dismiss this feeling--for which there are no philosophical consolations--as philosophically irrelevant. On the way to this bittersweet conclusion, Arpaly sets forth surprising theories about acting for reasons, the widely accepted idea that "ought implies can," moral blame, and more. (shrink)

Justice and Libertarianism The term ‘justice’ is commonly used in several different ways. Sometimes it designates the moral permissibility of political structures (such as legal systems). Sometimes it designates moral fairness (as opposed to efficiency or other considerations that are relevant to moral permissibility). Sometimes it designates legitimacy in the sense of it being morally impermissible for others to interfere forcibly with the act or omission (e.g., my failing to go to dinner with my mother may be wrong but nonetheless (...) legitimate). Finally, sometimes it designates what we owe each other in the sense of respecting everyone’s rights. Of course, these notions are closely related. What we owe each other may, but need not, be partly based on issues of fairness. Legitimacy and permissibility of political structures are largely, but perhaps not entirely, determined by what rights of non-interference individuals have. Nonetheless, these are distinct notions and we shall focus only on what we owe each other. Justice as what we owe each other is not concerned with impersonal duties (duties owed to no one, i.e., that do not correspond to anyone’s rights). If there are impersonal duties, then something can be just but nonetheless morally impermissible. For brevity, we shall often write of actions being permissible or agents having a moral liberty, but this should always be understood in the interpersonal sense of violating no one’s rights. Libertarianism is sometimes advocated as a derivative set of rules (e.g., derived from rule utilitarian or contractarian doctrines). Here, however, we reserve the term for the natural rights doctrine that agents initially fully own themselves. Agents are full self-owners just in case they own themselves in precisely the same way that they can fully own inanimate objects. Stated slightly differently, full self-owners own themselves in the same way that a full chattel-slaveowner owns a slave. Throughout, we are concerned with moral ownership and not legal ownership.. (shrink)

While interactions with other animate beings seem mostly to serve our own human interests, there are, at times, fugitive glimpses, passing contacts, momentary motions, and fleeting feelings of vital connection with other life forms. Life phenomenology attempts to realize these relational, interactive and intercorporeal possibilities. It challenges the language game of presuming the muteness and bruteness of non-human creatures and, at best, of speaking for them. It critiques the capture of non-human species within the inhibiting ring of human functions (...) and forms to reveal feelings and flows of interspecies commonality. It brings to expression the experiences of being moved to act and speak with others who do not share the human tongue. In part a critique of the logocentric, anthropocentric phenomenologies of intentionality, life phenomenology is more positively a means of coming to terms with the life-affirming kinetic, kinesthetic and affective dynamics of interspecies relationality. I take up the interrogation of this phenomenality, this humanimality, with the assistance of phenomenological scholarship that lends fuller credence to the experiences we have of moving in concert with other animate beings. In doing so, I aim to show the important insights that life phenomenology offers us in fostering not only greater appreciation of, responsivenss to and connection with other animals, but also in indicating the qualitative dynamics of relating with greater animate consciousness to one anotherof our own animal kind. (shrink)

Leading accounts of personal autonomy are content-neutral: they insist that there are no a priori constraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind (...) of person who acts at the command of others. I define myself as a slave and endorse those attitudes and preferences. My autonomy consists in being a slave.” ’ John Christman similarly claims that ‘any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be’ could be autonomously formed. The same seems to apply to Harry Frankfurt's view, that actions are autonomous if they stem from second-order volitions that reflect what the agent cares about; it puts no constraints on the content of what a person might care about. All of these accounts hold that the mere content of a desire or value is never sufficient to rule out that it might be autonomously acted on by someone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Image and SilenceGiorgio AgambenTranslated by Leland de la Durantaye (bio)[End Page 94]In the Roman pantheon there is a goddess named Angerona, represented with her mouth bound and sealed (ore obligato signatoque).1 Her finger is raised to her lips as if to command silence. Scholars claim that she represents, in the context of pagan mystery cults, the power of silence, although there is no consensus among them as to how (...) to understand this power. Etymologically speaking, myein, the root of the Greek word mysterion, means “to close the mouth, to silence.” At the beginning of the sacred rites in Eleusis a herald “commanded silence” (epittatei tēn siōpen). It is said that that the initiates into these Eleusinian mysteries were required to maintain absolute silence concerning what they had seen and heard during their initiation. Our question is how to understand this silence. Was it a prohibition aimed at keeping a secret doctrine from the uninitiated? Or did it concern, instead, something truly impossible to say?To begin we might ask what sense there might have been in the obligation to remain silent given that it was possible for anyone—including slaves, and thus, potentially, the entire population of Athens—to be initiated into the mysteries. In his early work, “On Philosophy,” Aristotle affirmed that, “the initiates do not need to learn something (mathein ti), but, instead, to be disposed to something, to experience and to undergo something (pathein kai diatethēnai).”2 It would therefore be possible that in the ancient mystery cults the initiate did not learn a doctrine that could be expressed in words (yet had to remain secret), but, instead, experienced something essentially silent, something impossible to say. “A great awe in face of the gods,” we read in the Homeric ode to Demeter, “silences the voice.”3The impossibility of speaking—and the power of silence—has two forms, one joyful and the other disturbing. In myth muteness is often associated with rape. The Romans tell the story of Lara who was punished for her inclination to gossip by being rendered mute and who was then raped in a sacred wood by Mercury (who took advantage of her impossibility of speaking). Before being transformed into a swallow Philomela was raped by Tereus, who cut off her tongue to prevent her from recounting his misdeed. Persephone, raped, kidnapped, and conducted to Hades, remained there silent as the dead. In every one of these cases silence is the painful experience of a privation of speech, of being unable to say what one wishes to say.In Gnostic mythology, the preexisting, eternal, uncreated God contains within himself a female figure which is his silence, Sigē. From his union with Silence Thought is born. “Sigē,” we read in a Valentinian text, “is the mother of all the beings that have emerged from the Abyss. He who has failed to say the unsayable has silenced it; he who was understood the unsayable, has declared it unsayable.”4 Here too silence appears as the experience of an impossibility of saying, as a privation. It is in opposition to this abyssal figure of silence that the church fathers affirmed the primacy of the logos in which God is revealed. Nevertheless, of the power of silence Heidegger would write: “This primordial silence is more powerful than any human potentiality. No one, on his or her own, has ever invented language—that is, has been strong enough to break the power of this silence.”5 [End Page 95]In Kafka’s parable on Ulysses, we are told that the silence of the Sirens is more perilous than their song, and that Ulysses—who realized, as his ship neared them, that the Sirens were silent—put on an act to protect himself from this silence, plugging his ears with wax and having his men tie him to the mast.6 In Kafka’s retelling of the tale, the silence of the Sirens represents a zero degree of song and, following a stubborn tradition that sees in absence the most extreme form of presence, also represents an at once zero and ultimate degree of reality. In this sense Heidegger could write... (shrink)

This paper argues that indexical reference is a species of discourse reference, just like anaphora. Both varieties of discourse reference involve not only context dependence, but also context change. The act of speaking up focuses attention and thereby makes this very speech event available for discourse reference by indexicals. Mentioning something likewise focuses attention, making the mentioned entity available for subsequent discourse reference by anaphors. Empirical evidence is presented from grammatical centering in Kalaallisut and "shifty indexicals" in Slave attitude (...) reports. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 343-346 [Access article in PDF] Kimura Bin on Schizophrenia James Phillips With "Cogito and I: A Bio-Logical Approach," Kimura has continued his research into the core disturbance in schizophrenia. In his work, he has combined an original phenomenological approach with some fundamental concepts taken from his native Japanese and Zen culture. As in the work of others in the tradition of phenomenological psychiatry, (...) he has focused on a basic disturbance that underlies the positive symptoms found in schizophrenic conditions. In what follows, I will attempt to relate this current effort to some of his previous work on schizophrenia. I will conclude this commentary with some remarks on what I find problematic in the treatment of Heidegger.In "Cogito and I," Kimura plunges us directly into the core ego disturbance of schizophrenic patients by quoting two patients who, each in his own words, describe a pathological split between what we may call a "subjective" and an "objective" I or self. The latter is the self that acts and is recognizable by others (and by the patient) as the agent acting in the world. The former, the subjective self, is the non-objectified sense of self or self-awareness that accompanies all our actions. The two must be integrated, and it is a failure of this integration that is at the basis of the schizophrenic's ego disturbance.We can gain further clarification of this central notion in Kimura's treatment of schizophrenia through reference to some of his other discussions of the topic. In "Reflection and Self in the Schizophrenic" (Kimura 1992b), he invokes Husserlian terminology to discuss the same polarity within the self. 1 In this study, he distinguishes "simultaneous reflection" (the subjective self) from "secondary reflection" (the objective self). In the latter, the self is a noematic object of reflection; it is the image of myself after the act, the I that has done something and can now be captured in reflection. While "Cogito and I" describes the schizophrenic split as between the noematic self and the noetic self of simultaneous reflection, "Reflection and Self in the Schizophrenic" locates the split further back within the noetic self. Kimura distinguishes in the noetic self an observing I from the I that is moving toward action, both prior to the noematic self of secondary reflection. "One could say that a subjective self here accompanies an other self no less subjective and observes it constantly 'from behind'. There is no objective, noematic self involved here; a sole noetic self splits into two simultaneous 'moments' which occupy alternitively the places of seeing and seen, and which nonetheless remain subjective-noetic" (Kimura 1992b, 118). Pélicier emphasizes this Husserlian analysis in his exposition of Kimura Bin's phenomenological treatment of schizophrenia: The Self is never grasped as an object, but rather experienced in a noetic mode. On the other hand, the representation (l'image), as an object of consciousness, and in a certain manner all representations (images), as objects of consciousness, are of the noematic [End Page 343] order in Husserl's sense. Kimura insists then on the difference between this auto-perception (jikaku) in the noetic register and its content, which, itself, is noematic. Starting from this analysis, Kimura poses to himself the question of the nature of schizophrenia.... (Pélicier 1984, 32) In still another treatment of the theme, "Pathology of the Immediate" (Kimura 1992c), Kimura Bin focuses on the role of language in the structure of the self. The circuit of simultaneous and secondary reflection described above is played out in the pre-linguistic and linguistic dimensions of the self. Simultaneous reflection is immediate and fugitive in a manner that escapes articulation but at the same time, very readily flows into a secondary reflection that exists only as a mediated, articulated, noematic self. As Kimura puts it, "As for the I, which seems apparently the most immediately given, this also, when it becomes conscious of itself as 'I,' is constituted equally as an experience mediated by a negative differentiation that inserts itself between the 'I' that is in the process of becoming... (shrink)

This article has two purposes. The first speaks to the compatibilist quality of Charles Mills’ Black Radical Kantianism (BRK), its strengths and weaknesses and the pertinence of W. E. B Du Bois to it. BRK turns from Mills’ previous critique of Kantianism as representative of arassenstaatlichpolitical liberalism, underwritten and tainted by the racial/domination contract, to his current defence of a compatibilist Kantianism as representative of arechtsstaatlichpolitical liberalism supported by a non-ideal racially corrective critique of both that contract and the kind (...) of political liberalism affiliated with it. The second focuses on what I introduce as the ‘Radicalization of Kant in Black’ (RKB). RKB isnota compatibilist project. Rather it re-examines issues first posed by ‘slave- and black-encoded’ blacks coming to act and struggle with the primacy of practical reason under the historically normative authority of freedom and the abolition of enslavement. What are the ramifications of each for Kant-/Kantian-radicalization? (shrink)

It seems to be a humdrum fact of human agency that we act on intentions or decisions that we have made at an earlier time. At breakfast, you look at the Taco Hut menu online and decide that later today you’ll have one of their avocado burritos for lunch. You’re at your desk and you hear the church bells ring the noon hour. You get up, walk to Taco Hut, and order the burrito as planned. As mundane as this sort (...) of scenario might seem to be, philosophers have raised a problem in understanding it. If you are simply abiding by this morning’s decision, how are you acting autonomously? Your earlier self seems to be calling the shots; if you are just acting accordingly, without thinking through it or in some other way trying to ensure that the past decision conforms to your present standpoint, it is not clear how this amounts to an exercise of your present autonomous agency. It seems, rather, that your earlier self has succeeded in slaving you to her own purposes. She was the one who wanted (intended, judged it to be good, etc.) to have an avocado burrito. In simply following through, your current self seems to be just an automaton performing the commands left behind by your former self. Of course, you might not allow yourself to be shackled by your earlier self. You might refuse to follow anything but your own present judgments: you will only go to Taco Hut if this is what you judge you should do right now, and once at Taco Hut you will only eat the avocado burrito if that is what you want to eat once there. But if this is the way you generally operate, this seems to block your ability to make effective future-directed decisions. The puzzle, then, is one of explaining how the future self can do the bidding of her past self without losing her autonomy. We call this “the Problem of Diachronic Autonomy.” Philosophers raising this problem take it to show that there must be reasons or rational requirements to follow-through with our past decisions. According to these philosophers, we can only make sense of our diachronic autonomy if our past decisions put rational pressure on us to follow through. We argue that there is no Problem of Diachronic Autonomy. There is, in other words, no puzzling situation that needs explaining. Consequently, there is no need coming from this purported puzzle to think that our future-directed decisions generate reasons or rational requirements to follow through. The correct view of our diachronic autonomy is the “naïve” one: the “future self” can do the bidding of the “past self” without giving up its autonomy because, very simply, the past self is the same agent as the future self. I am acting autonomously when I get the avocado burrito, because I was the one who decided to get the burrito. I am acting on my own freely-formed decision. (shrink)

Leading accounts of personal autonomy arecontent-neutral:they insist that there are noa prioriconstraints on the content of the desires or values that might motivate an autonomous action. In Gerald Dworkin's provocative words, ‘the autonomous person can be a tyrant or a slave, a saint or sinner, a rugged individualist or champion of fraternity, a leader or follower.’ ‘There is nothing in the idea of autonomy that precludes a person from saying, “I want to be the kind of person who acts (...) at the command of others. I define myself as a slave and endorse those attitudes and preferences. My autonomy consists in being a slave.” ’ John Christman similarly claims that ‘any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be’ could be autonomously formed. The same seems to apply to Harry Frankfurt's view, that actions are autonomous if they stem from second-order volitions that reflect what the agent cares about; it puts no constraints on the content of what a person might care about. All of these accounts hold that the mere content of a desire or value is never sufficient to rule out that it might be autonomously acted on by someone. (shrink)

"One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial, today than it was when it first appeared more than fifty years ago. This special new edition now also includes his little work The Philosophical Act. Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper shows that the Greeks and (...) medieval Europeans, understood the great value and importance of leisure. He also points out that religion can be born only in leisure; a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. Pieper maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture; and ourselves. Pieper's message for us is plain. The idolatry of the machine, the worship of mindless know-how, the infantile cult of youth and the common mind; all this points to our peculiar leadership in the drift toward the slave society. Pieper's profound insights are impressive and even formidable. Pieper has subjects involved in everyone's life; he has theses that are so counter to the prevailing trends as to be sensational; and he has a style that is memorably clear and direct." --Publisher. (shrink)

Mediterranean history, and the history of other closed seas, is seen here as the experience of those who traversed the sea and arrived as decentered aliens on the other side. Mainly these have been men, with merchants generally as pioneers who introduced the goods, ideas, and religion of one region to another. From antiquity onwards, port cities such as Carthage, Alexandria, Smyrna, and Livorno acted as links among the three continents facing the Mediterranean, and visitors from other lands were sometimes (...) free to roam, sometimes ghettoized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 1-17 [Access article in PDF] What if the Father Commits a Crime? Rui Zhu Apparently, Socrates and Confucius respond similarly to the question if a son should turn in his father in the case of the father's misdemeanor. When Euthyphro, flaring his pride of his moral impartiality, tells Socrates that he is on his way to report his father because he (...) has thrown one of the household slaves into a ditch and left him bound there until he was dead, Socrates says, "Good Heaven! Certainly, Euthyphro, most men would not know how they could do this and be right. It is not the part of anyone to do this, but of one who is far advanced in wisdom." 1According to Socrates, only a man of high wisdom knows how to prosecute his father righteously, but Euthyphro does not appear to have this wisdom. When his interlocutor observes that an upright man in his state would bear witness against his father if he misappropriates a sheep, Confucius contradicts the interlocutor's understanding of uprightness by speaking in a matter-of-fact tone: "In my country the upright men are of quite another sort. A father will cover up for his son, and a son his father—which incidentally does involve a sort of up—rightness." 2Confucius stands on the same line with Socrates but seems the more radical of the two. Socrates does not directly refute Euthyphro and only suggests that he make sure he understands what he is doing before going any further. Socrates is not only typically Socratic—indirect and suggestive—but also sounds so reasonable that Euthyphro appears in contrast to be a reckless youth who harbors [End Page 1] only a faint understanding of morality. Confucius's response is more rigid, for he categorically dismisses an act of the Euthyphroian kind. He demands that father and son cover up for each other in the case of either one's guilt. Compared to Socrates, Confucius advocates the position that seems a little too strong and leaves no room for justice, while Socrates does not have that problem with justice. This is how we feel about Socrates and Confucius on our first impression. The prima facie observations that we make from the remarks of Socrates and Confucius seem both plain and unproblematic.By embedding these remarks into their respective social or philosophical cultures, this paper will show that our previous observations are not quite accurate. The apparent affinity of the Socratic and Confucian stances belies different underlying moral philosophies. We want to use their comments as bridges to explore the early Greek and Confucian ethics and show how different a picture we see after things are examined within their traditions.The issue of a possible father-son conflict may be treated as a case study of the early Greek (the Heroic era until the age of Socrates) and early Confucian (Confucius and Mencius) morals. There is a strong theme in the early Greek morals that allows, or sometimes demands, a son such as Euthyphro to prosecute his father for the sake of justice, because justice, instead of love (philein) or filial piety, is the governing principle in the early Greek ethics. Confucian ethics is founded on love (human-heartedness), which in turn is extended from the love between father and son. All moral principles including justice are derived from this extension of love. The mutual love of father and son then becomes the governing principle in the case of Confucianism. A Guilty Father: The Greek Motif The question, "What if the father commits a crime?" has a certain realistic aroma to a boy coming of age in the Hesiodic Greek world. That father has to be overcome by son before some relief from strife becomes possible is a familiar theme in Greek literature. In Hesiod's Theogony, Uranus (the sky) incurs hatred from all his newborn children since he hides them in their mother Gaia's womb and does not let them return to the light, for no reason... (shrink)