The slogan that criminal liability requires an ‘act’, or a ‘voluntary act’, is still something of a commonplace in textbooks of criminal law. There are, it is usually added, certain exceptions to this requirement— cases in which liability is in fact, and perhaps even properly, imposed in the absence of such an act: but the ‘act requirement’ is taken to represent a normally minimal necessary condition of criminal liability. Even offences of strict liability, for which no mens rea (...) is required, require an act: thus to the familiar slogan that actus non facit reum nisi metis sit rea we can add the prior, more fundamental slogan that mens non facit reum nisi actus sit reus ; before we ask whether a defendant acted with mens rea or fault, we must ask whether he committed a criminal act at all. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is on the ethics of the act of wilfully “abandoning” human embryos. I offer a critique of this unique behaviour, which draws on empirical data about who wilfully abandons their surplus embryos and why. I argue that wilful embryo abandonment is in all cases avoidable. Given this, I make three observations which speak to the moral unacceptability of embryo abandonment. The first has to do with the abandoner’s unfair treatment of the clinic storing their (...) abandoned embryos, and the second the abandoner’s apparent lack of sympathy for the plight of other people like them, who require assistance in pursuing their family-building goals. The third observation has to do with the abandoner’s failure to meet their responsibility for directing the handling of their embryos, and what their reaction to that responsibility says about their moral character in certain respects. There is good reason to conclude that wilful embryo abandonment is morally unacceptable. One implication of this normative conclusion is that clinics have reasonable grounds for justifying the design of their policies and practices so as to make wilful embryo abandonment impossible. (shrink)

One element of the liberal ideal of secularity is the principle that the state should treat religions neutrally: This is the religious neutrality requirement. Applied to religious belief systems, the principle stipulates that the state should not take a position on whether or not a certain religion is true. I challenge this ideal and argue that teachers in public schools sometimes need to take a position on religious truth claims in order to avoid the risk of promoting false beliefs. (...) I then argue that not acting to avert these implications is sufficiently costly to justify the abandonment of this requirement. (shrink)

Why do we labour so hard to sustain relationships that are fundamentally harmful to our wellbeing? That is the question which lies at the heart of Maja Borg’s poetic and alternatively distributed documentary film, Future My Love. The detrimental bonds on which the film focuses are those that maintain our connection to an economic system that has thrown us into an acute state of crisis and the stillborn emotions that keep us hopefully attached to a romantic partnership that we have (...) already outgrown; this elision imbricates and implicates the personal in the political. Through a prism of painful and, at times, unbearable emotion, and by blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, the real and the fictional, this film urges us to imagine ourselves into a future in which it might be possible to live otherwise; but this requires us to abandon the future we have already imagined and, as the film evinces through archival imagery from the 1950s or golden age of capitalism, imaged ourselves into. By drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotion, Judith Butler’s work on the act of mourning, and the writing of Eva Illouz, Luce Irigaray and Alain Badiou on love in the age of late capitalism, this article contends that Future My Love pleads with us to abandon, in Ahmed’s words, ‘happiness for life’, to forsake an ideology that is invested in a highly specific notion of what it means to flourish and to thrive, to mourn and name our losses, and to think about the future creatively and without cynicism. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Actions and the Criminal Law Objects or Conditions of Criminal Responsibility? Actions and (Voluntary) Acts Abandoning the Act Requirement? An Action Presumption? References.

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that living kidney donation is permitted but living kidney sales are not. Call this the Received View. One way to support the Received View is to appeal to a particular understanding of the conditions under which living kidney transplantation is permissible. It is often claimed that donors must act altruistically, without the expectation of payment and for the sake of another. Call this the Altruism Requirement. On the conventional interpretation, the Altruism Requirement is a (...) moral fact. It states a legitimate constraint on permissible transplantation and is accepted on the basis of cogent argument. The present paper offers an alternative interpretation. I suggest the Altruism Requirement is a moral fiction—a kind of motivated falsehood. It is false that transplantation requires altruism. But the Requirement serves a purpose. Accepting it allows kidney donation but not kidney sale. It, in short, rationalizes the Received View. (shrink)

Doug Husak has argued, persuasively I think, that there is no literal ‘act requirement’ in Anglo-American law. I begin by reviewing Husak’s reasons for rejecting the act requirement, and provide additional reasons to think he is right to do so. But Husak’s alternative, the ‘control condition’, I argue, is inadequate. The control requirement is falsified by the widespread practice of holding extremely intoxicated offenders liable for criminal conduct they engage in even if they lack control over their (...) conduct at the time of the offense, and even if they are acting involuntarily. I provide examples from Canadian, US and German law to flesh out our legal practices with respect to intoxicated offenders. I then argue that, at least with respect to one class of intoxicated offenders–those known as ‘grand schemers’, who plan their criminal offending prior to rendering themselves incapable of voluntary control over their conduct–we are morally justified in imposing liability. I then propose an alternative to both the act and control requirements: what I call the ‘agency requirement’. I argue that our law does and should impose liability for conduct that is expressive of or constitutive of the defendant’s practically rational agency. Adopting an agency view allows us to expand our focus from just the moment of the offense to temporally extended instances of agency, such as is involved in planned offending by grand schemers. (shrink)

"The desert opens up beyond the proliferation of big box chains, car dealerships, fast food joints, and the bland sprawl along California State Highway 62. Out there, where signs of familiar habitation seem to fade from view, a change occurs in the landscape: small, dusty, mostly abandoned cabins dot the arid flatland. The majority of the existing cabins, historically found throughout the larger region known as the Morongo Basin, lie east of Twentynine Palms in outlying Wonder Valley. The curious presence (...) of these structures signifies that you are entering one of the few remaining clusters of "jackrabbit" homesteads in the American West. The mostly derelict structures-many vacant, some inhabited-are the physical reminder of former occupants who were the last to form the U.S. government's Small Tract Act of 1938." "One of the many land acts designed to dispose of "useless" federal lands from the public domain, the Small Tract Act authorized citizens to lease up to five acres of desert for recreational purposes or for use as a home or business. When the applicant made the required improvements to his or her claim by constructing a small dwelling within the three-year lease, they could file for a patent-the federal government's form of a deed. This mid-century homestead movement reflects the quintessential American desire to claim territory and own a piece of land even when the property in question was deemed "worthless" from an economic and governmental perspective."--Jacket. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Max Deutsch argues that there is no “qua problem” for purely causal theories of reference, according to which the extensions of some expressions are grounded in causal relations to members of their extensions during dubbing acts. The qua problem is the difficulty in specifying the facts in virtue of which the reference of “elephant” is grounded by causal contact with something _qua_ elephant and not _qua_ its other properties. If no such specification can be given, reference (...) remains unacceptably indeterminate. This has led many to abandon purely causal reference grounding. Deutsch’s argument for the dissolution of the problem goes as follows: we usually agree that an event can cause its effect _qua_ some of its properties and not _qua_ others. For example, a hot acidic solution causes a glass beaker to break due to its heat and not due to its acidity. Given this assumption, we can simply say that an event caused a dubbing act _qua_ the causally relevant property and not _qua_ the causally irrelevant properties, thus grounding the reference of the term; the qua problem has vanished. I will argue that causal mechanisms, and in particular the facts about causal relevance appealed to by Deutsch, are insufficient to dissolve the qua problem. It is not generally the case that a _unique_ property is causally relevant in purely physical cases of causation; but this is precisely what is required to avoid the referential indeterminacy highlighted by the qua problem. I will demonstrate that if we rely on causal relevance to dissolve the qua problem, there is no way to respect the uniqueness requirement: there are too many properties that are causally relevant to the occurrence of any single dubbing act, including the intentional states of the dubber. (shrink)

The draft Code of Conduct for Research is an important initiative towards assisting the scientific community in complying with the provisions of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). However, its approach towards cross-border data sharing should be reconsidered to clarify the ambiguities inherent in the legal requirements for the cross-border sharing of health data in the POPIA. These ambiguities include the concept of ‘transfer of information’, the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for transfer, the (...) nature of consent for cross-border sharing and the scope of the recipient third party. We suggest that the draft Code of Conduct for Research can be improved by: Explaining or defining the concept of ‘transfer of information’ and when it applies to cross-border sharing in research Clarifying the application of adequacy as a legal mechanism for transfer vis-à-vis the other alternatives Expanding on the interpretation and application of consent as a legal mechanism for cross-border transfers Expanding the category of persons who may be recipients of personal information in a third country. (shrink)

In On What Matters Derek Parfit advocates the Kantian Contractualist Formula as one of three supreme moral principles. In important cases, this formula entails that it is wrong for an agent to act in a way that would be partially best. In contrast, Parfit’s wide value-based objective view of reasons entails that the agent often have sufficient reasons to perform such acts. It seems then that agents might have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. In this paper I will argue that (...) such reasons are a symptom of a fundamental inconsistency between the Kantian Contractualist Formula and Parfit’s view of reasons. The formula requires that we consider what everyone could rationally will, while a wide value-based objective view requires that we consider only what the agent has sufficient reasons for doing. The same inconsistency is particularly obvious in Parfit’s version of the Consent Principle, which share important features with the Kantian Contractualist Formula. Parfit accepts that moral principles might entail that we sometimes have sufficient reasons to act wrongly. However, to accept that supreme moral principles have such implications is objectionable if you, like Parfit, also hold that principles with such implications should be rejected or revised. I suggest that we could abandon the requirement that we have to consider the reasons of everyone. This would make the Kantian Contractualist Formula consistent with Parfit’s view of reasons, at least in this respect. I also argue that we can keep most implications of the Kantian Contractualist Formula that Parfit finds attractive. (shrink)

: Research by Siminoff and colleagues reveals that many lay people in Ohio classify legally living persons in irreversible coma or persistent vegetative state (PVS) as dead and that additional respondents, although classifying such patients as living, would be willing to procure organs from them. This paper analyzes possible implications of these findings for public policy. A majority would procure organs from those in irreversible coma or in PVS. Two strategies for legitimizing such procurement are suggested. One strategy would be (...) to make exceptions to the dead donor rule permitting procurement from those in PVS or at least those who are in irreversible coma while continuing to classify them as living. Another strategy would be to further amend the definition of death to classify one or both groups as deceased, thus permitting procurement without violation of the dead donor rule. Permitting exceptions to the dead donor rule would require substantial changes in law—such as authorizing procuring surgeons to end the lives of patients by means of organ procurement—and would weaken societal prohibitions on killing. The paper suggests that it would be easier and less controversial to further amend the definition of death to classify those in irreversible coma and PVS as dead. Incorporation of a conscience clause to permit those whose religious or philosophical convictions support whole-brain or cardiac-based death pronouncement would avoid violating their beliefs while causing no more than minimal social problems. The paper questions whether those who would support an exception to the dead donor rule in these cases and those would support a further amendment to the definition of death could reach agreement to adopt a public policy permitting organ procurement of those in irreversible coma or PVS when proper consent is obtained. (shrink)

Samizdat, the underground circulation of unofficial and forbidden literature in the Soviet Union, is an example of how censorship can backfire. Ideological restrictions produced walls of monotony in libraries and bookstores, propelling readers to search for more interesting fare. Sensitive texts on religion, philosophy, human rights, and current events, as well as literary works, passed from hand to hand clandestinely from around 1960 until censorship was abolished in the late 1980s. Von Zitzewitz's study is itself interesting fare, uncovering the workings (...) of samizdat as both a distribution network, comparable to that of print culture, and a social network that developed bonds between people who shared a defined purpose outside the public space. By no means did they all think of themselves as dissenters. For many people who lived ordinary Soviet lives, it was simply that “reading samizdat increased [their] individual feeling of freedom and represented a personal act of resistance.”One merit of this book is its point-by-point comparison of the samizdat distribution network to the print-culture production chain of author-publisher-printer-shipper-bookseller-reader. Samizdat had an analogous chain, in which a text made its way from author to reader through a network of people, each performing a specific function—procuring manuscripts, housing them, typing (or photographing) multiple copies, and delivering copies to readers. There were others who served as compilers, translators, collectors, and even editors and “librarians” (although accepting this designation requires abandoning the notion of a library as a stationary physical repository).Since all participants in the network strove to hide their traces from the prying eyes of the security police, samizdat researchers are hampered by a lack of records and evidence. To help fill the information gap, von Zitzewitz (in collaboration with Memorial's Gennadii Kuzovkin) designed a sixty-three-question survey targeting former samizdat participants and posted online in 2017. Tables display statistics (from the first 122 respondents) on demographics (respondents’ gender, place and decade of birth, and education level) as well as information on which authors, genres, and subject matter were most read. Other survey questions were designed to elicit recollections that help us understand what it felt like to participate in samizdat culture, whether as an author or reader, or in some aspect of acquisition or distribution. The many quotations from the survey responses bring to life the intensity of this activity. Receiving a sought-after text with an injunction to return it (or pass it on) the next day might mean reading all through the night to get through hundreds of pages. And while it is intuitive to think of samizdat as walled off from official culture, this study argues persuasively that they were intertwined. There were plenty of gray areas and fuzzy boundaries, too. One owner of samizdat books had several of them confiscated during a KGB search of his apartment, only to find them later for sale in a bookshop.Having begun as a clandestine, makeshift response to the institution of censorship, samizdat became more sophisticated over time, evolving into an institution itself. It arguably contributed to the perestroika reforms and became unnecessary when censorship was given the heave-ho. Subsequently, samizdat activists who had managed the covert production and circulation of entire journals published full accounts of their activity and the operation of their networks. Von Zitzewitz makes good use of these sources and shows admiration for the role these men played. She notes, though, that their detailed descriptions omit names of any of the typists who gave up their leisure hours and nightly sleep for the pleasure of hammering out multiple carbon copies of forbidden literature, usually for no pay. The word typist, given its lowly connotation in both Russian and English, is unfortunate. Typists were samizdat's printing press, and without their commitment and sacrifice the whole enterprise would have collapsed. Von Zitzewitz suggests that it may never have occurred to the samizdat heavyweights to acknowledge them by name. They were just... women. On the other hand, the menial typist designation had its upside. It seems to have resulted in a shorter prison sentence for at least one of them.Von Zitzewitz argues strenuously that samizdat was first and foremost a social network. If you wanted to get hold of, say, The Gulag Archipelago, you needed to know someone with the connections to help you get it. To call samizdat a social network is, of course, to wade into comparisons with today's online social media networks. Von Zitzewitz notes parallels, but she finds that the differences overwhelm the similarities. Samizdat was a social network, but one that depended on mutual trust. (shrink)

Analyses of factual causation face perennial problems, including preemption, overdetermination, and omissions. Arguably, the thorniest, are cases of omissive overdetermination, involving two independent omissions, each sufficient for the harm, and neither, independently, making a difference. A famous example is Saunders, where pedestrian was hit by a driver of a rental car who never pressed on the (unbeknownst to the driver) defective (and, negligently, never inspected) brakes. Causal intuitions in such cases are messy, reflected in disagreement about which omission mattered. What (...) these analyses mistakenly take for granted, is that at issue is the 'efficacy' of each omission. I argue, on the contrary, the puzzle of omissive overdetermination favors taking the act/omission distinction seriously. Factual causation, properly understood precludes omissions (i.e. omissions are not causal). Of course, the law also attaches liability to omissions, but this works differently from liability for real causes (e.g. omissions have a duty requirement, they also respond differentially to difference-making considerations). The manner in which liability attaches for omissions differs from that of straightforward causal liability, and is entirely dependent on the underlying causal structure. Attention to that structure (e.g. that the driver's hitting the pedestrian with his car is what actually caused the injury) sheds light on which omissions matter (e.g. driver's failure to press on the brakes) and why (because that failure removes a defense the driver would have to liability for the accident he caused). Other cases, where the parties' connection is entirely omissive (e.g. two physicians fail to detect independently lethal conditions), come out differently (tracking moralized elements). The analysis offered makes better sense of both why omissive determination cases are puzzling and how to resolve them. (shrink)

In this paper, the issue of plant closings is analyzed from the perspective of halakhah (the Written Law of Judaism). Two levels of analysis in halakhah must be differentiated: the legal (enforced by courts) and the moral (not enforced by law, but rather framed in terms of duty to God). There is no legal mandate to keep an unprofitable plant open, but there are a number of moral imprecations (particularly "acting more generously than the law requires") that might influence an (...) employer''s decision making. Using analogical reasoning to infer moral and/or legal obligations may be a fruitful means for businesspeople to analyze business situations in terms of ethical implications. (shrink)

In this paper, the issue of plant closings is analyzed from the perspective of halakhah (the Written Law of Judaism). Two levels of analysis in halakhah must be differentiated: the legal (enforced by courts) and the moral (not enforced by law, but rather framed in terms of duty to God). There is no legal mandate to keep an unprofitable plant open, but there are a number of moral imprecations (particularly "acting more generously than the law requires") that might influence an (...) employer's decision making. Using analogical reasoning to infer moral and/or legal obligations may be a fruitful means for businesspeople to analyze business situations in terms of ethical implications. (shrink)

Smith argues that death caused by transplant surgery will not harm permanently unconscious patients, because they will not suffer a setback to their interests in the context of donation. Therefore, so the argument goes, the dead donor rule can be abandoned, because requiring a death declaration before procurement does not protect any relevant interest from being thwarted. Smith contends that a virtue of his argument is that it avoids the controversies over defining and determining death. I argue that it does (...) not and explain why no change in policy is justified. (shrink)

The Fatwā-house, which was within the body of Meshihat in the Ottoman Empire, gave answers to the questions posed to it by focusing on the Hanafi sect and the preferred fatwās of this sect for centuries. These questions and answers were also duly recorded. In this study, based on The Record for the Legal Responses of the Supreme Fatwā Office, which is registered at records numbered 378 in the Meshihat Archive of the Istanbul Mufti, one of the records containing the (...) answers given by the institution. It is an attempt to create an imagination about the scope and sphere of influence of the fatwā activity in the last period of the Ottoman Empire. Accordingly, in the last thirteen years of the state, Fatwā-house has been the addressee of questions from individuals, state and private institution directors, societies, ministries and the Grand Vizier. While some of these questions came from the provinces within the Ottoman borders or from the countries that had an administrative ties with the Ottoman Empire, some of them were submitted to the Fatwā-house by the Muslims of other states from the lost lands or simply because the caliphate center was the official fatwā organ. At the records, there is also a record of the questions coming from muslims who are Ottoman citizens but residing in other countries. Looking at the subjects, it was determined that most of the questions were asked about foundations. In addition, the permissibility of obtaining interest by bank facility or depositing money in the bank, the establishment of modern schools and whether the ways to create resources for these schools are permissible, whether teaching in Latin letters is possible, the provision of life insurance, the importance of cleanliness in the fight against cholera, the fight against innovations (bidʻas) in mosques. It is seen that questions on different issues, from issues such as whether the wife of the lost (mafqud) can be separated by the judge or not; to the issues of whether the fulfillment of judgment can be regarded as the end of the judgment or not. As it is mentioned in some fatwā records at the record book, it is obligatory to decide on fatwā and its fulfillment in the Ottoman Empire with the most authentic and preferred view of the Hanafi sect. The last two fatwā questions mentioned above are handled as examples of giving up the act with the will of the head of state, with the preferred fatwâs discussed in this article. It is only possible with the will of the head of state to make a decision with an opinion other than preferred fatwâ or an other opinion out of the sect. According to the first example, some of those of the citizens of other states outside the Ottoman Empire came to the Ottoman lands for reasons like trade etc. and married to Muslim women there and then left them suffering. This was also true for the wives of men who went to wars and did not return. Although the drawbacks of the Hanafi sect's preferred view, that one should wait until the age of ninety, one hundred, one hundred and twenty, or until the death of their peers, were resolved by appointing a regent from other sects, continuity could not be ensured in this practice either, finding people has not always been possible. For this reason, in the time of Shaykh al-Islam Hayri Efendi, a statement of change was prepared and submitted to the will of the sultan. In the issue of whether the signature of the head of state can be counted as the end of the judgment, another subject in which the will of the head of state is applied, the stages of abandoning the preferred view can be followed much more clearly. In the case of the dismissal of the judge or the expiration of the term of office before the execution of the judgment, especially in the distant provinces of the state, in the case of the judge's dismissal or the expiration of his term, according to the preferred view of the sect, which was based on juristic discretion, the closure of the cases took many years. It is seen that the judgment reached by analogy was submitted to the will of the sultan, with an article added to the script regarding the prepared procedure of reasoning, although there is no preferred view since it is the most suitable opinion for the interests of the people and the necessities of the century due to the increase in complaints. Effective from the time it was approved by the head of state, the execution of the sentence is no longer a requirement for the trial to be completed. The changes in the provisions of these matters also show that, although it was important for the Ottoman State to comply with the preferred view of the Hanafi sect - as in the previous Shaykh al-Islams' fatwās in the form of ma'ruzat - it was considered more necessary to look after the interests of the Muslims and different opinions were enacted and put into practice. (shrink)

The global age has confronted human beings with new and numerous challenges, from global poverty, to labour exploitation, to climate change. Many individuals, aware of such challenges, wish to act in solidarity, and give their contribution to countering them. Acting in solidarity in such contexts can be challenging, however, as which actions are most effective for reaching the desired goal is not obvious. Furthermore, an action that is intended in solidarity at times not only fails to promote the desired objective (...) but proves detrimental to it. In this article, I wish to propose a reflection on a prior duty of solidarity action: the epistemic duty to acquire information about the correct way to promote a cause. By analyzing the anti-sweatshop movement and climate action, I will show how acting in solidarity has significant epistemic requirements that should be considered as part of the solidarity action itself. (shrink)

For the events "e" and "f" to be identical, They must have the same subject and spatio-Temporal location, And their (participial) property-Descriptions must belong to the same "modification set" (e.G., Reddening, Reddening slowly, Reddening in july). The same criterion applies to actions, Which are here treated strictly as a proper subclass of events (john's closing the door = the door's being closed by john = the door's becoming closed). Actions related by goldman's "causal generation" are therefore distinct, But those related (...) by his other three types of act-Generation are not. This conclusion requires abandonment of the view--Questionable on other grounds--That causal contexts are thoroughly extensional. (shrink)

The study of insight problem solving could well become one of the most important topics in the contemporary debate on thought. Dealing with insight problems today requires of necessity reconsidering the concept of bounded rationality. Simon’s work has inspired us to reflect on the specific quality of the type of boundaries which, by limiting the search, allow and guarantee the act of creativity; finding the solution to insight problems is emblematic of this creativity and provides a paradigmatic case. According to (...) Simon, the solution to insight problems requires a search for an alternative space. He considered the “Notice Invariants Heuristic” to be a powerful tool for focusing this search which must always be guided by salience. Therefore, in the case of insight problems the heuristic is not a weak method of solving problems; indeed, it is the only way, an innovative and creative approach to reach the solution. In our view, the solution to these problems is not attained by abstraction, but only by a pertinent interpretation of the context (interpretative heuristic) in the light of the goal, allowing the problem solver to abandon the default representation. We therefore propose that this interpretative heuristic is inherent to all insight problem solving processes and, in more general terms, is an adaptive characteristic of the human cognitive system; this of course implies that the dual process theory will have to be challenged and discussed. (shrink)

This essay explores the historiographic and ethnographic valence of video in Indonesia since 1998, against the backdrop of transition from an authoritarian to a neoliberal regime, and the concurrent renewal of the country’s public sphere. The first section takes Joshua Oppenheimer’s controversial film The Act of Killing (2012) as exemplary of the moving image’s purchase on national trauma, emphasizing its role in the production (and perversion) of official history. The second section concerns the state of video discourse in Indonesia as (...) reflected in a conference held in Yogyakarta in 2011, addressing the diversity of contemporary video practices and situating them in local art and media histories. In a third and final section, we return to the epistemological quandaries raised by Oppenheimer’s film, mooting video’s capacity as a means of reconciliation with the past – a reconciliation that would seem to require both the documentary and a ‘revelatory’ function of the image. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent., was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention. The editors recommend that to experience the drifiting thought (...) that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terror Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage * * * * Instead of beginning with radical doubt, we start from naiveté. —Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. —Jack London, The Call of the Wild The figure of the feral remains a perpetual enigma, but the parameters remain relatively consistent. A person, usually a child, enters civilization after having been raised by wolves or kept in some kind of cruel captivity. The outsider perspective on domestication ensuing in an edge of a culture's self-recognition of its clumsier attributes, what has been taken for granted becomes apparent, is brought to the foreground with the stranger and made questionable. Amusement follows naïve questions or observations such as Kaspar Hauser in the Herzog film, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, when Kaspar notes that while in his room he is engulfed by it, but when he looks at the tower he can turn away and it disappears. Ergo, the room is larger than the tower. How entertaining. The aberrant one destabilizes the comforting cultural normative. Places become seen as mere impressions out of space, a patterning, a rut that not everyone lives in like us. This is one figure of the feral. The naiveté that begs all the questions. As a figure for a certain philosophical disposition, the rapidity of one’s saccade scans the environment, intuits it’s space, not from an initial thaumazein or a Critchlean sense of disappointment, but from a child-like naiveté bent on survival. To serve the naïve is merely one form of critique, and it is not nearly used enough in lieu of the critique that provides answers. How dull. It is not necessary to be an outsider to entrench a critique with naiveté. After having forced to suffer in the most parched and rocky terror, itself for so long rooted upwards of fifty feet into the ground upon which it grows, even a grapevine can spontaneously produce a white grape on a red vine. The curious feral can arise from within, and like pinot grigio, it adds variety without admonishing its roots. There is also the feral dog. Not raised by wolves, but humans. Founded in place the figure of this feral denies this place. The trajectory of this feral roves from the cultivated to uncultivated, or in speaking of plants from controlled to volunteer, finding the necessary nutrients and survival patterns on its own. Finding other places, reaching out into space testing its fertility. And when introduced into a foreign environment, it withers or flourishes. We would like to attempt a thesis at this juncture and to accept neither feral figure in its entirety, but to argue for the intimate conjunction between a cultivated place and its resonance with the space it procures for its nest and kin. I'm not a biter, I'm a writer for myself and others. —Jay-Z, What More Can I Say? I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers. —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans There is no subjective disposition outlining an unambiguous individual of the para-academy. There is no para-academic. We all have day jobs. 'Para-academic' seeped through the cracks as an adjective in the call to frame publishing dedicated to the critical rigor expected by academic publishing, but to deny the limitations of guarded legitimation through capital means. Open-access holds hands with this parasitic descriptor. Para-academic publishing's refusal to adhere to the valuation of locked access of a site, the site “of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value,” 1 seeks to recognize not merely an inclusive interpretation of significance, but the significance of thinking practice. The practice inside the paywalls of academic 'education' is held in a deathgrip by its infatuation with value and information, both empty without the apprehension of human experience, the barbaric yawp. “I can't breathe in here.” It is not that a para-academic practice leads one to the childish wonder of Kaspar Hauser who wonders about the spatiality of his room. It is the academic legitimation that distorts that one can hold the understanding of both in a constellation of place and space. Led to believe there is only a place for things, we are led to disillusionment. It is also not that a para-academic practice relinquishes itself to the invasive growth outside of careful cultivation, an abandonment of pleasantries for the toothy growl of a predator. It is the academy's fear that thought does not require capital to signify value. Some of the most nutritious meals can be foraged. Defining a para-academic practice is not outlining a place of accreditation of the practice, it is the recognition that any place is subject to modulation by the space it inhabits as well as creates. The para-academic practice keeps an eye of the creation of spaces, follows those paths that eat themselves in the name of academia. This is not unlike Red Peter's report to the academy, only successful if we report in idle idiosyncratic banalities that we have once again become victorious in our acculturation and nullification within the confines of accredited mush and our trajectory of wild rigor is defeated in our desire for recognition as recognizable in this place. Weeds are integral to the functioning of a large ecosystem. The manicured garden is entirely reliant on its keeper. The pansy can also go wild once neglected, the daisy definitely does.... a universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. At this stage the universe cannot be distinguished from how we act upon it, and the world may seem like shifting sand beneath our feet. —George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge, and another edge, mobile, blank, which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. —Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text Between these two epigraphs, interminable questions of where and questions of happening, gesture, and interface. To stay buoyed between a site of visible happening and haptic perspicacity. Bounded by one or the other leads to a desiccation of potential knowledge. The tumbleweed tumbles until met with mud, a bare structure moving but not movement. A tumbleweed tumbleweeds, propagates only at a place. It becomes significant again, continues. Significance, the site where meaning is made known through kinesthetic apprehension. 2 The feral founds a gestural horizon; an outsider’s scrawl-becoming-law; Deleuze teaching Meno’s dog geometry. Place as marked, outlined, recognized, territorialized. The academies marked by their peculiar disciplines, outlined by their rigid boundaries, recognized as factories of value. This far from ensures complete purchase on the space of thought, but it has made an undeniably elaborate means of making work significant. The academy is a muddy spot, it is fertile, but its gates are high and its dogs are barking. The coordinates of concept and experience. Already claimed by a stabilizing suspension, the terms enter specificity of ‘this is this’. Another correlation: activity and the individual. The individual, a placeholder in the crosshairs of juridical identification. Activity, what expands and surrounds this location, but utterly indebted to the node of “one who”. What's happening in this oscillation of nature and nurture is practice. Practice, as Stengers tells us “is not the activity of an individual or the product of that activity. It is the ingredient without which neither that activity nor this product would exist as such.” 3 Moving outward from our own honing, we're curious about the ingredient creating the place for holding conceptual and experiential engagements in each hand. And we'd like to argue that this place is not a limiting specification, but a practice undulating daily, by the minute. And we call this practice the para-academic practice. I repeat: there was no attraction for me in imitating human beings; I imitated them because I needed a way out, and for no other reason. —Franz Kafka, A Report to an Academy In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limit it discovers in itself—a limit where minds meet and, in meeting, begin to exist. — Albert Camus, The Rebel Anyone is a para-academic or practicer of such means. The academic can, and we argue should, be active para-academically, to escape the bounds, recognizing no site specific place as a place to rest on or the place to grab the Kafka's top and wonder at its disobedience not to continue. Yet, the para-academic practice must maintain the desire for rigor in scholarship. Indeed desiring past itself to claim a more naïve rigor, one that does not take its form for granted. Without a para-academic practice, the scholar spends half the time merely working on behalf of a hierarchy, to maintain it, and the other measly amounts of time are in the name of thinking, but only in name. Not to mention the amount of debt it takes to attend the halls of higher education. Not to mention the snoring tenures. Not to mention the barely scraping by adjuncts. Not to mention the materials that shake the very force of producible theory. Not to mention when swimming in texts becomes slogging through data. Academia is a barbaric food chain and it is our claim that there is, as always, an imperative for thought to move, with Heidegger, beyond the logics of calculation and planning, to a time of its own. The path, into the panic of the dark wood of this space can be followed by any; any who let the silence and the rigor enter the play. Where the little theater is larger when inhabited ; where the data of the tutor asymptotically refutes; and where, as much as one wouldn’t expect it here, ballet may turn out to be the most feral of forms… NOTES Jean Baudrillard, “Value's Last Tango” Simulacra and Simulation trans. Sheila Faria Glaser,. “What is significance? It is meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced.” Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text. Isabelle Stengers, “The Science Wars” Cosmopolitics I trans. Robert Bononno, 47. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of (...) Klee's Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

The article works out the thesis that to the excessive desire of the powerful for the absolute appropriation/domination it is opposed a not less excessive and absolute desire from people in order not to be appropriated/dominated: two desires of a distinct nature which are neither the desire for the same things nor the desire for different things, but desires in which the act of desiring is different. Taking into account that each desire aims at its absolute effectiveness, each one of (...) them tries to impose itself universally becoming doubly absolute: for one side it is inclined to the absolute domination (the powerful) or to the plain liberty (the people); for the other side, tries to impose itself to the whole political body. Each desire is only sustained by its heterogeneous desire. Each one pursues its own purposes whose realization will be the ruin of all collective life. Good institutions and good laws ensure liberty as long as they are capable to prevent the powerful or the people to consummate its desire or abandon its own desire to assume the other’s. However, having inscribed the order of law in the disorder of dissent, Machiavelli discarded the idea of an institutional order as a defi nitive solution to the disorder of dissent. Consequently, no law or institution is able to defi nitively resist the risk of corruption. This requires a periodic return to the origins: the experience of the constitutive moment of the original violence which, exposing men to risks, restores the initial reputation and strength of States and institutions. -/- O artigo parte da enunciação da tese de que ao desejo desmesurado dos grandes pela apropriação/dominação absoluta opõe-se um desejo não menos desmesurado e absoluto do povo de não sê-lo: dois desejos de natureza diferente que não são nem o desejo das mesmas coisas nem desejo de coisas diferentes, mas desejos cujo ato de desejar é diferente. Considerando que cada desejo visa sua efetividade absoluta, cada um tenta se impor universalmente tornando-se duplamente absoluto: por um lado, tende à dominação total (os grandes) ou à liberdade plena (o povo); por outro, tenta se impor ao conjunto do corpo político. Cada desejo somente se sustenta do desejo que lhe é heterogêneo. Cada um persegue uma fi nalidade própria cuja realização plena será a ruína de toda vida coletiva. Boas instituições e boas leis asseguram a liberdade na medida em que forem capazes de impedir que grandes ou povo consumam seu desejo ou que abandonem seu desejo próprio para assumir o do outro. Contudo, ao inscrever a ordem da lei na desordem dos dissensos, Maquiavel descartou a ideia de uma ordem institucional como solução defi nitiva da desordem dos dissensos. Consequentemente, nenhuma lei ou instituição é capaz de resistir defi nitivamente ao risco da corrupção. Isso obriga ao retorno periódico às origens: a experiência do momento constitutivo da violência originária que, expondo os homens ao risco, restaura o prestígio e vigor iniciais de Estados e instituições. (shrink)

A common assumption is that paternalism generates a special, and especially grievous, insult. Identifying this distinctive insult is then presented as the key to unlocking the concept and determining its moral significance. I submit that there is no special insult. It is, rather, a particular form that a lack of recognition respect can take. Attempting to capture the special insult has led us into confusion. In particular, it has led theorists to abandon the idea that paternalists must act for the (...) sake of the individual whose agency they supplant, and even the notion that paternalistic action requires a distinctive motivation at all. I argue that paternalistic actions must come from a place of care and concern for the paternalised agent and show that this explains the moral significance of paternalism since it tempers the general insult that such actions deliver and provides a partial defence when paternalism is misguided. (shrink)

The paper argues that the idea of gift-giving and its associated imagery, which has been founding the ethics of organ transplants since the time of the first successful transplants, should be abandoned because it cannot effectively block arguments for markets in human body parts. The imagery suggests that human bodies or their parts are transferable objects which belong to individuals. Such imagery is, however, neither a self-evident nor anthropologically unproblematic construal of the relation between a human being and their body. (...) The paper proposes an alternative conceptualization of that relation, the identity view according to which a human being is identical with their living body. This view, which offers a new ethical perspective on some central concepts of transplant medicine and its ethical and legal standards and institutions, supports widely shared intuitive ethical judgments. On this proposal, an act of selling a human body or one of its parts is an act of trade in human beings, not in owned objects. Transfers of human body parts for treatment purposes are to be seen as sharing in another human being’s misfortune rather than as giving owned objects. From the perspective of policy-making, the proposal requires, first, that informed consent for removal of transplant material be obtained from the potential benefactor. Secondly, explicit consent by the prospective benefactor is obligatory in the case of removal of transplant material from a living benefactor. Thirdly, in the case of posthumous retrieval, informed consent by the potential benefactor during their life is not ethically indispensable. Additionally, while refusal of posthumous retrieval expressed by a potential benefactor during their life must be respected, such a refusal needs ethical justification and explanation. (shrink)

Definition of the problem:Truog’s critique of the ”brain death” concept outlines inconsistencies well understood in the U.S. ethical debate, while he is one of the first to suggest returning to the traditional, coherent concept of death, thus breaking with the ”dead-donorrule.” The German transplantation law of 1996 endorses equating ”brain death” with death. A defeated draft, however, had acknowledged that irreversible total brain failure is a death-near state with a zero prognosis; organ harvesting, then, was to be allowed only in (...) case of prior personal consent. The politically effective objection against this concept was its admitted violation of the dead-donorrule and thus its (incorrectly) alleged precedent potential for legalising active euthanasia. Truog’s suggestion to justify organ explantation on the grounds of ”consent and nonmaleficence” would have fuelled German counter-critics had they known it. The problem is how to justify organ harvesting after breaking the dead-donorrule. Arguments: With the allegation that ”imminent death” and ”irreversible coma” allow concluding that there is ”no harm,” Truog ironically returns to the weak arguments traditionally used to support the ”brain death” concept. His suggestion opens the door to a wide array of eligible organ donors (and, indeed, to a precedential case for active euthanasia). The euphemistic tradition of the ”brain death” concept, perhaps a prominent reason for public scepticism towards transplantation, will be perpetuated unless it is acknowledged that the interference of organ explantation with the donor’s dying process does as such constitute ”harm” to this individual. Organ harvesting, then, requires prior personal consent and needs to be clearly differentiable from any act of ”killing” if it is to be compatible with the law, acceptable to surgeons and not a precedent for active euthanasia. A close look at the actual procedure reveals that consent has invariably the effect of prolonging, not shortening the factual life span of the person in whom irreversible total brain failure has been diagnosed. This peculiarity distinguishes organ explantation from all other forms of terminating a person’s life and is not congruent with the ethical and legal notion of ”killing”. Conclusion: Breaking the dead-donorrule by allowing for the donor to give prior personal consent to organ explantation as a procedure that is going to interfere with his or her dying can be justified, informed consent provided, without setting foot on a slippery slope. (shrink)

Sanctions such as those applied by the United Nations against Yugoslavia, or rather the actions of implementing and maintaining them, at the very least implicitly purport to have moral justification. While the rhetoric used to justify sanctions is clearly moralistic, even sanctions themselves, as worded, often include phrases indicating moral implication. On May 30, 1992, United Nation Security Council Resolution 757 imposed a universal, binding blockage on all trade and all scientific, cultural and sports exchanges with Serbia and Montenegro. In (...) addition to expressing the usual "concern' and "dismay" regarding various events, the language of this Resolution also includes, on three occasions, unmistakably moral language "deploring" failures in meeting the demands of earlier resolutions.' There is no question that sanctions have political, economic, military and trategic consequences for the sanctioned state, perhaps exactly as desired by the sanctioning party. However, the question raised in this essay is whether in addition to these consequences, sanctions also produce morally reprehensible consequences that undermine their often-cited moral justification. If so, international economic sanctions are an immoral means of achieving primarily political goals. Six morally significant consequences are: 1) The unethical, elevated susceptibility of the sanctioned to olitical (and other forms of) manipulation, 2) the inherent and unjust paternalism in the process of sanctioning, 3) the abandonment of strict moral criteria on virtually all levels of evaluation, primarily inside the sanctioned country, but also in sanctioning states best exhibited in the attitudes toward the sanctioned, 4) the general decline in moral consciousness, 5) the subsequent rise of many forms of violence within the sanctioned state in connection with the increase in lawlessness, and a general decline of expectations in all areas of life, and 6) the continual, arbitrary redefining of conditions for a final lifting of sanctions. In light of this moral phenomenology we shall argue that sanctions, lacking in moral justification, are simply a means for achieving the mentioned immoral goals. Furthermore, the argument will be that sanctions are a form of siege and, as such, an act of war, requiring the sort of justification that would be needed to justify a war. (shrink)

The Manifestation Requirement, advanced by Dummett in his critique of semantic realism, has been criticized for being behavioristic, and the responses have been made that the critics are mistaken. However, the dispute has failed to exhibit the point of the Requirement. In this paper, I shall argue (1) that, in the light of Anscombe's theory of practical knowledge, knowledge of linguistic meaning is to be seen as the knowledge-how that forms the basis of the practical knowledge that an (...) agent has of his own intentional actions, (2) that such knowledge of linguistic meaning is to be based on mutual agreements in a community, and (3) that the Manifestation Requirement is a condition for the possibility of such mutual agreements. As a result, the Manifestation Requirement finds its basis on the idea that language and linguistic acts are tools that we use while continually improving them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Acting Person and Christian Moral Life by Darlene Fozard WeaverSameer YadavThe Acting Person and Christian Moral Life By Darlene Fozard Weaver WASHINGTON, DC: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. 215 PP. $32.95In this carefully argued and theologically subtle study of human moral agency, Darlene Fozard Weaver describes a large-scale shift in theological ethics away from an “act-centered” approach and toward a more “person-centered” approach. She catalogues the shift via (...) recent debates between those with “traditionalist” and “revisionist” attitudes toward the moral status of particular actions in Roman Catholic ethics. Whereas the traditionalist position claims that the intrinsic evil of particular acts is determinative of the moral blameworthiness of the acting person, revisionists hold that the moral status of any act is more fundamentally determined by the orientation of the person to his or her act. This revisionist movement toward a person-centric analysis reflects a wider trend that also includes Protestant ethics, particularly in the twentieth-century resurgence of virtue ethics prompted by MacIntyre and Hauerwas. [End Page 210]Against this backdrop, Weaver wishes to side neither with those traditional act-centric models that culminated in the regulation of personal acts found in pre–Vatican II penitential manuals nor with the more recent person-centric models that privilege the moral interiority of the acting person. Each, she argues, has its gains and losses. The traditional picture rightly gives our particular actions their own fundamental moral significance, but at the expense of tending toward a kind of Pelagianism. The revisionist picture recognizes the irreducibility of our subjective orientation to particular acts, but it leaves the moral significance of personal actions and our resources for navigating moral dilemmas problematically open-ended. Crucially, both pictures, with their narrow fixation on moral culpability, restrict the moral significance of personal actions.Weaver’s contribution is to sketch an account acknowledging the irreducibility of the fundamental orientation of the acting person to his or her acts, while attending to the way that particular actions retain their power for determining that orientation. She builds a picture of this reflexive relation between person and act by way of its instantiation in the relation of sin to particular sins; intimacy with God as bound up in our actual relations to self and others; fidelity to God as a matter not primarily of moral culpability but of moral responsibility in negotiating the particular demands that others place on us; truthfulness before God as the kind of naming of our actions required by the vision of fidelity shared by our community; and reconciliation with God as realized in the healing enabled by acts of forgiveness for our breaches of fidelity. Each moment in this development of her overall picture carefully builds upon the moment preceding it to produce a rich and compelling picture of human moral economy as an outworking of (rather than meriting of) divine grace.Throughout the book, Weaver’s theological interests in moral theorizing are stressed over the philosophical ones, and this may disappoint readers wondering how a theology of human action supervenes on issues such as (in) compatibilism about free will or the metaphysics of agent causation. Although Weaver’s refocusing of our attention on the significance of particular actions is salutary, her criticism of virtue-based approaches as incomplete is attenuated by her dependence upon the Hauerwasian conception of virtue to explicate the very notion of reflexivity that she defends. Such worries notwithstanding, Weaver has given us an extraordinarily fruitful framework for Christian moral theology. Moreover, it is expressed lucidly and makes excellent use of literary sources and current events to illustrate her analysis. Given its depth and accessibility, the book not only is required reading for Christian moral theologians but also deserves a wider readership from anyone interested in making theological sense of human agency. [End Page 211]Sameer YadavIndiana Wesleyan UniversityCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series (...) of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that faith is recalcitrant in the face of new evidence, but it is puzzling how such recalcitrance could be rational or laudable. I explain this aspect of faith and why faith is not only rational, but in addition serves an important purpose in human life. Because faith requires maintaining a commitment to act on the claim one has faith in, even in the face of counter-evidence, faith allows us to carry out long-term, risky projects that we (...) might otherwise abandon. Thus, faith allows us to maintain integrity over time. (shrink)

Certain consequentialists have responded to deontological worries regarding personal projects or options and agent-centered restrictions or constraints by pointing out that it is consistent with consequentialist principles that people develop within themselves, dispositions to act with such things in mind, even if doing so does not lead to the best consequences on every occasion. This paper argues that making this response requires shifting the focus of moral evaluation off of evaluation of individual actions and towards evaluation of whole character traits (...) and patterns of behavior. However, this weds consequentialism to a sort of psychological determinism, with which it is incompatible, because it makes any sort of assessment in terms of right or wrong incoherent. The paper concludes by sketching an ethical theory that abandons right and wrong as its organizing concepts, but nevertheless preserves much of the spirit of consequentialism. Relationships between whole patterns of behavior and the production of good and bad consequences can be studied and analyzed, and this information can be used to improve society and ourselves, without it being required that any individual persons acts or dispositions to behave be evaluated as right or wrong. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Berel Lang PLOTTING PHILOSOPHY: BETWEEN THE ACTS OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE When Hegel wrote that philosophy's Owl of Minerva takes wing only at the falling of dusk, he did not mean that philosophy is always tardy, only that it comes late in the day. It may, however, seem both late and tardy to call attention now to the role of genres in philosophical writing, and still more beside the point (...) to assess the importance of philosophical genres to our philosophical and not only to our literary understanding. Even if we find a way past the varieties of aesthetic nominalism for which any allocation to genres is a snare and a trap— recall here Croce's declaration of"eternal war" against the obscurantism of genres1—we confront the growing skepticism of literary theory as it now disputes not only the formalism presupposed in the taxonomic distinctions of genre, but also the mimetic or representational function of discourse more generally.2 If texts as such can no longer rely on a mimetic ground, it would be impossible for the formal features ofgenre, rooted in the then archaic distinction between form and content, to represent a literary (or indeed any kind of) idea; that is, it would be impossible for them to be philosophically significant. This difficulty only intensifies, of course, for philosophical writing: philosophy, we learn, ought no longer to delude itself with hopes for success as a "mirror of nature" (in Rorty's phrase of opprobrium),3 and it would then be delusion added to delusion to believe that the genres of philosophical discourse might, at another remove, mirror an object which philosophy had mistakenly been supposed to represent in the first place. That original "representation" turns out now to represent nothing at all—and Plato's attack on the deceptions ofart thus discovers a new and finer object in philosophy itself: his indictment of art at least 190 Berel Lang191 supposed that there was something for art to be deceptive about. On this postmodernist account, then, there could be no philosophical point in plotting the course of philosophical genres; and indeed there could hardly be any other point except perhaps for antiquarians intent on finding a place for genres among the other historical curiosities which philosophers, quite inexplicably, once took seriously, like Descartes's piece of wax or Plato's aviary or Berkeley's tar water. Such intimations of the death of genres, however, may be not only premature but misdirected in rather a special way. For even in a less suspicious age, when the prima facie claims for the existence of genres might have been accepted at face value, their role was shadowy, fixed in a rhetorical limbo. Evidently (or so I would argue), there have existed generic conventions of which philosophical writers have been aware and to which their writings conformed. But even among writers in whom this pattern is most explicit and self-conscious, it is not as though the writer, after first reviewing a list of genres, would then simply choose the one among them that most recommended itself. No doubt, a writer's style—including the genre of his writing—is deliberate, in some sense a matter of choice. But the conception of "choice" in this context is an unusual one. Plotting genre could not be like trying on suits until one finds a likely fit— because this would imply that when the philosopher is trying out various possibilities, what he measures them by exists in his own mind as a philosophical Ur-genre, something which itself transcends the requirements of genre. We might suspect the presence here of the genre of all genres that is not itself, however, the member of a genre. And although it is possible that such a philosophical bedrock exists—this would be, in a way, a true philosopher's stone—all that philosophers have turned up in their history as a matter offact is a considerable number and variety of—well, we have to say it—philosophical genres. Genres, in other words, have rarely been read or written as "natural kinds," and yet they have surely been read and written. The distinctions among them and even the broad tide... (shrink)

The Data Protection Act 1998 presents a number of significant challenges to data controllers in the health sector. To assist data controllers in understanding their obligations under the act, the Information Commissioner has published guidance, The Use and Disclosure of Health Data, which is reproduced here. The guidance deals, among other things, with the steps that must be taken to obtain patient data fairly, the implied requirements of the act to use anonymised or psuedonymised data where possible, an exemption applicable (...) principally to records based research, the right of patients to object to the processing of their data, and the interface of the act and the common law duty of confidence. (shrink)

Behaviorism and the philosophy of the act are widely believed to be inconsistent with one another. I argue that both are true, Fulfilling the requirements of scientific psychology and the phenomenology of mind, Respectively. The key to understanding their mutual consistency lies in the idea of parallelism and its corresponding requirement that all descriptive features of mental states be analyzed as properties, None as relations (to anything physical). So the intentional link itself must be a 'logical' and not a (...) descriptive connection. More broadly, It is required to free the act from its origins in the metaphysical notion of 'activity' and the substance ontology from which that motion derives. (shrink)

: Prenatal and preconceptual testing and screening programs provide information on the basis of which people can choose to avoid the birth of children likely to face disabilities. Some disabilities advocates have objected to such programs and to the decisions made within them, on the grounds that measures taken to avoid the birth of children with disabilities have an "expressive force" that conveys messages disrespectful to people with disabilities. Assessing such a claim requires careful attention to general considerations relating meaning, (...) intention, and social practices; it has only begun to receive such attention. Building on work by Allen Buchanan, who has challenged this claim, I further consider the disabilities advocates' objection, ultimately concluding that it is misplaced; neither individual actions nor general practices of this type necessarily express disrespectful messages. (shrink)

As of December 1991, the Patient Self-Determination Act mandated that health care institutions which receive funding from Medicare or Medicaid provide written information about persons rights to participate in medical decision-making and formulate advance directives. The PSDA required each state…acting through a State agency, association, or other private nonprofit entity develop a written description of the law of the State concerning advance directives that would be distributed by providers or organizations under the requirements of [the Act].

As of December 1991, the Patient Self-Determination Act mandated that health care institutions which receive funding from Medicare or Medicaid provide written information about persons rights to participate in medical decision-making and formulate advance directives. The PSDA required each state…acting through a State agency, association, or other private nonprofit entity develop a written description of the law of the State concerning advance directives that would be distributed by providers or organizations under the requirements of [the Act].

SummaryThe toleration gained by Protestant Dissenters, the Toleration Act of 1689, was far from comprehensive. It insisted that Dissenting authorities should subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the Church of England. It suspended anti-Dissent legislation rather than repealing it and the sacramental requirement for civil officials remained in place. The situation of Dissent under the law was ambiguous and, at least in theory, the freedom of worship gained under the act was incomplete. This article examines Dissenter attempts to clarify (...) their situation under the law and to be free from the Anglican subscription requirement for minsters, schoolmasters and tutors. It focuses on those aspects of their campaigning propaganda which accorded with natural law theory and particularly on the relationship between concerns for the well-being of the community and the assertion of the natural rights of conscience. It finds that pragmatic considerations competed with theoretical prescriptions. Although the language of natural rights was increasingly to the fore in the late eighteenth century, even the more radical Dissenters did not entirely abandon claims for wider toleration based on natural law considerations. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that natural rights trumped natural law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility: Husserl and Fink on the Phenomenologizing Subject by Denis DŽANIĆD. J. HobbsDŽANIĆ, Denis. Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility: Husserl and Fink on the Phenomenologizing Subject. Cham: Springer, 2023. x + 236 pp. Cloth, $119.99Denis Džanić’s Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility, despite its superficially historical focus on a specific period of collaboration between Edmund Husserl and his somewhat wayward protégé Eugen Fink, addresses key (...) systematic issues in transcendental phenomenology, namely, how the act of phenomenologizing should be understood in connection with the specific human beings who aim to become phenomenologists, and what the answer to this question tells us about both the genuine subject of phenomenology and the motivation for phenomenologizing. These questions are important for our understanding of not only the historical development of phenomenology but also the practice and goals of phenomenology—specifically, for a conception of phenomenologizing as a project in which we, as particular, historical, empirical figures, might want to engage.Much of the book focuses on laying the groundwork for understanding these complicated issues both historically and systematically. Džanić does an admirable job of tracing the rapidly evolving interactions between Husserl and Fink, both as intellectual collaborators on this philosophical project and as a pair of very human figures who ultimately found themselves pursuing quite different solutions to the problems of the subject and origin of phenomenology. He focuses particularly on the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Fink’s attempt to extend Husserl’s famous text to include a phenomenology of the act of phenomenologizing itself (including Husserl’s marginal comments on the text), although he draws on a number of other significant texts and manuscripts (mostly Husserl’s, albeit with an extended aside on Heidegger) wherever they are helpful for explicating the complex evolution of Husserl’s thought on the subject. Admittedly, the book thus takes on a challenging task—both because of the difficult nature of this topic and because of the obscurity of the technical terms required to discuss it. However, despite the necessarily enigmatic character of the relevant language, Džanić’s attempts to explore the main outlines of this issue are worthwhile, particularly due to his ability to resist the temptation to view Husserl’s thought here as monolithic.In the early chapters, Džanić explicates in detail the rather complicated solution that Fink proposed to this difficulty, namely, the abandonment (to some extent) of the ultimately human origin of phenomenology in favor of a fundamentally nonhuman (and eventually meontic) conception of the transcendental ego, which generated a great deal of elaborate and (at least in the Sixth Meditation) inadequately supported speculation. For Fink, both the motivation to phenomenologize and the act of phenomenologizing itself ultimately stem from a source that is fundamentally prior to—in a(n onto)logical rather than temporal sense—any empirical ego or empirical act of phenomenologizing, a source that merely “enworlds” itself (in various complicated senses that Džanić does [End Page 145] an admirable job of clarifying) in the apparently anthropologistic, everyday world of individual phenomenologists. Džanić calls this interpretation of phenomenology Fink’s “epistemological anti-humanism,” and it serves as the basis for one potential (radically anti-Heideggerian but nevertheless somewhat disappointing) solution to the question of why we should phenomenologize at all. As Džanić notes, this solution was at least briefly taken up by Fink’s mentor Husserl himself, although the degree to which Husserl actually endorsed this path beyond the level of a fleeting flirtation remains questionable. Ultimately, as Džanić rightly highlights and as becomes abundantly clear in Husserl’s (often rather scathing) notes on Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, he abandoned this interpretation.Accordingly, in the later chapters of the book, Džanić traces Husserl’s ultimate development of a quite different solution to the problems of the origin and motivation of phenomenology—a solution that, unlike his brief foray into Finkian grandeur, views the act of phenomenologizing as essentially rooted in human possibility (that is, as part of the famous lifeworld that features so prominently in Husserl’s work, especially in the Crisis and other late texts). After his collaboration with and... (shrink)

My making choices and acting on those choices in a way that might count as my being free would seem to require that those choices are truly my choices. Furthermore, for my choices to be truly mine, it would seem that these choices must reflect my true self. So it seems that choosing and acting freely depends in a robust sense on such choosing and acting being authentic. Yet the concept of authenticity seems problematic. What or where is that true (...) self which would be the basis for authentic choosing, acting and living? Perhaps there is no such true self. This problem is central to the philosophies of both Sartre and Foucault. For the philosophers freedom authenticity or self-hood were central. The paper aims to show that, in spite of Foucault’s criticism, Sartre does not fall back on the idea of a true or deep self that is given to us. Sartre can appeal to the idea of authenticity without holding on such a dubious construct as a given, true self. Therefore the exploration of bad faith, good faith and authenticity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, where the problem is posed but left unresolved, is necessary. Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, where a more concrete problem – the problem of authentically identifying oneself with a group of human beings − actually opens up a way how to overcome the problem of authenticity. (shrink)

This contribution reconstructs and assesses Gideon Yaffe’s claims in his book Attempts about what constitutes an attempt, what can count as evidence that an attempt has been made, whether abandonment is a genuine defense, and whether attempts should be punished less severely than completed crimes. I contrast Yaffe’s account of being motivated by an intention and the completion of an attempt in terms of the truth of the completion counterfactual with an alternative picture of attempts as temporally extended decision trees (...) that are complete insofar as the agent has progressed toward the final act in the tree. I suggest that this alternative scalar conception of attempt may provide a more plausible account of the defense of abandonment. I also raise questions about whether Yaffe has provided an adequate justification of his mix of luck skepticism about censure and luck realism about punishment. (shrink)

This paper is an analysis of the events recounted in 'Informed consent to septoplasty: An anecdote from the field.' As a commentary, it assesses the behavior of many agents who are parties to the story - physicians, nurses, friends of the patient, the patient's wife and the patient himself. This story is interesting for being mundane. The medical condition involved and the failures of care are not momentous. The patient's role as a medical ethicist led him to see things in (...) particular perspective and motivated or influenced his conduct sometimes not in the smartest of ways. Several accounts of informed consent are reviewed and used as measures of what happened. The moral vision behind informed consent, the rights and duties it implies and the elements of its contents are identified. No account was fulfilled. Some of the reasons and causes for this are discussed. Many sources of information and forces acting on the situation are explored. Post-operative experiences include severe irritation and discomfort as well as severe frustration and a sense of alienation and abandonment. The case communicates a hint about what physicians do not know in order to have informed consent occur. Physicians' lack of awareness about, e.g., post-operative experience means that they will not provide what the informed aspect of informed consent requires. Patients can feel abandoned and perhaps are abandoned in a variety of ways, subtle and not so subtle. A few issues besides informed consent are discussed (the roles of wives in working at their physician-husband's front desk, the language of reassurance). (shrink)

In his "Reply to Iddo Landau," Edmund Wall responds to the author’s critique of some of the views expressed in his "Sexual Harassment and Wrongful Communication." The present article concentrates on what the author takes to be the main problem in Wall’s definition: by requiring that any act, even if intentional and cruel in nature, needs to be repeated to count as sexual harassment, Wall allows too much leeway and renders permissible a wide range of intentional, mean, and harmful actions (...) that most, including, the author believes, Wall himself, would like to outlaw. The article considers Wall’s linguistic and nonlinguistic responses to this critique and finds them problematic. Key Words: sexual harassment • discrimination • law • ethics • feminism. (shrink)