This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

In a post-apartheid South Africa, the value of reflective memories and their impact on community history gives credibility to their relationship with personal struggles such as disability, be it physical or political. Shaped by South African Indian heritage, an isolated individualised case of a second-generation descendant’s ability–disability experience is researched and narrated in this article. The respondent, Dr Kasturi Varley is a woman of the South African Indian community, who was born almost 101 years after the first shipload of Indian (...) indentured labourers arrived in the then Colony of Natal. Her memories shed light on a unique Indo-African-European experience. Her indentured paternal grandfather arrived in the African continent in August 1900. Her reflective memories and shared experiences of various episodes of the ability–disability paradigm add to the body of knowledge of the Indian indentured labour system that already exists and partially fills up the prevalent gaps in the research on this topic. Her story is unique in that she worked wheelchair-bound at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria and subsequently settled in the United Kingdom. This study applied a qualitative research methodology.Contribution: This article provides insight on reflective memories within the domain of social memory and contributes to an understanding of the historiography of the descendants of Indian indentured labourers in South Africa. In 2020, this community commemorated the 160th anniversary of the arrival of the labourers to the Colony of Natal. (shrink)

The relevance and value of oral history practices and principles and its impact on community history gives credence to its relationship with the liberation struggle. The liberation struggle heroines that formed the cohort of interviewees for this research were members of the South African Indian community. This interview- research process provides a platform that allows the veteran South African female of Indian Heritage to reflect almost 50 years later and be a part of the celebration, preservation and promotion (...) of struggle narratives. The women who were interviewed for this research shed light on celebrating political achievements, whilst remembering and recalling the educational, material and economic assistance from international sources. Furthermore, these women referred to the preservation of South Africa’s unique heritage as, South Africa is united in its diversity. Promoting the values of the liberation struggle by sharing her anecdotes, honouring the cadres, relating experiences, retelling tales and sometimes possibly reliving military camp days completed the oral history interview process and eventually added to the body of knowledge that already exists and partially filled the gaps that exist.Contribution: From a multidisplinary religious perspective, this article contributes to the historical and social-cultural discourse on liberation theology within a paradigm in which the intersection of social sciences and humanities generates a transdisciplinary contested discourse. (shrink)

As our understanding of biological evolution continues to deepen, tension still surrounds the relationship between competition and cooperation in the evolution of the biosphere, with rival viewpoints often associated with the Red Queen and Black Queen hypotheses respectively. This essay seeks to reconcile these viewpoints by integrating observations of some general trends in biosphere evolution with concepts from game theory. It is here argued that biodiversity and ecological cooperation are intimately related, and that both tend to cyclically increase over biological (...) history; this is likely due to the greater relative stability of cooperation over competition as a means of long-term conflict resolution within ecosystems. By integrating this view of the biosphere with existing models such as Niche Game Theory, it may be argued that competition and cooperation in ecosystems coexist at equilibria which shift preferentially towards increasing cooperation over biological history. This potentially points to a state of “cooperative equilibrium” as a limit or endpoint in long-term biosphere evolution, such that Black Queen and Red Queen behavior dominate different phases in an evolutionary movement towards optimal cooperative stability in ecological networks. This concept, if accepted, may also bear implications for developing future mathematical models in evolutionary biology, as well as for resolving the perennial debate regarding the relative roles of conflict and harmony in nature. (shrink)

This paper will explore the relevance of vulnerability to children’s rights. Broadly speaking legal debates over children can be broken down into two camps. First, those who emphasise the vulnerability of children. For them rights designed to protect children from abuse and promote their welfare are the most significant. Second, those who claim that children are far less vulnerable than is assumed and should be given many of the freedoms of adults. For them rights of autonomy and freedom should be (...) emphasised. This paper will argue that both camps make the error of starting with the norm of adulthood being a time of invulnerability and independence from which children are either distinguished or are closer to than is normally appreciated. Once it is recognised that adults share in children’s vulnerability, we can see that childhood vulnerability is not something which children should be enabled to escape from, nor is it something that is unique to children. Vulnerability and interdependence should form the basis of rights for both children and adults. There is, therefore, no reason why children and adults should not have the same rights. (shrink)

In March 2020, the Government produced a document entitled “Responding to COVID-19: The Ethical Framework for Adult Social Care”. In this article, we summarise the key features of the proposed ethical framework and subject it to critical analysis. We highlight three primary issues. First, the emphasis placed on autonomy as the primary ethical principle. We argue if ever there was a context in which autonomy should dominate the ethical analysis, this is not it. Second, we examine the interface between ethics (...) and law which is largely overlooked in the document. Finally, we explore the surprising lack of attention paid to the concept of responsibility and communal obligations within the framework. (shrink)

We are very grateful to Richard Ashcroft 1 and Andrew McGee 2 for their thoughtful and articulate criticisms of our views. 3 Ashcroft has disappointingly low aspirations for the law. Of course he is right to say that the law is not a ‘self-sufficient, integrated and self-interpreting system of doctrine’. The law is often philosophically incoherent and internally contradictory. But it does not follow from this that all areas of the law are philosophically unsatisfactory. And if that were true, the (...) response should not be Ashcroft’s contemptuous despair, but a determination to make it better. Ashcroft would say that such idealism is unrealistic in the light of the very nature of ‘the Law’: ‘...a complex assemblage of institutions, rules, accredited persons, practices and systems’. That isa radically ‘legal realist’ position and is plainly unsustainable. We can demonstrate its unsustainability while demonstrating both that he is wrong... (shrink)

We are very grateful to Richard Ashcroft1 and Andrew McGee2 for their thoughtful and articulate criticisms of our views.3 Ashcroft has disappointingly low aspirations for the law. Of course he is right to say that the law is not a ‘self-sufficient, integrated and self-interpreting system of doctrine’. The law is often philosophically incoherent and internally contradictory. But it does not follow from this that all areas of the law are philosophically unsatisfactory. And if that were true, the response should not (...) be Ashcroft’s contemptuous despair, but a determination to make it better. Ashcroft would say that such idealism is unrealistic in the light of the very nature of ‘the Law’: ‘…a complex assemblage of institutions, rules, accredited persons, practices and systems’. That isa radically ‘legal realist’ position and is plainly unsustainable. We can demonstrate its unsustainability while demonstrating both that he is wrong to tar all areas of the law with the same brush and wrong to deny that medical ethics are ‘intellectually and metaphysically prior to medical law’. Take the law of murder which, of course, is part of ‘medical law’. It is surely trite to observe that humans thought that killing people was wrong before they started penalising murder. Ethics generated the law. There is nothing elusive or incoherent about the philosophical foundations of the law of murder. Human life is thought to matter. To kill is both to cause a harm and to commit a wrong. There is more than something of the straw man in Ashcroft’s elaboration of his argument. For he chooses, of all things, autonomy and, in particular, its invocation in the law of consent. Lawyers’ eyebrows will rise at his assertion that ‘while the concept of “autonomy” has an explanatory role in discussions of the …. (shrink)

When it comes to injustice, especially racial injustice, rage isn't just an acceptable response-it's crucial in order to fuel the fight for change. Anger has a bad reputation. Many people think that it is counterproductive, distracting, and destructive. It is a negative emotion, many believe, because it can lead so quickly to violence or an overwhelming fury. And coming from people of color, it takes on connotations that are even more sinister, stirring up stereotypes, making white people fear what an (...) angry other might be capable of doing, when angry, and leading them to turn to hatred or violence in turn, to squelch an anger that might upset the racial status quo. According to philosopher Myisha Cherry, anger does not deserve its bad reputation. It is powerful, but its power can be a force for good. And not only is it something we don't have to discourage, it's something we ought to cultivate actively. People fear anger because they paint it in broad strokes, but we can't dismiss all anger, especially not now. There is a form of anger that in fact is crucial in the anti-racist struggle today. This anti-racist anger, what Cherry calls Lordean rage, can use its mighty force to challenge racism: it aims for change, motivates productive action, builds resistance, and is informed by an inclusive and liberating perspective. People can, and should, harness Lordean rage and tap into its unique anti-racist potential. We should not suppress it or seek to replace it with friendly emotions. If we want to effect change, and take down racist structures and systems, we must manage it in the sense of cultivating it, and keeping it focused and strong. Cherry makes her argument for anti-racist anger by putting Aristotle in conversation with Audre Lorde, and James Baldwin in conversation with Joseph Butler. The Case for Rage not only uses the tools of philosophy to articulate its arguments, but it sharpens them with the help of social psychology and history. The book is philosophically rich and yet highly accessible beyond philosophical spheres, issuing an urgent call to all politically and socially engaged readers looking for new, deeply effective tools for changing the world. Its message will resonate with the enraged and those witnessing such anger, wondering whether it can help or harm. Above all, this book is a resource for the activist coming to grips with a seemingly everyday emotion that she may feel rising up within her and not know what to do with. It shows how to make sure anger doesn't go to waste, but instead leads to lasting, long-awaited change. (shrink)

The transformation of forests to agriculture is a dominant theme in human history, previously associated with progress, increasingly associated with local and global danger. A workshop at the Smithsonian Institution brought together scholars interested in one very large and fragile deltaic forest system of international importance: the Sundarbans. We found that land-hungry peasants are not quite the villain of the piece, as often portrayed; destruction and deterioration of the forest reflected pre-colonial dynamics of community and state formation, colonial land and (...) forest policy, international economics, and failure to solve international commons dilemmas. Preservation of the remaining Sundarbans depends on profound shifts in values concerning nature as well as changes in political structure and national economic pressures. Conventional wisdom in the form of the “tragedy of the commons” in explaining environmental degradation stands in need of revision. (shrink)

Volume 20 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ ably traverses the analytic canvas with sections on "Theoretical Studies," "Clinical Studies," "Applied Psychoanalysis," and "Psychoanalysis and Philosophy." The first section begins with Arnold Modell's probing consideration of the paradoxical nature of the self, provocatively discussed with John Gedo. Modell focuses on the fact that the self is simultaneously public and private, dependent and autonomous. Alice Rosen Soref next explores innate motivation and self-protective regulatory processes from the standpoint of recent infancy research; her (...) notion of a lifelong two-track model of self and relatedness helps establish a normative baseline that can anchor psychoanalytic theory. George Mahl makes an interesting contribution to Freud studies in the form of a new chronology of Freud's works and the number of pages they contain in the _Standard Edition_. The section ends with Robert Galatzer-Levy and Mayer Gruber's "quasi-experiment about disgust." They test and disconfirm the hypothesis that disgust is an affective response to an abstract sense of disorder rather than a transformation of a concrete, bodily experience by systematically exploring references to concepts of disgust in the Old Testament. Section II, on "Clinical Studies," opens with Henry Smith's fascinating elaboration of Freud's notion of "screen memories" into a theory of screening that denotes the general process by which mental content is organized. He illustrates his thesis by invoking the "screen language" employed by a patient throughout her analysis. Ernest Wolf next explores the tension between being a "scientist" and a "healer" in Freud and his followers to illuminate struggles within the psychoanalytic movement and to help account for current attitudes toward abstinence, neutrality, and gratification. Kenneth Newman focuses on this same triptych of technical precepts. He argues, in the spirit of Winnicott and Kohut, that analysts can only alter the hostile internal environments of their patients by becoming "usable" objects and cultivating an optimally responsive analytic environment. A particularly rich collection of applied analytic studies forms Section III of the volume. Individual chapters focus on the childhood of Vincent van Gogh ; the psychological healing process depicted in George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ ; the self-psychological meaning of "blood brotherhood" in D. H. Lawrence's _Women in Love_ ; ecstatic mysticism in the 19th-century Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna ; the disintegration of the Tyrone family in Eugene O'Neill's _Long Day's Journey into Night_ ; and the nature and analytic significance of Freud's aesthetic response to Michelangelo's _Moses_. Finally, in Section IV, George Brook examines the commonsense psychological knowledge of everyday life, that is, the nonpsychoanalytic knowledge on which much of clinical psychoanalysis ultimately depends. Taken together, the four sections of Volume 20 of _The Annual_ offer an exciting overview of contemporary psychoanalysis. Section I highlights recent trends in psychoanalytic theorizing and the testing of psychoanalytic propositions; Section II explores the relevance of new theoretical perspectives to clinical work; Section III demonstrates the applicability of these new perspectives to psychobiographical and literary analysis; and Section IV provocatively explores the points of connection between everyday ideas and attitudes and the tenets of psychoanalytic practice. (shrink)

The law of informed consent to medical treatment has recently been extensively overhauled in England. The 2015 Montgomery judgment has done away with the long-held position that the information to be disclosed by doctors when obtaining valid consent from patients should be determined on the basis of what a reasonable body of medical opinion agree ought to be disclosed in the circumstances. The UK Supreme Court concluded that the information that is material to a patient’s decision should instead be judged (...) by reference to a new two-limbed test founded on the notions of the ‘reasonable person’ and the ‘particular patient’. The rationale outlined in Montgomery for this new test of materiality, and academic comment on the ruling’s significance, has focused on the central ethical importance that the law now accords to respect for patient autonomy in the process of obtaining consent from patients. In this paper, we dispute the claim that the new test of materiality articulated in Montgomery equates with respect for autonomy being given primacy in re-shaping the development of the law in this area. We also defend this position, arguing that our revised interpretation of Montgomery’s significance does not equate with a failure by the courts to give due legal consideration to what is owed to patients as autonomous decision-makers in the consent process. Instead, Montgomery correctly implies that doctors are ethically obliged to attend to a number of relevant ethical considerations in framing decisions about consent to treatment, which include subtle interpretations of the values of autonomy and well-being. Doctors should give appropriate consideration to how these values are fleshed out and balanced in context in order to specify precisely what information ought to be disclosed to a patient as a requirement of obtaining consent, and as a core component of shared decision-making within medical encounters more generally. (shrink)

This paper explores new working time arrangements around a critique of the ‘commodification of time’ to illuminate the contradictions of such new flexibilities. Two features of these new arrangements are seen as relevant for evaluating the Marx/Engels analysis. Firstly, it roots the examination of time in commodification, although, as criticised in this paper, some authors have seen this as the generality of time rather than that within the exchange of labour power. Significantly — and central in all working time (...) arrangements — it is labour power that is sold, be it for a particular period of time, rather than the time itself. Hence, working time arrangements set boundaries against ‘free’ time or time in which labour power is not sold as a commodity, that ‘free’ time which was recognised in the traditional arrangements — fought over in early industrialism — which set premium payments against anti-social hours within ‘overtime’. New working time arrangements tend to blur the boundaries between ‘free’ and ‘working’ time, assuming an availability of labour power to capital. While much of the promotion of flexibility stresses the possibility of making adjustment to suit social and domestic requirements it is more usually the means for altering working time to meet the demands of capital. The much-vaunted case of Volkswagen has led to ‘working time accounts’ becoming the established temporal arrangement within the German car industry and increasingly becoming the norm for other European auto producers. The name given to these new working arrangements within the motor industry suggests that time has indeed become further commodified. For workers within these new time regimes, the hours owed to their employer is displayed along with their earnings — and deductions — on their wage slip. (shrink)

While discussions of dissolving the hyphen between Marxism and feminism were put on the back burner in the United States and England in the 1980s, the author argues that changes in Latin America during the same decade favor a possible convergence of contemporary Marxist and feminist theory and practice. These conditions include the emergence of a second-wave feminist movement in many Latin America countries, the central role of women in contemporary social movements, and an internal critique within Latin (...) American Marxism. Key issues pointing toward a convergence of thinking include a reevaluation and redefinition of democracy, the concept of “a plurality of social subjects” or potential revolutionary actors, the importance of autonomy for popular movements in relation to political parties and the state, and a new understanding of the importance of daily life in the struggle for socialism. (shrink)

In her introduction to this collection, Tymieniecka presents her phenomenology of life - the leitmotif of the three-volume anniversary publication of Analecta Husserliana - as something that stands out from preceding historical attempts to investigate life in an 'integral' or 'scientific' way. After an incubation lasting throughout the 2000 years of Occidental philosophy, this scientific phenomenology/philosophy of life at last uncovers the entire area of the 'inner workings of Nature', exposing the way in which the 'sufficient reason' and the 'ground' (...) of beingness as such crystallise out of the 'onto poietic' process. This onto-poietic process, continuing as it does in the human creative condition, also reveals the authentic genius of the works of the human spirit. This new and original philosophy, free of fallacious simplifications, speculations and reductionism, opens up a basic starting point for all philosophy. Life, 'the theme of our times', at last receives a profound philosophical treatment. (shrink)

Evangelical Christianity is often thought of as oppressive to women. The #MeToo era, when many women hit a breaking point with rampant sexism, has also reached evangelical communities. Yet more than thirty million women in the United States still identify as evangelical. Why do so many women remain in male-dominated churches that marginalize them, and why do others leave? In each case, what does this cost them? The Struggle to Stay is an intimate and insightful portrait of single women's (...) experiences in evangelical churches. Drawing on unprecedented access to churches in the United States and the United Kingdom, Katie Gaddini relates the struggles of four women, interwoven with her own story of leaving behind a devout faith. She connects these personal narratives with rigorous analysis of Christianity and politics in both countries, and contextualizes them through interviews with more than fifty other evangelical women. Gaddini grapples with the complexities of obedience and resistance for women within a patriarchal religion against the backdrop of a culture war. Her exploration of how women choose to leave or remain in environments that constrain them is nuanced and personal, telling powerful stories of faith, community, isolation, and loss. Bringing together meticulous research and deep empathy, The Struggle to Stay provides a revelatory account of the private burdens that evangelical women bear. (shrink)

This book advances a novel theory of international justice that combines the orthodox liberal notion that the lives of individuals are what ultimately matter morally with the putatively antiliberal idea of an irreducibly collective right of self-governance. The individual and her rights are placed at center stage insofar as political states are judged legitimate if they adequately protect the human rights of their constituents and respect the rights of all others. Yet, the book argues that legitimate states have a moral (...) right to self-determination and that this right is inherently collective, irreducible to the individual rights of the persons who constitute them. Exploring the implications of these ideas, the book addresses issues pertaining to democracy, secession, international criminal law, armed intervention, political assassination, global distributive justice, and immigration. A number of the positions taken in the book run against the grain of current academic opinion: there is no human right to democracy; separatist groups can be morally entitled to secede from legitimate states; the fact that it is a matter of brute luck whether one is born in a wealthy state or a poorer one does not mean that economic inequalities across states must be minimized or even kept within certain limits; most existing states have no right against armed intervention; and it is morally permissible for a legitimate state to exclude all would-be immigrants. (shrink)

Abstract This essay provides a critical engagement with neo?Gramscian perspectives on European integration, dealing with their core theoretical assumptions as well as empirical analyses of individual aspects of European integration. It is argued that by drawing on Gramsci's rejection of economic determinism, his thinking on the agency?structure problem, as well as his work on how to conceptualise the role of ideas, neo?Gramscian perspectives as a critical theory are able to analyse the social purpose of European integration. The conclusion identifies several (...) shortcomings in the neo?Gramscian literature on European integration, namely (1) the neglect of national and European institutions and their structural impact on social forces as main collective actors; (2) the related oversight of possibilities for change within the existing institutional structure; (3) the neglect of studying resistance to neo?liberal restructuring in Europe; and (4) the missing analysis of trade unions and labour as potential actors within movements of resistance. (shrink)

Ida B. Wells (1862?1931) was a considerable figure in her day. But she has not been accorded posthumous acclaim in parallel. This oversight is either just, or an unprecedented historical falsification ? enabled largely through unhappy, gendered misperception. African?American thought for long turned round dispute between accommodation (Washington) and protest (Du Bois) as forms of leadership. Yet this contrast may mislead. First, Washington was more white placeman than black leader. Second, Du Bois, more than anyone, helped diminish, even extinguish, the (...) Wellsian intellectual legacy. If Wells?s arguments (on violence) have critical significance, and Washington?s are insubstantial and time?serving, then the important struggle within African?American leadership may come to be relocated within the protest tradition ? as between Du Bois (romantic Pan?Africanist) and Wells (universal defender of human rights), both recovered by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Wells possibly more fittingly. (shrink)

This article is about the method of philosophizing employed by Karol Wojtyła. He worked out his main ideas concerning the human person within a Thomistic framework, but at the same time made extensive use of the method typical of phenomenology. The article sets out to demonstrate that these two approaches do not exclude each other, but can instead be considered complementary. Phenomenology, in the version employed by Wojtyła, aims to do justice to the experience of the person, and its (...) analysis helps us understand the richness of the latter. At the same time, all of the phenomena that pertain to the person demand further explanation, and this can be supplied by Thomistic metaphysics. The method devised by Wojtyła can be expressed in the formula “from phenomenon to foundation.”. (shrink)

This article focuses on the legality of euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are allowed in certain cases, but there is no consensus with respect to the extent of the situations in which physicians should not be prosecuted. I argue that the individual, and, more specifically, his/her suffering, should be the focal point, and that the present legislation falls short in this respect; no solution can as yet be offered to individuals whose suffering cannot be (...) resolved through medical means and which cannot be subsumed under the terms the law specifies. (shrink)

By drawing up a model of the internal communication system of Bangladeshi ready-made garment factories, Helene Blumer identifies the existence and intensity of its communication flows. She furthermore discloses a connection from this communication system to labor unrest. The absence of a functioning formal channel within the factory, the lack of effective labor representation and the rare physical presence of the factory owners confirm the existence of a communication barrier. As symptom of a flawed communication system, this barrier (...) confirms a connection to labor unrest and the management's unawareness of its emergence, which would thwart any modes to predict and prevent work disruptions. Contents - Introduction to the Bangladeshi ready-made garment sector - Illustration of the internal communication system of Bangladeshi ready-made garment factories - Display of a communication barrier and its connection to labor unrest Target Groups - Academics in the fields of corporate responsibility and corporate/internal communication - Practitioners in the fields of corporate responsibility, corporate communication, development cooperation and garment industry About the Author Helene Blumer obtained her Master of Science in Business Administration (major in New Business Development) at the University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur. She currently works at the Swiss Institute for Entrepreneurship (SIFE) in the fields of corporate responsibility and business internationalization. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders the event in International Relations (IR) through the writings of Hannah Arendt. The event has for too long been neglected in IR; international events are overwhelmingly conceived as mere happenings that have meaning only within the process and temporal structure of the theory from which they are understood, and as holding no or only limited meaning in and of themselves. In her work on political theory and her reflections on totalitarianism, however, Arendt elaborates a rich view (...) of the event and its relationship to history, one that offers an alternative way of thinking about international relations. Arendt urges us to remain open to the possibility, however difficult, of conceiving of the event as meaningful outside of the processes within which our established mode of thoughts would have us subsume it. This requires on the part of the historian a commitment to judgement, to a recognition of the importance of imagination and impartiality that gives meaning to the event for others. In explicating Arendt's complex notion of the genuine political event, the paper aims not merely to demonstrate the intrinsic interest of this conception of the event to her thought, but to add to the small but growing number of works in IR that have found fruitful new avenues of thought in Arendt's various writings, and also to recent discussions on the proper relationship between history and IR theory. (shrink)

This contribution aims to outline the birth and development of the Unione Donne Italiane in regard to its relations with the Partito Comunista Italiano from 1944 to 1963.The present research has drawn mainly from archival sources.UDI was born as a multi-party women’s organization but the hegemony of the Communist women would de facto bring it under the influence of the PCI. The Italian Communist Party tried to perform a normative and normalizing task. By the logic of the Cold War, women (...) were relegated to deal mainly with the defence of peace, both nationally and internationally.From the international point of view, UDI was among the founding organizations of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. Gradually, the Unione began to accrue dissent even within the WIDF, leading to an internal struggle on the path to emancipation that the organization was already developing within its national context. (shrink)

In A Moral Theory of Political Reconciliation, Colleen Murphy devotes a full chapter to arguing that international criminal trials make significant contributions to political reconciliation within post-conflict and transitional societies. While she is right to claim that these trials serve an important function, I take issue with her with respect to what that important function is. Whereas Murphy focuses on the contributions international criminal prosecutions might make to political reconciliation within the borders of transitional societies, I claim instead (...) that their primary function is to restore order at the international level and to dispense justice. The aims of justice are not always consistent with the aims of reconciliation. Moreover, several features of international criminal trials should give us pause with respect even to how well, in fact, they manage to serve the ends of international justice. (shrink)

Women's exclusion from political enfranchisement in Kant's political writings has frequently been noted in the literature, and yet has not been closely scrutinized. More often than not, commentators suggest that this reflects little more than Kant's sharing in the prejudices of his era. This paper argues that, for Kant, women's civil incapacities stem from defects relating to their capacities as moral agents, and more specifically, to his teleological account of the conditions within which we, as imperfect beings, develop our (...) moral capacities. Women are not incidentally or tangentially excluded from the boundaries of political and moral agency, but rather must adopt an explicitly nonmoral character if we are to understand humanity as moving toward its naturally given, moral ends. I argue (1) that Kant's teleological view of human development requires women to develop an explicitly nonmoral character; (2) that this teleology is inextricable from his view of the moral agency that human—and not merely rational—beings are capable of; and (3) that taken together, these suggest that women's subordinate status is internally connected to Kant's view of moral personhood. (shrink)

The extent to which normal (nonmalignant) cells of the body can evolve through mutation and selection during the lifetime of the organism has been a major unresolved issue in evolutionary and developmental studies. On the one hand, stable multicellular individuality seems to depend on genetic homogeneity and suppression of evolutionary conflicts at the cellular level. On the other hand, the example of clonal selection of lymphocytes indicates that certain forms of somatic mutation and selection are concordant with the organism-level fitness. (...) Recent DNA sequencing and tissue physiology studies suggest that in addition to adaptive immune cells also neurons, epithelial cells, epidermal cells, hematopoietic stem cells and functional cells in solid bodily organs are subject to evolutionary forces during the lifetime of an organism. Here we refer to these recent studies and suggest that the expanding list of somatically evolving cells modifies idealized views of biological individuals as radically different from collectives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist DesireStories by Ding Ling, Alice Munro, and Eileen ChangYuhui Bao (bio) and Ian Dennis (bio)Desire has a history and, for a literary criticism inflected by mimetic theory, novelistic prose fiction offers a privileged view of its unfolding. We study novelistic fiction, as opposed to various romance genres, to grasp that history, for what its authors have been able to see, understand, and dramatize—this is (...) the procedural model, indeed the authority established by René Girard and that has largely governed such criticism thereafter.1 But of the three short fictions we consider here—two Chinese and one Canadian—only two are fully novelistic in character, in that they attempt to describe and diagnose—rather than merely express—emergent and changing desires. Students of Girard, of course, recognize here the distinction between the romanesque and romantique. to which one might add the understandings of genre developed by a number of other theorists.2However, we might also concede that all fictions are invariably and to some degree romantic—some desire, necessarily mediated, is always operative, in writers and readers alike, before or even as it is demystified, if indeed it is. Furthermore, a passionate fictional commitment to that which Girard boldly [End Page 131] designated the mensonge romantique may actually reveal or clarify, at least for later readers, that which the author seeks half- or unconsciously to conceal. It is with this possibility in mind that we propose to consider our other subject fiction, "Miss Sophie's Diary" (莎菲女士的日记 sha fei nv shi de ri ji; 1927) by the pioneering Chinese woman writer Ding Ling (丁玲 ding ling).3 "Miss Sophie's Diary," to be clear, is no simple romance; it is at least hybrid, and in its brave if perhaps only partially successful pursuit of the truth of desire, subtly revelatory. Miss Sophie (莎菲 sha fei), chronically ill with tuberculosis and half-separated from a human world she both longs for and despises, with her aggrieved sense of superiority and desperate, shameful longing for those she passionately feels to be her inferiors, with her loquacious rationalizing and constant, perverse reversals of attitude, is a kind of Dostoyevskian "underground woman," afflicted as well with a touch of the "nausea" later made prestigious by J.-P. Sartre.4 She is clearly a harbinger of her own culture's precipitation into the world of internally mediated, indeed, metaphysical desire, what we might also call the market world, the modernity Girard credits the great European novelists from Stendhal onward with diagnosing. This story has long been described as an unprecedented and "frank" revelation "of a Chinese woman's sexual feelings and contempt for conventional views," expressing an "outspoken and unrelenting individualism."5 At the same time, it has been seen as a product of the fatally compromised and ultimately unsuccessful May Fourth literary movement,6 and not necessarily representative of its author's overall fictional production. From an orthodox Girardian critical perspective, however, the crucial interpretative question might be the degree to which Ding Ling is aware of the sources of the newly enfranchised desires her heroine wrestles with, or, as we might also put it, the degree of separation between the author's understanding and that of Miss Sophie. But such a question is perhaps easily enough answered. Ding Ling clearly does not share Girard's "novelistic" perspective on the operation of desire. But from our current perspective, does her best-known work nonetheless offer, however imperfectly, certain now-recognizable insights into historical processes of desire that our other two writers more fully realize?"Miss Sophie's Diary" is famous in China for the delicacy, depth, and explicitness with which those bold and passionate sexual desires of Sophie are exposed, even as such desires are (perhaps reassuringly) defeated, or at least revealed as illusory. Clearly the story reflects a period of cultural and personal crisis. "I was extremely confused at that time," she wrote in a later phase of self-critique. "On one hand, I was radically rebellious, believing blindly in social revolution; on the other hand, I indulged myself in a petty bourgeoisie sense, departing from revolution, so I was trapped in loneliness, struggle and misery [End... (shrink)

In her target article “Shared health governance” (AJOB 11(7): 32-45, 2011) and in her book Health and Social Justice (2009), Jennifer Prah Ruger defends an original model of governance dubbed “Shared Health Governance” (SHG). This model borrows elements from many other models of governance, and one may wonder what is the secret sauce that holds together these diverse ingredients. In response, Ruger would perhaps ultimately turn to public moral norms. My comment raises some concerns about the function and content of (...) these norms in her model and their connection to her claims about shared sovereignty within SHG. (shrink)

Human rights have always been an acute ideological issue. The peaceful coexistence of states with different social systems does not imply any relaxation of ideological struggle; but this struggle has to be carried on within a definite framework, without slander or interference in the domestic affairs of other states. Otherwise, it will undermine international détente, which is incompatible with any spread of suspicion, mistrust, or hostility in relations among nations. Détente implies mutual respect for the sovereignty and (...) the laws and customs of states. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze by Anthony Sean NealKordell DixonPhilosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze Anthony Sean Neal. Rowman & Littlefield, 2022.Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle begins with a clear and concise establishment of its aim: to analyze and expand upon those figures mentioned when discussing the academic project of studying (...) black people. Neal broadens the account of black scholars examining racialized existence by centering his work on the modern era and its initiator W. E. B Du Bois. Neal develops an ethnic reflective canon that documents the long history of black thinkers attempting to define their blackness and advance the conception of freedom. This book does an excellent job of capturing the genealogical structure of the struggle for freedom. Within the work, Neal denotes that all relevant figures in this tradition are freedom gazers. These gazers are spectators of a radically imagined future liberated from the oppressive systems that encumber the persecuted. Du Bois's approach to freedom gazing uses academic training to examine his blackness and inevitably to solve the "race problem." What Neal provides the reader is a road map of the intellectual work of black scholars. This road map details the common themes among black thinkers and how these themes relate to Du Bois. Neal's intricate network of philosophers uses their experience and their expertise to write about what is necessary for black people to obtain freedom. Neal composes a complex and remarkable catalog of black scholars that demonstrates the interconnectedness and progression of black thought on oppression and liberation.In the second chapter, Neal elucidates why Du Bois is chosen as the inaugurator of the modern era. As a formally educated black man, Du Bois questions his experience and what tethers him to oppression. Neal uses Du Bois as a focal point, not because Du Bois is the first black person to document their struggle with their racialized existence, but because he believes that Du Bois is the first scholar to analyze the black experience completely. The holistic nature of Du Bois's study of the existential conflict that race can manifest within its subjects allows Du Bois's analysis to be used as a tool to unify other works that discuss race and the struggle for freedom. Neal expresses how other scholars such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Anna Julia Cooper all had work that takes up a similar task as Du Bois's but lacks the fullness of Du Bois's study. Here, Neal does not articulate clearly [End Page 87] how these figures are inadequate with respect to their work. It could be argued that each scholar named could be said to have accomplished a task similar to that of Du Bois. However, how these figures are studied throughout different disciplines gives the impression that their examination of race and freedom is much more focused on one specific field. This point speaks to how we interpret the work of these scholars and not to these scholars' work itself. Neal proceeds to describe Du Bois as a freedom gazer and explains how Du Bois's imagining of black persons as freed would allot a perceptual framework that motivates them to proclaim their right to mental and physical freedom. Further, Neal establishes that Du Bois's position as a freedom gazer allows him to expand the ethnic reflective canon. This canon includes Ida B. Wells, whose journalism on the lynching of black people during the Reconstruction era made headway on what social sciences could contribute to the struggle against injustice. Anna Julia Cooper is included in this canon; her radically imagined future was thought to be achieved through education. Wells and Cooper proceeded and directly influenced the work of Du Bois, creating a lineage of radical social thought. Neal maps his transition through the intellectual work of black scholars by using conceptions of peace, rebellion, revolution, and freedom as relational markers. The reader can identify the relationships among the varied work of freedom gazers despite the vast range of their spatiotemporal placement.In the third chapter, Neal examines the subjects Hubert Harrison, William H... (shrink)

How will we as feminists theorize these borders? How will we as beings whose very bodies are objects of globalization theorize a border which we dwell within? Ofelia Shutte asks whether it is “possible for Western feminism to disentangle itself from the historical forces of Western colonialism and from the erasure of otherness that such forces entail? (Shutte 2000, 59) I ask whether it is possible for feminism, Western or non-Western, Northern or Southern, to utilize the theoretical and political (...) resource that others, who are “othered” on both sides of the border, offer to feminist struggle. (shrink)

My knowledge of architecture is constrained to a coupler of idiosyncratic data: my love for Ayn Rand and her architecture-novel The Fountainhead; my admiration of the Stalinist “wedding-cake” baroque kitsch; my dream of a house composed only of secondary spaces and places of passage – stairs, corridors, toilets, store-rooms, kitchen – with no living room or bedroom. The danger that I am courting is thus that what I will say will oscillate between the two extremes of unfounded speculations and what (...) most is already known for a long time. I would like to begin with the notion of parallax which I took from Kojin Karatani. The common definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective,” due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself. When confronted with such a parallax gap, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other ; the task is, on the contrary, to conceive all possible positions as responses to a certain underlying deadlock or antagonism, as so many attempts to resolve this deadlock… and this already brings us to so-called postmodern architecture which, sometimes, seems to enact the notion of parallax in a directly-palpable way. Think about Liebeskind or Gehry: their work often appears as a desperate attempt to combine two incompatible structuring principles within the same building, as if two principles are locked in a struggle for hegemony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Body Hidden WithinTara ChapmanBeing “fat” was not a choice. It was my life and it slowly happened over time. Being obese is a disease that I have struggled with my entire life. I am 36 years old, nearing 37.I might not have eaten the right foods, but I didn’t overeat. I grew up eating typical American food and continued to cook that way into my adult life. I (...) ate eggs and toast for breakfast, sandwiches, chips and a few cookies for lunch, or leftovers, and some kind of meat and potatoes or pasta for dinner, with a canned vegetable. I very seldom ate fresh vegetables, but I did like summer fruits. However, those are filled with natural sugar and are only in season for a few months out of the year. I didn’t eat out, other than having my daily Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino on the way to work five days a week. I didn’t load my plate up with food. I ate less than my brother, sister and parents who are smaller than me. I took exercise and fitness classes all through college and knew what I was supposed to do. I exercised over the years, only to quit because I never lost weight and got discouraged. I would feel [End Page 93] better physically; however, I just kept packing on the pounds, which took a toll emotionally.By November 2012, I topped the scale at 291 pounds and could barely fit into my size 22 jeans and 3xl tops. I would sweat uncontrollably because of all the extra weight I was carrying around and could barely make it up the ramp at work or a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing. Because I would sweat profusely, my wardrobe consisted of white or black shirts. I had to hide the sweat stains. I had high blood pressure and cholesterol. I was on medication for both. My insulin levels were all over the boards. I knew that when I was shaky and my levels were high, it was time to eat. I would control my type II diabetes by eating a small piece of candy, which would instantly control my shakes. I would follow the candy up with a meal. My diet and exercise habits were causing me to have terrible headaches. In my early 20’s, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). Besides having ovarian cysts and unbalanced hormones, the major issue with PSOC is unexplained weight gain and not being able to lose it. My health was spinning out of control and I secretly knew it. I just didn’t know how to fix it or what to do.I had to do something and I needed help. I didn’t want to die by the time I was 40; and the path that I was on was leading me to an early grave. I could hear it in my mom’s voice every time I talked to her. She knew something was wrong; she would try to talk to me about it and tell me I was going to have a heart attack. She would tell me how worried my dad was. I wouldn’t listen. I began to sleep more and more every day after work and on weekends. I had to take naps almost daily because I was so exhausted and had no energy. I didn’t know what to do. I was depressed and felt like I was alone. Nobody in my family understood and my friends couldn’t relate to what I was going through. I was fat and they weren’t.I heard about a special clinic that focused on women’s health issues from a co–worker. Under the close watch of the clinic’s doctor and her medical staff, I began a therapeutic lifestyle change on February 27, 2013. I had no expectations because I had always been obese. I had never lost weight, so why would this be any different? This lifestyle change includes committing to a healthy diet of high protein, vitamins and supplements, balancing hormones for PCOS and exercising. However, before I could begin changing my eating habits... (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s fierce critique of sovereignty, along with her excavation of Greek agonism, has gained much traction among critical theorists of international politics who revisit the basic assumptions of conventional international theories, such as state sovereignty and power as domination. This paper engages with an increasingly popular stream within such critical international studies that appropriates Arendt’s agonism to envision a form of a global public acting in concert. I argue that Arendt’s thoughts cannot be reduced to a radical vision (...) of agonistic cosmo-politics. Rather, her thinking suggests that political actors appreciate and care for their public worlds while remaining alert to institutional ossification. Her appreciation of the constitutional state confirms that state agency is an important element of her thoughts. By examining the vicissitudes of publicity found in Arendt’s thinking and their reflexive effect on inter-polity relations, the article elucidates the grounds of her international agonism and brings home a form of international politics where states pursuing the domestic goal of greatness coexist and cooperate. Thus, the study suggests that critical scholars of radical agonism miss the important implications of an “institutional” Arendt for international politics. (shrink)

This paper examines the bond between humans and dogs as demonstrated in the life and work of Emily Brontë . The nineteenth century author, publishing under the pseudonym, Ellis Bell, evinced, both in her personal and professional life, the complex range of emotions explicit in the human-dog bond: attachment and companionship to domination and abuse. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë portrays the dog as scapegoat, illustrating the dark side of the bond found in many cultures. Moreover, she writes with awareness of (...) connections - unknown in the nineteenth century - between animal abuse and domestic violence. In her personal life, Brontë's early power struggles with her companion animal mastiff, Keeper, evolve into a caring relationship. In a human-dog bond transformation that survives Brontë's death, Keeper, becomes both bridge and barrier to other human relationships. A dog may, and in this case Keeper does, take on a comprehensive role in which he both mourns his own loss and comforts others in their collective grief. (shrink)

This article suggests that Tagore’s conception of cosmopolitan education can provide the basis for advancing matters of global social justice, when considering the problem posed by Nancy Fraser in her essay ‘Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World’: ‘How can we integrate struggles against maldistribution, misrecognition and misrepresentation within a post-Westphalian frame?’. To this end, the article briefly reflects on the perspective of cosmopolitanism, setting the scene for an exploration of Tagore’s distinctive cosmopolitan educational philosophy. The article develops the argument (...) that framing pedagogy centred on Tagore’s principles of cosmopolitan education to produce cosmopolitan-minded citizens can help bring about social, political, and economic change at local, national, and international level, in order to integrate the three-dimensional struggle for social justice outlined by Fraser. The article concludes by suggesting what can be done at the institutional and curriculum levels to help foster the cosmopolitan attitude. (shrink)

This book offers an intelligent and thought-provoking analysis of the genealogy of Western capitalist 'development'. Jennifer Beard departs from the common position that development and underdevelopment are conceptual outcomes of the Imperialist Era and positions the genealogy of development within early Christian writings in which the western theological concepts of sin, salvation, and redemption are expounded. In doing so, she links the early Christian writings of theologians such as Augustine and , Anselm and Abelard to the processes of modern (...) identity formation of which the West, the First World, the Rule of Law and the individual subject and his or her freedoms are but a part. The concept of development is thus identified within western culture as a symptom of loss within the desire for completion; as the logic behind the economic restructuring of nations as underdeveloped is revealed as that ruthless imaginary by which First World nations maintain their ideal of themselves. Drawing upon anthropology, economics, historiography, philosophy of science, theology, feminism, cultural studies and development studies, this book contains the best of interdisciplinary work in international law. (shrink)

Wendy Laura Belcher has done her cultural work by queering Mother Walatta Petros's life in this one of a kind book. The struggles of Mother Walatta Petros and her nuns and their heirs' reluctance to enunciate same sex desire is brought out well in this book and its review in Prabuddha Bharata which has not missed an issue from 1896 to date. The book under review establishes Mother Walatta Petros as an African proto-feminist. This is a very well researched book. (...) The genre of the gädl too is very well brought out by Belcher and Kleiner. Medievalists offline and online really do not as yet think African indigenous works as worthy of their consideration. Belcher overcame many roadblocks to write something actually worth reading. Because of constraint of space, the book could not be reviewed more expansively. While the book is one of its kind in its domain; it is still an act of colonial interference within Ethiopian realpolitiks of religions. I have mentioned in the review that African Roman Catholic Cardinals like Cardinal Sarah insist on washing his Church's dirty linen in private. Now, the question is, would say, Wendy Laura Belcher and Kleiner have the guts and their publisher too, to write about paedophilia in the various American Churches? Is it not convenient to impute lesbianism to Mother Walatta Petros and shy away from writing about female desire say, within the global Loreto Convents? This reviewer presumes from this book that all convents are dens of female desire: some can be enunciated by white folks; some cannot. The question is: why queer Ethiopian spirituality when Mother Walatta Petros is no longer alive to defend herself? (shrink)

Carole Patemanâe(tm)s writings have been innovatory precisely for their qualities of engagement, pursued at the height of intellectual rigour. This book draws from her vast output of articles, chapters, books and speeches to provide a thematic yet integrated account of her innovations in political theory and contributions to the politics of policy-making. The editors have focused on work in three key areas: Democracy Patemanâe(tm)s perspective is rooted in a practical perspective, enquiring into and speculating about forms of participation over and (...) above the âe~traditionalâe(tm) exclusions through which representative systems have been variously constructed over time. Her work pushes hard on theorists and politicians who make easy assumptions about apathy and public opinion, who bracket off the workplace and the home, and who see politics only in partisan activity, voter behaviour and governmental policy. Women Patemanâe(tm)s innovatory and still-cited work on participation antedates the feminist revolution in political theory and many of the practical struggles that developed through the later 1970s. While woman-centred, her concerns were always worked through larger conceptions of social class, economic advantage, power differentials, âe~liberalâe(tm) individualism and contracts including marriage. Her feminism was innovative in political theory, and within feminism itself. As a feminist Pateman defies categorization, and her concepts of âe~the sexual contractâe(tm) and âe~Wollstonecraftâe(tm)s dilemmaâe(tm) are canonical. Welfare Patemanâe(tm)s innovation here is an integration of welfare issues âe" in particular the proposals for a âe~basic incomeâe(tm) or for a âe~capital stakeâe(tm) âe" into her broad but always rigorous conception of democracy. This is argued through in terms of citizenship, taken as the result of a social contract. In that way Pateman puts liberalism itself through an imminent critique, drawing in the practicalities and risks of life in late capitalist societies. Her theory as always is political, taking in neo-liberal attacks on âe~welfare statesâe(tm) and the stark realities of international inequalities. Patemanâe(tm)s career achievements in democratic and feminist theory are brought productively to bear on debates that would otherwise occur in more limited, and less provocative, academic and political contexts. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the (...) question of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

The last fifteen years have seen an increasing social science scholarship into the nature and pervasiveness of hooking up amongst college students,1 but research on the philosophical and ethical issues within hookup culture and practice has not kept pace. To the extent that hooking up has been taken up by philosophers, it has been as part of a larger conversation about the ethics of casual sex, broadly construed; a conversation which is dominated by questions of objectification. As such, investigations (...) into the ethics of hookup sex have been limited to questions of whether someone was used in the encounter.2 This essay aims to change this by utilizing Ann Cahill’s recent book, Overcoming Objectification, to argue that the ethical problems with hookup sex in Guyland are not rooted in women’s objectification but rather their derivatization. (shrink)

The experimental practice in contemporary molecular biology oscillates between the creativity of the researcher in tinkering with the experimental system, and the necessity of standardization of methods of inquiry. Experimental procedures, when standardized in lab protocols, might definitely be seen as actual recipes. Considering these protocols as recipes can help us understand some epistemological characteristics of current practice in molecular biology. On the one hand, protocols represent a common ground, i.e. the possibility of reproducibility, which constitutes one of the essential (...) properties for contemporary science to define an actual discovery. At the same time, however, protocols are flexible enough to be adapted by the individual researcher (within a space of maneuver given by the experimental system and by the practices that each individual discipline gives to itself) to his/her specific needs. These variations, just like the recipes, remind us that the legitimacy of an experimental practice, involves both objective and subjective constraints and it is articulated on a fuzzy background rather than a rigid and clear context. Moreover, looking at experiments according to this perspective can provide a key to understanding how different forms of science (which adopt different methodologies but which investigate the same phenomena), such as computational biology, are precisely different in the use of a different “cookbook”.Indeed, given the procedural/operational realism of biologists towards phenomena, the clash of different procedures has opened a discussion also about the nature and the meaning of the obtained results. Thus, according to the recipe-perspective that, the methodological struggle over the nature of biological phenomena (and their ways of discovery) among scientists, might be seen as a not always explicit, epistemological debate, however coming from the practice of science itself. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half (...) dead and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

The scene takes place in O'Higgins Park, in Santiago, Chile, on 1 October 1995. Some women have just taken their place on the stage and the enthusiastic audience is applauding, the women have started singing accompanied by a guitar, but they cannot be heard, for the audience is still applauding. One of the women gets up. Like the others, she is wearing a white blouse and a long black skirt, she is old and her hair is grey. She moves to (...) the front of the stage, chooses her place and stops, her eyes search the horizon but do not wander aimlessly, her eyes are fixed somewhere between the here and the hereafter. When she finds what she is looking for, she raises her right hand to wave a white handkerchief, and the dance begins. The audience, suddenly attentive, watches. And what do they see? Not the woman alone on the stage, but the empty space which she traces. The empty space disturbs us, as Chilean spectators, because the cueca, the national folklore dance, is danced by two people, or it is not danced at all. The invisible other is invoked by this woman's every gesture and we do not smile when faced with the absence of her man because we have a premonition that she is not pretending, we have a premonition that she can see him. The image of women dancing alone has become one of the symbols of the struggle of the families of the disappeared under the dictatorship of General Pinochet. The families are commemorating, on 1 October 1995, the twentieth anniversary of their organization into an association in 1975. The term “the disappeared” has progressively become accepted to indicate the victims of a novel, coercive practice in Chile, since the coup d’état on 11 September 1973. The forced disappearance of people differs from political assassination, as Amnesty International never ceases to indicate in the various reports which it commissions on them. In the Chilean case, this speciality is in part due to the security system which has taken on the responsibility of destroying all organized opposition to the military dictatorship: the DINA, the intelligence service created by the military junta, which is only answerable for its actions to the junta. More fundamentally, the special character of disappearance is due to the invisibility of the victim's body and to the doubt that this invisibility arouses within the victim's family circle: the disappeared is not identified as dead because his death is never certified, on the other hand his sudden and unexplained absence indicates that he is a person in danger and that this danger extends to all those who notice his absence. (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and emo­tional challenges. `Wise (...) Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

Resumen: Alfonsina Storni es una escritora que se ha labrado un lugar dentro del canon literario argentino, por mucho tiempo bajo una imagen de escritora que anudaba sentimentalismo, fatalidad y poesía “femenina”, aunque más recientemente la crítica literaria de orientación feminista haya desmontado esa imagen. Este trabajo se interesa, no obstante, por los años en que Alfonsina Storni publicaba sus primeros poemarios y comenzaba a pugnar por un lugar en el incipiente campo literario, dominantemente masculino. El objetivo es visualizar, desde (...) una perspectiva de género, las prácticas culturales emergentes, dominantes y residuales que contribuyeron o condicionaron su camino hacia la profesionalización como escritora, en un contexto de cambios por los procesos modernizadores y de avances del movimiento feminista.: Alfonsina Storni is a writer who has forged a position within the Argentinian literary canon, under the image of a writer who revokes sentimentalism, fatality and “feminine” poetry. Recently, the feminist-oriented literary criticism has dismantled this image finding out other areas in her literary production. This work is focused on the years in which Alfonsina Storni published her first collections of poems and started struggling for a certain position in the emerging literary field, which was mainly under male domain. Taking a gender perspective, the aim is to visualize emerging dominant, and residual cultural practices that contributed or determined her path towards becoming a professional writer, in a context of changes due to modernizing processes and the feminist movement advance. (shrink)

Constitutions around the world have overwhelmingly been the creation of men, but this book asks how far constitutions have affirmed the equal citizenship status of women or failed to do so. Using a wealth of examples from around the world, Ruth Rubio-Marín considers constitutionalism from its inception to the present day and places current debates in their vital historical context. Rubio-Marín adopts an inclusive concept of gender and sexuality, and discusses the constitutional gender order as it has been shaped by (...) debates such those around same-sex marriage and the rights of trans persons. Covering a wide range of themes, from reproductive rights to political gender quotas and violence against women, this book offers a comprehensive feminist account of constitutional law. Truly international in scope and ambitious in subject matter, this is an invaluable resource for students and scholars working on gender within multiple disciplines. (shrink)

Recent work in science and technology studies has looked at how chemical industries manufacture doubt about the toxicity of their products and manage to establish their scientific views in the field of international regulations on toxic substances. Rather than examining yet another “victory” for the industry, this article analyzes the deployment of a “pro-industrial” scientific position, punctuated mainly by failure and opposition. This trajectory is tracked through the analysis of several data sets: archives, scientific documentation, and sociological interviews. The first (...) part of the article charts the development of a biochemical concept, “peroxisome proliferation,” within an academic subfield and its subsequent appropriation by certain industrial parties who used it as a defensive weapon for their commercial interests. Through the example of the International Agency for Research on Cancer and its network of interdependent institutions, the article goes on to analyze the multiple attempts of chemical industry players to establish their interpretation of the concept within the regulatory bodies for carcinogenic substances. The study of such systems of sociological interdependence shows that a full analysis of the “doubt manufacturing” requires an examination not only of the manufacturing process but also of the reception of the ideas produced. (shrink)