Drawing from extensive, eye-opening first-person accounts, No Refuge puts a spotlight on the millions of refugees worldwide who have to leave home but find nowhere to resettle. As political philosopher Serena Parekh argues, this is not just a problem for politicians. Citizens also have a moral duty to help resolve the global refugee crisis and to end the suffering and denial of human rights that refugee are forced to endure, often for years. While the media usually focus on the (...) challenges that Western states have with the arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers and refugees, the real problem is that millions are stuck in inhumane conditions in refugee camps and urban centers, with little chance of finding a more permanent solution. Grounded in powerful testimony from refugees and meticulous research on the conditions in which so many suffer worldwide, No Refuge shows why, as states but also as citizens, we cannot afford to wait any longer to end this crisis. (shrink)

Erich Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was published more than sixty years ago and is deservedly considered a classic. The book brought into focus the fundamental difference that exists between the two basic approaches to the textual representation of reality in Western culture. These two “styles,” as Auerbach called them, were archetypically displayed in Homer’s poems and in the Old Testament, respectively. Auerbach’s differentiation is the starting point for Bandera’s insightful work, which expands and develops (...) on this theory in several key ways. One of the more significant differences between the two styles transcends and grounds all the others. It concerns the truth of each of the two archetypal texts, or rather, the attitude exhibited in those texts with regard to the truth of what they narrate. Auerbach, Bandera notes, is amazed at the Bible’s “passionate” concern for the truth of what it says—a concern he found absent in Homer. Bandera finds that what the prophet Isaiah called “a refuge of lies” defines Homer’s work. He draws on his own research and René Girard’s theory of the sacred to develop an enhanced perspective of the relationship between these texts. (shrink)

Recently many methods for reducing the risk of human extinction have been suggested, including building refuges underground and in space. Here we will discuss the perspective of using military nuclear submarines or their derivatives to ensure the survival of a small portion of humanity who will be able to rebuild human civilization after a large catastrophe. We will show that it is a very cost-effective way to build refuges, and viable solutions exist for various budgets and timeframes. Nuclear submarines are (...) surface independent, and could provide energy, oxygen, fresh water and perhaps even food for their inhabitants for years. They are able to withstand close nuclear explosions and radiation. They are able to maintain isolation from biological attacks and most known weapons. They already exist and need only small adaptation to be used as refuges. But building refuges is only “Plan B” of existential risk preparation; it is better to eliminate such risks than try to survive them. (shrink)

In response to and as an elaboration on Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle’s Socrates Tenured, I wish to recognize the notion of practical philosophers as both public intellectuals and as those who may find refuge in the academy in order to shed the pretense of expertise, on the one hand, and the esoteric engagement with topics irrelevant to the affairs of contemporary culture, on the other.

In Refuge in Crestone: A Sanctuary for Interreligious Dialogue, Aaron Thomas Raverty elucidates how the praxis of interreligious dialogue, as outlined in key Vatican documents in the Catholic Church, could be better served by attending to the qualitative ethnographic methods of sociocultural anthropology. Using the unique, multi-religious Colorado site of Crestone and its environs as a fieldwork “laboratory” and self-described “Refuge for World Truths,” the ethnographic data gleaned from this project exemplifies the creative interdisciplinary contributions of anthropology to (...) theology. (shrink)

Realists have responded to challenges from the historical record of successful but ultimately rejected theories with what I call the selective confirmation strategy: arguing that only idle parts of past theories have been rejected, while truly success‐generating features have been confirmed by further inquiry. I argue first, that this strategy is unconvincing without some prospectively applicable criterion of idleness for theoretical posits, and second, that existing efforts to provide one either convict all theoretical posits of idleness (Kitcher) or stand refuted (...) by detailed consideration of the very examples (optical/electromagnetic ether, caloric fluid) to which they appeal (Psillos). I also argue that available avenues for improving on these proposals are unpromising. (shrink)

This essay identifies and explores an underappreciated win-win policy option that has the potential to address both the needs of refugees for resettlement and the labor demand of destination countries. Building upon provisions of the Model International Mobility Convention—a model convention endorsed by dozens of leading migration and refugee experts—and a program pioneered by Talent Beyond Boundaries, we explore how to scale up valuable measures for identifying job opportunities that can resettle refugees from asylum countries to destination countries. The latter (...) can benefit from the labor of refugees and thereby offer long-term refuge for populations in desperate need of resettlement. (shrink)

A rhetoric of refuge and escape is a consistent feature of the world’s great garden traditions. The connections between a desire for escape, need for refuge and disquieting sense that life is no longer what it ought to be gestures to a complex conception of garden appreciation. I explore these connections using Christian, Islamic, and Chinese garden traditions. In them one finds a conception of certain gardens as places of moral refuge from the corruption and failings of (...) the mainstream world. (shrink)

This article is part of an ‘Author meets author' exchange that focuses on my recent book, Justice for People on the Move, and Serena Parekh’s forthcoming book, No Refuge. I describe some of the way...

Since the early Medieval Time people contested theological legitimation and rational discursive discours on authority as well as retreated to refuges to escape from any secular or ecclesiastical authority. Modern attempts formulated rational legitimation of authority in several ways: pragmatic authority by Monteigne, Bodin and Hobbes, or the contract authority of Locke and Rousseou. However, Enlightened Anarchism, first formulated in 1793 by the English philosopher William Godwin fulminated against all rational restrictions of human freedom and self-determination. However, we do not (...) analyze anarchism by the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, but by looking for the best actual approach of Anarchist’s ‘Promised Land’. Furthermore, we follow the footsteps of Thoreau’s Walden Pond experiment considered as a place of salvation and prototype of 19th century romantic’s extreme individualism towards Leopold’s ethics of the land. Indeed, Thoreau’s and later Muir’s concepts of refuges are tightly connected to territorial and temporal bio-regional constraints and imply an internally organized public area based on mutualism and Hannah Arendt’s agape. From these ideas of refuges, Aldo Leopold formulated his Land-ethics that claimed integrity and autonomy of the ‘Land’. His foundation is a prototype of the eco-centric free space version of eco-anarchism as formulated by Bookchin. In order to formulate a philosophical foundation of eco-anarchism we reject Newtonian homogeneous space-temporal conception, preceding the whole Modern discours about authority and state. On the contrary, we adopt the pluralistic Leibnizian space-time from which thinking-humans do not dissociate themselves, but participate as part of the rational infrastructure of eco-refuges. In eco-refuges, citizen belong to the civil society that stays in equilibrium with the landscape and all forms of biological life. Space is the boundary condition of human activity and determines how borders, environmental organization and institutes are sustained. Space has its proper essence of sustainability, unity and integrity. The individual feelings of security are embedded in a timelike tradition and evolution of the free space, while individual particular conceptions of space and time integrate into the social processes of identification with the refuge. Therefore, the creation of eco-refuges transforms the actual world of national authorities into a world of anarchistic democratic eco-regional homelands. (shrink)

In the Platonic dialogues, the enigmatic concept of the good tends to retreat at those very moments when it is supposed to show itself. This paper examines the relation between the beautiful and the good as the good takes refuge in the beautiful. Hans-Georg Gadamer holds a particular interest in these retreats since they show that there is actually an emphasis on appearances and the human good in Plato. In contrast, Emmanuel Levinas is critical of the primacy of vision (...) and the beautiful from an ethical perspective. The relevant passages in the dialogues will be interpreted with respect to this divergence. (shrink)

We are, as of May 2019, witnessing yet another “caravan” of people fleeing violence in Latin America, bonding together to reach the territory of safer states in the North. Similarly, in the fall of 2015, Europe experienced the movement of many refugees fleeing war, persecution, and grave human rights violations in Syria. These new waves of people on the move have raised anew important questions about asylum and refuge: who should be able to claim asylum? Should the fear of (...) persecution be sufficient, or do asylum seekers need to show that they have actually suffered it? And maybe most controversially, how should asylum‐granting states respond to the plight of those asking for asylum on their territory?The moral principles guiding asylum and refuge are different from the rules usually regulating immigration, which are based on the principle of territorial sovereignty that allows nation‐states to discriminate and select among those who hope to immigrate. Asylum and refuge instead call upon nation‐states to provide refugees with a new home, protect human rights, and over time, provide access to the social, political and civic rights that characterize membership. Included in the list of human rights, I will argue, is the provision of the means for individual physical and psychological well‐being. (shrink)

Margit Osterloh and Bruno S. Frey have introduced a novel, and potentially powerful, vision of migration rights, on which European states might respond to the current crisis of migration by conditioning admission on the payment of an entry fee. In this comment, I raise a worry about the morality of a world governed by such a principle. While Osterloh and Frey foresee a world in which migration is made more sustainable, with benefits for all stakeholders as a result, I am (...) worried their program would lead to a lessening of support for the moral principles that gave rise to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. This Convention, I argue, ought to be preserved as a public statement of the principle that wealthy states have an obligation to bear some costs in the defense of human rights; Osterloh and Frey, I argue, might be undermining support for those moral principleswe currently have the most need to reinforce. Nevertheless, I argue that under emergency circumstances we might have a need for experimentation and political innovation, even if we are confident that what they produce will necessarily involve some degree of political wrongdoing; we might, in short, have a reason to try out proposals of the sort Osterloh and Frey defend, even if the moral worries I defend here are correct. (shrink)

Using a multidisciplinary framework, this article examines the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s (ORR) policy decision to prohibit teens in federal immigration custody from obtaining abortions. As we argue, this appropriation of decisional authority over their reproductive bodies discursively cast them as doubly subversive for first breaching the southern border of the United States and then insisting upon the right to ‘abortion on demand’. Mapping these twinned agendas onto their bodies, these teens were configured as a threat to the racialised national (...) order during the Trump era. Centring our analysis on the much publicised constitutional challenge to ORR’s abortion ban in Garza v. Hargan, we interrogate this policy as a powerful expression of legal duplicity, the spatial and bodily containment of those deemed other, and the privileging of the citizen-foetus over their undocumented mothers. (shrink)

The cities of refuge as detailed in the Deuteronomic witness in the Hebrew Bible have served as the inspiration and model for the practice of providing sanctuary for many throughout the centuries, namely with the most recent Sanctuary movements in the US and the UK in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And yet, its biblical witness as to its implementation and effectiveness is practically silent. Using methods of biblical studies via liberation hermeneutics and theological ethics from both the Jewish (...) and Christian traditions, the following questions will be explored: What were the cities of refuge? How were they to be set up? What are the theological and ethical questions at play in the biblical witness as to their use? What relevance, if any, do they have for us today? (shrink)

How to assess and deal with the claims of millions of displaced people to find refuge and asylum in safe and prosperous countries is one of the most pressing issues of modern political philosophy. In this timely volume, fresh insights are offered into the political and moral implications of refugee crises and the treatment of asylum seekers. The contributions illustrate the widening of the debate over what is owed to refugees, and why it is assumed that national state actors (...) and the international community owe special consideration and protection. Among the specific issues discussed are refugees' rights and duties, refugee selection, whether repatriation can be encouraged or required, and the ethics of sanctuary policies. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Guattari’s prescient final text, Chaosmosis, argues that the conditions of Capital responsible for the current social-psychic-ecological crisis of migration demand modes of analysis capable of grasping their complexity, ones grounded in the ethico-aesthetic. It is a text that draws directly from the therapeutic practice that he, Tosquelles, Oury, and others in the Institutional Psychotherapy (IP) movement developed in their clinics. This work entailed the inclusion of aesthetic practices that work to deterritorialise the institution, shifting from carceral sites and creating therapeutic (...) spaces of care and refuge. This article explores the centrality of an ethico-aesthetic approach to the understanding of therapeutic space within the sites and clinical practice of Institutional Psychotherapy. Looking especially at daily life and the inclusion of aesthetic practice, it examines the particular notion of asylum that emerged in these sites that so informed the clinical and critical work of Guattari and Deleuze, and draws connections to the current global crisis of migration in the necessity of such sites to the forced segregation between those deemed mad and sane. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson famously suggested that employment of the objective attitude in an intimate relationship forebodes the relationship’s demise. Relatively less remarked is Strawson's admission that the objective attitude is available as a refuge from the strains of relating to normal, mature adults as proper subjects of the reactive attitudes. I develop an account of the strategic employment of the objective attitude in such cases according to which it denies a person a power of will – authorial power – whose (...) recognition is necessary for sustaining intimacy. This conception of the objective attitude in its strategic employment presses those who urge universal adoption of the objective attitude (perhaps in its nonreactive, emotionally toned species) to confront the costs of their proposal. (shrink)

The intellectual Huguenot Refuge is one of the most important movements in Early modern Europe. This volume provides new information about one of its centres: about Berlin, and on the extremely important role Huguenot scholars played disseminating Enlightened thought.

This dissertation concerns the rights of refugees. It is a project of two parts. Part One provides an account of the scope of the right to refuge in international law. Here, I reject both the alienage and persecution requirements for refugee-status-eligibility outlined in the 1951 Refugee Convention. Instead, I defend a definition that extends the right to refuge to any individual whose human rights are urgently threatened, who has no effective recourse to their home government, and whose interests (...) can only or best be satisfied by means of refuge. In Part Two, I turn to the question of what refugee-hosting states and societies owe to refugees within their borders. Here, I provide a refugee-specific framework for future discussion on the topic of integration, and outline some high-level rights and responsibilities states, refugees, and members of the host society have to facilitate integration between refugees and their host communities. I also provide an account of the scope and nature of refugee family reunification rights, arguing that states have stronger, broader, and less-conditional duties to reunite refugees with their families, especially when those refugees are children. I conclude with a summary of the arguments in this dissertation, and an outline of the primary principles upon which those arguments depend. (shrink)

This is a reply to the essays by Catherin Prueitt, Sonam Kachru, and Roy Tzohar on the problem of intersubjectivity in Yogācāra, from a panel at the American Academy of Religion. I argue that the problem of explaining genuine intersubjectivity, as opposed to parallel subjectivity remains unsolved.

Resumen Este artículo muestra que la pintura de Tiziano contiene en el fondo un esquema dialéctico de tensión entre elementos opuestos: jovial/trágico, clásico/cristiano, puñal/refugio. Esta tensión alimenta la intersección de estructuras significativas que caracteriza a toda obra de arte. Esta dialéctica explica el sentido último que tiene la pintura para Tiziano. Centramos esta dialéctica en la obra Desollamiento de Marsias, obra que enseña que la pintura, el arte en general, para Tiziano abre heridas, es un puñal, pero también es un (...) abrigo donde el que refugiarnos del horror del mundo. Abstract This article shows that Titian's painting contains at its core a dialectical scheme of tension between opposing elements: jovial/tragic, classical/christian, dagger/refuge. This tension feeds the intersection of meaningful structures that characterize every work of art. This dialectic explains the ultimate meaning of painting for Titian. We focus this dialectic on the work The Flaying of Marsyas, a work that teaches that painting, art in general, for Titian opens wounds, it is a dagger, but it is also a shelter in which to take refuge from the horror of the world. (shrink)

I suggest that virtue ethics can learn from Foucault’s critical observations on biopolitics and governmentality, which identify how a good cannot be disassociated from power and freedom. I chart a way through which virtue ethics internalizes this critical point. I argue that this helps address concerns that both virtue ethics and the critical scholarship inspired by Foucault otherwise ignore. I apply virtue ethics to the contexts of refugee arrival, asylum procedure, and immigrant integration in Western Europe; I then see how (...) Foucault’s critical thought provides a counterpoint to virtue ethics; I finally analyze how incorporating that critique allows virtue ethics to make sense of both the context and the stakes involved. (shrink)

Patriotism is a form of loyalty. The range of loyalty is from patriotism to friendship. Liberals were often accused of having no sense of loyalty. They usually tend to deny the charge — even while refusing to take a loyalty oath. Even the liberal philosopher Sir Karl Popper has claimed (Open Society, i, ch. 10), that liberals can be better patriots than others. 1 find this line of defense erroneous and morally wrong. I find it much nicer, much more honest, (...) to join Martin Buber in his taking Jeremiah as a model because when he felt that capitulation to the enemy is morally justified he recommended just that. Buber, fearful of the effects of patriotism, opposed the foundation of a Jewish state and proposed, instead, a program.. (shrink)

Late in his exceedingly protracted life, Ernst Jünger introduced the term “anarch” to refine his notion of resistance amid political decay. Hermann Amborn’s argument would have benefitted by taking...

One of the most pressing and urgent academic tasks of the day is to dismantle the persistent Eurocentrism of philosophy. In the quest to remedy the white, middle-class, heteronormative, and European biases of philosophy's initial expressions, feminist theorizing has cultivated culturally and ethnically specific forms, intersectional analyses, and global articulations. Buddhism beyond Gender and Women and Buddhist Philosophy breathe new vitality into these pursuits. Both books underscore the immense potential of the core doctrines of Buddhist philosophy, such as the nonsubstantialist (...) view of self, the nondualistic outlook, and the ontological premise of the interdependence of all beings, for overcoming Western hierarchies, reified conceptions of identity, and pernicious dichotomies. The two women represented in these books—Rita Gross herself and Kim Iryŏp, a Buddhist nun —ground philosophy in a narrative, existential journey and in their personal practices as Buddhists. In contrast with Gross's second-wave methodology and revisionist aims, Park's contribution to comparative feminist scholarship underscores the originality of Iryŏp's attempt to rethink Buddhist ideas in a contemporary feminist context. Particularly compelling is that Park unequivocally defends existential narrative as a genre of philosophy largely through an analysis of the Buddhist nun's love letters. (shrink)

This article examines some selected ethical issues in human space missions including human missions to Mars, particularly the idea of a space refuge, the scientific value of space exploration, and the possibility of human gene editing for deep-space travel. Each of these issues may be used either to support or to criticize human space missions. We conclude that while these issues are complex and context-dependent, there appear to be no overwhelming obstacles such as cost effectiveness, threats to human life (...) or protection of pristine space objects, to sending humans to space and to colonize space. The article argues for the rationality of the idea of a space refuge and the defensibility of the idea of human enhancement applied to future deep-space astronauts. (shrink)

While proponents of sustainability reporting believe in its potential to help corporations be accountable and transparent about their social and environmental impacts, there has been growing criticism asserting that such reporting schemes are utilized primarily as impression management tools. Drawing on Goffman’s self-presentation theory and its frontstage/backstage analogy, we contrast the frontstage sustainability discourse of a sample of large U.S. oil and gas firms to their backstage corporate political activities in the context of the passage of the American-Made Energy and (...) Good Jobs Act, also known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Bill. The ANWR Bill was designed to allow oil exploration within the most sensitive environmental areas in the Refuge and this bill was vigorously debated in the United States Congress in 2005 and 2006. Our results suggest that the firms’ sustainability discourse on environmental stewardship and responsibility contrasts sharply with their less visible but proactive political strategies targeted to facilitate the passage of the ANWR Bill. This study thus contributes to the social and environmental accounting and accountability literature by highlighting the relevance of Goffman’s frontstage/backstage analogy in uncovering and documenting further the deceptive nature of the discourse contained in stand-alone sustainability reports. In addition, it seeks to contribute to the overall understanding of the multifaceted nature of sustainability reporting by placing it in relation to corporate political activities. (shrink)

The Threefold Refuge in the Theravada Buddhist Tradition. Edited by John Ross Carter with George D. Bond, Edmund F. Perry and Shanta Ratnayake. Anima Books, Chambersburg 1982. 89pp. $3.95.