This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida’s writings on Heidegger and the gift. In the first section of the essay, I situate the publication of the latter half of Derrida’s 1978–79 seminar against his writings on the gift generally, beginning in 1968 and ending in 2000. In the second section, I explain how the second volume of Donner le temps relates to the first. In the final three sections of the paper, I (...) focus on three prominent topics of the seminar, so as to show how they impact our previous understanding of major aspects of Derrida’s thought: first, the Heideggerian thinking of the es gibt, as it relates to the gift’s unconditionality. Second, the problematic of the Kunstwerk, as it informs Derrida’s thinking of récit. Third, the problem of Dichtung, as it is linked to the poématique. (shrink)

The problem of translation confronts every English, or French-language reader of Geschlecht III, from its title page on, by way of Derrida’s decision not to translate the German noun Geschlecht. In this paper, I explore the stakes of Derrida’s refusal to translate, by situating it within the context of the 1984–5 seminar, ‘Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism’, from which the text of Geschlecht III was taken. I show that the question of translation is already at the heart of that seminar, which (...) concerns the place of the idiom in philosophy, and why approaching the difficulty posed by the untranslatability of a term like Geschlecht might be the very objective of Derrida’s reading of Heidegger on Trakl. (shrink)

Crown under Law is an investigation of the constitutional idea through an exploration of the political thought of Richard Hooker and John Locke. It should appeal to academics within a number of disciplines including history of ideas, political philosophy, philosophy of law, and theology.

One Health, as an international movement and as a research methodology, aspires to cross boundaries between disciplines. However, One Health has also been viewed as “reductionist” due to its overemphasize on physicians-veterinarians cooperation and surveillance capacity enhancement, while limiting the involvement with socio-political preconditioning factors that shape the impact of diseases, and the ethical questions that eventually structure interventions. The current article draws on a qualitative study of Brucellosis control in Israel, to address the benefits of broadening the One Health (...) perspective to include ethical considerations and the socio-political aspects of health. Using in-depth-interviews, observations and document review, the article analyzes stakeholders’ knowledge (policy makers, practitioners and livestock owners) to understand Brucellosis control interventions in the Negev region of Israel. The analysis highlights four different types of boundaries: geographical, professional, disciplinary and participatory. The variety of boundaries going beyond disciplinary ones, are often neglected by traditional One Health discourses, however they provide clearer understanding regarding the role of the Israel and Palestine relations; enforcement activities and trust creation; and mechanisms of decision-making and public participation, in Brucellosis interventions. A broad One Health analysis that addresses ethical concerns and socio-political environments, as well as human and veterinary medicine, encourages re-framing of causes and solutions when dealing particularly with Brucellosis in the Negev, but more generally with zoonotic diseases, low-trust settings and inequitable distribution of power. The inclusion of historical, political and bioethical considerations of Public Health in One Health creates opportunities to increase the relevance of One Health and expand its scope as a novel scientific paradigm. (shrink)

A philosophical study of the ethics of good and evil. Ch. 6 (pp. 163-207), "Banality and Originality, " takes issue with Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil. Contends that no legally sane Nazi was free of evil. The individual has free choice in regard to doing good and evil, and is responsible for his evil acts. Takes issue, also, with Raul Hilberg's view that the Jews did not resist the Nazi terror, and asks "What is the right way (...) to act during one's Holocaust?" Ch. 7 (pp. 209-220), "Thinking Like a Nazi, " analyzes the Nazi mentality, again showing that the individual cannot claim to have been led astray or to have been controlled by his subconscious - at every stage he was a free agent deliberately choosing evil. (shrink)

Recent efforts in soft robotics and Artificial Life are attempting to construct homeostatically functioning machines with ‘feeling’ analogues. Such robots are designed to be ‘vulnerable’ and, thus, depart from traditional approaches to machine design and construction. In this paper, I explore a representative proposal by Antonio Damasio and Kingson Man, and ask how we can understand the deconstruction of ‘life’ in Derrida, Stiegler, Malabou and Wills to relate to such efforts. I argue that the adoption of biological and phenomenological principles (...) in machine design calls for attention to the precise extent that it may not result in robots that adhere either to biological or to mechanical models. It is with this admission, of the essentially unknowable character of what may result from these efforts, that deconstruction can assist roboticists and synthetic biologists today. (shrink)

More than twenty years ago the late Bernard Williams published a paper under the oxymoronic title of ‘Moral Luck’, which claimed that chance shapes moral standing, and that moral standing, like social or professional standing, has its winners and losers, successes and failures. Williams’ final book, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, offered as a ‘fiction’ a sociobiological genealogy of moral standing, and worked to free some of the virtues associated with it—such as integrity, Accuracy, and Sincerity—from the taint (...) of these presumed primitive origins. Whatever the proceeds of this exercise in saving reductionism from itself, it seemed that ‘moral luck’—the earlier category—had come through it essentially undamaged. (shrink)

AbstractWe propose an emerging conceptualization of “intervention hesitancy” to address a broad spectrum of hesitancy to disease prevention interventions among healthcare personnel (HCP) beyond vaccine hesitancy. To demonstrate this concept and its analytical benefits, we used a qualitative case-study methodology, identifying a “spectrum” of disease prevention interventions based on (1) the intervention’s effectiveness, (2) how the intervention is regulated among HCP in the Israeli healthcare system, and (3) uptake among HCP in the Israeli healthcare system. Our cases ultimately contribute to (...) a more nuanced conceptualization of hesitancy that HCP express towards disease prevention interventions. Our case interventions included the seasonal influenza vaccine, the Mantoux test, and the hepatitis B (HBV) vaccine. Influenza and HBV are vaccine-preventable diseases, though their respective vaccines vary significantly in effectiveness and uptake among HCP. The Mantoux test is a tuberculin skin test which provides a prevention benchmark for tuberculosis (TB), a non-vaccine preventable disease. We conducted semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders and analyzed them within Israeli and international policy context between 2016 and 2019, a period just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose the conceptualization of “intervention hesitancy”—beyond “vaccine hesitancy”—as “hesitancy towards a wide range of public health interventions, including but not limited to vaccines”. Results suggested that intervention hesitancy among HCP is rooted in weak trust in their employer, poor employment conditions, as well as mixed institutional guidelines and culture. Conceptualizing intervention hesitancy expands the ability of healthcare systems to understand the root of hesitancy and foster a supportive institutional culture and trust, cognizant of diverse disease prevention interventions beyond vaccination. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Psychological or political criticism of the parent‐child relation presupposes a normative account of that relation. Such an account is here provided. The normative account can shed most light when the parent‐child relation is presented recognizably, not in Utopian disguise. The purposes of reasonable people partly depend on their interpretations of those of their parents. This is so whether such people accept or reject any particular parental purposes. The filial art sticks to the project of working out the enacted interpretation—until (...) it gets it approximately right. There is a corresponding parental art, neither compensatory nor sacrificial. (shrink)

Conversions: A Philosophic Memoir belongs to the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau: the "confession" of a life that is a quest for truth. It is in large part the story of two major episodes from Abigail Rosenthal's early adulthood, bought putting personal identity dramatically at risk. As a young Fulbright scholar in Paris, Rosenthal met and entered reluctantly into a love affair with a young Greek communist philosopher who believed (along with many Parisian intellectuals of that era) that force and (...) deception were justified by a utopian vision of world history. In the inevitable collision of values—between Jew and Greek, liberal and revolutionary, theist and atheist, woman and man in unequal truggle—they separated. Suffering in the aftermath, she at last turned for help to a young African American woman graduate student whom she met in London. This woman's Gnostic Christian rejection of personal and cultural history eventually left Rosenthal without defense against her new mentor's remarkable use of charisma, ridicule, and moralistic reproach to usurp the author's life story. These stratagems of mind control reached a climactic phase in Portugal, where the two went—Rosenthal to paint the other woman to write—in what would turn out to be the terrifying reverse of a summer idyll. With the U.S. State Department, the Portuguese Policía Internacional devised an extraordinary rescue. This arresting narrative, which deals with relations between blacks and whites, Christians and Jews, and men and women, delivers its own philosophic theory of the individual in history. Author note: Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York and the author of A Good Look at Evil (Temple). (shrink)

I want to imagine an alternate universe with you—if only for a moment. One in which there were no clones. A universe free of cloning. One that simply did not have to worry itself with the moral, ethical, religious, legal, scientific, medical, economic, or philosophical questions surrounding what it is to clone; who or what ought or ought not to be cloned; what is and is not clonable; or with clonality in general. A clone-less or clone-free world, then, though not (...) necessarily one without tropical storms, or cyclones. A-clonal, un-clonable, in-clonate. What would this universe look like? Would such a universe appear in the same light as it does today? Would this be anything less than another universe, that is, a... (shrink)

Arendt claims that evil is banal and its perpetrators merely shallow. Deliberate evil she takes to be extremely rare. However, nonrare examples of deliberate evil, whose aim is to spoil one's story, abound in everyday life. Arendt also makes forgiveness personal, not requiring repentance. This prompts a consideration of certain personal relations among philosophers. Heidegger's relation to Husserl shows a betrayal of teacher by student. His seductive and philosophic power over Arendt, a betrayal of student by teacher, should not be (...) dismissed in terms of reductive Freudian notions. Faced with a real feminine predicament, Arendt made the wrong choices: in her exoneration of Heidegger, her report on the Eichmann trial, and her exculpatory doctrine of evil. (shrink)

Taking exception to Gilbert Ryle's influentially ironical remark about introspection, that it would be like peering into a 'windowless chamber illuminated by a very peculiar sort of light, and one to which only he [the one attempting the introspecting] has access', this essay claims that introspective awareness of one's actions and motivations in their chronological sequence is not empty but highly informative, not trivial but inseparable from any significant life, and not hopeless but entirely feasible. It is argued that informative (...) and significant introspective awareness is a practice which ought to be as unbroken as possible, not fetched into consciousness or dismissed therefrom at whim in discrete quanta. Philosophers of mind for whom self-awareness is a surd will, however, naturally be inclined to attend to it reluctantly, thus without the requisite persistence, and without understanding it to be a skilled practice. This essay offers a preliminary map of the territory of introspection, which it defines under the heading of 'inner space and inner time.' It shows what sorts of conceptual clarifications are to be gained by the introspective practice it recommends, what responsibilities grasped, and what missteps avoided. (shrink)

It was news verging on sensational when A. J. Ayer came back from four minutes of heart death with a report of what he saw. Especially since the philosopher, who publicized his near-death experience [NDE] in 1988, in the Telegraph and the Spectator, was known for his lifelong rejection of religion and the supernatural. But, as will be seen, Ayer's beliefs on that head were substantially unchanged, if more ambivalently expressed, and the interest of his NDE lies elsewhere— in what (...) it reveals about his philosophy. (shrink)

In Actor Training in Anglophone Countries, actor, director and theatre scholar Peter Zazzali has considerably deepened and extended his unique performative-pedagogical research. As he argued in his...