"... stimulating and insightful... a thoroughly researched and timely contribution to the secondary literature of ethics... " —Library Journal "His important new work establishes Scott... as one of the foremost interpreters of the Continental philosophical tradition of the US.... Necessary for anyone working in ethics or the Continental tradition." —Choice "... a provocative discourse on the consequences of the ethical in the thought of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Heidegger." —The Journal of Religion Charles E. Scott's challenging book advances the broad claim (...) that ethics as a way of judging and thinking has come into question as philosophers have confronted suffering and conflicts that arise from our traditional systems of value. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an understanding of philosophy of education as cultural and intercultural work and philosophers of education as cultural and intercultural workers. In our view, the discipline of philosophy of education in North America is currently suffering from measures of insularity and singularity. It is vital that we justly and respectfully engage with and expand our knowledge and understanding of sets of conceptual and life-practice resources, and honor and learn from diverse histories, cultures, and traditions. Such honoring (...) provides responsive conditions for our coming together in and across differences in order that we may productively and creatively address and overturn grammars of violence, destruction, and dis-ease in these complexly troubled times. Committing ourselves to deconstructing historical and contemporary beliefs, values, and practices that are compromising human and planetary flourishing, we undertake responsibilities to go cross-cultural and intercultural. (shrink)

In theCompanion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophyan international group of fourteen Heidegger scholars shares strategies for reading and understanding this challenging work.

I mean by the phrase "taking differences seriously" freeing differences from the conceptual and linguistic formations that promote recognitions based on categorical grouping and what we might call domination by images of familiar normalcy and global similarities. 1 I have in mind a discipline of turning out of those ways of speaking and thinking that intend to bring unity and essential harmony to highly diverse events and entities. Those are ways of thinking and speaking that assume that original identities define (...) basic resemblances among classes of things. I understand this claim to mean that many current and established ways of thinking are dangerous for this country's diverse culture and for our .. (shrink)

Constitutes a thoughtful survey of contemporary hermeneutics in its historical context.

"... remarkable account of the impact of postmodern philosophy on the question of ethics and politics... commendable also for its balanced view of Heidegger’s relationship to politics and ethics.... an excellent account of Heidegger’s philosophical understanding of technology..." —Choice This book takes as its point of departure the question of ethics: that values and their pursuit in the West often perpetuate their own worst enemies. At issue are the dangers in the structures and movements of images, values, and ways of (...) knowing that are most intimately a part of our lives. (shrink)

Living with Indifference is about the dimension of life that is utterly neutral, without care, feeling, or personality. In this provocative work that is anything but indifferent, Charles E. Scott explores the ways people have spoken and thought about indifference. Exploring topics such as time, chance, beauty, imagination, violence, and virtue, Scott shows how affirming indifference can be beneficial, and how destructive consequences can occur when we deny it. Scott’s preoccupation with indifference issues a demand for focused attention in connection (...) with personal values, ethics, and beliefs. This elegantly argued book speaks to the positive value of diversity and a world that is open to human passion. (shrink)

National attention on issues of public health preparedness necessarily brings into sharp focus the question of how to assure adequate, community-wide health care financing for preventive, acute care, and long-term medical care responses to public health threats. In the U.S., public and private health insurance represents the principal means by which medical care is financed. Beyond the threshold challenge of the many persons without any, or a stable form of, coverage lie challenges related to the structure and characteristics of health (...) insurance itself, particularly the commercial industry and its newly emerging market of consumer-driven health plans. States vary significantly in how they approach the regulation of insurance and in their willingness to support various types of insurance markets. This variation is attributable to the size and robustness of the insurance market, the political environment, and regulatory tradition and custom. Reconciling health insurance markets with public health-related health care financing needs arising from public health threats should be viewed as a major dimension of national health reform. (shrink)

Human desire usually has an object of longing or hope. The more intense the desire, the more singularly prominent its object. Sides, after all, means “heavenly body.” When people desire, they want, crave, and even covet the desired, whether the desired is ice cream, a professorship, or another’s body. What is intensely desired, even if it is not heavenly, has the status of an object with exceptional and immediate meaning and draw. When simple desire finds satisfaction, the desired’s attraction withers (...) in its completeness, and the object fades into the ordinary environment, not unlike the disinterest we experience after we have overindulged in Chunky Monkey or the indifference to the.. (shrink)

Foucault's genealogies and archeologies provide occasions in which one may come to know the powers, accidents, and influences that have structured a particular knowledge or discipline. The Birth of the Clinic shows the development of modern medicine in a process by which rational inference and emphasis on the history of a disease are replaced by pathological anatomy. In modern anatomy, the corpse, not reason, became the “space” of modern medical knowledge. In this “space” developed a confederation of dead body, knowledge, (...) trained and noninferential gaze, organic unity, and the increased importance of bodily space instead of physical time. The discussion shows how Foucault's genealogy of modern medicine is influenced by and overcomes the knowledge that it describes. In this context, his genealogy is also shown to be self-overcoming and to raise important questions for medical ethics when ethical thought is conceived within the structures of knowledge that have been exposed by the genealogy. (shrink)

"Like Foucault and Levinas before him, though in very different ways, Scott makes an oblique incision into phenomenology... [it is] the kind of book to which people dazed by the specters of nihilism will be referred by those in the know." —David Wood "... refreshing and original." —Edward S. Casey In The Lives of Things, Charles E. Scott reconsiders our relationships with ordinary, everyday things and our capacity to engage them in their particularity. He takes up the Greek notion of (...) phusis, or physicality, as a way to point out limitations in refined and commonplace views of nature and the body as well as a device to highlight the often overlooked lives of things that people encounter. Scott explores questions of unity, purpose, coherence, universality, and experiences of wonder and astonishment in connection with scientific fact and knowledge. He develops these themes with lightness and wit, ultimately articulating a new interpretation of the appearances of things that are beyond the reach of language and thought. (shrink)

We begin at the site of borders, the demarcations between us, between: my body and your body, humans and nonhuman animals, habits of thought and institutional structures, nature and culture, subject and object. We find ourselves between the devil and the deep blue sea. Differences, distinctions, and borders are key to knowing and acting responsibly. Yet we are “held captive” by particular habits of understanding that police such borders with unbecoming fervor. We desire to trouble these borders with the aim (...) of transforming habits of thought and embodied dispositions, to give rise to new appreciations of difference through the deep, ongoing play of the in-between. Ours is an ontology of the in-between... (shrink)

First, I engage Del McWhorter's confessional voice in the context of her thought and emphasize her claim that even "objective knowledge" often has an indirectly confessional aspect. Second, I give an account of the value of historicity and genealogy in McWhorter's understanding of knowing and subjectivity. Third, I address her reconfiguration of the subjectivity of desiring by prioritizing pleasure in the project of "becoming truly gay." Finally, I assess the meaning of her phrase, "straying afield from myself.".

The guiding question in this essay is, how might we speak of silence—interpret silence—without objectifying it and losing a sense of it in the way we speak of it. That means that prioritizing the value of direct linguistic language, comprehension, interpreting what other hermeneuts say about silence, or attempting to make it visible is not a viable option. The myths of Hermes and Metis, however, might be integral to the lineages of speaking and knowing that are more suited to speaking (...) of silence than the lineages that arise out of biblical exegesis and modern/contemporary philosophy and theology. In the process of shifting to the value of those myths, the bonding of truth and goodness with stability and moral decency is displaced by the value of uncertainty and indirection. Throughout, the essay accepts the distinction between silences and silence and prioritizes awareness of silence in the silence accompanying awareness. (shrink)

A proposal for individual responsibility in communal life.

What does living well look like in the Anthropocene? Despite our brief tenure on planet Earth, we have reached an epoch--the Anthropocene--that is characterized by our species' uncanny ability to spoil our own nest. In the face of this somber reality of ecological degradation, The Book of Ecological Virtues asks the all-important question, "What does living well look like in the Anthropocene?" It is vitally important that we turn towards the cultivation of ecovirtues, a new set of values by which (...) to live, if there is to be hope for us and other species to continue. These essays inspire readers not just to ponder but to embody and live the ideals of these timeless ecological virtues. (shrink)

This book punctuates the moments of crisis in continental thought from the foundational crisis of reason in Husserl’s call for a rigorous science of phenomenology to the current crisis of postmodernism and its rejection of Husserl’s metanarrative of history and rationality. The mediating links between these moments is the centrality of the epochal history of Being, the power of cultural and disciplinary practices, and the dispersal of meaning in the post-Husserlian and post-subjective philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Included (...) here are the thoughts of leading scholars who critically discuss Husserl’s analysis of the crisis of Western thought and the importance of the concepts of “world” in Husserl’s early writings. The authors analyze the deprivileging of philosophy as social critique through the text of Husserl, Habermas, Foucault, and recent feminist theory. They examine the end of the epistemological and morally autonomous subject in continental thought. Together, these thoughts articulate multiple points or moments of crisis without cure or end. (shrink)

Ethics and Danger examines Heidegger’s association with German National Socialism and attempts to understand both the question of politics in Heidegger’s thought and the thought that gives rise to that question. It explores the contribution of Heidegger’s work to issues of ethics, technology, and social theory, as well as his relationship to other thinkers such as Parmenides, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, Benjamin, Levinas, Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida. Finally, it addresses the more general question of the future of ethical thought within continental (...) philosophy. In order to engage the ethical issues surrounding Heidegger’s life and thought, the authors speak of dangers such as facism and the facile, self-congratulatory moral stance that Heidegger exemplifies. The question of how to speak in the wake of Heidegger’s thought takes many forms, and the answers represent a diversity of viewpoints from both American and continental thinkers. (shrink)

Explores the mythology of memory, involuntary memory, and the relation between time and memory in the context of questions prominent in contemporary thought.

Questions of whether anything exceeds reasonable sense and meaning have persisted throughout the history of philosophy. These questions have even continued in postmodern thought as well as in liberatory philosophies in which many kinds of events and lineages are experienced and seen as beyond philosophy. In this cowritten text, distinguished philosophers Nancy Tuana and Charles Scott pay particular attention to lineages and their dynamism as they develop the idea of things beyond philosophy, beyond norms. This is not a history of (...) philosophy or a critical study of a particular philosopher but a way to engage experience around dimensions of events that are beyond measuring, counting, meaning, and value. These attunements, they assert, are vitally important for the ways people orient themselves in the world and comport themselves in it. Tuana and Scott build on the alternatives to normative ethics that they find in the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Anzaldúa. They urge attunement to the world as a way to speak about what is impossible to give voice to, to live in the spaces between speech and the unspeakable, and to conceptualize and articulate the boundaries of rational sensibility. (shrink)

In a context of experiences in which events become apparent that encroach upon mainstream and reasonable good sense, this paper gives an account of the emergence of political subjects into public domains that make possible new knowledge and personal and institutional transformations. A statement by Simone de Beauvoir and engagement with Michel Foucault's interpretation of “limit experiences” help to orient the paper. The essay ends with a discussion of certain types of power and the birth of political subjects.

ABSTRACT We are concerned with borders and their crucial importance in people's lives. Throughout we place emphasis on liberatory critique and knowledge and on the importance of the forces lineages exercise in the ways we live. How might we speak of whatever is bordered and allow that of which we speak its manifest differences? How are we able to engage differences and maintain our own differences? How might we, as philosophers, speak philosophically about what is beyond philosophy? Such speaking would (...) constitute an art, a philosophical art, that is guided by unspeakable differences. After developing the concepts of border, in-between, sensibility, and mutations of lineages, we turn to Gloria Anzaldúa's accounts of border awareness and her experiences of it. Through an engagement with her account of nepantla, we offer reflections on the force that “beyond” can have in the happenings of liberatory philosophies. In doing so, we emphasize her conceptions of border arte and her manner of bringing it to expression. In that process we find parts of Alejandro Vallega's work helpful in elaborating radical exteriority, fluid margins, and “ana-chronic” sensibilities. We are engaging a philosophical understanding that gives us bridges that provide thresholds beyond philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The primary goal of this article is to find an interplay of concepts that will help us to write about the broad transformative potential of Gloria Anzaldúa's experiences of what she calls nepantla in her posthumously published Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. We want to integrate these concepts into our reading of her account of nepantla and to allow her language to further animate the force and meaning of the concepts' interactive connections. The (...) concepts are assemblage, occasion, lineages, sensibility, and temporality. The article concludes with her own culminating understanding of nepantla. The leading topics are Anzaldúa's world, the Coyolxauhqui process, rebirth, and cuerpoespíritu. (shrink)

This is a volatile time for health insurance policy. Medicare and Medicaid are in turmoil, as is the private health insurance market. Public and private health insurance costs constitute eighty percent of healthcare spending in the United States. Public health professionals depend on the insurance system to behave in ways that are responsive to public health in prevention and crisis management.Seventy-five percent of the American population, excluding the elderly, has coverage through the private health insurance system. Ninety percent of this (...) group receives their insurance through employer-sponsored programs, and the remaining ten percent buy their own coverage. Approximately ten percent of the non-elderly population has insurance through a government program, and fifteen percent of the non-elderly population, almost forty-one million Americans, is uninsured. (shrink)

When we consider the concepts and assumptions of a way of interpreting we are not abstracting ourselves from concrete analytical practice, but are dealing with one dimension of that practice. When a person’s assumptions and concepts change, aspects of his therapeutic work will also change. The philosophical ideal of conceptual clarity means that one strives to be able to recognize how he interprets what is going on—he strives to recognize how he proceeds with the therapeutic process in relation to other (...) options. In that way he has a far better chance of allowing the experience to speak for itself to him, i.e., when he knows something about his own assumptions in relation to a variety of other assumptions, he is able to hear how an occurrence exceeds or differs from his own accustomed ways in which he makes sense of things. (shrink)

This essay is written in two sections. The first, following a short introduction, is made up of three scenarios drawn from the life and work of Martin Buber. As well as demonstrating his obvious interest in human relationships with the other-than-human, each scenario describes an encounter between either Buber himself or a stand-in character and a member of the other-than-human world. Together, these scenes not only suggest that I/Thou encounters are possible with the other-than-human, and that they are important for (...) the development of the human I, but also outline characteristics that make such encounters possible. The second section focuses on Buber's description of the “great actor” in order to offer a way teachers might engage their own students with the other-than-human world. Just as the actor embodies both the character and his or her own person in a dramatic role, so the teacher might embody the I/Thou relationship with the natural world, becoming Teacher/Tree, and exemplifying that relationship with the students. (shrink)