Solidarity between more and less vulnerable groups is fundamental to an effective public health response to a global pandemic. Yet in the case of COVID-19, a focus on deciding who can and who cannot be protected from harm has shaped the pandemic experience and continues to determine the post-pandemic trajectory of life with SARS-CoV-2. In this paper I discuss how this has affected our understanding and acceptance of solidarity.

Race, Crime, and the Law. Randall Kennedy. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1997, xiv + 539 pp.

Alan Turing is often portrayed as a materialist in secondary literature. In the present article, I suggest that Turing was instead an idealist, inspired by Cambridge scholars, Arthur Eddington, Ernest Hobson, James Jeans and John McTaggart. I outline Turing’s developing thoughts and his legacy in the USA to date. Specifically, I contrast Turing’s two notions of computability (both from 1936) and distinguish between Turing’s “machine intelligence” in the UK and the more well-known “artificial intelligence” in the USA. According to my (...) proposed historical interpretation, Turing did not view computations in the real world to be exhaustively and deterministically characterized by his automatic machines from 1936. (shrink)

The literary and scientific renaissance that struck Germany around 1800 is usually taken to be the cradle of contemporary humanism. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism shows how figures like Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as scientists specializing in the emerging modern life and cognitive sciences not only established but also transgressed the boundaries of the “human.” This period so broadly painted as humanist by proponents and detractors alike also grappled with ways of challenging some of humanism's (...) most cherished assumptions: the dualisms, for example, between freedom and nature, science and art, matter and spirit, mind and body, and thereby also between the human and the nonhuman. Posthumanism is older than we think, and the so-called “humanists” of the late Enlightenment have much to offer our contemporary re-thinking of the human. (shrink)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

This chapter contains sections titled: Note.

La mort est ce qui identifie l'homme à l'animal et ce qui l'en différencie. Comme tout être vivant, l'homme subit la mort. A la différence de tout être vivant, il nie la mort dans ses croyances en un au-delà. Edgar Morin dégage les attitudes fondamentales des hommes et des cultures à l'égard de la mort. Il examine l'horreur de la mort, le risque de mort, le meurtre, et les deux grands mythes originaires de la mort : celui de la (...) survie et celui de la renaissance. Il dégage les croyances concernant la mort dans les grandes civilisations historiques pour en arriver à la crise contemporaine de la mort et aux nouvelles conceptions biologiques sur les relations entre vie et mort. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen (b. 1842, d. 1919), more than any other single figure, is responsible for founding the orthodox neo-Kantianism that dominated academic philosophy in Germany from the 1870s until the end of the First World War. Earlier German philosophers finding inspiration in Kant tended either towards speculative, metaphysical idealism, or sought to address philosophical questions with the resources of the empirical sciences, especially psychology. In contrast, Cohen’s seminal interpretation of Kant offered a vision of philosophy that decisively maintained its independence (...) from empirical psychology, without at the same time simply lapsing back into uncritical metaphysics. Cohen brought these attitudes to bear on a wide range of topics, writing systematically about epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, law, political theory, and aesthetics. His anti-psychologism became a defining commitment not only of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, founded by Cohen himself, but of orthodox neo-Kantianism more generally. Indeed, that commitment ultimately defined the philosophical context from which, in the early twentieth century, both phenomenology and logical positivism emerged. No less significant than his influence on academic philosophy, Cohen was his generation’s preeminent German-Jewish public intellectual and religious philosopher. His philosophical ethics and political theory provided the foundation for a non-Marxist, Kantian democratic socialism that informed his more popular and topical writings. He argued publicly for universal suffrage and for the rights of workers to organize democratically-constituted collectives. He also saw deep points of connection between ethics and religion, and developed a view of Judaism as a fundamentally ethical system of belief and practice. He argued that monotheism was the historical source of the idea of universal ethical laws, and thus that Judaism offered the world its first model of a universalist morality. This view of Judaism’s ethical significance ultimately informed Cohen’s public defense of the Jews’ place in Germany not only against anti-Semitic attacks, but also against the arguments of early twentieth-century Zionists. However, Cohen’s influence on Jewish thought extends far beyond debates within Imperial Germany: his late religious writings inspired a broad renewal in twentieth-century Jewish ethics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Edgar Morin livre quelques leçons sur des philosophes qui l’ont marqué. Penseurs de la complexité, de la contradiction, de l’ambivalence, comme Héraclite, Montaigne, Pascal, Hegel. Penseurs universalistes et humanistes incarnant l’esprit « judéo-gentil », tels Spinoza. Penseurs messianiques, tels le jeune Marx. Penseurs de la technique comme Heidegger. Penseurs ayant su exprimer magnifiquement la dialectique de la souffrance et de la joie, tels... Beethoven. Ces leçons sont complétées de quelques réflexions sur la nature même de la philosophie, sur sa (...) place dans l’enseignement, sur son rôle dans la « réforme de pensée » prônée par Edgar Morin. (shrink)

If we consider human thought as the, so far, ultimate, if not supreme, stage in the evolution of life on Earth, we must also try to understand the evolutionary conditions that allowed it to emerge, and that leads us to look again at living organization.Whatever the origins of life (cf. the text of Jacques Reisse, p. 53), it is clear that the oldest living organization, that of a protobacteria, is extremely complex in its functional and complementary association of extremely diverse (...) macro-molecules, and that this complexity includes in particular: a) the organization of exchanges with an environment from which it draws both matter-energy and organization ; b) a permanent process of self-reorganization through the replacing of molecules that have deteriorated and through the production of new ones; c) the organization of the self-reproduction of the creature through division. An organization of this kind includes a quasi-informational dimension (the hereditary message inscribed in the genes and the capacity to extract information from the environment), a quasi-computational dimension (the processing of data, via indices or quasi-signs from the interior and exterior), and a communicational dimension (internal RNA-protein communication and external communication with its congeners). In short, from the beginning, a living being is the product/producer of a self-eco-organization the nature of which is at the same time computational, informational, and communicational. In other words, within every living organization, there is a cognitive dimension, but this cognitive dimension is undifferentiated within it. (shrink)

Nietzsche's Posthumanism explores the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche's philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche's reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology, Edgar Landgraf provides both fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies.

This book addresses a key issue in Hegel's philosophical legacy - his account of purposiveness and teleology - that has often been wrongly criticised and misunderstood. Its re-examination of the issue has implications for the whole of Hegel's philosophical legacy.

Schools are interesting as complex organizations in and of themselves but even more so for how they refract the societal dynamics by which inequality is reproduced, an enduringly vexing question (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012:3). Educational attainment is core to socioeconomic status and connected to outcomes in housing, health, and employment. Unequal schools in fields characterized by stratification are often the subject of reform attempts (Tyack, 1974). We examine how a wealthier and a poorer school responded to a state-level regulatory mandate (...) for change, in the U.S. context of schools as putative engines of opportunity. Bourdieu’s “master concepts” of field, habitus, and cultural capital (Swartz, 2008) are often applied, and we used them to answer frequent but still relatively unanswered calls in the literature: first, to use the master concepts together rather than singularly, and second, to attend specifically to the organization level and what it refracts (Dobbin, 2008; Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008; Hallett & Gougherty, 2018; Lounsbury & Ventresca, 2003; Mohr, 2013). For this integrative and organizational level approach, we derived the concept of “class signature,” which enabled us to focus on practices in organizations. This lens revealed “resistant compliance” in the wealthier school and “compliant resistance” in the poorer school, both of which reshaped the stratified field, even if stratification was not rectified. These responses appeared to reproduce inequality, not simplistically, we argue, but along a winding path fraught with practical experiments, protection against penalties, redefinition of the reform’s terms, and some small gains to remedy intra-organizational inequalities. (shrink)

Nos connaissances sur l'humain, sur la vie, sur l'univers, sont en pleine expansion. Elles sont aussi séparées et dispersées. Comment les relier? Comment affronter des problèmes qui sont tout à la fois complexes, fondamentaux, intellectuels et vitaux? Comment nous situer dans l'aventure de la vie et dans celle de l'univers, en tenant compte du fait que l'humain est intérieur à l'univers et que l'univers est intérieur à l'humain? La réponse d'Edgar Morin, avec ce livre, est lumineuse d'intelligence et accessible (...) à tous. L'auteur nous invite, à sa façon, à penser global, c'est-à-dire à considérer l'humanité dans sa nature " trinitaire ", puisque chacun est à la fois un individu, un être social et une partie de l'espèce humaine. L'humanité est emportée dans la course effrénée de la mondialisation : la réflexion d'Edgar Morin nous propose de scruter son avenir et son devenir sans céder aux facilités de l'air du temps ni aux injonctions de l'actualité. (Quatrième de couv.). (shrink)

This book reconceives disability as a set of social relations and practices, as experienced embodiment, and as an emancipatory movement, as well as a biomedical phenomenon. The author brings new attention to complex ethical questions surrounding disability, looking at not only the biomedical understanding of impairment, but also its cultural representations and social organization.

abstract In this paper we question the basis on which judgements are made about the ‘quality’ of the lives of people whose embodied experience is anomalous, specifically in cases of impairments. In moral and political philosophy it is often assumed that, suitably informed, we can overcome epistemic gaps through the exercise of moral imagination: ‘putting ourselves in the place of others’, we can share their points of view. Drawing on phenomenology and theories of embodied cognition, and on empirical studies, we (...) suggest that there are barriers to imagining oneself differently situated, or imagining being another person, arising in part from the way imagination is constrained by embodied experience. We argue that the role of imagination in moral engagement with others is to expand the scope of our sympathies rather than to enable us to put ourselves in the other's place. We argue for explicit acknowledgement that our assessments of others’ QOL are likely to be shaped by the specifics of our own embodiment, and by the assumptions we make as a consequence about what is necessary for a good quality of life. (shrink)

The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing into a radical ontology when he died prematurely in 1961. Merleau-Ponty identified this nascent ontology as a philosophy of incarnation that carries us beyond entrenched dualisms in philosophical thinking about perception, the body, animality, nature, and God. What does this ontology have to do with the Catholic language of incarnation, sacrament, and logos on which it draws? In this book, Orion Edgar argues that Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is dependent upon a logic of incarnation (...) that finds its roots and fulfillment in theology, and that Merleau-Ponty drew from the Catholic faith of his youth. Merleau-Ponty's final abandonment of Christianity was based on an understanding of God that was ultimately Kantian rather than orthodox, and this misunderstanding is shared by many thinkers, both Christian and not. As such, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy suggests a new kind natural theology, one that grounds an account of God as ipsum esse subsistens in the questions produced by a phenomenology account of the world. This philosophical ontology also offers to Christian theology a route away from dualistic compromises and back to its own deepest insight.. (shrink)