Based on ethnographic research done in Moscow, Russia, this article describes how some Muscovites articulate their moral consciousness, that is, the ways in which persons articulate to themselves and others how they conceptualize morality. While it may be possible, and indeed is often the case, that these concepts influence how people act and help guide individuals toward moral behavior, what is more important for our purposes is that these concepts provide a way for persons to give meaning, both for themselves (...) and for others, to their moral worlds and experience. Thus, what I hope to do in this article is describe just one of the conceptual frameworks within which moral experience is rendered meaningful for my Muscovite interlocutors. In doing so, I will consider how certain concepts of the moral person that have their origins in turn of the century Russian religious philosophy, Russian Orthodox Christianity, and Soviet ideology have all come together to make up various aspects of this moral consciousness. (shrink)

In the spring and summer of 2020, the world broke down. A worldly breakdown often gives rise to forms of moral breakdown, or those “moments” when some worldly event or occurrence forces a person or persons to critically reflect on their until then unquestioned way of being-in-the-world (Zigon 2007). From the persistence of the global pandemic, to the collapse of the economy, to the murder of George Floyd by police officers on camera, to the worldwide response to that injustice, (...) the world and its human inhabitants experienced a breakdown in those months and it became impossible to ever see, hear, understand, or be in the world in the same way again. This special issue of Puncta brings together anthropologists and philosophers who take up a critical phenomenological or hermeneutic approach for thinking the contemporary condition. From the possibility of inhabiting a world conditioned by a global pandemic, to the impossibility of dwelling in conditions of systemic racism, from the question of how to face a future that presents itself as looming, to a present that denies the very possibility of truth: this collection responds to these and more in the hope of showing not only the contemporary conditions of existence, but that other conditions always remain as an ever-present potentiality. (shrink)

This essay attempts to reconceptualize temporality as it relates to ethics, by interrupting dominant anthropological notions of time—most particularly the temporal coherence of narrative unity—which are homogeneous and empty. Eschewing the more commonly understood notion of anthropology as ethnographic thick description, this essay is a practice of anthropological hermeneutics by which I take a cue from my Muscovite interlocutors to disrupt dominant anthropological conceptions of temporal unity within which action is considered to take place, and in so doing, reveal temporalization (...) as the process by which ethical action becomes possible. (shrink)

What do certain military missions in Afghanistan, domestic spying in the United States, therapeutic interventions in Russia and Denmark, torture and rape in an Indonesian police station, and Stop a...

Today it is said that we live in a condition of post-truth. In this essay, I will query this claim. In doing so, I do not intend to argue the contrary position, and neither will I attempt to offer some hope for a “return” to truth. Rather, my query will begin with an exploration of the assumptions behind the claim of post-truth and then consider an alternative notion of truth offered by Martin Heidegger and put into practice by Vaclav Havel. (...) Next, I consider how this Heideggerian/Havelian notion of truth is perhaps better thought in terms of thinking as articulated by Hannah Arendt, and a conception of ethics that runs close to Arendt’s thinking on thinking. Finally, the essay ends with the consideration that in the increasingly complex worlds of global and informational interconnectedness, perhaps what is most needed is not truth but thinking. That is, thinking that gives way to a sense of the world. (shrink)

Franciscus Sanchez ist profunder Kenner der erkenntnistheoretischen Auseinandersetzungen seiner Zeit. Sein konsistentes skeptisches Denken und der hohe Grad der Argumentativität seiner Ausführungen machen Sanchez zu einem herausragenden Vertreter des frühneuzeitlichen Skeptizismus.

Bd. 1. Elementa philosophiae instrumentalis, seu institutionum philosophiae eclecticae, tomus primus -- Bd. 2. Elementa philosophiae theoreticae seu institutionum philosophiae eclecticae, tomus secundus -- Bd. 3. Elementa philosophiae practicae -- Bd. 4. Introductio ad historiam philosophiae ebraeorum. Accedit dissertatio de haeresi Valentiniana -- Bd. 5. Analecta historiae philosophicae -- Bd. 6. Institutiones theologiae moralis variis observationibus illustratae -- Bd. 7. Institutiones theologiae dogmaticae variis observationibus illustratae (<2> v.) -- Bd. 8. Isagoge historico-theologica ad theologiam universam singulasque eius partes, novis supplementis (...) auctior. (shrink)

v. 1. Dualism in the Archaic and Early Classical periods of Greek history -- v. 2. Dualism in the political and social history of Greece in the fifth and fourth century B.C. -- v. 3. Dualism in Greek literature and philosophy in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. -- v. 4. Dualism in the ancient Middle East -- v. 5. A cultural history of Dualism -- v. 6. Dualism in the Hellenistic world -- v. 7. Dualism in the Palestinian-Syrian region (...) during the first century A.D. until. ca. 140 -- v. 8. Gnostic dualism in Asia Minor during the first centuries A.D. (2 v.) -- v. 10. Dualism in Roman history: 1. Imperialistic dualism -- v. 11. Dualism in Roman history: 2. Dualism in interior politics and social life -- v. 12. Dualism in Roman history: 3. The Christian church in conflict with the Roman Empire and with Judaism -- v. 13. Dualism in Roman history: 4. The struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the early Christian church -- v. 14. Dualism in Roman history: 5. Enemies of the Roman Order -- v. 15. Imperialism in medieval history I : dualism in Byzantine history, 476-638 and dualism in Islam, 572-732 -- v. 16. Imperialism in medieval history II : dualism in German history I -- v. 17. Imperialism in medieval history III : dualism in German history II -- v. 18. The dualism of the Christian and Muslim worlds during the middle ages -- v. 20. Gnostic-dualistic tendencies in the history of medieval Europe -- v. 21. Dualism and non-dualism in medieval theology and philosophy. (shrink)