James T. Hong’s experimental documentary, The Denazification of MH is neither anapology for Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism nor a condemnation of thatinvolvement. Rather, the film is a critical philosophical confrontation with Heidegger’s thought and the issue of his involvement withNational Socialism. The film addresses the perennial concern as old as philosophy itself: therelationship between the philosopher’s life and his philosophy. While the film does notadopt a definitive position regarding Heidegger, Nazism, and the issue of personalresponsibility, it does suggest an (...) affirmative response to the question posed by bothLevinas and Blanchot regarding the possibility of philosophizing after Auschwitz.Considering Heidegger’s influence on contemporary philosophy and literary studies,inspiring such films as The Denazification of MH and The Ister , it appears as though it is not only possible, but necessary, to carefully andcritically approach Heidegger in the effort to continue to philosophize in the wake of themost catastrophic event of the 20thcentury, the Holocaust. In his thoroughly researched biography of Martin Heidegger, Rudiger Strafaski states the following regarding thepotential of Heidegger himself to do philosophy in the wake of the German death camps, amatter about which Heidegger remained conspicuously silent. (shrink)

There has been increasing interest in the attributes of successful entrepreneurs. Increasingly, too, research on entrepreneurship has focused on the identification of personality traits conducive to entrepreneurial success. The present study moves away from predicting entrepreneurial success and instead focuses on exploring and describing the personality traits of a successful entrepreneur, namely Steve Jobs. A psychobiographical case study design and qualitative approach were employed to explore the extent to which Steve Jobs displayed the personality traits identified by Rauch and Frese. (...) Data collection and analysis were guided by three linked sub-processes proposed by Miles and Huberman, which include data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing and verification. The findings of this study show that, over the course of the subject’s life, the personality traits identified by Rauch and Frese as conducive to successful engagement in entrepreneurial activities were displayed, namely need for achievement, risk-taking, innovativeness, autonomy, internal locus of control, and self-efficacy. In so far as it can be argued that these personality traits inherently predisposed Steve Jobs to achieve the success he displayed as an entrepreneur, the findings of this study affirm the relevance of the personality trait perspective in describing and understanding the life course of successful entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Affirmative action is standardly pursued in relation to admissions to prestigious universities, in hiring for prestigious jobs, and when it comes to being elected to parliament. Central to these forms of affirmative action is that they have to do with competitive goods. A good is competitive when, if we improve A’s chances of getting the good, we reduce B’s chances of obtaining the good. I call this Competitive Affirmative Action. I distinguish this from Non-competitive Affirmative Action. The latter has to (...) do with non-competitive goods, e.g., being granted early parole or freedom from arbitrary arrest. I argue that some of the most prominent objections against affirmative action—in particular, the reverse discrimination objection and the merit objection—speak less against Non-competitive Affirmative Action. And that some of the most prominent arguments in favor of affirmative action, insofar as they justify Competitive Affirmative Action, also justify Non-competitive Affirmative Action. (shrink)

Psychotherapy holds out the promise of help for people who are hurting and in need. It can save lives and change lives. In therapy, clients can find their strengths and sense of hope. They can change course toward a more meaningful and healthy life. They can confront loss, tragedy, hopelessness, and the end of life in ways that do not leave them numb or paralyzed. They can discover what brings them joy and what sustains them through hard times. They can (...) begin to trust, or to trust more wisely. They can learn new behaviors in therapy and how to teach themselves new behaviors after therapy ends. They can question what they always believed was a given. They can find out what matters most to them, and how to stop wasting time. They can become happier, or at least less miserable. They can become better able, as Freud noted, to love and to work. They can learn how to accept and love themselves just as they are and accept others who are different from them. Our ethics acknowledge and affirm our profession's responsibilities. This book was written to help strengthen, deepen, and inform ethical awareness and the sense of personal ethical responsibility. Its job is to help you hold onto the ideals-including ethical ideals-that called you into the profession to begin with, to help you develop and fulfill those ideals. There will be so much-trust us on this-that tends to dull ethical awareness, to make ethics drift out of focus, to create barriers between you and your ideals, to replace ethics with pseudo-ethics and ethics placebos. Fatigue, endless paperwork, unrealistic expectations, illness, family crises, not being able to make ends meet, burn out, threats of job loss, insurance coverage that doesn't come close to meeting the needs of our clients, biases that have not been addressed, and so many other forces can pressure us into cutting ethical corners. This book is intended to help you develop a strong and healthy resistance to such forces, to help you weather them without losing your ethical awareness and ideals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Model for the Many Senses of ScriptureFrom the Literal to the Spiritual in Genesis 22 with Thomas AquinasChristopher S. Morrissey (bio)Introduction: Many Senses Require Many TranslationsOn the mountain the Lord appeared (NETS, Gen. 22:14b)On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided (RSV)1In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen (KJV)On the mountain the LORD will see (NAB)ἐν τῷ ὄρει κύριος ὤφθη (LXX)in monte Dominus (...) videtur (Nova Vulgata)in monte Dominus videbit (St. Jerome’s Vulgate)In his book Abraham’s Curse, Bruce Chilton argues that in Gen. 22:14b, “the Septuagint’s Greek renders the Hebrew text” correctly (i.e., “with Yahweh as the subject of the verb”), whereas English translations like the King James Version (KJV) prefer to imply that the ram is the verbal subject. Chilton contends that “This is a case of translators caring more about doctrine than wording, and attempting to legislate what the Bible can say.”2Chilton’s textual exegesis does have some value. He notes that “Contextually [End Page 231] as well as grammatically, God is the subject: Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah, liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention.”3 But with his polemics against the KJV, he fails to affirm the rich polysemy of the passage. He replaces one literal reading with another and then argues as if the two are at odds. But Scripture has many senses, a truth famously expressed in the medieval distich of Augustine of Dacia, best known in the version of Nicholas of Lyra: “The literal sense teaches what happened; what you believe, the allegorical; the moral, what you should do; where you are going, the anagogical.”4 Therefore Chilton is wrong to impute bad motives to anyone who would attempt to unfold the spiritual sense of a passage (“caring more about doctrine”), or even to anyone who would note that a passage has more than one literal meaning.Chilton’s own insistence on uncovering the univocal original meaning of a passage (through his preferred historical method of “generative exegesis”)5 is excessively literal, as if recourse to grammar would allow one “to legislate what the Bible can say.” When Chilton says “Yahweh ‘was seen’ on Moriah,” he is not contending that God was seen directly, literally, but rather interpreting the metaphorical or parabolical sense of the phrase “Yahweh was seen” (in Gen. 22:14b), because he glosses the meaning of the metaphor as “liberating Isaac by means of divine intervention”;6 that is, God is seen indirectly, cognitively, rather than literally with the eyes. Because literally seeing a ram is not opposed to cognitively understanding God’s action, the KJV, pace Chilton, can be defended contextually. To my mind, the Revised Standard Version (RSV), echoing the KJV, does the best job of rendering the Hebrew text literally, with “On the mount of the lord it shall be provided,” because this leaves open the many senses of the third person singular “it,” to be unfolded by exegesis. Thus more than one translation is required in order to appreciate all the significations being deployed in the treatment of “seeing” in Gen. 22:8 and 22:14. “It shall be provided”: More than one univocal sense of the “it” has to be uncovered by exegesis in this Scripture, in order to see what “it” is all about.To justify my opinion that the RSV most felicitously translates the Hebrew, I would like to prepare the way to a conclusion in which I compare the Septuagint’s translation (which follows Chilton’s preferred rendering of the context) with the Vulgate Latin translations. The path toward this conclusion will show that Chilton’s polemics, indicative of an exegetical attitude that is hostile to an appreciation of the many senses of Scripture, fail to see how the RSV translation is also defensible as keeping the reader’s mind open to the many senses of the Scriptural passage. But first things first. With the help of St. Thomas Aquinas, let me distinguish the various senses of Scripture and then point out how they are all exemplified here, all being signified by the text. [End Page 232] Click for larger view View... (shrink)

From the point of view of ethics, truthtelling is not a matter of speaking the truth but is rather a matter of speaking what one believes to be the truth. So too liars do not necessarily say what is false; they say what they believe to be false. Further, one can mislead without lying. An executive answering in the affirmative the question whether some employees are in excessive danger on the job will mislead if he knows that in fact most (...) employees are but does not say so. Yet he does not lie. Similarly there is no lie in an advertisement suggesting that those who use a certain product will win garner wealth and power. This article deals with the ethical and practical dimensions of truthtelling and lying only. (shrink)

This paper has two parts. First, I argue that three prominent arguments in favour of affirmative action—the mitigating discrimination argument, the equality of opportunity argument and the diversity argument—may be based on a relational egalitarian theory of justice, as opposed to a distributive understanding of justice. Second, I argue that basing these arguments in favour of affirmative action on relational egalitarianism has an interesting implication when it comes to the site(s) of affirmative action. Whereas affirmative action is usually discussed and (...) pursued in university admissions and in hiring for jobs, the relational egalitarian-based arguments entail, all else equal, that we have more reason to pursue affirmative action in the political domain than in the traditional sites. (shrink)

The question of how to affirm one's life in view of suffering and loss is central to Nietzsche's philosophy. He shows, I claim, that one can affirm – take joy or find beauty in – one's life as a whole, conceived as necessary in all its elements, while also despising parts of it. Yet he mostly pictures such life-affirmation as achievable only via an atheistic theodicy that relies on a key ambition of the very system of morality that he (...) famously attacks: namely to explain or justify suffering in terms of a higher end to which it is essential. I argue that affirmation of one's life is more powerful without the crutch of any theodicy, and point to Job as a paragon of one who can affirm his life without seeking an answer to the question of the meaning or value of suffering – indeed who can dispense altogether with that question. (shrink)

The burgeoning field of economic theology constitutes primarily a critical device against the Nachleben of medieval providential theology in modern economic governance. Especially Agamben has highlighted the role of the notion of oikonomia in providential and modern economic thought to promote humble acceptance in light of the problem of evil. I show how economic theology can also be a vantage point for affirmative critique. I discuss Negri’s interpretation of the Book of Job and the Italian feminist appreciation of the Virgin (...) Mary as responses to the problem of evil. Both emphasize the ineradicable potential for resistance to oikonomia in human life instead of merely lamenting humanity’s submission to God’s providential economy, like Agamben. For Negri, this potential is located in humankind’s capacity to protest against God-given evil and re-appropriate God’s potential for creating the world, while the feminists point toward the human ability to care for the vulnerable. (shrink)

Barbara Bergmann's defense of Affirmative Action (hereafter, AA) is replete with relevant analogies, parables and examples. Accordingly, AA is a matter of conscience, “planning and acting to end the absence of certain kinds of people … from certain jobs and schools” (7). The purposes of AA are to eliminate discrimination, promote integration, and reduce poverty of minority groups (9). “The heart of an AA plan is its numerical hiring goals, based on an assessment of the availability of qualified minority people (...) and women for each kind of job” (12). Bergmann acknowledges that A A programs “do have quota like aspects” (13), but she claims this is the only method to get women and minorities into jobs for which they are qualified and without which they would be rejected. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From First Hesitation to Scenic ImaginationOriginary Thinking with Eric GansAndrew Bartlett (bio)Taken together, the publication of Eric Gans’s The Scenic Imagination: Originary Thinking from Hobbes to the Present Day (2008), the recent release of Adam Katz’s anthology The Originary Hypothesis: A Minimal Proposal for Humanistic Inquiry (2007),1 and the organization of three international gatherings devoted to generative anthropology2 suggest a recent infusion of vital energy into the (...) forward movement of generative anthropology. The goal of this review essay is to add a little to that infusion. The essay surveys the six major books of Eric Gans in which the originary hypothesis is defined, developed, tested, and taken onto various intellectual terrains. It has been composed with the readers of Contagion in mind. Insofar as it has a definable stance, that stance emphasises elements of generative anthropology that might encourage scholars and students familiar with the ideas of René Girard but more or less unfamiliar with the thinking of Eric Gans to begin studying Gans free of inhibitions about discontinuities between his way of thinking and that of Girard. This essay’s mode is one of affirmative exposition rather than critical suspicion. Its multiple suggestions are advanced in the conviction that neglecting one thinker for the sake of the other does an injustice to both. [End Page 89]IThe person ready to study the book where generative anthropology began—The Origin of Language: A Formal Theory of Representation (1981)—should be set for an extraordinary experience. It stands as the most austere, abstract, and taxing of Gans’s books; but by virtue of those very qualities, the most rewarding and the best basis for understanding subsequent elaborations of the hypothesis. The Origin of Language may feel odd to readers who come to it working “backward” from later volumes or articles. In it, key terms in the later works, such as “resentment,” “mimetic,” “scenic,” even the adjective “originary,” do not figure prominently. In expositions where Gans explains the differences between René Girard’s institutional theory of representation (which proposes that language evolved somehow as a side effect of ritual) and Gans’s formal theory of representation, there is an odd thickness of cautious deference, a propriety verging on a reluctance to disagree. In Girard’s thought, the maximal form of human culture, the institution of ritual as it evolved from episodes of collective murder, is foundational; by contrast, in Gans, the minimal form of human culture, linguistic exchange as it has evolved in a dialectic of desire and representation, is foundational. Nor for Gans are the earliest “victims” of collective violence human ones; Gans’s hypothesis puts an object initially of appetite (most easily figured as food), transfigured by the sign into a desire-object, into the center of the scene of representation. The humans in generative anthropology are less murderous and more hungry than those in mimetic theory; the economic-consumerist element of human beings enjoys a privilege in Gans’s system that it does not have in the system of Girard, with its more orthodox otherworldliness.Generative anthropology is about human language. It takes linguistic exchange, the deferral of violence through representation, as the essence of the human. The title The Origin of Language reflects this. Gans’s hypothesis is that human language began with a communally mediated abortive gesture of appropriation toward a central object of appetite in a scenic event; that abortive gesture of appropriation is the gesture of originary thinking. Originary thinking now, even as I am doing it here, does what it did then at the beginning of human thought: it reflects on its own origin. The emission of the first human sign, that first abortive gesture of appropriation, is the object of the hypothesis. The mimetic paradox of rivalry and imitation familiar to students of Girard precedes the emission of the first ostensive gesture-sign, generating the double-bind circumstances that make possible its being chosen. For Gans, the collective violence familiar to students of Girard follows the emission of the first ostensive [End Page 90] sign; indeed, violence is intensified by the abortive gesture of appropriation—because what was an object merely of appetite before the... (shrink)

Jacques Derrida regularly appeals to an affirmative gesture that is ‘prior’ to or more ‘originary’ than the form of the question, and this suggests one way to understand deconstruction's critical force. The ‘Yes, yes’, he says, situates a ‘vigil or beyond of the question’ with respect to an ‘irreducible responsibility’. Some Derrida scholars therefore construe the double affirmation as a source or ground of critique. In this paper, I refute this suggestion. While an originary ‘Yes, yes’ or (...) ‘come’ (viens) does open the fields of (for example) ‘inheritance’, language, or ‘holistic webs’, I argue, it only marks (will have marked) the processes of différance or of trace that make signification possible in general. No thing, as such, is thereby affirmed. This is why the originary affirmation cannot be said to constitute, in itself, the imperative (il la faut) of the logic (la logique) of ethical-political critique. To explain why a certain ethical imperative can be associated with deconstruction, one must determine why one is always already subject to a vigil that opens critique to its own possibility. One must also determine how the affirmative gesture relates to deconstruction's critical force. (shrink)

Gender-affirming healthcare interventions are medical or surgical interventions that aim to allow trans and non-binary people to better affirm their gender identity. It has been argued that rights to GAH must be grounded in either a right to be cured of or mitigate an illness—gender dysphoria—or in harm prevention, given the high rates of depression and suicide among trans and non-binary people. However, these grounds of a right to GAH conflict with the prevalent view among theorists, institutions and activists that (...) trans and non-binary people do not have a mental illness and that one can be trans and entitled to GAH without being depressed or suicidal. This paper challenges the orthodoxy that a right to GAH must be grounded in either of these ways and instead argues for a right to GAH grounded in a right to live and act with integrity. The standard view, which this paper explains, is that our rights to live and act with integrity ground a right to religious accommodation in many cases such as a right to not be denied social security due to one’s refusal to work a job on a holy day. This paper argues that if our rights to live and act with integrity can ground prima facie rights to religious accommodation, our rights to live and act with integrity ground prima facie rights to GAH. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

Relations of belonging are at the heart of biopolitical analysis. They determine, at the biological level, who is included in the polis and who is excluded from it. More abstractly, belonging is the conceptual mechanism of classification. By examining the specific relations of belonging within the biopolitical paradigms of four key works – Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and Esposito’s Bios – this article will highlight the dynamic of classification at the (...) heart of each. Doing so will make the question of belonging explicit and render the dialectic of inclusion/exclusion visible. More than simply emphasizing the centrality of belonging to biopolitical analysis, this article will demonstrate that any politic over life must ignore and deny an originary politic of life. Returning biopolitics to the question of belonging thus entails the affirmation of relation and the positive association of life itself. (shrink)

Until 1996, poor single mothers in the United States could claim welfare benefits for themselves and their children under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program if they had no other source of income. With the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), paid work and work-related activities became a mandatory condition for receiving aid. At the same time, the law promotes marriage as a route out of poverty. Using a feminist reinterpretation of Althusser’s (...) concept of interpellation, I turn to Job Clubs, mandatory week-long workshops that teach job search skills, to analyze the citizen-subject generated by front-line representatives of the state in the context of this new legislation. Based on participant-observation, I conclude that while PRWORA ostensibly promotes both marriage and paid employment, Job Club trainers enforced a masculine worker-citizen subject through the deployment of three discursive strategies. These discursive strategies 1) promoted paid work over welfare-receipt as both a pragmatic and moral choice, 2) posited an individual-psychological account of women’s welfare receipt, and 3) portrayed parenting skills as marketable skills. In the conclusion, I speculate that current welfare reform efforts require the generation of a self-reproducing worker-citizen and that workshops like Job Club become a site in which the existence of this autonomous citizen is affirmed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Heidegger’s Craving Being-on-SchellingDavid L. Clark (bio)What we call spirit exists by virtue of itself, a flame that fuels itself. However, because as something existing, it is opposed by Being, the spirit is consequently nothing but an addiction to such Being, just as the flame is addicted to matter. The most base form of the spirit is therefore an addiction, a desire, a lust.—Friedrich Schelling, Stuttgart Private Lectures1. Just Say (...) NoHow not to speak of addiction? We know from Derrida that in talking this way we are always asking two overlapping questions, 1 both of which remind us that what is still confusedly called “addiction”—and with it, a host of related concepts ranging from “drugs” and “toxicity” to “dependence” and “simulation”—is perhaps best held open as a question or, rather, in the strange space between two questions, quite possibly more. First, an interrogative: a query that calls for a certain vigilance and responsibility when it comes to thinking about addiction, and that draws attention to the ways in which addiction is figured, the rhetorics or tropologies as well as the knowledges of addiction. Like mourning and longing, Schellingian philosophemes to which it is closely related and to which I will return in this essay, addiction is among other things a figure of understanding, to use Tilottama Rajan’s evocative phrase. 2 As a figure, so the first question goes, “addiction” deserves to be written and to be read slowly, not only for what might be called “political” reasons, which is to say, reasons having to do with the normalizing efficiency that comes of speaking the word too quickly, of claiming to know “who” the addict is as such and “what” it means to be addicted, but also because when it comes to addiction—again, like mourning and longing—we are dealing with a term that is irreducibly allegorical in nature, a term that inevitably says more than it says. One could almost say that “how not to speak of addiction” means “let us try to speak well or properly of addiction, even and especially if this means speaking properly of addiction’s multiple improprieties.” One could almost say this, if “addiction,” understood as a fundamental structure of desire that “holds valid for all possible contents of the world” [Slawney 42], were not precisely that which displaces and disorganizes firm oppositional limits between [End Page 8] propriety and impropriety, as it does between responsibility and irresponsibility, voluntarity and compulsion, delinquency and productivity, sickness and health, the very limits that the medical, juridical, and criminal discourses of addiction often seem most in the service of inscribing and enforcing. But of course the inability unequivocally to speak well (or, for that matter, unwell) of “addiction” in no way suggests that we have nothing to say about it—the collection of papers of which this one forms a small part is proof of that—and this goes to the heart of my second question, not interrogative but rhetorical in kind. “How not to speak of addiction?” also means that there is no way not to speak of it; insofar as addiction names a structure that precedes and exceeds the knowing subject (and is thus “older” than it), that subject is always “speaking” of it, as if answering and answerable to an imperious law, the law of addiction that amounts to an addiction to the law. Addiction there is: that is the strange, anonymous, and always anterior logic of craving, a craving no longer necessarily in thrall to the thought of self-possession and sobriety that Schelling scandalously evokes and explores, and that Heidegger directly pursues in his lectures on Schelling. More: where the human is, so too is “the deepest self-craving [der tiefsten Eigensucht]” [Heidegger, ST 140; 42, 244]. 3 Under these maximally habituated conditions, “how not to speak of addiction?” means that we are not unwilling but incapable of just saying no to a form of radical intoxication. Instead we find ourselves, as ourselves, whether speaking specifically about addiction or not, responding in a kind of passive affirmative to an originary craving, saying yes to addiction even when, in the name of an... (shrink)

It has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at (...) the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

It has been widely observed that virtue ethics, regarded as an ethics of the ancient, in contrast to deontology and consequentialism, seen as an ethics of the modern (Larmore 1996: 19–23), is experiencing an impressive revival and is becoming a strong rival to utilitarianism and deontology in the English-speaking world in the last a few decades. Despite this, it has been perceived as having an obvious weakness in comparison with its two major rivals. While both utilitarianism and deontology can at (...) the same time serve as an ethical theory, providing guidance for individual persons and a political philosophy, offering ways to structure social institutions, virtue ethics, as it is concerned with character traits of individual persons, seems to be ill-equipped to be politically useful. In recent years, some attempts have been made to develop the so-called virtue politics, but most of them, including my own (see Huang 2014: Chapter 5), are limited to arguing for the perfectionist view that the state has the obligation to do things to help its members develop their virtues, and so the focus is still on the character traits of individual persons. However important those attempts are, such a notion of virtue politics is clearly too narrow, unless one thinks that the only job the state is supposed to do is to cultivate its people’s virtues. Yet obviously the government has many other jobs to do such as making laws and social policies, many if not most of which are not for the purpose of making people virtuous. The question is then in what sense such laws and social policies are moral in general and just in particular. Utilitarianism and deontology have their ready answers in the light of utility or moral principles respectively. Can virtue ethics provide its own answer? This paper attempts to argue for an affirmative answer to this question from the Confucian point of view, as represented by Mencius. It does so with a focus on the virtue of justice, as it is a central concept in both virtue ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 417-418 [Access article in PDF] Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, editors. Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 290. Cloth, $78.50. Paper, $26.95.The current anthology presents an important contribution to the study of Spinoza's relation to Jewish philosophy as well as to contemporary scholarship of Spinoza's metaphysics and political (...) theory.In the opening essay, Lenn Goodman takes upon himself the ambitious task of evaluating Spinoza's positions as to several central disputes throughout the history of philosophy. In this rich and extensive essay Goodman argues that Spinoza's radical rationalism makes him pursue syntheses between traditionally opposed poles. Lee Rice's article, "Love of God in Spinoza," carefully analyzes Spinoza's concept of love and suggests the existence of three kinds of love parallel to the three kinds of knowledge. Warren Montag addresses the unresolved issue of Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah. Montag sides with Deleuze against the association of Spinozism with the Neo-Platonic theory of emanation, arguing that unlike the Neo-Platonists and Kabbalists, Spinoza's view of God rules out any hierarchy, and does not assume a descent from primal simplicity into complexity. Edwin Curley contributes a beautiful reading of the story of Job and of Maimonides' interpretation of the story. Curley follows Maimonides' discussion of the various positions regarding the question of divine providence and his attempt to identify the speeches of the characters of the book of Job with each of these positions. Following a sensitive consideration of various attempts to [End Page 417] recover Maimonides' own rather concealed view about providence, Curley concludes that "[W]hatever you think Maimonides' final word on Job is, our examination of him certainly supports [Spinoza's] claim that [Maimonides] reads Scripture in terms of Platonic or Aristotelian speculations" (170).Warren Zev Harvey's essay addresses Spinoza's most neglected work, the Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language. Apart from providing an outline of Spinoza's work as a Hebrew grammarian ("a noun-intoxicated grammarian") and pointing out some of Spinoza's more eccentric views about the nature of the Hebrew language, Harvey makes a compelling case for the importance of the book for the study of Spinoza's metaphysics. He points out a fascinating analogy which Spinoza draws between the parts of speech: (proper) noun, adjectives, and participles, and Spinoza's key metaphysical terms: substance, attributes, and modes. (Think about the weighty implications of this analogy for Curley's interpretation of the substance-mode relation.) According to Harvey, Spinoza's claim that all Hebrew words are derived from nouns is a linguistic parallel to Spinoza's pivotal metaphysical doctrine which makes all things be in the substance (or God). Kenneth Seeskin's article discusses the views of Maimonides and Spinoza on the question of creation and God's relation to the world. Seeskin reconstructs an interesting critical dialogue between these two philosophers. According to Seeskin, both philosophers held that an effect must be similar to its cause. Maimonides' commitment to Negative Theology and to the denial of any common measure between God and finite things forced him to deny causal or explanatory relation between God and the world. What Maimonides can suggest instead is rather to prove that the emergence of the world ex nihilo and according to the divine will, is possible, and even likely given certain astronomical facts of medieval science. Thus, Maimonides would hold that "although we have grounds for believing that creation occurred, we will never be in a position to say how" (120). For Spinoza, such a view constitutes nothing but a "sanctuary of ignorance." Thus, according to Seeskin, Spinoza affirms a clear causal relation between God and the world of finite things insofar as God is said to explain the world. While I tend to agree with most aspects of this analysis, it is important to note that Spinoza also claims that "between the finite and infinite there is no relation" (Letter 54). This... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spirit and Politics: Some Thoughts on Margaret Watkins’s The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s “Essays”Andre C. Willis (bio)Margaret Watkins’s elegant text, The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays (2019),1 is marked by a Humean approach: it fosters philosophical consideration of both the faculties of the mind and the affective features of experience in ways that bear on practical, moral issues. Ever-attentive to the meaning of Hume’s various nuances and strategic ambiguities, (...) Watkins’s even-handed approach guides us into a broad swath of Hume’s ideas and marches us through a trajectory of secondary interlocutors. It also establishes Watkins as an integral part of Hume’s lineage, in the sense that she understands that thoughtful writing itself is an intellectual virtue. Her “unusual sensitivity, not to life’s daily vicissitudes but to beauties and deformities” (193)2 richly textures her overall argument that positions Hume’s Essays as a filter for his vision of “true philosophy:” that reflective turn towards nature and common life that openly challenges abstruse reasoning, fluently embraces historicism and perspectivalism, and deftly foregrounds the usefulness of ideas over their logical certainty.As much as Watkins reveals Hume’s vision for philosophy, she also extends it; for, among other things, her consideration of Hume’s unique endeavor in philosophical literature (ultimately collected under the title Essays, Moral, Political and Literary [1758]), makes an important twofold contribution to Hume studies. It brings greater attention to Hume’s notion of “public spirit,” a distinct mode of human excellence that combines “benevolence” with “greatness of mind.” And, it aestheticizes some practical dimensions of human life (noted in chapter titles, for example, “Working,” [End Page 143] “Thinking,” “Loving”) without losing track of their socio-political valences. I shall return to these two main points below. As an introductory gesture, I want to note that Watkins’s writing both nicely elaborates Hume’s philosophical vision and thoughtfully broadens his literary insights. It does “the job of putting the audience into a responsive relation with the work of art,” what literary critic R. P. Blackmur identified as “the job of intermediary.”3Generally speaking, Watkins’s mediation filters salient themes and terms from Hume’s corpus through a particularly close reading of the Essays. Cast through her richly stylized analysis, Hume’s foundational ideas of “sympathy,” “convention,” “impressions,” “association,” “imagination,” “artifice,” the “passions” (and more) find fresh interpretive air. An example of this in her first chapter tracks Hume’s use of both “artifice” and “convention” from the Treatise through the second Enquiry to the Essays. For Watkins, a through-line for Hume is that “governing” can be thought of as repeated actions that bridge institutional policy to individual character. To think about governing in this way is to open ourselves to new ways of conceiving potential overlaps between nature and artifice (say, in the instance of a moral virtue like courage [50]). To link categories in the Essays back to their antecedent texts along the lines that Watkins does is to situate them in the context of Hume’s larger thought-project and, indirectly, confirm connections between the individual essays. These conjoinings, for Watkins, suggest Hume’s Essays can be treated together, without either blending their disparate themes or diluting their individual subject matter.4This point stands in opposition to Hume’s own semi-admonishment (1741) that “The Reader must not look for any connexion among these Essays but must consider each of them as a Work apart.”5 Watkins’s response—indicative of the graciousness of her overall tone—is to warmly acknowledge Hume’s reproach and affirm the distinctiveness of each of the essays. She proclaims: “The Essays are not unified” (5). Her thinking about them separately, however, reveals a common practical thread in their form. Watkins characterizes this form as serving “to promote public benefit” (4). I think about this form as being philosophical in the way that Richard Rorty conceives of philosophy as cultural criticism. Watkins, however, wants to emphasize the public character of Hume’s philosophy. She writes: “Hume seeks to benefit the public in two ways. First, he tries to allay irrational attitudes that produce imprudent personal and... (shrink)

With his “discovery” of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl confronted the problem of intersubjectivity: How is the Other constituted? Gustav Shpet, a Russian student of Husserl’s in Göttingen, unlike many others accepted the reduction on some level but, unlike Husserl, did not dwell on the problem. In this essay, we look first at the Russian treatment of intersubjectivity in the immediately preceding years and see that the concern was over the possibility of proving our natural conviction in the Other. We then (...) turn to Husserl’s position circa 1912 with its embryonic conception of empathy as its vehicle into the sphere of the Other’s “ownness.” Finally, we turn to Shpet, who cautiously suggests that Husserl’s division of intuition into two sorts, experiencing and ideal, is insufficient. Affirming Husserl’s claim that each species of being has a correlative cognitive method, Shpet asserts that social being should also have its own method. Shpet recognizes that Husserl does not ascribe originary givenness to what empathy provides, but might Husserl have been wrong about this? Could it be that empathy, properly understood as a third form of intuition, “comprehension,” provides social being originarily and therefore functions in the constitution of the Other analogously to the way experiencing intuition functions in the constitution of physical things? However, comprehension is employed on what the Other presents, namely signs, be they in the form of bodily movements, speech or even writing. In this way, Shpet transforms Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology into a hermeneutic phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper seeks to redress the marginalization of Adorno in environmental philosophical discourse. Kate Soper describes two opposing ways of conceiving nature. There is the redemptive “nature-endorsing” paradigm that lays claim to the intrinsic value or “otherness” of nature. Conversely, the “nature-sceptical” approach denies that we can access originary, untouched nature. This paper argues that the significance of Adorno’s treatment of natural beauty lies in how he brings these approaches together. In writings that resonate with the dual connotations of (...) Sebald’s phrase “after nature”, Adorno both affirms the skeptical point that we cannot transcend a human history alienated from nature as well as retaining redemptive hope wherein art “after” nature seeks creative possibilities from out of the very ruins of history marked by nature’s destruction. (shrink)

Translation and Hermeneutic PhenomenologyThe problem of translation has been reflected since the antiquity but it became a special field of research only later within the "traductorolgie" and the translation studies. Applying Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology, the author suggests that translation in the narrow sense is felt also at the level of translation in a broader sense, that is, of mutual understanding within the same linguistic community; thus, it could serve as a model par excellence for the European community. In accordance (...) of Paul Ricoeur's conception of "originary affirmation" and language hospitality, he argues that translation has not only ethical but also political implications: Matured by its century-long history of conflicts and wars, Europe is called to become a translator and mediator of the world and to promote the encounter between cultures, religions and nations with an active peace-policy, especially in the Mediterranean region and the Balkans. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show the anthropological resources of Ricceur’s philosophy of the act, in order to elaborate a living articulation of ethics and politics that avoids the deadlock which represents the idea of a complete divorce between moral idealism and political realism. In this second part, it defends the thesis that the reconquest of an “ethical-political teleology” is only possible to the extent that, in Ricceur, the reappropriation of the “ethical originary affirmation” takes a (...) radically critical form. Then it tries to show how this critical approach is likely to lead to a release of the mediating power of social imaginary, which always complements and precedes our acts. (shrink)

This essay addresses the anguish of Job which he pours out in Job 10. Job’s anguish is heightened by the fact that he does not know why he is suffering. He directs his protest to God whom he believes knows everything and judges the deepest intentions of human heart. How can God who is the sole author of life and judges rightly be responsible for this unjustifiable torment of the life a righteous man? This study examines the different outpourings of (...) Job’s anguished heart and sees them as the epitome of the anguish of a whole group that passes through unjust suffering. The approach adopted in the study is exegetical but with practical pastoral concerns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Rawls's Originary Theory of JusticeEric Gans (bio)The fundamental thesis of generative anthropology is that the principal concern of human culture is and has been from the outset to defer the potential violence of mimetic desire. To this mode of thought, constructing a model of the good society in any but the general terms of "exchange" and "reciprocity" is unfaithful to the human community, whose operations have been (...) from the beginning beyond the grasp of any individual mind within the society, and in which since the rise of the market system we participate largely unmediated by ritual. Rather than providing a template for the "good society," originary thinking provides a touchstone for ethical progress: act so as to contribute to reciprocal exchange, negatively, by aiding those who need help to participate in the exchange system more fully, and positively, by creating new foci of desire that enrich the system of exchange, the circulation of desire and satisfaction. The result of these acts is to reduce or "defer" resentment, negatively, by removing grievances, and positively, by creating new opportunities for recycling resentment into productive activity.These precepts notwithstanding, the "moral model" of reciprocal exchange, as exemplified in the exchange of signs around the sacred center in the hypothetical originary event, provides the basis for a recurrent temptation to create utopias. The theoretical gesture of measuring a given social order against a moral ideal is an extension of the moral intuition we apply in judging all human actions; whatever our degree of resignation, we cannot help but resent any suggestion—even when it is "objectively" false—that we have been victims of a failure of reciprocity. Both the theory and the personal intuition are direct descendants of the originary exchange of representations, as are the moral "theories" that are explicitly grounded in the sacred. Abstract moral theorizing must ultimately appeal to either transcendence or intuition, and the appeal to the former differs only in its rhetoric from the appeal to the latter.Finally, these "timeless" reflections must be situated in history. Determining the proper relationship between universal morality and historically [End Page 149] particular ethics poses a particularly acute problem in the postmodern era. The question that has remained with us since the end of World War II is how to overcome the paralysis of Auschwitz—how to acknowledge the necessary deferral of reciprocity without condoning genocide. If we hold history's institutions to the touchstone of the moral model, they will always be found wanting, yet this historical experience tells us that if we do not so hold them, anything is possible. The fact that accusations of Nazism (or "fascism") continue to be made today—notably against Israel itself—is a sign that the moral dilemma has not yet been resolved. But unlike metaphysical thought, originary thinking takes the Holocaust as a sign not of the need to construct a social model that will resolve this dilemma, but of the inappropriateness of confronting it directly. Making the world a better place not only does not require but is in fact incompatible with a prior image of the world made good.The most serious attempt by mainstream Anglo-American social thought to grapple with this postmodern quandary is that of the late Harvard philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002), whose A Theory of Justice (1971) remains the era's most important work of moral philosophy. To sum up in my own terms Rawls's basic idea: if we imagine ourselves in an "original position" when society has not yet come into existence, so that our (future) place in it is hidden from us by a "veil of ignorance," then we will be able to agree on the criteria of a good society, since our uncertainty will convince us all equally of the necessity to protect ourselves from unfairness in the event we are assigned one of society's less desirable roles. We may then accept this imaginary agreement, unbiased by the participants' knowledge of their eventual social role, as universal humanity's most just arrangement. Rawls considers that under these conditions any inequality in the overall distribution of social goods can be justified only if it produces a margin of... (shrink)

Using poststructural criticism, we explore how the book of Job deconstructs the deed/consequence nexus that stands at the core of the Hebrew Bible’s theological framework – i.e. the doctrine of reward and punishment. Building on both Derridean deconstruction and Foucauldian resistance, we show that the book of Job refuses to comply with the opposite binary of reward and punishment. First, we demonstrate how the friends in their speeches enforce the binary and, thereby, exercise power over Job. Secondly, we consider Job’s (...) resistance and deconstruction of this binary through both his lived experience and desire to argue with God. Finally, we argue how Job’s desire to argue with God challenges God to defend themself in court. In God’s answer, however, one is introduced to a different God than as portrayed by Job’s friends. Moreover, God’s boastful reply, which lacks any justification for Job’s suffering, makes God appear fragile and weak. As such, this article argues that the book of Job may not merely deconstruct dominant ideology, but also God itself. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to examine the problem of suffering in the book of Job and the possible solution it offers. For this reason, it is structured as follows: In the first section, we will analyse Job’s evidential argument; the second section will delve into the ”friends’ and their failed attempt at a retributive theodicy; finally, we shall look into God’s argument and try to explain Job’s answer in terms of sceptical theism.

Job motivation remains an area of concern among researchers due to the rising issues of poor or lack of motivation among workers. This refers to one’s personal will or drives to perform a task at work. Meanwhile, job satisfaction refers to an employee’s sense of fulfillment with his or her work experience. Therefore, the current study utilized the descriptive- correlational research design to investigate the impact of job motivation on the job satisfaction of accountants. To gather essential data and achieve (...) the objectives of the study, Multidimensional Work Motivational Scale (MWMS) and Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) were administered to the target respondents. The collected data were then analyzed using a Multiple Regression Analysis; findings revealed that job motivation has a significant impact on the job satisfaction of accountants. Additionally, the results of this study were carefully evaluated and discussed, and recommendations were made to benefit the stakeholders of the study and contribute to the existing body of knowledge. (shrink)

In continental philosophy of religion, the hermeneutics of narratives takes a central role. Analytic philosophy of religion, on the other hand, considers religious statements mostly as assertions of fact. It examines the logical form and semantics of religious statements, addresses their logical commitments, and examines their epistemological status. Using the example of a passage in the Book of Job, it is investigated whether the methods of analytic philosophy are also suitable for analyzing religious narratives. The question is explored whether there (...) is a genuine form of knowledge, besides propositional factual knowledge, which is bound to the form of narration. Particular attention will be paid to the inter-personal pragmatic embeddedness of narratives. The connection between second-personal knowledge and narratives is examined. Using the historical example of Ignatius of Loyola's theory of religious knowledge, it is argued that propositional argumentative knowledge is only one form of religious knowledge among others. The others are second-personal and narrative in character. Having thus established this distinct form of knowledge, it is asked whether our best empirical knowledge of the neurophysiological basis of intuitive and non-argumentative cognition provides a foundation for better understanding inter-personal religious cognition within narratives. (shrink)

Paul Klee’s sense of modern art and his own painting as the channeling of the originary movement of life leads to an insight beyond modern art, and back towards such dynamic cosmological experiences as that of the Onas people of Patagonia. In their daily life and their rituals their painted bodies expressed the living force of their cosmos, an originary energy that occurred at the limit of what one may call art and nature. In engaging Klee’s painting and (...) drawing, one is brought to such an open space of living transformative movement; one finds a place wider than our present imagination, a time-space that in our being exposed to his works and experience remains for us to inhabit. (shrink)

Atran's putative module for folk biology is evaluated with respect to evidence from patients showing category-specific impairments for living kinds. Existing neuropsychological evidence provides no support for the primacy of categorization at the generic species level. We outline reasons for this and emphasize that such claims should be tested using inductive reasoning tasks.

On the powerful qualities view, every fundamental property is both dispositional and qualitative. Identity theory is the standard account of the view, which makes the stronger claim that a property’s dispositionality and qualitativity are identical to each other, and identical to the property itself. Recent defences of the powerful qualities view have involved novel theories of powerful qualities which are not also variants of identity theory. Giannotti (Erkenntnis 86:603–621, 2021a) has suggested a novel theory of his own, the dual aspect (...) account, which makes use of a particular notion of aspects. For Giannotti, dispositionality and qualitativity are each an aspect of a property, and an aspect is a property’s way of being. The importance of aspects is twofold. Firstly, by introducing aspects to identity theory, the theory becomes more precise. Secondly, aspects allow for a novel theory of powerful qualities, the dual aspect account, which maintains that dispositionality and qualitativity are aspects, but rejects the identity claim. Giannotti’s aim is to show that even if identity theory is false, the dual aspect account remains an available theory for advocates of powerful qualities. This paper will be a critical examination of Giannotti’s ideas. Firstly, I will clarify Giannotti’s notion of aspects, explaining how it involves a misunderstanding of supervenience, and why it does not offer the advantages that he claims it does. Secondly, in light of my discussion of aspects, I will argue that the dual aspect account lacks relative advantages over the compound view of powerful qualities. (shrink)