Local foodshed proponents in the United States seek to change the food system through campaigns to “buy local” and to rediscover “good food” in the local foodshed. Presumably, common sense dictates that the word “local” signifies spatial proximity to the consumer. For some populations, however, both the terms “local” and “local food” signify various different meanings. The local food definition generally used by scholars and activists alike as “geographically proximate food” is unhelpfully narrow. Localist rhetoric often does not incorporate the (...) food choices and practices of immigrants, migrants, and refugees. In this paper, I report the various characterizations of local food among Filipino immigrants in San Diego, California: (1) geography-based local food; (2) (US) America-based local food; (3) community-based local food; and (4) immigrant identity-based local food. Local foodshed proponents should acknowledge those who have a starkly different definition of “local”—those who possess translocal subjectivities, for whom “local-ness” is both mobile and embodied. My study underscores how the movement of food—or its containment within a geographic space—cannot be viewed in isolation from the movement of people. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 (...) seems even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” he proposed, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19:18 seems (...) even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In “Miracles Happen,” Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters” reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors. (shrink)

In this paper we compare Kierkegaard’s and Marx’s views on social reform. Then we argue that Kierkegaard’s own reasoning is consistent with the expression of neighbor-love through collective action, i.e. social reform. However, Kierkegaard’s approach to social reform would be vastly different than Marx’s. We end by reviewing several questions that Kierkegaardian social reformers would ask themselves. Our hope is that this exploration will provide helpful insights into how those who genuinely love their neighbors ought to seek the common (...) good through collective action. (shrink)

Recent work on the ethics of love may be divided into norm-centered and affective-centered approaches. Norm-centered approaches, exemplified by Hallett and Outka, argue for either moral parity between self and other or for self-subordination; they regard self-love as legitimate within strict boundaries; and they sharply distinguish agape from other forms of love. Affective-centered approaches, exemplified by Vacek and Post, con- centrate on love for God as the central context for neighbor-love; they ac- cord a high status to friendship, marriage, (...) and other primary relationships; and they regard all forms of love as Christian in that they are transformed by grace and constitute cooperation with God. The re- maining agenda for both approaches is primarily theological, including especially the need to develop an extended application of the doctrines of creation and grace for the status of "special relations" in the ethics of love. (shrink)

The role of religion in clinical ethics consultations is contested. The religion of the ethics consultant _can be_ an important part of the consultation process and improve the quality of a consultation. Practicing neighbor love leads to empathy, which not only can improve the quality of ethics consultations but also creates a space for religion to be part of, but not imposed on, the consultation. The practice of empathy will build trust, rapport, and an intersubjective connection that improves the (...) quality of the consultation. (The views expressed are the author’s and not representative of any institution or employer). (shrink)

There is a famous passage in the Gospels, where a lawyer questions Jesus with regard to the command to love God with one's whole heart and to love ones neighbour `as oneself.' The lawyer asks, 'And who is my neighbour?' (Luke 10:2 [1]). Is he someone who lives close by or a co-religionist or is he a stranger, a follower of a different faith as Jesus suggests by answering with the parable of the good Samaritan? The 'religions of the book (...) [2],' Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have difficulties answering this question. As their respective histories show, they all manifest a double potential. They show themselves capable of promoting acts of love and extreme self-sacrifice in their followers. But they also have histories marked by religiously motivated struggles, intolerance and acts of brutality. What is the root of this double potential? How can they promote both love and violence? (shrink)

With the Hegel Lecture 2010, held by Homi K. Bhabha, the Dahlem Humanities Center is launching the Open Access publication of the series. In his talk, Bhabha evokes the spirit of Hegel in an attempt to understand contemporary issues of ethical witness, historical memory and the rights and representations of minorities in the cultural sphere. Who is our neighbour today? What does hospitality mean for our times? Why is the recognition of others such an agonizing encounter with the alterity of (...) the self? The lecture examplifies how the “Third Space” - one of the key theories of Postcolonialism - helps us to establish a new understanding of cosmopolitanism and hospitality in a globalized world, based on the right of difference in equality. (shrink)

Contrasting loving our neighbors with utilitarians’ demand to maximize good reveals important metatheoretic structures and dynamics that I call virtues- basing, input drive, role centering, and patient focus. First, love (good will) is a virtue; such virtues are foundational to both moral obligations and the impersonally valuable. Second, part of loving is acting lovingly. Whether and how I act lovingly, and how loving it is, is a matter of motivation; this input-driven account contrasts with highlighting actions’ outcome. Third, in regarding (...) someone as our neighbor we view her in relation to ourselves; a role-centered perspective shows that a wide range of person-to-person role-relationships constitute moral life. Fourth, if our moral task is loving each person, the moral question is how we respond to each person’s relevant welfare and needs, focusing on those toward someone acts (moral patients), not on maximizing good across persons or producing an optimal world. (shrink)

Few people doubt that severe poverty is a pressing moral issue. But what sorts of obligations, if any, do affluent people have toward the severely poor? If one accepts the idea that one has some obligations to the severely poor there still remains disagreement about the magnitude of this obligation and when it obtains. I consider Peter Singer's influential "shallow pond" argument, which holds that affluent people have greater obligations toward the severely poor than ordinary moral judgments suggest. Critics hold (...) that Singer's view is excessively demanding and therefore untenable. I thus turn to the parable of the Good Samaritan and Christian accounts of neighbor-love to help attenuate this criticism. Drawing from Christian conversations on neighbor-love, I attempt to demonstrate that accepting an obligation to assist does not necessarily result in one abandoning one's special relations, abnegating self-regard, or no longer pursuing other non-moral strivings. (shrink)

Kierkegaard faces an apparent dilemma. On the one hand, he concurs with the biblical injunction: we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. He takes this to imply that self-love and neighbor-love should be roughly symmetrical, similar in kind as well as degree. On the other hand, he recommends relating to others and to ourselves in disparate ways. We should be lenient, charitable, and forgiving when interacting with neighbors; the opposite when dealing with ourselves. The goal of my paper (...) is to solve this puzzle. I first consider addressing it by appealing to Gene Outka’s idea that equal love does not entail identical treatment. After rejecting this solution, I offer my own: Asymmetry between the two loves is not a moral ideal for Kierkegaard but a rehabilitative strategy. He recommends being more latitudinarian with others than with ourselves to correct against a common tendency toward the opposite extreme. (shrink)

What are the driving forces of cultural macroevolution, the evolution of cultural traits that characterize societies or populations? This question has engaged anthropologists for more than a century, with little consensus regarding the answer. We develop and fit autologistic models, built upon both spatial and linguistic neighbor graphs, for 44 cultural traits of 172 societies in the Western North American Indian (WNAI) database. For each trait, we compare models including or excluding one or both neighbor graphs, and for (...) the majority of traits we find strong evidence in favor of a model which uses both spatial and linguistic neighbors to predict a trait’s distribution. Our results run counter to the assertion that cultural trait distributions can be explained largely by the transmission of traits from parent to daughter populations and are thus best analyzed with phylogenies. In contrast, we show that vertical and horizontal transmission pathways can be incorporated in a single model, that both transmission modes may indeed operate on the same trait, and that for most traits in the WNAI database, accounting for only one mode of transmission would result in a loss of information. (shrink)

This article focuses on the everyday practices that make the place of the neighbourhood – social control, legitimacy and support, while also looking at how gender is produced in everyday life in the neighbourhood. In doing this, the discussion underlines the tremendous social and cultural influence of neighbours and the neighbourhood and argues that neighbourhoods need to be seen as a social formation as important as caste, class, ethnicity or religion. This is particularly important given that a strong focus on (...) identities in recent decades has tended to eclipse social formations such as the neighbourhood. This ethnographic discussion is based on fieldwork carried out in neighbourhoods in two towns in India, Thalassery in Kerala, South India and Bikaner in Rajasthan, North India. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to take a philosophical approach to the powerful text of the parable of the Good Samaritan in light of the opportunities of the 21st century. The text starts with presenting variousways in which modern Christians can answer the question “who is my neighbour?” and comparing them to the typical response assumed by the effective altruism movement. On the basis of one of the interpretations, a framework is offered for determining whether the beneficiaries of help in (...) the cause areas of effective altruism can be categorized as neighbours. For this inquiry, the so-called "less demanding"interpretation is chosen since prima facie it does not seem to provide a justification for the thesis that all people fall under the category of neighbour. This article claims that due to the development of technology and research as well as due to the global increase in wealth, the less demanding interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan conceives of people distant in space as neighbours but not of animals and not of the unidentified people distant in time. It is argued that Christians have moral reasons and ways to support treating animals as neighbours, as well as to support cooperation for the sake of protecting future humanity, at least from the threats that are of human origin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself, and: Maimonides and His HeritageLouis E. NewmanLove Thy Neighbor as Thyself Lenn E. Goodman New York: Oxford, 2008. 235 pp. $55.00.Maimonides and His Heritage Edited by Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, and James Allen Grady Albany: SUNY, 2009. $24.95.Perhaps no principle is more central to Western religious ethics than that of “loving your neighbor as yourself.” It is at the (...) heart of the Hebrew Bible’s ethic [End Page 196] of caring for others, especially those most marginalized, both within and outside of the Israelite community. It is rooted in the belief that all humans are created in the divine image, and its implications extend to a myriad of specific injunctions designed to secure the rights of individuals as individuals as well as to ensure the just distribution of goods within society. It has been the subject of extended reflection by generations of Jewish and Christian philosophers (among many others), has spawned multiple versions of the Golden Rule, and has received modern philosophical expression in Kant’s categorical imperative. It should not surprise us, then, that any treatment of such a far-reaching religious–moral principle will require a scholar whose reach extends from the Bible to contemporary moral theory.Lenn Goodman demonstrates in this book that he is more than equal to the task. First given as two of the 2005 Gifford Lectures (the others that year were given by a Christian, a Muslim, and a secular philosopher), these chapters explore the ways in which love of neighbor is at the very heart of biblical ethics, as well as the theory of ethical obligation that it implies. Goodman’s erudition is on full display here as he moves easily from Aristotelian virtue ethics to medieval Jewish Bible commentators to contemporary natural law theorists.Following the long line of commentators who read “as thyself” as a gloss on “neighbor”—namely, that we love the other because she is a person, like oneself—Goodman writes that “our first obligation to one another is respect for subjecthood” (14). All other biblical injunctions with respect to moral behavior are merely corollaries of the notion that all persons are of equal worth insofar as they are equally created in God’s image and so entitled to equal consideration. Goodman takes pains to emphasize that this commandment, though, cannot be reduced to the sum total of positive injunctions; it aims to inculcate an attitude (“love”) that both motivates our moral behavior and extends its scope to encompass the infinite task of emulating God.The most philosophically interesting part of Goodman’s discussion comes in his treatment of monotheism’s contribution to ethics. After all, the command to love our neighbor is presented to us both as a command from God and as a command to love God by loving God’s creatures. How are our idea of God and our relationship with God correlated with our understanding of the nature of moral duty and the scope of moral life?As Goodman sees it, monotheism asserts that “God... is not just a judge but an ontic principle, the greatest reality, highest good and source of all goods, which are conceived as God’s work, expressions of his generosity and wisdom” (45). At the same time, he eschews any simple divine command theory of morality according to which the good is determined by God, either verbally or ontologically. For, “It’s not just that we know the right because we know God’s will. We also know God’s will because we know what is right” (51). This dialectical understanding of God and the good is best captured in Goodman’s claim that “we bring our moral notions, suasions, customs, instincts, attitudes [End Page 197] and intuition to the Law, and they enter into dialogue with what we read, informing our hermeneutic, as scripture itself and the conception of the God encountered in scripture, inform them in turn” (53).Goodman acknowledges that such a view runs headlong into the problem of divinely sanctioned mass murder (see the book of Joshua) and, most famously, the injunction to utterly destroy the Amalakites (Deut. 25:17... (shrink)

_Zero's Neighbour_ is Hélène Cixous's tribute to the minimalist genius of the artist in exile who courted nothingness in his writing like nobody else: Samuel Beckett. In this unabashedly personal odyssey through a sizeable range of his novels, plays and poems, Cixous celebrates Beckett’s linguistic flair and the poignant, powerful thrust of his stylistic terseness, and passionately declares her love for his unrivalled expression of the meaningless ‘precious little’ of life, its unfathomable banality ending in chaos and death. Poised between (...) a critical essay and a textual performance across two languages adapting Beckett's own literary vein, this book will appeal to scholars, critics and creative writers as well as students of the ‘grey self-Sam’. Its allusive intertextual insights will also prove to be of critical relevance to readers of Dante and Proust, among other literary figures, as much as to those appreciative of Cixous’s own inimitable genius for dissecting the quintessence of the life and works of a ‘neighbourly’ artist. (shrink)

This essay takes up the question of what "agape" intends for the neighbor. Though material welfare and freedom have been adequately emphasized in recent Christian ethics, the God-relation has not. Drawing on T. S. Eliot, Abraham Heschel, Kenneth E. Kirk, and Max Scheler in particular, the case is made for a retrieval of the Augustinian assumption that the service of the most lasting significance for the neighbor is the restoration of the divine-human encounter that issues in true happiness. (...) Criticism is directed at efforts to understand "agape" within the limiting terms of modern secular frameworks. (shrink)

The biblical injunction to love one's neighbour has long been regarded as a central pillar of morality. It is taken to be an ideal which gives direction to our moral aspirations, even though most of us find it difficult to live up to, owing to our selfish natures. But the difficulties I wish to raise are of a logical kind, as distinct from those depending on personal character. They fall under three headings: the first concerns the scope of ‘my neighbour’, (...) the second the injunction to love, and the third the idea of loving oneself. The first will probably be the most familiar. (shrink)

Jorge Romero is facing a big problem. His neighbours are convinced he is a soulless zombie. What can he say to persuade them he's a conscious being just like them, and save his neck? Is Your Neighbour a Zombie? brings together philosophical puzzles and problems to challenge your preconceptions and change the way that you view the world.

More than an introduction to Levinas's philosophical itinerary and the position where it matures, Liturgy of the Neighbor is also a critical discussion and original response to an acknowledged master of the twentieth century. The Levinas who appears in this dialogue is a thinker not only determined to get free of Western tradition, but also one whose project and claims shed new and penetrating light on the major figures whose work stood in his way. By moving to this level, (...) where Levinas's teachers and opponents speak for themselves and not only in the voices Levinas has assigned to them, Bloechl presses the discussion beyond an evaluation of Levinas's readings of his interlocutors, and beyond the question of his success in getting free of them, to the more urgent task of weighing the stakes of reestablishing religion, and the ethics where it has meaning, after Nietzche and, above all, Heidegger. (shrink)

The Christian commandment of love of neighbour “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” might rather easily give rise to what I would like to call, with the necessary reservations, ‘immoderate images’. If we examine the consequences of the commandment, we very soon run into a world of excessive obligations and exaggerated unselfishness which can trouble the imagination and stir up fantasies of desire. The commandment which some would say is irreconcilable with the natural limits of common sense, is nonetheless (...) intriguing to both the imagination and the desire of the human person. Associations can easily be made with the peculiar and sometimes spectacular lives of certain saints, martyrs and impassioned mystics in which the boundaries between perversion, narcissism, selflessness, self-destruction and high moral standing are not always crystal clear.It is perhaps possible that Christianity’s attractiveness is due, in no small measure, to this associative network of tormented images and extreme examples which are easily evoked by the vestiges of our commandment. The fact that some people, when reflecting on the commandment, are almost exclusively inclined to think of extreme, and sometimes sinister, sacri- fices does not only speak of the commandment itself but also reveals something about such people and their desires. It is almost as if the commandment, while at first sight running against common sense, at the same time plays along with, and even leans towards, our human desires.We might ask ourselves if it is not a fact that every ethical theory somehow turns around a ‘core’ which, if we relate to it too directly and too literally, can let the theory’s principles run wild. Perhaps the commandment of love of neighbour has taken the place of such a ‘disorienting core’ in Christianity. Perhaps also there can be no particular ethic which does not somewhere run the risk of leading to excess. If this is the case, however, then the commandment of love of neighbour loses something of its specific expressiveness. Nevertheless, it is my contention that we can argue with good reason that our Christian commandment disorients moral rules and obligations in a very direct, radical and even characteristic way.In order to argue my point, the first part of this essay will be devoted to a discussion of Freud’s repudiating and reticent attitude in relation to this commandment. In this regard, I will make an abstraction of the question how the tradition, the church and moral education have taught us to understand the commandment and focus our attention on a structural and grammatical analysis of its formulation. I will argue that Freud’s aversion entails the fact that our commandment, in contrast to the incest taboo and the Ten Commandments, as such forbids nothing. Indeed, it is precisely the fact that it forbids nothing that makes it so alarming.In the second part of the essay I will return to the way in which the tradition has taught us to understand this ‘opaque commandment’. I will point out that the paradigmatic line of approach concerns ‘helping the needy’, although the commandment, in the literal sense, speaks only of love. I will also tackle the question of the identity of my neighbour and what it means for someone to become my neighbour. In conclusion I will raise the question whether in fact every kind of charitable activity can be understood from the perspective of ‘helping’.The problem which lies at the root of this question, however, is the following: if it is the case that the solid and characteristic core of love of neighbour has to do with the alleviation of needs, then why, in exceptional circumstances, is burying the dead considered an act of charity? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:And Thy Neighbor as Thyself:The Elastic Self in the Moral Psychology of John Duns ScotusJoseph Dowd (bio)1. IntroductionAccording to Anselm of Canterbury, God gave human beings two affectiones: the affectio commodi and the affectio iustitiae. For Anselm, these two affectiones are largely equivalent to egoistic motivation and non-egoistic (specifically, moral) motivation: the affectio commodi motivates one to seek one's own advantage (commodum), while the affectio iustitiae motivates one (...) to seek justice (iustitia) for its own sake. Two centuries after Anselm, John Duns Scotus appropriated the terms affectio commodi and affectio iustitiae but made some changes to Anselm's account of the affectiones. Anselm thinks that human beings lost the affectio iustitiae when Adam sinned1 and can regain it only through divine grace,2 but Scotus regards the affectio iustitiae as innate to human beings.3 Also, [End Page 53] Scotus integrates his account of the affectio commodi into the Aristotelian natural teleology commonly accepted at his time, associating the affectio commodi with one's inclination toward one's natural end.4Although Scotus modifies Anselm's account of the affectiones, many interpreters think that he preserves the affectio commodi's association with egoism and the affectio iustitiae's association with non-egoism. I call this interpretation of Scotus's two affectiones "the Standard Reading." On the Standard Reading, the affectio commodi is one's inclination to will things for one's own benefit.5 The Standard Reading's proponents disagree about what exactly the affectio iustitiae is. Some interpret the affectio iustitiae as one's inclination to will or love things because they are good in themselves.6 Others interpret it as one's inclination to love others for their own sake (as opposed to loving them as means to one's own benefit).7 Despite this disagreement, all versions of the Standard Reading agree that the affectio iustitiae enables one to aim at goals other than one's own good.8 [End Page 54]As I argue in this article, some of Scotus's remarks suggest another reading of the two affectiones, one that I call "the Alternative Reading." On this reading, the affectio iustitiae enables one to love both oneself and other beings, and the affectio commodi inclines one to desire things for the benefit of both oneself and other beings that one loves. To be precise, the affectio commodi is an inclination to will what the mind represents as appealing. This inclination, I argue, inclines one to desire what one regards as beneficial to the beings that one loves. Hints of this reading appear in the work of Cruz González-Ayesta,9 but, to my knowledge, no one has drawn special attention to the reading.As I show in this article, both the Standard Reading and the Alternative Reading have textual support, and I regard the support for each as conclusive.10 Therefore, I believe that Scotus accepts both readings. This does not make Scotus inconsistent; I end the article by offering an interpretation that makes both readings true simultaneously. My interpretation is as follows. The affectio commodi is egoistic in that it inclines one to desire what one perceives as beneficial to oneself. The affectio iustitiae is non-egotistic in that it enables one to love a being, whether oneself or something else, for its own sake, as a response to its own objective goodness. But, by loving the being, one comes to see the being's good as part of one's own. Thus, in inclining one to desire things for one's own benefit (as the Standard Reading claims), the affectio commodi inclines one to desire things for the benefit of the beings that one loves (as the Alternative Reading claims) because one perceives their good as part of one's own.To my knowledge, this interpretation of Scotus has not been proposed before. John Hare and Matthew D. Mendham have attributed to Aristotle the view that the self is "elastic": one's own good "stretches" to include the good of one's loved ones. However, they specifically deny that Scotus holds such a view and, in fact, use Aristotle's view as a foil for... (shrink)

This first English-language translation captures the excitement of the original text-already a contemporary classic, and will likely become a standard reference in the history of eighteenth-century thought, politics, and society, and in the ...

I consider in this essay three possible interpretations of the infinitely rich story of Abraham and Isaac found in Genesis 22. Against the background of what I call "the traditional reading," I compare the views of William Blake, Johannes de Silentio, and Søren Kierkegaard. Blake's poetry and painting suggest a striking alternative to our usual understanding of the story, but they finally require too radical a departure from the Biblical text. The pseudonym de Silentio's views on obedience to God, presented (...) in Fear and Trembling, are even more problematic, however. They are at odds with Kierkegaard's powerful account of love of neighbor, related under his own name in Works of Love, for instance. The God who is Love would not literally require murderous intent toward a neighbor, I conclude, but that same God might issue an "ironic" command designed to lift us out of an abominable ritual. (shrink)

Ethical theories consistent with Christian moral sensibilities must assure each neighbor's dignity and recognize his or her unique needs. While utilitarian ethics and duty-based ethics may fail to some degree in these respects, virtue ethics offers perspectives that echo more faithfully the parable of the Good Samaritan.

This article engages with the question of who our neighbour is, linked to the imperative of love thy neighbour, with the aim of a broadened understanding of who should be seen as a neighbour on an ontological level. First, drawing on posthumanistic theory and its critique of human anthropocentrism, as well as ascribing subjectivity and agency outside the human sphere, it seeks to put it into relation with contemporary theological work. Secondly, it brings together the interconnectedness and interdependency argued by (...) posthumanism and its link with the climate crisis the world faces. Drawing on Hans Jonas’s ethics of responsibility and Sallie McFague’s kenotic theology, it argues for a responsibility to be taken by humanity through decentralization, as proposed by posthumanism. Finally, it argues for an expanded understanding of the neighbour in the context of all creation, where love should be directed to all beings. (shrink)

When examined in light of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the term “neighbor” raises questions of exclusivity and inclusivity, one's understanding of God, and responsibility toward the “Other.”.

This work is based on the prestigious Gifford Lectures, which Lenn Goodman was invited to deliver in 2005. Goodman was asked to speak about the commandment to 'love thy neighbour as thyself' from the standpoint of Judaism.

Gait recognition in video surveillance is still challenging because the employed gait features are usually affected by many variations. To overcome this difficulty, this paper presents a novel Deep Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (DLMNN) method for gait recognition. The proposed DLMNN trains a convolutional neural network to project gait feature onto a metric subspace, under which intra-class gait samples are pulled together as small as possible while inter-class samples are pushed apart by a large margin. We provide an extensive (...) evaluation in terms of various scenarios, namely, normal, carrying, clothing, and cross-view condition on two widely used gait datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DLMNN achieves competitive gait recognition performances and promising computational efficiency. (shrink)

Enlightenment ideals of a society rooted in liberationist reason and morality were trampled in the wake of the savagery of the Second World War. That era's union of cold technology and ancient hatreds gave rise to a dark, alternative reason--an ethic that was value-free and indifferent with regard to virtue and vice, freedom, and slavery. In a world where "the unthinkable" had become reality, it is small wonder that theorists would turn to the writings of a man whose eighteenth-century imagination (...) preceded twentieth-century history in its unbridled exploration of viciousness, perversion, and monstrosity: the Marquis de Sade. Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade's reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski's seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan. (shrink)

John Duns Scotus (1265/6-1308) and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) have much to say regarding the relationship between the commandments to love God and to love one’s neighbor. Their positions are so similar in places that some interpreters have suggested that Kierkegaard and Scotus agree that the command to love one’s neighbor follows necessarily from the command to love God. That is, Scotus and Kierkegaard allegedly hold that the indicative, “One’s neighbor is to be loved” is necessarily true in (...) the same way as the indicative, “God is to be loved.” For Scotus, determining the modal status of these commands involves framing imperatives as indicatives. According to Scotus, there is a distinction between natural law in the strict sense (where the truths of propositions are epistemically immediate and necessary) and the loose sense (where the truths of propositions are mediate and contingent), and the command to love God is natural law in the strict sense. However, Scotus does not posit an entailment relationship between love of God and love of neighbor, where loving one’s neighbor is necessary and epistemically immediate, and the suggestion that Scotus holds this belief seems unwarranted given textual evidence in Ordinatio III. 28 and, especially, III. 37, nn. 32-39. This paper argues that while Kierkegaard and Scotus share remarkably similar accounts of neighbor-love, Kierkegaard departs from the Scotus in some crucial respects, particularly concerning the modal status of the indicative “one’s neighbor is to be loved,” and the qualifications for a neighbor. Identifying where Kierkegaard departs from Scotus highlights the subtleties of their respective accounts of neighbor-love, and it might also supply clues regarding the trajectory of Kierkegaard’s mediated reception of the Subtle Doctor. (shrink)

This article takes as its point of departure the episode from Confessiones 4 in which a mature Augustine questions his earlier distraught reaction to the death of a friend. In order to place Augustine’s account of this episode within a broader context, I discuss, in the first part of the article, Augustine’s teaching on love of neighbor in De doctrina christiana. The second part of the article proposes an analogy between Augustine’s views of how one ought to be related (...) to one’s neighbor, and his views of how one ought to be related to the sacraments, and particularly to the Eucharist. By seeking to reconcile Augustine’s treatment of how we ought to love our neighbors with his treatment of the Eucharist, and of the Eschaton, I suggest how the reader might understand love of neighbor in Augustine’s thought as having both a temporary aspect and a lasting aspect. (shrink)

In the book "When I needed a neighbour were you there? Christians and the Challenge of Poverty" I highlight the overwhelming evidence that involvement with poor people and the issues of poverty is a fundamental part of what it means to be Christian. The life and teaching of Jesus Christ suggest that all Christians should be seriously concerned about the plight of poor people. Why? Let me explain. Jesus is the foundation of the Christian faith and role model for Christian (...) behaviour in the world. In his life on earth he showed deep compassion for all people marginalized by society – for the poor, for widows, children, and the sick. Many of his stories and actions illustrate the extent to which he prioritized the relief of human suffering in his own ministry. The emphasis in the ministry of Jesus on compassion for marginalized people was nothing new in ancient Israel. A constant theme in the Old Testament was an imperative to show concern for marginalized people, especially widows, orphans, strangers, and poor people. As in the New Testament, caring for society’s vulnerable members was tied to the central religious obligations required of the ancient Israelites. I seek to uncover ethical values in the biblical texts that can enrich our understanding of how best to deal with poverty. This book is primarily directed at non-poor Christians to persuade them to take the plight of poor people more seriously. It also aims to present biblical perspectives on poverty that can be empowering to those who personally face the challenges of poverty. (shrink)