Genocide remembrance is a complex epistemological/ethical achievement, whereby survivors and descendants give meaning to the past in the quest for both personal-historical and social-historical truth. This paper offers an argument of epistemic injustice specifically as it occurs in relation to practices of (individual and collective) genocide remembrance. In particular, I argue that under conditions of genocide denialism, understood as collective genocide misremembrance and memory distortion, genocide survivors and descendants are confronted with hermeneutical oppression. Drawing on Sue Campbell’s relational, (...) reconstructive account of remembering, I argue that genocide denialism involves disrespectful challenges to memory, which systematically misrecognize rememberers. Adopting the case of Turkey’s denialism of the Armenian genocide, I discuss two interrelated mechanisms through which this can happen: i) through the systematic portrayal of survivors and descendants as vicious rememberers, and ii) through distortions of the very concept of ‘genocide’. Based on this, I show how hermeneutical and testimonial injustice are crucially interrelated when it comes to “contested” memories of historical injustice and the biographical testimony it gives rise to. (shrink)

Ueda Shizuteru 上田閑照, one of the most consequential and celebrated Japanese philosophers of the last hundred years, passed away on June 28, 2019, at the age of 93. A professor of religious studies at Kyoto University, he was not only a leading scholar of Meister Eckhart and Nishida Kitarō, he was a highly original philosopher in his own right and widely recognized as the central figure in the third generation of the Kyoto School. Moreover, he was not only one of (...) the foremost philosophical interpreters of Rinzai Zen Buddhism, he was himself an inka certified lay master. (shrink)

Remembrance can be understood as “the primary meditative practice” within Islam ; as such, remembrance is most emphasized within the Islamic mystical traditions given the name Sufism by European scholars. Dhikr is centrally important in the initiatic mystical lineages linked to Muhyiddin Ibn al-’Arabi, known as Shaykh al-Akbar. My focus will be on the fruitional experience aimed at in dhikr—namely, turning from a condition of heedlessness and duality to a unitive experience of remembering God and being remembered by (...) God. Remembrance will be framed not as a metaphysical doctrine but as a lived experience situated in the practice of classical Sufism... (shrink)

Religious Remembrance. Professor Mykola Zakovych.

Twenty years since the onset of the traumatic wars of Yugoslav secession, the countries of the Western Balkans continue to nurture narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. The troubling ways in which states in the region remember their pasts provide continuing obstacles in the search for acknowledgment and justice. In this essay, I develop an argument for understanding the relationship between justice and remembrance of the past. To illustrate this relationship, I explore ways in (...) which education and memorialization projects contribute to justice efforts. I critically analyze a few ongoing education and memory projects in the region, and then present alternative ideas on mechanisms of public memory that would be more conducive to building the foundational blocks of justice based on trust, respect, and dignity. (shrink)

Religious Remembrance. Professor Valentin Vandishev.

The Editorial Board of Political Theory joins the intellectual community the world over in mourning the death of Michael Oakeshott. Professor Oakeshott was a member of the board of Political Theory from the inception of the journal. We shall miss his voice in our conversations. Three of those who knew him well offer the following comments and memories.

The art historian Aby M. Warburg and the philosopher Walter Benjamin are widely respected as two of the most significant cultural theorists of the twentieth century. Their common interests in historiography, the function of collective memory, and the relation of modern society to earlier stages of human social existence, were important examples of the attempt to articulate, analyse and represent the experience of modernity. Drawing on a variety of discourses from aesthetics, art history, anthropology and psychology, they presented an account (...) of modernity and human development that represented an important counter to the optimistic belief in progress prevalent amongst their contemporaries. Rarely, however, have the connections between these two thinkers been explored in depth. This volume consists of an exploration of the intellectual relation between them, considering their varying responses to the question of the meaning of modernity, and above all their common legacy for the present. (shrink)

Remembrance and reconciliation envision intentional pathways out of conflict and toward peace.

How do the experiences of people who undergo extreme suffering and trauma in one generation get passed on to the next generation? And how do these experiences affect religious–spiritual beliefs and practices? Can we help to create resilience in these later generations through these religious–spiritual beliefs? In order to answer these questions, one must remember and understand not only how trauma is embodied and inherited, but also the role that religious beliefs and practices play in facing and overcoming the trauma. (...) People who have experienced trauma can pass on the effects to subsequent generations biologically through epigenetic changes to their DNA, but also through their religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. The ways people remember and recover from trauma involve complex biological, psychosocial, and spiritual processes. We use the sciences of embodied cognition and epigenetics to analyze the heritability of trauma and its spiritual–religious manifestations in the next generations. Having done so, our hope is that we can understand how spiritual and religious practices can be developed to help people who undergo trauma so that they can become resilient and thrive. (shrink)

Although the major part of the chapter’s investigation is on the mode and acts of remembering in Chan Buddhism, Wang opens with a survey of the traditional Indian Buddhist context of remembering, its differentiation of wholesome and unwholesome acts of remembering, and its critique of unwholesome and discursive modes of memory, as Buddhism evolves from Theravada to Mahayana. This context is a necessary condition under which the interaction between Indian and Chinese Buddhist ideologies, or between the inherited tradition and its (...) Chinese Chan appropriation, becomes possible. Wang then examines how Chan masters, from early to classical period, appropriate and develop the traditional distinction of wholesome and unwholesome remembrance and its affirmation of the former and critique of the latter in a Chinese context. As opposed to the widespread Chan hierarchy of forgetfulness over remembrance that has shaped much of our modern understanding, Wang presents a rediscovery of Chan teachings on remembrance, disclosing how remembrance is related to the internal tension between the positive attitude towards the traditional cultivation and the iconoclastic attitude towards it in various Chan ideologies. The approach of these examinations is a combination of textual/contextual inquiry, conceptual analysis and philosophical interpretation. The part of “summary and reflections” includes a review of the uniqueness of the Chan mode of remembering, an analysis of its ethical dimension by using, and comparing it with, Ricoeur’s ethics of memory, and an exploration of the paradoxical relationship between remembering and forgetting. (shrink)

I argue that political forgiveness is sometimes, but not always, compatible with public commemoration of politically motivated wrongdoing. I start by endorsing the claim that commemorating serious past wrongdoing has moral value and imposes moral demands on key actors within post-conflict societies. I am concerned with active commemoration, that is, the deliberate acts of bringing victims and the wrong done to them to public attention. The main issue is whether political forgiveness requires forgetting and conversely whether remembrance can be (...) an impediment to political forgiveness. The notion of political forgiveness, its definition, very possibility and desirability are contentious issues in the contemporary literature. I develop a multidimensional account of political forgiveness with a core element. The core element of political forgiveness involves taking a non-adversarial stance towards perpetrators in the sense of committing to stop holding their wrongdoing against them. The core element of forgiveness is usually combined with other attitudes and practices, which are appropriate depending on the circumstances. This is due to the fact that there are different ways of holding a wrong against an offender. I argue that forgiving perpetrators is not compatible with continue to punishing them, refusing to reconcile with them, and/or reminding them of their misdeed if perpetrators refuse to accept punishment, deny the importance of commemorating the past or wish to reconcile against the victim’s desires. I show that some forms of political forgiveness are not morally legitimate because they conflict with moral demands to punish perpetrators, commemorate atrocities and respect victims. This conclusion is less alarming than it might initially seem because the refusal to forgive politically motivated wrongdoing does not necessarily lead to the perpetuation of violence and conflict. I briefly draw on the example of Argentina in order to show how some forms of political un-forgiveness can be morally legitimate and effective ways for victims to uphold these demands. (shrink)

In the present chapter I try to determine to what extent the public policies adopted by Romanian governments following the fall of the communist regime contributed to alleviating the most egregious past injustice, the Holocaust. The measures taken for memorializing the Holocaust will be analysed through the lens of a mixed reparatory justice – relational egalitarian account. Employing such a framework entails a focus on symbolic reparations, meant to promote civic trust, social solidarity, and encourage the restoration of social and (...) cultural capital in societies affected by historical injustices. Such symbolic reparations can include public atonement, changing street names, establishing memorials, funding museums, including Holocaust study in the national curriculum, setting national days for the commemoration of the Holocaust, etc. The need for symbolic reparation has become increasingly clearer in the literature on Holocaust memorialization, and the present paper intends to go a step further, by providing researchers with a theoretical approach that can be used to make better sense of the effects of measures taken as part of the process of Holocaust remembrance. In the chapter I also address the issue of determining who the duty-bearers should be. I argue that there could be several indicators for reparatory justice, including in this case compensation programs and the establishment of institutions that would allow dialogue between descendants of the victims and descendants of the perpetrators, a sine qua non condition for restoring social trust in communities marked by violations of human rights, especially of such a scale as the Holocaust. (shrink)

The form of commemoration offered by Remembrance Day ceremonies works to produce a sense of nationalist patriotism. The ‘public history’ of the nation, as a mode of self-representation, presents a particular narrative of limited scope, occluding all elements that do not fit its ideological framework. Remembrance Day simultaneously invokes and educates Canadian collective memory and public history, mediated through the contemporary power/knowledge discourse on war. The values, structure, and 'tendencies of a society' become evident in collective memory and (...) this cultural heritage of society becomes a site at which it is 'visible to itself'. (shrink)

stuart rosenbaum passed on December 14, 2020. A longtime member of SAAP and leader in other societies, he was well-known to many of us and will be fondly remembered for his kindness, his quiet humor, his insight, and his support of this community. He was a loving father and grandfather who will be deeply missed. For me, he was a mentor with unceasing generosity.Stuart transformed Baylor University’s Philosophy Department by designing and launching the PhD program. In the years before, he (...) had been a crucial part of Baylor’s MA program, and several of his students have gone on to work in colleges and universities. He was the first program director, and after that an encouraging, supportive yet critical presence... (shrink)

In the past few decades there has been rapid progress in cognitive science with respect to how people learn. Indeed, it can be difficult to keep up with all of the recent findings, and it is sometimes unclear how these findings should influence day-to-day teaching in the philosophy classroom. But one simple way to use the insights of cognitive science in the philosophy classroom is to begin each class with a five-minute recap of the previous few lessons. Cognitive science suggests (...) that such a practice can greatly aid student learning by increasing retention of material and skills. I explain why teachers of philosophy ought to take the time to do such a recap by outlining some recent and surprising findings in the science of how people learn, and put forward concrete suggestions for making such a recap as effective as possible. (shrink)

Remembrance Education (RE) indicates “an attitude of active respect in contemporary society based on the collective remembrance of human suffering that is caused by forms of human behavior such as war, intolerance or exploitation, and that must not be forgotten.” Unlike traditional history education, the point of RE is not the straightforward teaching of historical facts (if that is at all possible). Instead, RE’s purpose is to bring learners into a community, a community of memory, where they become (...) witnesses, judges and guardians of the memories of tragic past events. Writings on RE are conspicuously absent from Dewey studies. In this bibliographic essay, I offer an overview of RE, including a sample of its programs, initiatives and curricula. In addition, I propose that Dewey’s educational philosophy can helpfully inform the practice of RE. Rather than articulate a definitive account of Dewey-inspired RE, my intention is only to draw a tentative ground map to motivate future research. (shrink)

The US TV series Mad Men, set in an advertising agency in 1960s New York, offers a vivid portrayal of corporate sexism in pre-feminist America, and yet its creators defend it as a ‘feminist’ show. Reflecting on the series, I will draw out two key elements which seem significant for a consideration of the current state of feminism in church and academy, both of which centre around what it means to remember or to forget. First, there is the power of (...) what might be called ‘the allegorical past’ in helping to shape the sensibilities of both feminist theory and feminist theology: reimagining the past in order to destabilize the present and to re-envision the future. But second there is the question of whether we have become too complacent – and forgetful about the sexual revolution of the past 50 years, and whether a new wave of ‘re-membering’ our feminist heritage is required, in order to rejuvenate progressive visions of critique and transformation. (shrink)