Money is the epitome of Marx’s fetishised commodity. And, in Marxist discussions of the connected topics of currency and commodity fetishism, it often is left under-appreciated that such fetishism reaches its apotheosis only with the development of ‘interest-bearing capital.’ Herein, I perform two complementary gestures, one as regards Marxism and another with respect to psychoanalysis. Apropos Marxism, I counter-balance the usual, long-standing (over)emphasis on commodity fetishism as per the first volume of Das Kapital with a foregrounding of this fetishism as (...) per the third volume. Apropos psychoanalysis, I shift away from its traditional fixation on reducing financial matters to libidinal contents. I explore instead the implications of the forms of capitalist fetishism for reconsidering the forms of intra-subjective defence mechanisms. This leads me to posit a complementary inversion of Lacan’s dictum according to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression. To pose a rhetorical question paraphrasing Brecht: What is the laundering of money compared with the laundering that is money? (shrink)

Hobbes’s account of sovereign power can be seen as an impetus to Arendt’s passion for authentic political life. From the Human Condition, we will see how the distinction between labor, work, and action can be read as a response to Hobbes’s accounts of both human nature and the necessity for harsh restrictions on citizens in society. In particular, the need for compelled silence, for Hobbes, appears as a dialectical counterpoint to the role of speech in the space of appearances for (...) Arendt. Hobbes also has a hand in drawing Arendt to her final interest in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Here, Arendt addresses the problem of imperialism in Hobbes’s account of global power. She sees a way beyond imperialism through the cosmopolitan bond we share around the aesthetic domain. Aesthetic cosmopolitanism is a unique way into Arendt’s fight against tyranny. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of Ibn Sīnā's (Avicenna) Commentary on Chapters 6-10 of Aristotle's Metaphysics Λ. It is significant as it is one of only a small number of surviving commentaries by Ibn Sīnā and offers crucial insights into not only his attitudes towards his predecessors, but also his own philosophical positions — especially with regard to the human intellect's connections to God and the cosmos — and his attempt to develop a distinctive mode of commentary.

In Wilmot-Smith’s recent ‘Law, “Ought”, and “Can”,’ he argues that legal obligation does not imply ability. In this short reply, I show that Wilmot-Smith’s arguments do not withstand critical scrutiny. In section 1, I attack Wilmot-Smith’s argument for the claim that allowing for impossible obligations makes for a better legal system, and I introduce positive grounds for thinking otherwise. In section 2, I show that, even if Wilmot-Smith had established that impossible obligations make for a better legal system, his subsequent (...) attack on OIC fails. (shrink)

Logical thinking; criticism and interpretation; Arab philosophers.

Anne Conway (1631–1679) is often described as a vitalist. Scholars typically take this to mean that Conway considers life to be ubiquitous throughout the world. While Conway is indeed a vitalist in this sense, I argue that she is also committed to a stronger view: namely, the panpsychist view that mental capacities are ubiquitous and fundamental in creation. Reading Conway as a panpsychist highlights several aspects of her philosophy that deserve further attention, especially her accounts of emanative causation and universal (...) perfectibility. There are also historical benefits to interpreting Conway as a panpsychist. Through its history, ‘vitalism’ has often been used to describe philosophies that draw a sharp line between living and non-living nature; surely, Conway is not a vitalist in this way. Moreover, some of Conway’s contemporaries (for instance, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More) are sometimes regarded as vitalists, but were not panpsychists. It is important to distinguish between Conway’s vitalism and her version of panpsychism and to add a term like ‘panpsychism’ to the interpretive lexicon. Otherwise, we run the risk of undervaluing Conway’s originality within her own context and beyond. (shrink)

Geographical features and cultural traits influence the character of big-mountain tourism in Alaska. This research considers the intersectionality of wilderness and frontier concepts on tourism culture, examines guides’ and clients’ motivations for participation, and relates these influences to the larger phenomena of tourism generally and nature tourism specifically. The findings show that Alaska’s big-mountain tourism is globalized in its political and economic scope. Guides imagine themselves as pioneers on a last frontier of mountain pursuits, notions that relate well to images (...) depicted of the region in literature and promoted by the tourism industry. Clients, on the other hand, come to Alaska because of its exceptional geography and unique mountain sporting culture, but are not as enamored with the mythos of the frontier. (shrink)

In his recent Ars Disputandi article, ‘Some Difficulties for Amos Yong’s Disability Theology of the Resurrection,’ Ryan Mullins argues that Yong’s proposals are fundamentally misguided by Stanley Hauerwas’ dictum – which states that to ‘eliminate the disability means to eliminate the subject’ – and that therefore Yong’s disability theology of the resurrection body encounters potentially insuperable difficulties or is not sufficiently justified in the face of more traditional accounts. In response to Mullins’ criticisms, clarifications are offered with regard to both (...) the role of Hauerwas’ notion in Yong’s theology and the theological basis for claims regarding the persistence of the marks of impairment in the resurrection body. (shrink)

Philosophy; philosophical theology; philosophical anthropology; history.

Legal positivists typically describe law as ‘thinly’ normative to distinguish it from the ‘thick’ normative force of moral norms have; which legal norms may lack. One popular account of thin normativity is social normativity. But a number of scholars have offered accounts of what it is to be a thin norm that are distinct from social normativity. This paper addresses these alternative accounts of what it is to be a thin norm. It also explores whether law counts as necessarily ‘thinly (...) normative’ on these accounts. I argue that some accounts of thin normativity are so generic (‘super-thin’) that they are unable to distinguish between (thin) norms and nonnormative facts and thus collapse into triviality. I also consider more metaphysically demanding accounts of thin normativity, such as the view that everything is a norm that is essentially represented by deontic modals. However, law might fail to meet the demands of these slightly thicker accounts. I thus propose a view of law as consisting in nonnormative facts (diagnostic categories) and suggest sketching accounts of thin normativity as contingent, rather than necessary, features of laws and legal systems. (shrink)

This 4000 word entry to Routledge’s Handbook of Development Ethics (Jay Drydyk & Lori Keleher, eds., 2018) considers development within United States of America and Canada. Indigenous peoples and their nations are also featured. Canada and USA are both characterized by the UN Development Program as maintaining very high human development. Addressable weaknesses are nevertheless evident when performance is compared, for example, with OECD member nations. This entry focuses upon such comparison, noting characteristic political institutions and attendant social inequality in (...) the areas of social welfare, education and health. The histories of both nations over the past half-century suggest that cultural shifts within USA have displaced the ethos of social responsibility that the country had previously shared with Canada, replacing it with an ideal of self-reliance. The turn may be a factor in the USA’s increasing inequality and general weakness in social welfare programs since the 1980s. Events since 2016 especially also display a turn towards another ideal of self-reliance: isolationism. USA’s reduction in global commitments – to open trade, to limits on environmental impact, and especially, to immigration – contrast greatly with Canada’s evolving commitment to a global society and to a cultural ideal of multiple non-assimilated cultures within its borders, including cultures of new immigrant populations. Canada is by many measures a more equal society, but it shares with USA continued failings in development for aboriginal groups and vulnerability for that group and others. (shrink)

Many newspapers have emulated innovative news form and content associated with USA Today. At the same time, critics tutored in social responsibility theory have raised serious ethical concerns about this innovation. The situation would seem to pose an ethical dilemma for rank-and-file newsroom professionals. To illuminate the nature and extent of that dilemma, this study employed a two-step methodology: (a) a content analysis of the 230 largest U.S. dailies to identify two clusters of newspapers - adopters and nonadopters of the (...) innovation, and (b) a mail survey of 200 staff-level newsroom reporters and editors in each cluster. Results indicate that journalists generally have less concern than the critics about USA Today-style innovation. However, adoption of innovation has produced some ethical unease, which is roughly patterned by news work type (hard vs. soft news) and news work function (writer vs. editor). (shrink)

This paper surveys some of the innovations introduced by USA Today during its first three and one?half years of publication. It finds that USA Today's innovations in design, market research, and news have not been widely accepted because these approaches have raised significant ethical dilemmas to many journalists. Professional reservations about USA Today are discussed as well as some of the newspaper's advances in color reproduction, use of information graphics, promotion, and sports coverage.

[Analytical Philosophy in the USA at the end of the 20th Century.].

In today's world, moral uncertainty is found everywhere. MORALITY USA calls for recognition of the multiplicity of moral structures that now exist and argues that we need to rethink our concepts of morality.

In her preface to this collection of 11 new essays on Ramsey, Frápolli clarifies the nonhistorical orientation of the volume: ‘Our way of honoring Ramsey has been to think with him and, wherever possible, to go beyond that, putting his ideas to work and seeing how far they can reach’ (ix). This certainly makes sense for the topics of many of these essays, building as they do on Ramsey’s rich contributions to economics and reliabilist epistemology as well as on his (...) suggestive proposals about truth, pragmatism and the content of scientific theories. Unfortunately, such an orientation leads to mixed results for the four essays that squarely focus on Ramsey’s philosophy of logic and mathematics. Here Ramsey’s contemporary significance is more debatable and the most fertile mathematical innovation that Ramsey offered, namely ‘Ramsey theory’, is not noted by the contributors to this volume. (shrink)

The alliance of the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea) and the United States of America (or US) was brought as a result of the Korean War. To South Korea, the war was to defend freedom and democracy with democratic countries including US, on the other side, to North Korea, it was to spread the communism revolution by invading South Korea. The original alliance of both South Korea and US was military alliance. It was gradually extended to the fields (...) of politics, economy, society and culture. The ROK-US alliance continues to change as a result of both advanced international status of South Korea and the status of the United States in international society. Especially both countries have shown about differences Japan and China, and North Korea. And the lingering awareness of the difference between the two sides in the alliance still faces the challenges to be solved. This paper suggests ways to promote future peace condition on the Korean peninsula. To do that, this paper tries to show the basic principles for the identity principle, the principle of universality, the principle of reciprocity. (shrink)

L'état actuel des études juridiques critiques aux USA.

This article is currently available as a free download on ingentaconnect.

The outburst of antiracist protests in the USA in 2020 demonstrates how deeply this society’s present-day problems are rooted in its past. From this perspective, a study of the cultural memory of the time of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the key moment in the contemporary American nation formation, is especially relevant and important. The cultural frontier between the North and the South that had appeared as an outcome of differences in US history has not disappeared up (...) to now. By example of the complexity and inconsistency of the historical memory of the Civil War, slavery, and its abolition in the USA manifested in their visual representations, the article documents how through collective memory, history does not just invade modernity but is present in it, particularly in the form of memorials, monuments, museum expositions, and therefore determines the nation’s modernity to a large degree. (shrink)

Mit Hilfe von Leo Strauss, seinem Freund und philosophischen Kollegen, verließ Hans Jonas Israel und siedelte 1949 nach Kanada. Nachdem Jonas einige Jahre in Kanada an der Carleton University gelehrt hatte, erhielt er 1955 einen Ruf als Professor an die New School for Social Research. Leo Strauss und Karl Löwith, die beide dort lehrten, hatten sich für ihn eingesetzt.