This chapter contains sections titled: Five Relations Service to the Gods Jesus' Answer Euthyphro's Failure Socrates' Answer Further Reading.

: It is argued here that ancient Chinese convictions-that appearances and truth, the outer and the inner, and everything else in the universe are correlated; that the outer can change the inner; and that the cosmos and human society are inherently hierarchical-gave rise to the Confucian politicization of appearance, and this culminated in the rites' stringent requirements of reverence and gravity from the traditional Chinese junzi (the morally and often socially superior man) during public appearances, thereby causing his humor (...) to fade and vanish in public, thanks to an apparently natural antithesis between reverence/gravity and laughter/humor. (shrink)

Most people believe that everything happens for a reason. Whether it is “God’s will,” “karma” or “fate,” we want to believe that an overarching purpose undergirds everything, that nothing in the world--especially a disaster or tragedy--is a random, meaningless event. This dilemma presents itself provocatively in Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that, in the conventional scientific understanding, is driven by random chance. Reconciling chance and divine purpose poses challenges to the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the Hebrew Scriptures, in the (...) ancient and powerful story of Job, reveal that questions of purpose and order have long been a part of the conversation. Although the Bible generally affirms that God blesses the righteous in an orderly way, the story of Job is a powerful counterexample to this orderly scheme. The achingly beautiful but tragic story of Job, in concert with the modern quantum picture of the world, push back against the idea that “everything happens for a reason.”. (shrink)

This book is about how big is the universe and how small are quarks, and what are the sizes of dozens of things between these two extremes. It describes the sizes of atoms and planets, quarks and galaxies, cells and sequoias. It is a romp through forty-five orders of magnitude from the smallest sub-nuclear particles we have measured, to the edge of the observed universe. It also looks at time, from the epic age of the cosmos to the fleeting lifetimes (...) of ethereal particles. It is a narrative that trips its way from stellar magnitudes to the clocks on GPS satellites, from the nearly logarithmic scales of a piano keyboard through a system of numbers invented by Archimedes and on to the measurement of the size of an atom. (shrink)

At the heart of the stories in Everything Flirts are some of life's trickiest questions: Why is it so hard to make the first move on a date? How do we find the person we will love? If you finally find a person to love, how do you convince them to love you back? Searching for love, in all its stages-lustful intoxication through lasting commitment-is a process peppered with unanswerable questions, the kind of questions that philosophers usually like to (...) pursue. Romantic love is one of the concerns at the center of most human lives, one of the basic things that can make our lives happy or unhappy. But philosophers, historically, have avoided this topic. Why? Is it too hard for them? Or do they simply lack the experience required to answer it? With a mixture of humor and reverence, Everything Flirts hijacks classic works of philosophy and turns their focus to love. The philosopher Wittgenstein helps us consider the limits of language: does there exist an argument, a logical deduction, that will cause another person to love us? The philosopher Zeno's laws of motion stipulate that we can only ever cross half of any distance. This principle is applied to a first date, where making a first move becomes more and more impossible because the movie this couple goes to see is a depressing mood-killer. A woman afraid of love applies Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian principles to find her perfect match, testing every man she meets until she finds one who aces every one of her tests. Nonetheless, she wonders: is he right for her? is she ready to fall in love, forever? The sublime and the ridiculous come together to playfully examine why love just might be a topic too hard for philosophers to explain. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Professor’s DesireAnca Parvulescu (bio)Roland Barthes. THE NEUTRAL. Trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Trans. of Le Neutre. Paris: Seuil, 2002.I add: a reflection on the Neutral, for me: a manner—a free manner—to be looking for my own style of being present to the struggles of my time.—Roland Barthes, The NeutralWhat I am looking for, during the preparation of this course, is an (...) introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance.—Roland Barthes, The NeutralLe Neutre reaches us late. Like an echo, it needed time, and it took its time to come. The second of the three courses Roland Barthes gave at the Collège de France between 1977 and 1980, Le Neutre was published in 2002 by Éditions du Seuil, following the editorial work of Thomas Clerc, under the direction of Éric Marty.1 Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier’s translation as The Neutral brought it to life in English in 2005. After thirty years, Le Neutre comes indeed late, but perhaps its lateness, the time of the echo, is part of its very scene.Barthes did not conceive of Le Neutre as a book. It was a course, to happen as a onetime affair and then be put aside: “We’ll have to hold on to the unsustainable for thirteen weeks: after that, it will fade” [13]; “This course is made to die on the spot” [250]. As such, the course is not only an attempt to do justice to a “subject,” to which, Barthes insists, we should not hold on once the course is over, but also to meditate on the very situation of teaching.2 The course on the neutral offers the occasion to ask, What is it to teach? And teaching, we soon find out, is a matter of desire: the course should have been called The Desire for the Neutral. The teacher follows his desire and, in doing so—Barthes is reminded by a student—inflects and curbs the student’s desire. What is it, then, that one desires when one desires the neutral? The teacher is pressed to offer something by way of definition:I define the Neutral as that which outplays [déjoue] the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles the paradigm. For I am not trying to define a word; I am trying to name a thing: I gather under a name, which here is the Neutral.[6]The neutral is a “thing” (no qualifying adjective) that outplays, baffles, or dodges the “implacable binarism” of language as seen through Saussurian linguistics: in order to [End Page 32]produce meaning, one is in the same breath choosing A and refusing B. The search here is for a ”thing” that might suspend, thwart, or elude the paradigm, what Barthes calls its arrogance. Indeed, what would it mean to escape the necessity of choosing, say—this is Barthes’s first example—between je ris (I laugh) and je lis (I read)?A problem for the teaching theater unfolds: the moment one names the “thing,” one brings it into the paradigm, constructing an opposition between the neutral and arrogance. The scene of teaching performs an aporia: “Neutral = impossible; to speak it is to defeat it but not to speak it is to miss its ‘setting up’ [...] to speak this cacophony, I need a course” [29]. There is an obvious tension between teaching, its demands for clear and transparent meaning-making and inherent institutional arrogance, and the neutral. “Arrogance”: “the taking of too much upon oneself as one’s right; the assertion of unwarrantable claims in respect of one’s own importance; undue assumption of dignity, authority, or knowledge” [OED]. The teacher is inevitably occupying the place of arrogance. Indeed, foregrounding its righteousness and authority, arrogance is standing, a position Barthes associates with a certain kind of fascism. The neutral teacher struggles to dodge the arrogance inherent to the teaching scene. Sitting, he stammers, cacophonizes. One speaks, but one accompanies speaking with a continuous performance of an apology for speaking.3 The teacher does not offer an anchor in... (shrink)

Juxtaposing Derek Jarman’s film Wittgenstein (1993) with the eponymous philosopher’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), this article shows how Jarman’s film warns its viewers against the conceptual and political problems created by treating queerness as a metaphysical abstraction. For Jarman’s version of Wittgenstein, the need to make queerness a metaphysical abstraction was the product of homophobic self-loathing, which in turn distorted the philosopher’s sense of what and who could be part of “the world.” I take Jarman’s film as an opportunity to bring (...) these issues to bear on recent theoretical accounts of queerness as being either difficult to define or somehow beyond representation. (shrink)

We call many things sacred, from cows, churches and paintings to flags and burial grounds. Is it still meaningful to talk of things being sacred, or is the idea merely a relic of a bygone religious age? Does everything - and every life - have its price? Is Nothing Sacred? is a stimulating and wide-ranging debate about some of the major moral dilemmas facing us today, such as the value of human life, art, the environment, and personal freedom. Packed (...) with clearly presented controversial issues, we are asked to decide whether we should revere life when someone chooses to die, preserve the giant California redwoods, cherish Vermeer's originals for their own sake, or curtail personal freedom for the greater good. Ronald Dworkin argues that the concept of the scared is essential to any human ethics, and Simon Blackburn explains why he thinks 'a humanist should not feel guilty at the emotions of awe and reverence that can be inspired by great religious works of art. Throughout, the idea of the sacred in a secular age is hotly debated amongst the authors and put to the test: should it be abandoned altogether, or does it still have something to teach us? Is Nothing Sacred? brings together outstanding philosophers and thinkers, including Suzanne Uniacke, Michael Clark, Alan Holland, Simon Blackburn, Richard Dawkins, Richard Norman, Alan Howarth, Nigel Warburton, Matthew Kieran and John Harris. (shrink)

The evolution of the history of physics shows how natural phenomena can be grouped into discrete regimes, between which there are precise relationships and specific connecting elements but which, with an excellent approximation, can be considered independent of each other. Here it is clarified, in the light of developments in contemporary physics, in what sense theory of everything means "theory that aims to explain a specific and limited level of energy", highlighting the link between the world we experience daily (...) and the background of the theories of everything. Keywords: theories of everything; quantum gravity; principle of collective organization Sunto L’evoluzione della storia della fisica mostra come i fenomeni naturali possono essere raggruppati in regimi discreti, tra cui esistono precise relazioni e specifici elementi di raccordo ma che, con un’ottima approssimazione, si possono considerare indipendenti l’uno dall’altro. Qui si chiarisce, alla luce degli sviluppi della fisica contemporanea, in che senso teoria del tutto significa “teoria che si propone di spiegare un livello di energia specifico e limitato”, evidenziando il legame tra il mondo che sperimentiamo quotidianamente e il background delle teorie del tutto. Parole Chiave: teorie del tutto; gravità quantistica; principio di organizzazione collettiva. (shrink)

We want to become those we are—the new, the unique, the incomparable, the self-legislators, the self-creators. [Wir aber wollendie werden, die wir sind—die Neuen, die Einmaligen, die Unvergleickbaren, die Sich-selber-Gesetzgebenden, die Sich-selber-Schaffenden!] (GS 336, 1882)Verily, the individual himself [der Einselne selber] is still the most recent invention. (Z I:15, 1883)My philosophy aims at an ordering of rank: not at an individualistic morality. (WP 287, from the notebooks of 1886–87)If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process...,where society and (...) the morality of custom at last reveal what theyhave simply been the means to: then we discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual [souveräne Individuum], like only tohimself, liberated again from the morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral..., in short, the man who has his own independent,protracted will and the right to make promises. (GM II:2, 1887)Every particular individual [ Jeder einzelne] may be regarded as representing the ascending or descending line of life. When onehas decided which, one has thereby established a canon for the value of his egoism. If he represents the ascending line his valueis in fact extraordinary.... If he represents the descending development..., then he can be accorded little value. (TI “Skirmishes”33, 1888)The particular person, the ‘individual’ [Der einzelne, das ‘Individuum’], as people and philosophers have hitherto understood him,is an error: he does not constitute a separate entity, an atom, a ‘link in the chain,’ something merely inherited from the past—heconstitutes the entire single line ‘Mensch’ up to and including himself. (TI “Skirmishes” 33, 1888)Goethe conceived of a strong, highly cultured human being, skilled in all physical accomplishments, who, keeping himself incheck and having reverence for himself, dares to allow himself the whole compass and wealth of naturalness, who is strongenough for this freedom.... A spirit thus emancipated stands in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, inthe faith that only the particular individual [das Einzelne] may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed.... But such a faith is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name Dionysus. (TI “Skirmishes” 49). (shrink)

In Is Nothing Something? Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh answers heartfelt, difficult, and funny questions from children of all ages. Illustrated with original full-color artwork by Jessica McClure, Is Nothing Something? will help adults plant the seeds of mindfulness in the young children in their lives. Beginning with the most basic questions, "What is important in life?" and "Why is my brother mean to me?" and progressing through issues that we all wrestle with, such as "How do I know if (...) I really love somebody?", "How long am I going to live?", and "What does God look like?", each page presents a question with a short answer from Thich Nhat Hanh, appropriate for beginning readers to work with on their own. The back of the book has the first complete children's biography of Thich Nhat Hanh, along with basic, kid-friendly instructions for mindful breathing and mindful walking. Both humorous and profound, Is Nothing Something? is the perfect resource for kids with questions, adults looking to answer them, and anyone with questions of their own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.2 (2004) 393-405 [Access article in PDF] Decency and Its Discontents Richard Freadman La Trobe University In The Beginning of the Journey, Diana Trilling makes this rather shocking claim about her husband, Lionel: "In the dark recesses of his heart where unhappiness was so often his companion, he was contemptuous of everything in his life that was dedicated to seriousness and responsibility."1 Lionel had been (...) dead almost 20 years when a near blind Diana dictated this comment in her controversial auto/biography in the early 1990s. Of course he was revered for—among other things—precisely his qualities of intellectual "seriousness and responsibility." But Diana argued that Lionel had in effect settled for such sober virtues because for temperamental and other reasons he could not live the life he really craved—the life of a swashbuckling novelist, with all its recklessness, its refusal of compromise, even its moral waywardness. When Hemingway died Lionel wrote in his notebook: "who would suppose how much he haunted me? How much he existed in my mind—as a reproach? He was the only writer of our time I envied" (Beginning, p. 371). Lionel's critical discussions of Hemingway's fiction are judicious and qualified.2 He admired the uncompromising short story writer who was "passionately and aggressively concerned with truth" (SLS, p. 127), but found the work of the self-conscious "legend" (p. 125), writing in the first-person, ponderous and disappointing. It was not the prose that Lionel so wanted to emulate. It was the life; in particular, its power to release and nurture creativity. Diana continues: "It was to decency that Lionel felt he had sacrificed his hope of being a writer of fiction—conscience had not made a coward of him, it had made him a critic" (Beginning, p. 372). [End Page 393]Decency—how often we use the word. How seldom we ask what we mean by it. Usually it functions as a sort of guarantor term, like the caged canary in the coal mine. If the canary lives, the miners are judged to have fair air to breathe; if a person possesses certain qualities, or a society provides certain requisite conditions, we say the person is "decent," or that this is a "decent society." Yet remarkably few virtue ethicists have countenanced the possibility that decency might be counted among the virtues; that it might be the subject of substantive intellectual reflection; that we might investigate its relation to other virtues, its internal structure, its characteristic patterns and possibilities of existential investment. As John Kekes, one of the very few philosophers to have paid the notion serious philosophical attention, says: "Decency is generally admitted to be a good thing, but is not generally supposed to be particularly important."3In this short essay I attempt two linked undertakings: first, to offer a characterization of Decency—the term henceforth accorded a capital "D" to indicate its status as a moral virtue; second, to read aspects of Lionel Trilling's life and work, and Diana's late assessment of him, in the light of Decency, as I understand the term. I "Decent" seems to refer to a "state," a sort of moral condition a person is "in," and to a resultant orientation towards others. The "state" is one of modesty, even humility. The ego doesn't loom large or get in the way. The orientation is one of solicitude towards others. Decent people of this kind genuinely care about, feel for others. Unless they are given good reason to behave otherwise, their disposition towards others tends to be respectful; they bring to most situations an assumption that the other person is worthy, deserves to be taken seriously. Decency of this kind tends to be associated with receptiveness, relatedness, a patient openness to others, though it need not be passive.The word "decent" derives from the Latin, deceré—to become, to be fitting. It's been used in English since about the 1530s. From that period to the early twentieth century "decent" has generally indicated that something is fitting, appropriate, with respect to social rank... (shrink)

The Deed is Everything offers an engaging new interpretation of Nietzsche as committed to an 'expressivist' conception of agency. Aaron Ridley shows that Nietzsche develops highly distinctive accounts of freedom, morality, and selfhood, with a robust commitment to the value of human excellence in all of its forms.

The view, in Quine, that all there are are pure sets is presented and endorsed.

Since mankind hide the truth because they are unjust, God's wrath is shown from heaven against all of their immorality. Because God has revealed to them everything, they can know about him, it is obvious to them. Since the beginning of time, his intangible qualities, namely, his everlasting power and divine nature, have been evident in the things that have been created. Thus, they have no justification. Because even though they were aware of God, they did not revere or (...) express gratitude to him; instead, their hearts became darkened and their thinking became pointless. Therefore, it is obviously incorrect to consider God's transcendence to be a sort of fog that obscures God from human perception. Indeed, verses in the Bible highlight God's mystery and incomprehensibility, such "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!" How inexplicable his methods and how unsearchable his judgements! Because no one has ever understood the Lord's thoughts or served as his counsellor. Or has someone given him a present for which he may receive payment? Because everything comes from him, through him, and to him. Glory eternally to him. Amen. His "immanence," not his "transcendence," is enigmatic in this line. Even if God's historical facts are unfathomable, Paul is nonetheless able to explain them in understandable terms. He informs the Roman church of what they are unaware of and the reason for it. "Known unknowns" are the unknowns. Furthermore, a mystery involving a God otherwise "clearly" understood is always a mystery. If God's transcendence does not impede our understanding of him or our ability to articulate him clearly, how should we describe it? "On high" or "in Heaven," as used in the Bible, consistently alludes to God's regal status. (shrink)

The paper explores the severity of the problem of soil erosion and a variety of approaches to the problem. The typology of approaches includes doing nothing, individual party litigation, the state's invocation of public trust doctrine, and the state's exercise of its police power. The Reinvest in Minnesota Program reflects the state's exercise of its police power and addresses the problem of soil erosion by retiring marginal land from crop production through conservation easements. Programs such as Reinvest in Minnesota also (...) reflect a certain ethic about the land. (shrink)

This article is a presentation of the problem of human nature in Dostoevsky's writings. Its author does not agree that the great Russian thinker would give his assent to any of the two opposing ideas: neither that man is good by nature nor that his fate from the moment of birth is tragic. Dostoevsky has proved that freedom constitutes the core of human being. When this freedom is used in a wrong way man becomes bad, and if it is used (...) according to Jesus Christ teachings, he may attain righteousness due to His Grace. In such circumstances, there is no space for any predetermination. Man is free, if he wants to be free. He has got free will. He is always responsible for everything he has done. Dostoevsky uses the term n a t u r e in two different meanings. The first one is essential and refers to the notion of freedom. Consequently, Dostoevsky claims, human nature is beyond full cognition. The second meaning of the term nature refers to the attributes of a particular nation. The differences between nations are further evidence of freedom, which manifests in an infinity of ways. Nature understood as such can be changed and comprehended. The change requires much effort over a long period of time but can by achieved. To capture the full picture of the problem of human nature in Dostoevsky's ultimately it works, both meanings of the above notion should be the taken into consideration. (shrink)

Before the Semitic fragments of 4QTobit were found at Qumran, the 4th-century Greek GI version of Tobit was thought to be original and was regarded as ‘a lesson on almsgiving and its redeeming powers’. In his presentation of the 4Q196–4Q199 (Aramaic) and 4Q200 (Hebrew) fragments of Tobit, Fitzmyer, in 1995, reconstructed and rendered the Semitic lexeme צדקה (literally, ‘righteousness’) as ‘almsgiving’, as in Mishnaic Hebrew. He referred mainly to the 4th-century Common Era Greek and Old Latin versions. The hypothesis of (...) this article is that the Aramaic lexeme צדק may not yet have had the meaning of ‘almsgiving’ in the original composition; thus, the original authorial intention may be masked in Fitzmyer’s presentation. Therefore, the emphasis on almsgiving for ultimate personal gain found in the later copies of Tobit may be a secondary, reductionist application by subsequent scribes of the lexeme צדקה. To test this hypothesis, the relevant reconstructions and English translations as ‘almsgiving’ of the Semitic copies of Tobit found at Qumran are examined and reconsidered. In the beginning of the narrative, in 4Q196 (and in GI and GII) the rather self-righteous Tobit is ‘accidentally’ blinded while performing an act of charity to his own kin, which he believed was the way to gain righteousness and thus be rewarded by God. In the end, when he has recovered his sight, Tobit redefines the way to achieve true righteousness: to bless God and extol his majesty to all nations with truthfulness in heart and soul.Contribution: The comparison of the Semitic fragments from Qumran with the Septuagint versions suggests that the first reconstructions and translations of 4QTobit may have been overly influenced by the long-standing Greek versions. Whereas the Greek versions tend to emphasise almsgiving as a means to gain righteousness, the older Aramaic versions tend to highlight righteousness and truthfulness as the primary value. (shrink)

In this engaging and provocative new book, Lee Eisenberg, bestselling author of The Number, dares to tackle nothing less than what it takes to find enduring meaning and purpose in life. He explains how from a young age, each of us is compelled to take memories of events and relationships and shape them into a one-of-a-kind personal narrative. In addition to sharing his own pivotal memories (some of them moving, some just a shade embarrassing), Eisenberg presents striking research culled from (...) psychology and neuroscience, and draws on insights from a pantheon of thinkers and great writers-Tolstoy, Freud, Joseph Campbell, Virginia Woolf, among others. We also hear from men and women of all ages who are wrestling with the demands of work and family, ever in search of fulfillment and satisfaction. It all adds up to a fascinating story, delightfully told, one that goes straight to the heart of how we explain ourselves to ourselves-in other words, who we are and why. (shrink)

In the book of Romans, also called ‘Paul’s Letter/Epistle to the Romans’, it is clear that Paul created a very close lexical semantic relation between the concepts πίστις/πιστεύω [faith, believe], δίκαιος/δικαιοσύνη [righteous, righteousness] and σωτηρία/σῴζω [salvation, save]. Although it is said that the theme of righteousness (by or through faith) is the focal point of Paul’s theology, especially in Romans, this term is very closely linked to the two concepts, faith and salvation, in this letter. The aim of this (...) article is to investigate that relation, specifically in the two passages of Romans 1:16–17 and 10:6a, 8b–10, in an attempt to come to an understanding of what Paul had in mind when he used these three terms together in these passages. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 343 The Education of Desire: Plato and the Philosophy of Religion. By MICHEL DESPLAND. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 395. $45.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Plato, in Professor Despland's considered estimate, is a " philosopher of religion" avant la lettre. Despite their remote antiquity, Despland finds the dialogues a plausible introduction to the admittedly "un-Platonic" twentieth-century philosophical discussion of religion. His premise (...) is that modern philosophy of religion shares, or ought to share, Plato's twin concern for inducing benign social dispositions and for arousing reverent intellectual contemplation-a combination which Despland's compendious yet for the most part plain-spoken scholarship calls "the education of desire." Despland accordingly aims to clarify " the demands for attention that the religious life of Greece presses upon Plato's mind 1and the sort of attention Plato pays to it" (xii). He begins with the Socratic dialogue Euthyphro, which raises but does not resolve the question "What is piety?" Socrates's question is posed during the late fifth-century twilight of Athenian religious traditions, amid the glare of competing practical claims about standards for evaluating right and wrong. Not surprisingly, neither Euthyphro nor Socrates quite embodies the traditional piety to which their conversation purportedly appeals. Euthyphro is one-sided and doctrinaire in his appropriation of the ancestral myths by which he would justify his highly irregular lawsuit against his father for impiety. Socrates, on the other hand, is consistently ironic and, claiming little more than knowledge of his own ignorance, is said to "stake everything on the, it is hoped, well-scrutinized conscience" (31). However this may be, Plato's unsettled and unsettling dialogue on piety indicates the need for philosophy of religion as Despland understands it. Plato (whom Despland would distinguish sharply from Socrates) aims "to rethink the opinions Greeks shared, or disputed, about t.he world or man's place in it" with a view to supplying more positive and lasting answers (57). He takes his bearings by the threefold theology implicit in the Laws. In Book X, Plato's Athenian Stranger asserts inter alia that the gods exist, that they care for human beings, and that they are incorruptible (cf. 907b). Despland attributes the Stranger's assertions to Plato himself, as Plato's innovative, rationally defensible " creed " by which he " seeks to change the minds of human beings with the help of the law and its penalties " (103f). He argues as follows. That the gods are incorruptible is seen to imply a " universal moral economy '' whereby " all souls in the end get their just deserts" (120)-as Socrates maintains in the myth which culminates Plato's Gorgias, whose plot Despland summarizes accordingly. That the gods exist at all suggests "an intelligible order con- 344 BOOK REVIEWS ducive to the human good" (126ff.), an order knowable not simply by analogy with the human cra£ts (as supposed by Socrates in the so-called " earlier " dialogues) but rather by " a sort of austere mystical submission to the Good" (141)-as Despiand shows by interpreting the Republic in the light of the cave image of Book VIL Finally, that the gods care for human beings means that, given " the presence of a cosmic pull that keeps the soul open to transcendent realities and helps it on its way towards them" (165), human desires are not inevitably selfish but are educable or convertible to the desire. for truth-;a doctrine which Despland ascribes to Plato by way of an analysis of Socrates's notion of "divine madness" in the Phaedrus and the adjacent myth comparing the soul to a pair of charioteer-driven winged horses (244e-255c). In Despland's reading, then, Socratic dialectics function above all to support or illustrate the accompanying myths. The dialogues.ther.eby produce "reasoned doctrines " (197). Socratic philosophizing is pressed into the service of a Platonic story-telling designed t.o reshape the popular mores. Plato's subsequent failure to bring about political reform during his own lifetime (whether in Athens or at Syracuse) evidently proved no obstacle to his posthumous influence (e.g., in the tradition of Christian Platonism). Therein lies his perennial interest for philosophers of religion... (shrink)

–Righteousness– is normally what one ought to do, and the –righteous– are those who do it. Paul sees the law of Moses as explicating “righteousness” required of all human beings and “justification by faith” as the extraordinary path to “righteousness” offered by God to the unrighteous of all nations.

The study of masculinity, particularly in peacebuilding and transitional justice contexts, is gradually emerging. The article outlines three fissures evident in the embryonic scholarship, that is the privileging of direct violence and its limited focus, the continuities and discontinuities in militarised violence into peace time, and the tensions between new masculinities and wider inclusive social change. The article argues for the importance of making visible the tensions between different masculinities and how masculinities are deeply entangled with systems of power and (...) post-conflict social, political and economic outcomes. An analysis of masculine power within and between the structures aimed at building the peace in societies moving out of violence is considered essential. The article argues for an analysis that moves beyond a preoccupation with preventing violent masculinities from manifesting through the actions of individuals to considering how hidden masculine cultures operate within a variety of hierarchies and social spaces. (shrink)

This chapter is perhaps best treated as a ‘site’ rather than a treatise. It employs disrupted writing strategies, based in turn on ‘walking’ practices and the authors’ background in performance, as tools for playful debate, collaboration, intervention, and spatial meaning-making. The chapter, like our walking, is intended to be porous; for others to read into it and connect from it and for the specificities and temporalities of sites to fracture, erode, and distress it. It draws on the outcomes of previous (...) works including site-specific performance works such as Mis-Guided Tours or published Mis-Guides, ‘drifts’, mythogeographic mapping, public art or installations, explorations of the Wienfluss, excavations of subterranean library stacks, and a recently installed network of plaques across an English seaside resort. (shrink)

This essay examines the relevance of eschatological themes to the political theory of Michael Walzer. A distinctive eschatological hope is identified, which functions as a guide to thought throughout Walzer's writings, even though he seldom expresses it (and sometimes denies it). This analysis of Walzer's work demonstrates that eschatology is relevant to the contemporary discussion of justice, and conversely, that contemporary political theory can be a guide for the construction and evaluation of theological doctrines of eschatology. Any eschatology that enters (...) into political debate in a modern, pluralistic society like the United States, however, must have at least one important characteristic: it must be informed by a profound sense of limitation. (shrink)

The political contours of social actions appear not only in the relationships between cultural actors but in the artifacts that surround them. This is increasingly the case as digital technology becomes the vehicle for education. This article focuses on the rhetoric that accompanies such educational technology. All too often, both the hype and the criticism surrounding technology in education implicitly accept that digital machines and media represent the impending future. However, if technology is understood as the instantiation of enduring social (...) relations, then it must always represent the sociopolitical configurations of the past, however recent that past is. Seen in this light, technology does not drive change so much as it resists it. Technology becomes a tool of maintenance, not innovation. This article spins out how this might be the case and accompanies the arguments with concrete instances of how this is being played out in public schooling. (shrink)

In a postmodern culturism, everything is relative, in this way, nothing can be affirmed as absolute truth. Taking into account that culturism is the belief that some cultures are superior than others, this essay proposes the idea that a postmodern culturism is the belief, superior to others, that all cultures are to be revered. Within a postmodern culturism, the essay proposes the analysis of three common arguments through a specific epistemological perspective, rationalism: empirical data and the primacy of reason. (...) The analyzed arguments are: first, all cultures ought to be equally revered; second, western logic is different to the ancestral logic; third, all ancestral cultures have wisdom. The article concludes that these arguments do not withstand the rational analysis. (shrink)

Last year, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations for the first time included provisions in its Hospital Accreditation Manual requiring institutions to have mechanisms in place to consider ethical issues arising in the care of patients and to educate care givers and patients on bioethical issues. This new requirement is notably vague. There is no indication of what type of mechanisms would be appropriate or how those involved in considering ethical issues should conduct themselves. This vagueness is by (...) no means accidental, but it reflects a recognition that clinical bioethics is still in its formative stages and that there are currently almost as many different mechanisms for dealing with bioethical issues in the healthcare setting as there are institutions that have such mechanisms. The Joint Commission's action, however, also implies that the time for experimentation will soon be over. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that Thomas Aquinas consider the problem of evil, not only as a question of evil in itself, but in the much broader context of God’s work of creation and providential government, and thus proves that the existence of evil in the world is not a viable argument against God’s existence. For Thomas Aquinas, evil is not something, some being with its essence and nature, but it is the lack of a good that should by nature (...) be present in a being. Evil has good as its subject, object, and cause, and may ultimately have good as its effect. Such complete immersion and dependence of evil on good says that evil’s ontological status is real, but not absolute. Evil cannot exist from itself, by itself and for itself. It is in every way subordinated to the good. Such a status of evil becomes even more apparent in Aquinas’ view of the relation between evil and the absolute good that is God. God is the one who exists in the absolute sense, and evil exists only in relation to the good that is God’s creation. The decay of things is only a consequence of God creating a good world in which some beings may be deficient in good, which they sometimes are. This means that God does not want evil, but in a way allows it while providentially governing everything to the good that he is. God is so omnipotent that by allowing evil he can accomplish even greater and more numerous goods. In the work of God’s governing over the world, man occupies a special place because he is capable of a personal relationship with God. But man can also voluntarily deviate from the order and rules that lead him to union with his ultimate good which is God. Such an act is called the moral evil of guilt or sin. Thomas Aquinas finds the example and model of the victory of good over evil in the character of the righteous and innocent Job, who, thanks to the experience of a terrible evil, has realised that God infinitely transcends human cognition, being and power, and that any attribution of evil to God would be foolishness, that every denial of God’s existence because of the evil that befell him would be insane. Job realised that God’s righteousness and logos rule everything and that the ultimate victory of good is certain. (shrink)

The Vedas, the Hindu scripture, make it clear that God is one, not only everywhere but also everything, has no name or form and prescribes a monistic and pantheistic perspective. Still devotees of different preferences and inclinations have the option to choose different names and forms for worshipping God. Thus, Hindus worship a very large number of gods and goddesses as aspects or powers of God promoting a distinctive monotheism. The most prominent goddesses are Durga and Kali both of (...) whom are demon-slayers with unlimited power, Parvati a great wife and mother who is highly learned, Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and Sarasvati, the goddess of learning. The most prominent gods are Brahma, the creator who supervises the beginning of each creative cycle, Vishnu, the god of preservation and Siva, the god of destruction. Vishnu has the largest following followed by Siva, a close second and Brahma, a distant third in following. Vishnu has many incarnations who come to the world to restore righteousness and order when there is great trouble. The two most popular reincarnations are Rama and Krishna, the lead characters respectively of the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. (shrink)

It weighs in at a bit more than five pounds; its dimensions demand a cradle. Yet this book is a handsome and welcome achievement despite its bulk. Its reproduction of the 1922 text, its maps and photos of 1904 Dublin; its list of minor characters in Ulysses; its bibliography of scholarship, both old and new; its timeline of Joyce's life, and its exemplary detailed annotations of the text: everything, harvested from the best sources, has been brought together to create (...) the largest volume dedicated to Joyce scholarship ever produced—a book that celebrates the first printing of Joyce's masterpiece. Given its weight and size, its classroom utility is likely limited; given its monumentality, it is a proper hundred-year tribute.What is wholly original about the book's contents are the essays that preface each of the eighteen episodes of the masterpiece. That Joycean scholarship grows upon itself is amply demonstrated by the sophistication and weight of learning the eighteen writers can now display. Almost fifty years have passed since Clive Hart and David Hayman edited a volume with a similar aim. Each of the new essays reveals just how much more there is now to know and say about Ulysses, how much more there is to praise in how Joyce conceived the book, how much more there is to teach, and how unlikely it is that Joycean scholarship will ever be diminished in either its curiosity or its energy. Given the increasing complexity and density of such accumulated knowledge, it is a pleasure to witness the economy and precision shown by so many of the writers. In particular, Robert Spoo's writing about “Nestor,” Maud Ellmann's writing about “Lotus Eaters,” and Vicki Mahaffey's writing about “Nausicaa” demonstrate how concision can make for valuable illumination.But there is a problem with where these essays are positioned. Coming before each of the episodes they introduce, they might condition the mind of a reader new to Ulysses to look upon those episodes as no more than demonstrations of what the scholars think. Catherine Flynn, the book's editor, emphasizes the need of such professional interpretation when she describes the plight of anyone “struggling through Ulysses” and “the key challenges facing the reader.” She is right about how hard it is for any new reader to “get” the book, but the placement of the essays is at odds with her claim that “grappling with the novel's challenges, the reader is pushed toward one of the most important rewards of reading Ulysses: thinking independently.” The prefaces may well impede the reader from thinking independently.Professor Flynn's focus on challenge and difficulty is widely shared throughout the Joycean community and has become a fundamental preoccupation in Joyce scholarship. Taking Joyce's mastery as a given, many Joyceans assume a Talmudic stance in believing, to quote Spinoza, that “the intellectual love of a thing consists in understanding its perfections.” Facing the formidable Joyce, they turn and turn again to explication. They subscribe to the dictum that the youthful Joyce himself, perhaps self-mockingly, set down: “A man of genius makes no mistake. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” But is Ulysses free of error?Fritz Senn, writing about “Ithaca,” does not put himself in opposition to Joyce but in opposition to the presumed inerrancy of Joyce. He argues that the episode displays a troubling disjunction between what Joyce intended to do in the episode and what he did. Joyce told his friend Frank Budgen that in the episode “not only will the reader know everything and know it in the baldest and coldest way, but Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze.” But readers do not, indeed, get to know all they should, or see all they should see. Senn notes that they “learn next to nothing about Bloom's mother, his birthday, or the exact nature of his father's suicide, although they do learn a lot about such things as the junk in a drawer, the Dublin water supply system, and the addresses of Dublin shops.” Senn asks: “What does the meeting of the two characters amount to? Will it change Stephen so that he might become the author of the book he is in? Does Bloom find a son? Does he become the father that Stephen is supposed to be looking for? The impassive episode does not seem to answer, or to care.” But these are questions about which many a reader might care.Joyce named “Ithaca” as his favorite among the episodes. Senn demonstrates by his care and attentiveness that he too admires it. But by not limiting himself to dutiful reverence, he instead critically examines the Joycean text. His tribute to Joyce is both unsparing and generous.Equally attentive and yet incisive is Katherine O'Callaghan in her examination of “Sirens.” She recognizes the experimental daring of Joyce's strategy of “conveying music through language” in that episode. But her analysis, as penetrating as it is learned, does not leave the reader persuaded that the episode is entirely successful. As she observes, “the reluctance of the musical art to bend to the critical written voice” is a “stumbling block.”Another problematic experiment, “Oxen of the Sun,” which Joyce himself described as “the most difficult episode... both to interpret and to execute,” presents its commentator, Sarah Davison, with the task of explaining how its grandiose mixture of parody, plagiarism, and sheer celebration of myriad English prose styles over the centuries can function without, as she says, “wrongfooting and dissatisfying readers” who assume that the episode “enacts a historical progression only to find themselves disorientated by so many different echoes and cadences.”Were Joycean scholars more devoted to critical judgment than to explication—even when they are faced with the spectacular imposition of genius—the common reader would more likely find fellowship, and less intimidation, when reading a book that is not a sacred text but a human document, written with the extraordinary self-imposed challenges, as well as the problematic results, that only a most extraordinary human could make. (shrink)

Background In end-of-life situations, the phrase “do everything” is sometimes invoked by physicians, patients, or substitute decision-makers, though its meaning is ambiguous. We examined instances of the phrase “do everything” in the archive of the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board in Canada, a tribunal with judicial authority to adjudicate physician–patient conflicts in order to explore its potential meanings. Methods We systematically searched the CCB’s online public archive from its inception to 2018 for any references to “do everything” (...) in the context of critical care medicine and end-of-life care. Two independent assessors reviewed decisions, collected characteristics, and identified key themes. Results Of 598 cases in the archive, 41 referred to “do everything” in end-of-life situations. The phrase was overwhelmingly invoked by SDMs, typically to advocate for life-prolonging measures that contradicted physician advice. Physicians generally related “doing everything” to describe the interventions they had already performed, using it to recommend focusing on patients’ quality of life. SDMs were generally reluctant to accept death, whereas physicians found prolonging life at all costs to be morally distressing. The CCB did not interpret appeals to “do everything” legally but followed existing laws by deferring to patients’ prior wishes whenever known, or to concepts of “best interests” when not. The CCB generally recommended against life-prolonging measures in these cases, focusing on patients’ “well-being” and “best interests.” Conclusions In this unique sample of cases involving conflict surrounding resuscitation and end-of-life care, references to “do everything” highlighted conflicts over quantity versus quality of life. These appeals were associated with signs of cognitive distress on the behalf of SDMs who were facing the prospect of a patient’s death, whereas physicians identified moral distress related to the prolongation of patients’ suffering through their use of life-sustaining interventions. This divergence in perspectives on death versus suffering was consistently the locus of conflict. These findings support the importance of tools such as the Serious Illness Conversation Guide that can be used by physicians to direct conversations on the patients’ goals, wishes, trade-offs, and to recommend a treatment plan that may include palliative care. Trial Registration Not applicable. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I Why is Freedom to Choose Death More Important Than Protecting Life's Inherent Worth? II What Justifies the State's Safeguarding Intrinsic Values? III How Ought the State to Honor Life's Sanctity? IV Conclusion Acknowledgement.

In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" but, more importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as false and (...) spiritually debilitating. A central claim of the book is that supernaturalism is idolatry. If this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent with the deliverances of the natural sciences. Princeton University Press is publishing Saving God in conjunction with Johnston's forthcoming book Surviving Death, which takes up the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death. (shrink)

The theological problems of the ethics of love for one’s neighbour are considered: the impossibility of literal fulfilment of the commandments and doubtfulness of their applicability in public and state life. One of the approaches to solving these problems is based on the principle of reverence for life, proposed by Albert Schweitzer and expressing, in his opinion, the essence of love for one’s neighbour. Subsequently, this principle was borrowed by Karl Barth, who gave it a theological justification. Although Barth’s texts (...) on reverence for life are well known, some fundamental issues are still insufficiently investigated. Why did Barth claim that reverence for life does not fully express the essence of Christian ethics? What is the fundamental difference between the Barth’s and Schweitzer’s approaches to Christian ethics? How was this difference of approaches manifested in the practical recommendations? The article provides a comparative analysis of Barth’s and Schweitzer’s ethics and answers the above questions. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a Christian model of social and political engagement and to illustrate its appropriateness and fruitfulness through its application to the post-conflict situation in Northern Ireland. The argument is structured around three propositions, the implications of which are explored in a final fourth section: (1) that political forgiveness is an inappropriate model of Christian social and political engagement; (2) that Christians should seek justice/ righteousness in the public realm; (3) that Christian commitment and (...) practice are contextual, and, consequently, the practice of righteousness in Northern Ireland must take account of and relate to the particular history of Northern Ireland; and finally (4) an account is provided of the form Christian righteousness could take in post-conflict Northern Ireland. (shrink)

The present framing of the cultural debate in terms of materialism versus religion has allowed materialism to go unchallenged as the only rationally-viable metaphysics. This book seeks to change this. It uncovers the absurd implications of materialism and then, uniquely, presents a hard-nosed non-materialist metaphysics substantiated by skepticism, hard empirical evidence, and clear logical argumentation. It lays out a coherent framework upon which one can interpret and make sense of every natural phenomenon and physical law, as well as the modalities (...) of human consciousness, without materialist assumptions. According to this framework, the brain is merely the image of a self-localization process of mind, analogously to how a whirlpool is the image of a self-localization process of water. The brain doesn’t generate mind in the same way that a whirlpool doesn’t generate water. It is the brain that is in mind, not mind in the brain. Physical death is merely a de-clenching of awareness. The book closes with a series of educated speculations regarding the afterlife, psychic phenomena, and other related subjects. (shrink)

There is no doubt that industry-sponsored biomedical research is under the microscope. Unfortunately, this new era of skepticism prematurely rushes in doubts of the ethos of science. Skepticism can lead to positive changes, but only when timely and supported by sound reasoning. Snapshot views and theories, especially those that result in costly new regulations and inefficient policies often do more harm than good. Many critics would have the reader doubt scientific integrity because they believe that the relationship between the pharmaceutical (...) industry and biomedical research poses an unavoidable and dangerous conflict of interest. However, these conflicts are neither unavoidable nor dangerous per se. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 415-431 [Access article in PDF] The Humanities at Home with Themselves Mark Bauerlein The Crafty Reader, by Robert Scholes; 272 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, $24.95. WHEN I STARTED GRADUATE SCHOOL in English in the early Eight ies, a typical thing happened. Those few students with a background in philosophy drifted together, shared influences, and developed a hierarchy of critical works. A (...) few pushed analytic philosophy and pragmatism, but overall Continental theory took first place, especially Derrida. "Structure, Sign, and Play" and "White Mythology," de Man's "Rhetoric of Temporality," Shoshana Felman's "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," and other weighty essays had the status of cutting-edge wisdom, and the hostility deconstruction drew from traditionalists and Marxists in the department only sharpened our commitment. Having no other professional standing, we savored the stigma, the roguishness. It complemented our poverty, and eased our transition from hot-shot undergraduates to first-year, prequalifying Ph.D aspirants. In the evenings, after instructing freshmen in comma splices, we gathered to trade Nietszchean epigrams and mock professors who looked befuddled at the mention of a priori and aporia.Other students found us insufferable, and doubtless we were, but not in a partisan way. We panned each other just as hard as we did the uninformed. This was UCLA, not Yale or Johns Hopkins, and personalities mattered less than arguments. If in discussion I backed a point with [End Page 415] "As Derrida says...," someone always answered, "So what?" We frowned on arguments from authority. Popularizations such as Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction earned our scorn. They were one step up from Cliff's Notes, packed with servile observations like "Jean Baudrillard wants to take us further, into a world where everything is so textualized that there is no space left for the real." We preferred to understand deconstruction through laborious readings of Being and Time and Beyond Good and Evil, not in watery effusions about textuality or the mechanical pairing of binary oppositions. The latter we placed among the scribes, those well-intentioned professionals canny enough to recognize the broad import of deconstruction, but not acute enough to discern the real meaning of différance or the radical disclosure of the ontic-ontological difference. The genius of philosophy, we thought, lay in plumbing the fundamental habits of cognition, like Hegel breaking down sense certainty and Heidegger questioning the determination of Being as substance. Exegesis of other texts was a lesser activity, though we acknowledged exceptions such as Starobinski's book on Rousseau and Kojève's lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit.Lower in our rankings were the quasi-Leftist attacks just emerging, such as Frank Lentricchia's Criticism and Social Change, which cast theorists as mandarin functionaries treating interpretation as an apolitical game. They filled the page with spiteful terms like "the mask of pure reason" and righteous declarations like "it is wrong to claim that you are above politics," spurning argument for the rhetoric of the reformer. We diagnosed them as puny reactions to the Reagan Revolution, carried out on the irrelevant ground of literary theory. Philosophically, Lentricchia was a hack, and we rejected the imputation that theory nullified activism and justified the status quo. Not that we thought theory bred activism. We just considered them separate activities, and saw no determinate connection between hermeneutical stance and party affiliation. However, we accepted the elitist charge. How could ambitious academics avoid elitism? It wasn't hard for graduate students struggling on $900 a month to see that populist attitudes didn't suit the tenured Ivy Leaguer. Professors were paid by exclusive institutions to teach poetry, to write letters for the best and brightest, to run recondite journals and jet to prestigious symposia. We wanted to join them, but not with phony expressions of social injustice that targeted theory as the problem.Allied with the political attacks on theory, and esteemed even lower, were critiques of the humanities as a bastion of high culture. Polemics [End Page 416] such as Andrew Ross's No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture treated... (shrink)

Stephan Joubert has already made his mark in South Africa with his solid way of doing Theology. In this Festschrift, we wanted to accord recognition to him for what he has already made and for what he is currently doing with e-kerk. His book, Jesus Radical, Righteous, Relevant, having initially been written in Afrikaans, was translated in 2012 into English and depicts his heart for the followers of Jesus and the familia Dei, specifically in South Africa. This article is (...) a journey through this book, with the current dilemma in our country and worldwide in the back of our minds, namely, the coronavirus disease starting in 2019. CONTRIBUTION: This article forms part of the Special Collection which will serve as a Festschrift for Prof Stephan Joubert to honour him for the tremendous work that he has done in Theology in South Africa. I took his book, Jesus, Radical, Righteous, Relevant as basis and applied it to our current situation with COVID-19. (shrink)

Aaron Ridley's The Deed Is Everything: Nietzsche on Will and Action uses the notion of expressivism to draw together several strands of Nietzschean thought into a view that both challenges and complements previous accounts of agency in general and previous secondary-literature accounts of Nietzsche's view of agency in particular. The book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. In this review, I briefly discuss each chapter with a particular focus on Ridley's distinction between the "letter" and the (...) "spirit" of an action, a distinction that seems to me crucial to Ridley's conception of expressivism's advantages over other theories of agency. The "letter" of an action comprises the aspects of... (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)