The paper offers a critical appreciation of sand in the Japanese tradition of karesansui 枯山水gardens. At first, sand is approached from a phenomenological standpoint, then described in relation to the Daoist ideals of “blandness” (dan 淡) and its original function in Shinto shrines. The following sections draw an East-West comparison between the sand garden at Ginkaku-ji 銀閣寺 and the sand sculptures by the Basque artist Andoni Bastarrika, and between the sand garden at Shisen-dō 詩仙堂 and the Renaissance garden at Villa (...) di Castello. The main purpose is to illustrate the philosophical significance of sand in respect to the aesthetic expression of such Buddhist-influenced notions as ku 空 (“emptiness”), yuge 遊戲(“play”), kire-tsuzuki 切れ続き(“cut-continuance” or “dis/continuity”) and the dialectic of conventional and ultimate reality. (shrink)

The first edited collection to offer a systematic introduction to African phenomenology.

Tsenay Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics has been crucial to the development of African philosophy. Initially employed as a pathway through the ethno- and professional philosophical debates, scholars have engaged how Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics grapples with one’s own place within a socio-historical world in service of liberation/self-determination. However, this scholarship mainly has focused on his adaptation of Gadamer’s ‘effective-historical consciousness’ for his own concept of heritage. This consequently leaves his concept of a ‘lived existence’ – which is equally crucial – under-examined. This paper probes (...) what a ‘lived existence’ entails and its essentiality when explicating how one even begins to authentically think, which is the groundwork to Serequeberhan’s hermeneutics. This deepens why his concept of heritage matters as a starting point for self-determination. Addressing this lacuna, this article asks, where does philosophy begin and where should it go, particularly when rationality has been historically denied? Serequeberhan’s point of departure to answer this question proposes Heidegger’s concept of thinking itself to arrive at a notion of existence; contrariwise to most African scholars who employ a Sartrean existentialism via Frantz Fanon. As such, this paper gives an in-depth exploration of Serequeberhan’s initial reading of Heidegger, and then unfolds how he appropriates Heidegger to craft his notion of ‘lived existence’. The upshot this is twofold: First, a broader understanding of Serequeberhan’s project, its non-existentialist view of existence; Second, it describes how he specifically tailors his ‘lived existence’ to undergird his hermeneutical approach to heritage as a prescriptive, activist project which dynamically addresses the postcolonial situation. (shrink)

Vibrant Death links philosophy and poetry-based, corpo-affectively grounded knowledge seeking. It offers a radically new materialist theory of death, critically moving the philosophical argument beyond Christian and secular-mechanistic understandings. The book's ethico-political figuration of vibrant death is shaped through a pluriversal conversation between Deleuzean philosophy, neo-vitalist materialism and the spiritual materialism of decolonial, queerfeminist poet and scholar Gloria Anzaldua. The book's posthuman deexceptionalizing of human death unfurls together with a collection of poetry, and autobiographical stories. They are analysed through the (...) lens of a posthuman, queerfeminist revision of the method of autophenomenography (phenomenological analysis of autobiographical material). Nina Lykke explores the speaking position of a mourning, queerfeminine "I", who contemplates the relationship with her dead beloved lesbian life partner. She reflects on her enactment of processes of co-becoming with the phenomenal and material traces of the deceased body, and the new assemblages with which it has merged through death's material metamorphoses: becoming-ashes through cremation, and becoming-mixed-with-algae-sand when the ashes were scattered across a seabed made of fiftyfive million-year-old, fossilized algae. It is argued that the mourning "I"'s intimate bodily empathizing (theorized as symphysizing) with her deceased, queermasculine beloved life partner facilitates the processes of vitalist-material and spiritual-material co-becoming, and the rethinking of death from a new and different perspective than that of the sovereign, philosophical subject. (shrink)

Much philosophical attention has been devoted to “The Land Ethic,” especially by Anglo-American philosophers, but little has been paid to A Sand County Almanac as a whole. Read through the lens of continental philosophy, A Sand County Almanac promulgates an evolutionary-ecological world view and effects a personal self- and a species-specific Self-transformation in its audience. It’s author, Aldo Leopold, realizes these aims through descriptive reflection that has something in common with phenomenology-although Leopold was by no stretch of the imagination a (...) phenomenologist. Consideration of human-animal intersubjectivity, thematized in A Sand County Almanac, brings to light the moral problem of hunting and killing animal subjects. Leopold does not confront that problem, but it is confronted and resolved by Jose Ortega y Gassett, Henry Beston, and Paul Shepard in terms of an appropriate human relationship with wild-animal Others. Comparison with the genuinely Other-based Leopold-Ortega-Beston-Shepard wild-animal ethic shows the purportedly Other-based humanand possibly animal ethic of Emmanuel Levinas actually to be Same-based after all. (shrink)

Volume 6, Issue 2, November 2019, Page 195-202.

The paper is the final, fifth part of a series of studies introducing the new conceptions of “Hilbert mathematics” and “ontomathematics”. The specific subject of the present investigation is the proper philosophical sense of both, including philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of physics not less than the traditional “first philosophy” (as far as ontomathematics is a conservative generalization of ontology as well as of Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” though in a sense) and history of philosophy (deepening Heidegger’s destruction of it from (...) the pre-Socratics to the Pythagoreans). Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s derivative “fundamental ontology” as well as his later doctrine after the “turn” are the starting point of the research as established and well known approaches relative to the newly introduced conception of ontomathematics, even more so that Husserl himself started criticizing his “Philosophy of arithmetic” as too naturalistic and psychological turning to “Logical investigations” and the foundations of phenomenology. Heidegger’s “Aletheia” is also interpreted ontomathematically: as a relation of locality and nonlocality, respectively as a motion from nonlocality to locality if both are physically considered. Aristotle’s ontological revision of Plato’s doctrine is “destructed” further from the pre-Socratics' “Logos” or Heideger’s “Language” (after the “turn”) to the Pythagoreans “Numbers” or “Arithmetics” as an inherent and fundamental philosophical doctrine. Then, a leap to contemporary physics elucidates the essence of ontomathematics overcoming the Cartesian abyss inherited from Plato’s opposition of “ideas” versus “things”, and now unifying physics and mathematics, particularly allowing for the “creation from nothing” instead of the quasi-scientific myth of the “Big Bang”. Furthermore, ontomathematics needs another interpretation of arithmetic, propositional logic and set theory in the foundations of mathematics, where the latter two ones are both identified with Boolean algebra, and the former is considered to be a “half of Boolean algebra” in the exact meaning to be equated to it after doubling by a dual anti-isometric counterpart of Peano arithmetic. That unified algebraic realization of the foundations of mathematics is related to Hilbert mathematics in both “narrow and wide senses” where the latter is isomorphic to the qubit Hilbert space, thus underlying all the physical world by the newly introduced substance of quantum information being physically dimensionless and generalizing classical information measured in bits. The substance of information, whether classical or quantum, visualizes the way of the unification of physics and mathematics by merging their foundations in Hilbert arithmetic and Hilbert mathematics: thus how ontomathetics is a “first philosophy”. The relation of ontomathematics to the Socratic “human problematics”, furthermore being fundamental for Western philosophy in Modernity, is discussed. Ontomathematics implies its “substitution” by abstract information (or by “subjectless choice” relevant to it), thus “obliterating the human outline on the ocean beach sand” (by Michel Foucault’s metaphor). A reflection back from the viewpoint of mathematic to Western philosophy as the philosophy of locality ends the study. (shrink)

J. Baird Callicott et al. have argued that Aldo Leopold developed a descriptive technique that has something in common with phenomenology and that it would not be farfetched to explore A Sand County Almanac as a kind of Heideggerian clearing in which usually unnoticed beings come to light. They further suggest that Leopold describes animal others as fellow subjects who co-constitute the world and that through his method of observation, description, and reflection Leopold reveals a “multi-perspective experience of a common (...) environment” that discloses an inter-species intersubjectivity comparable to Husserl’s more formal descriptions of intersubjectivity. I shall argue that the similarities between Husserl and Leopold are stronger and deeper than Callicott et al. suggest. Husserl’s method is designed to expose what has been hidden by “ideological positivism,” while Leopold’s method is designed to reveal what has been concealed by what he labels “conventional physics. Both agree that what we might today call a “scientistic worldview” denies, devalues, and dismisses subjectivity, meaning, and value from rational discourse. In Husserl’s view this leads to cultural crisis and barbarism, while in Leopold’s view it leads to ecological catastrophe. For Husserl the only alternative is a cultural renewal rooted in a rethinking of the dominant scientistic worldview while for Leopold the alternative lies in the construction of a new ethical system. These two alternatives are deeply compatible. Finally, I will discuss the ways in which Husserl’s understanding of the intentionality of our subjective experiences and Leopold’s integration of the evolutionary and ecological kinship of humans and non-humans with the social sciences have important implications for the possibility of intercultural understanding and dialogue and thereby allow us to overcome the thesis of incommensurability that denies the possibility of meaningful intercultural understanding and dialogue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40.4 (2006) 89-103 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Philosophical AestheticsDonald Phillip VereneIs there an aesthetics of philosophy? Does philosophical discourse have a foundation in sense and sensibility? If the answer to these questions is affirmative and there is in some sense a philosophical aesthetics, what conclusions might be drawn for philosophical education?Put another way: Does philosophy require the power of the imagination and the product (...) of this power-image? Or is philosophy the product of the pure concept, the rational idea? Does philosophical reason rest upon a logic that resides in thought alone that is expressed essentially in principles and arguments disconnected from images and sentiment?The Philosophical ImaginaryThe French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff says:Whether one looks for a characterization of philosophical discourse to Plato, to Hegel or to Bréhier, one always meets with a reference to the rational, the concept, the argued, the logical, the abstract. Even when a certain coyness leads some authorities to pretend that they do not know what philosophy is, no agnosticism remains about what philosophy is not. Philosophy is not a story, not a pictorial description, not a work of pure literature. Philosophical discourse is inscribed and declares its status as philosophy through a break with myth, fable, the poetic, the domain of the image. 1Le Doeuff continues:If, however, one goes looking for this philosophy in the texts which are meant to embody it, the least that can be said is that it is not to be found there in a pure state. We shall also find statues that breathe the scent of roses, comedies, tragedies, architects, foundations, dwellings, [End Page 89] doors and windows, sand, navigators, various musical instruments, islands, clocks, horses, donkeys and even a lion, representatives of every craft and trade, scenes of sea and storm, forests and trees: in short, a whole pictorial world sufficient to decorate even the dryest "History of Philosophy." 2Le Doeuff points to Hegel's work as an example of the claim that the sole form of philosophy is thought. Yet the works of Hegel, like those of Plato, are full of images. Plato and Hegel are masters of metaphor. One can say of them what Aristotle says in the Poetics, that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others and it is a sign of genius. For the right use of metaphor requires an eye for similarities in dissimilars." 3 Despite his mastery of metaphor, in the Republic Plato uses his doctrine of eidos to criticize the power of eikon to present truth. Hegel, in the Phenomenology, uses his doctrine of the Begriff to claim that the Bild cannot produce the science of the absolute. Plato and Hegel say one thing in their texts, but in the texts themselves they do another. Plato's dialogues are filled with metaphors and likely stories from the Ring of Gyges to the metaphor of the Sun to the tale of Atlantis, as are Hegel's works, from the "night in which all cows are black" to the phrenological skull to the owl of Minerva that flies only at the falling of dusk.How are we to comprehend the extremes of philosophical doctrine on the one hand and the discourse that expresses it on the other? Is the discourse simply the outer shell of the doctrine, inessential to its truth, or does the doctrine itself require for its truth all that is needed for its proper statement?I wish to seek the answer to this by connecting Plato to Hegel, using Vico as an intermediary, in particular Vico's conception of la sapienza poetica (poetic wisdom) and his conception of the universale fantastico (imaginative universal). My claim is that philosophical discourse, as well as philosophy itself, depends upon an aesthetic that cannot be overcome by reason, that there is a philosophical imaginary that necessarily accompanies philosophical rationality. The concept, the idea, always has a shadow, a doppelgänger through which... (shrink)

Martin Sand explores the problems of responsibility at the early, visionary stages of technological development. He discusses the increasingly dominant concept of innovation and outlines how narratives about the future are currently used to facilitate technological change, to foster networks, and to raise public awareness for innovations. This set of activities is under increasing scrutiny as a form of “visioneering”. The author discusses intentionality and freedom as important, albeit fuzzy, preconditions for being responsible. He distinguishes being from holding responsible and (...) explores this distinction’s effects on the problem of moral luck. Finally, he develops a virtue ethical framework to discuss visioneers’ and innovators’ responsibilities.​. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the patterns of lifestyle and posed psychological stress on pregnant women. However, the association of sleep duration and screen time with anxiety among pregnant women under the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic scenario has been poorly addressed. We conducted one large-scale, multicenter cross-sectional study which recruited 1794 pregnant women across middle and west China. Self-reported demographic characteristics, lifestyle, and mental health status were collected from 6th February to 8th May 2020. We investigated the association (...) of sleep duration and screen time with the risk of anxiety by multivariable logistic regression analysis and linear regression analysis after adjusting potential confounders. The dose-response relationship of sleep duration and screen time with anxiety was visualized using a cubic spline plot. Our data revealed that almost 35% of pregnant women suffered from anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sleep duration was dose-dependently associated with a lower risk of anxiety among pregnant women, while screen time exhibited a conversed effect. Notably, sleep duration synergistically combined with screen time to diminish the risk of anxiety. Taken together, sleep duration and screen time were independently and jointly associated with anxiety. Therefore, promoting a more active lifestyle and maintaining higher sleep quality could improve the mental health of pregnant women, especially under public health emergency. (shrink)

Environmental theorists, seeking the origin of Western exploitative attitudes toward nature, have directed their attacks against 'humanism'. This essay argues that such criticisms are misplaced. Humanism has much closer affinities to environmentalism than the latter' s advocates believe. As early as the Renaissance, and certainly by the late eighteenth century, humanists were developing historically-conscious, hermeneutically-grounded modes of understanding, rather than the abstract, mathematical models of nature often associated with them. In its twentieth-century versions humanism also shares much of the mistrust (...) of consumerism, instrumental reason, and 'worldlessness' that marks environmentalist literature. Nevertheless, humanism is indeed committed to the principle that human beings are and ought to be free, and opposes theoretical approaches that suppress freedom. Reconciling humanism and environmentalism thus involves two steps: resisting the former's tendency to treat nature and freedom as metaphysical polarities, and drawing environmental theory away from flirtation with deterministic, biologistic worldviews. The essay concludes by suggesting Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac as the paradigm case of environmental thought with roots in humanist approaches. (shrink)

Learning a second language (L2) proceeds with individual approaches to proficiency in the language. Individual differences including sex, as well as working memory (WM) function appear to have strong effects on behavioral performance and cortical responses in L2 processing. Thus, by considering sex and WM capacity, we examined neural responses during L2 sentence processing as a function of L2 proficiency in young adolescents. In behavioral tests, girls significantly outperformed boys in L2 tests assessing proficiency and grammatical knowledge, and in a (...) reading span test (RST) assessing WM capacity. Girls, but not boys, showed significant correlations between L2 tests and RST scores. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and event-related potential (ERP) simultaneously, we measured cortical responses while participants listened to syntactically correct and incorrect sentences. ERP data revealed a grammaticality effect only in boys in the early time window (100–300 ms), implicated in phrase structure processing. In fNIRS data, while boys had significantly increased activation in the left prefrontal region implicated in syntactic processing, girls had increased activation in the posterior language-related region involved in phonology, semantics, and sentence processing with proficiency. Presumably, boys implicitly focused on rule-based syntactic processing, whereas girls made full use of linguistic knowledge and WM function. The present results provide important fundamental data for learning and teaching in L2 education. (shrink)

This handsomely produced volume contains 22 contributions from international scholars, which were originally presented at the 2000 Conference of the International Society for Phenomenology, Fine Arts, & Aesthetics. The papers center around the theme of gardens and include a wide range of topics of interest to phenomenologists but also, perhaps, to gardeners with a philosophical bent. A sampling of topics: Leonardo's Annunciation Hortus Conclusus and its reflexive intent; hatha yoga--a phenomenological experience of nature; the Chinese attempt to miniaturize the world (...) in gardens; conflating and compressing time in commodified space and architecture; constructing the deconstructive landscape (the ruin aesthetic); and a phenomenological-anthropological aproach to Zen gardens. The volume is lightly indexed by name (mostly philosophers). Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com). (shrink)

Well-known predictors of prejudice toward Muslims include social dominance and authoritarianism. However, a gap exists for variables reflecting a rejection or mitigation of ideological motivations associated with prejudice toward Muslims. We examined if quiet ego was related to positive attitudes toward Muslims, and whether this could be explained by lower levels of authoritarianism, social dominance, and the motivation to express prejudice. We explored this possibility across two studies of adults in the United States. In Study 1, regression results showed quiet (...) ego was directly associated with positive attitudes toward Muslims. Study 2 utilized path analyses and found that the direct relationship between quiet ego and positive attitudes toward Muslims was explained by associations between quiet ego and lower endorsement of authoritarianism, social dominance, and the internal motivation to express prejudice toward Muslims. Moreover, these associations held when accounting for several correlates of intergroup attitudes. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the complex relations between aesthetics and phenomenology as they show themselves within the core locus of their interplay—the realm of the visible and the invisible. To do so, the paper examines a specific case study, a Rembrandt painting—A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654)—through which the discussion illuminates the interconnected and inseparable relationship between aesthetics and phenomenology in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the visible and the invisible. The reading addresses both dimensions of the visible: the (...) essential intersubjective aspect of life and its complex visual representation in art. To achieve this, the paper first explores Merleau-Ponty’s late aesthetic ontology—a phenomenology that perceives the aesthetic realm, particularly the visible domain, as originating from human corporeal existence, thereby redefining the act of seeing and the concepts of the visible and the invisible; I show the manner in which invisible elements permeate our visual experience in the Rembrandt painting and in seeing as such. The paper also reveals the unique ontological role of painting and the painter in unveiling the aesthetic world, and in guiding the philosopher toward a vision that true philosophy—phenomenology—must embrace. The paper concludes by rethinking the significance of aesthetics, and especially, the arts, to phenomenological thought, and the necessity of phenomenology to aesthetic thought. (shrink)

Merold Westphal’s new publication, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, gives us an opportunity to explore the many ways in which Kierkegaard has influenced Westphal’s thinking as a whole. This present contribution seeks to show how Kierkegaard helps Westphal discover a concept of faith which holds no ‘reasonable’ foundation as it is entirely dependent upon two different aspects of revelation in tension with each other. Moreover, faith is seen as a willing assent by the believer, and thus it becomes a task and (...) not merely a proposition to behold or to which one’s life conforms. In addition to explicating this notion of faith within his work, this present contribution seeks to situate this faith within Westphal’s philosophy of religion, showing how it is integral to Westphal’s entire project. (shrink)

Martin Sand and Luca Chiapperino find in the concept of serendipity a versatile umbrella term to reassess their previous work on moral luckLuck (also, Epistemic Luck, Moral Luck) and collectiveCollectiveresponsibilityResponsibility. Moral luck supposedly occurs when someone receives praise or blame for things beyond control. Given the ubiquity of luckLuck (also, Epistemic Luck, Moral Luck), this seems to be a seriously disquieting aspect of ordinary morality. The rewards and recognition for serendipitous discoveries fall into exactly this category. That is: more than (...) the intentions, actions, and characters of scientists matters for discoveries to obtain, just as in cases of moral luckLuck (also, Epistemic Luck, Moral Luck) something beyond morality affectsAffect our moral judgments. Even if a theoretical way of resolving the conceptual ambiguities that underlie this debate were found, there remain practical questions of how to perform stratification in science and innovationInnovation in ways that both hinge on, and yet refrain from, considerations of desert and achievement. With the example of Edward Jenner’sJenner, EdwardluckLuck (also, Epistemic Luck, Moral Luck)- and serendipity-infused discoveryDiscovery (also, Scientific Discovery) of vaccination, the authors attempt to better understand the intricate valueValue trade-offs that underlie stratification policies in science, which have to be constantly re-negotiated to maintain their legitimacy. Thereby, Sand and Ciapperino aim to take a bold step towards understanding the ethicsEthics of serendipity. (shrink)

The acclaimed and controversial historian turns his critical gaze on the writing of history today. Drawing on his four decades as a professional historian, Shlomo Sand interrogates the academic discipline of history, whose origin lay in the need for a national ideology. In the last few decades, traditional history has begun to fragment, yet only to give rise to a new role of historians as priests of official memory. Working in Israel has sharpened Sand's perspective, since the role of history (...) as national myth is particularly salient in a country where the Bible is treated as a history book. He asks such questions as: Is every historical narrative ideologically marked? Do political requirements and state power weigh down inordinately on historical research and teaching? And, in such conditions, can there be a morally neutral and 'scientific' truth? Despite his trenchant criticism of academic history, Sand would still like to believe that the past can be understood without myth, and sees pointers for this in the work of Weber and Sorel"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This book identifies the turning points in Habermas's work and his transition from one stage to another in the development of his theoretical oeuvre. Habermas began his academic career as part of the Frankfurt School, but the two key points at which his career changes trajectory are moving from historical materialism to normative idealism and playing with some of the ideas of liberalism. Normative idealism is an ahistorical theory that insists on the independence of the normative from material reality, severing (...) the connection between base and superstructure that Marx wrote about. The break with the basic concepts of Marxism enabled Habermas to build his own discursive (critical) theory, which, especially since the end of the 1980s, takes the ideas of liberalism seriously. This book makes a systematic, multidimensional and detailed analysis of Habermas's theoretical oeuvre in two dimensions, chronological (in the order in which Habermas worked on certain topics) and thematic (enclosing certain thematic units). (shrink)

(1996). Contract government and the academic intellectuals. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 762-770.

In her introduction to this collection, Tymieniecka presents her phenomenology of life - the leitmotif of the three-volume anniversary publication of Analecta Husserliana - as something that stands out from preceding historical attempts to investigate life in an 'integral' or 'scientific' way. After an incubation lasting throughout the 2000 years of Occidental philosophy, this scientific phenomenology/philosophy of life at last uncovers the entire area of the 'inner workings of Nature', exposing the way in which the 'sufficient reason' and the 'ground' (...) of beingness as such crystallise out of the 'onto poietic' process. This onto-poietic process, continuing as it does in the human creative condition, also reveals the authentic genius of the works of the human spirit. This new and original philosophy, free of fallacious simplifications, speculations and reductionism, opens up a basic starting point for all philosophy. Life, 'the theme of our times', at last receives a profound philosophical treatment. (shrink)

orbit and far beyond it. Indeed, the immense, painstaking, indefatigable and ever-improving effort of Husserl to find ever-deeper and more reliable foundations for the philosophical enterprise (as well as his constant critical re-thinking and perfecting of the approach and so called "method" in order to perform this task and thus cover in this source-excavation an ever more far-reaching groundwork) stands out and maintains itself as an inepuisable reservoir for philosophical reflec tion in which all the above-mentioned work has either its (...) core or its source. In fact, in his undertaking to re-think the entire philosophical enterprise as such and to recreate philosophy upon what he sought to be at least a satisfactorily legitimated basis, Husserl, through his already systematised and "authorized" work, and his courses, and later on in his spontaneous reflection (which did not find its way into a definitive corpus but was nevertheless sufficiently coherent with his previously established body of thought to be considered a continuation of it), uncovers perspectives upon the universe of man and projects their new philosophical thematisation that brings together all the attempts by philosophers (e. g., Merleau-Ponty, who drew upon this material and found there his own inspiration) who succeeded him with foundational intentions; it also gives a core of philosophical ideas and insights for the youngergenerationofphilosophers today. (shrink)

Levinas did not present any new ethical theories; he did not even give any normative recommendations. But his phenomenological investigations help us to understand how the idea of ethics emerges and how we try to cope with it. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some implications from a reading of Levinas on how ethical challenges are handled within a management perspective. The paper claims that management, both in theory and in practice, is necessarily egocentric and thus ethically biased. (...) Therefore, ethics, defined as the idea that it is possible to do otherwise than pursue one's own interest, must have its source outside the scope of management. Levinas identifies this source as the call for responsibility from the Other, beyond the reach of managerial control. He also suggests how this idea of ethics is put into practice, especially in economic life: the existence of money makes it both possible and necessary to compare unique and incomparable others. Management tools may be used in the service of always more justice, as it also may be used for the opposite purpose. Instead of trying to draw a normative conclusion from Levinas, we may distinguish between two ways of experiencing reality: one through language and knowledge, covering both descriptive and normative knowledge, including business ethics, and the other through the particular events of encounters, from where this knowledge is continuously questioned through the call for responsibility, and thereby may provide possibilities for continuous improvements towards always more justice. (shrink)