Re-treating Religion is the first volume to analyze his long-term project The Deconstruction of Christianity,especially his major statement of it in Dis-Enclosure.Nancy conceives monotheistic religion and secularization not as opposite ...

Both Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Nancy have tried to understand the law within the heterogeneity of society by means of Kant's notion of 'as if'. Kant introduced this notion in order to respect the gap between reason and intuition; Lyotard and Nancy took it up to explain the lack of unity in society. In the margins of their work — footnotes and postscripts — they have discussed this theme and searched for the presuppositions and risks of each others position, as (...) a result of which the 'as if' is considered from different perspectives and the philosophies of Lyotard and Nancy are illuminated inopposition to each other. Although this discussion commenced in the seventies, this theme is currently more topical than ever as is clear from the development of the Europeanand Iraqi constitutions. An analysis of the complex discussion between Lyotard and Nancy is given to provide insight into the principles that constitute the law. Both Lyotardand Nancy are trying to solve the problem of how to judge without a given rule. Lyotardis mainly concerned with understanding the 'as if' as an attempt to respect heterogeneity, while Nancy criticizes Lyotard for ignoring the constitution of this heterogeneity.Nancy uses the notion of 'dislocation' to understand both every case as an accident andthe neglect of this aspect by the jurisdiction. At the same time, we will elaborate on the reception of the Kantian thinking in French philosophy. Although the importance of well-known notions such as the sublime have been emphasized many times, the relevance of the 'as if' has not been thoroughly investigated. It will be shown that the notion ofthe 'as if' can be fruitful for understanding the creative element of jurisdiction, that is, for judging without rules. (shrink)

Although many have identified similarities between the arts, the question as to what principle they would share has proved difficult to answer. This article unfolds three crucial moments in the search for an answer to the question of the singularity and plurality of art: Batteux’s attempt to reduce the arts to one principle in The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (1746), the early idealist-romantic attempt to synthesize the arts in The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism (1798), and Nancy’s (...) recent attempt, in The Muses (2006), to understand the Hegelian End of Art as a beginning of the arts in plural. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est le premier à proposer une recherche systématique du rapport entre communauté et littérature dans la pensée de Jean-Luc Nancy. L'auteure développe la thèse originale que cette relation doit être comprise comme une refonte du mythe. This is the first book to provide a systematic investigation of the relation between community and literature in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. The author develops the original claim that this relation has to be understood as a rethinking of myth.

This book offers a new account of what it is to act for a normative reason. The first part of the book examines the problems of causal accounts of acting for reasons and suggests to solve them by a dispositional approach. The author argues for a dispositional account which unites epistemic, volitional, and executional dispositions in a complex normative competence. This ‘Normative Competence Account’ allows for more and less reflective ways of acting for normative reasons. The second part of the (...) book clarifies the relation between the normative reason that an agent acts for and his or her motivating reasons. It refutes the widely held ‘identity view’ that acting for a normative reason requires the normative reason to be identical with a motivating reason. The author describes how normative reasons are related to motivating reasons by a relation of correspondence, and proposes a new understanding of how normative reasons explain those actions that are performed for them. Determined by Reasons engages with current debates from a wide range of different philosophical areas, including action theory, metaethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and ontology, to develop a new account of acting for normative reasons. (shrink)

Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity mainly consist of a reworking of Christian and traditional philosophical notions, a process by which he demonstrates how these notions have virtually exhausted themselves. He has examined how such notions contain, as their very condition, the possibility of their own exhaustion. As a result, Nancy’s project of a deconstruction of Christianity is actually a ‘reading’ of Christianity deconstructing itself, i.e. of Christianity’s raison d’être containing at the same time the possibility of its own exhaustion. Or as (...) Derrida would have phrased it, Christianity’s construction generates its deconstruction at the same time. This text tries to summarise the outlines of such deconstruction and its the rise in Nancy’s work, from his earlier publications up until La déclosion in 2005. (shrink)

In his ‘deconstruction of Christianity’, Jean-Luc Nancy seeks to show how our modern, secular society and its so-called Christian ‘roots’ are co-original and mutually constitutive. As a result of this mutual constitution, the Christian religion is fundamentally characterised by its own deconstruction. This article focuses on one element of this auto-deconstructive movement of Christianity: that of prayer, or more generally, of addressing God. According to Nancy, prayer reveals how Christianity contains at its core, or rather as its core, the principal (...) absence of its God and therefore the kernel of its own secularisation. This article examines why, in Nancy’s work, prayer has to be understood both as a form of demythologisation, as well as a poetic movement, a movement correlating with, and proper to, poetic practices. In adopting such an approach, Christianity’s auto-deconstruction is explained as a question of language. (shrink)

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This paper will, in its successive steps and movements, revolve around one single question, a question that might, at first sight, come across as somewhat irrelevant or even impertinent within the context of philosophical or academic discourse. How romantic is Jean-Luc Nancy? Or: is there a specifically Nancyan sense of romance? Notwithstanding these somewhat unscholarly formulations, I am increasingly convinced that the question of love, or indeed more specifically of romance, is the most intimate inspiration of Nancy’s work, the key (...) unlocking all other keys. The theme of love has always played an important role in his work, from the early essay “Shattered Love” (“L’amour en éclats,” 1986) to his later works on the body and pleasure. In this paper, I will touch upon a number of these texts, but I will more particularly refer to two of Nancy’s more recent works, the yet untranslated book Sexistence from 2017 and Expectation: Philosophy, Literature (2018, published in French in 2015 as Demande: Littérature et philosophie). The question of romance, that is, the question of passionate interaction, of intrigue, of writing, of dramatization. This quite heterogeneous web of associations already implies a number of age-old philosophical issues: the relation between love and thinking; the relation between love and literature; and, subsequently, between philosophy and literature; the issue of the relation itself. The knot uniting these issues under the single heading of “romance” has been most firmly tied about two centuries ago, in the late eighteenth-century movement of early German, i.e., Jena, Romanticism, that significant moment in intellectual history where the barriers between philosophy and literature were broken down and where, quite generally put, the sense of the world was conceived of as a matter of romanticization. Although Nancy himself would be reluctant to call himself a Romantic philosopher in this historical sense of the word, this is exactly what I want to argue here: I want to show that Nancy’s philosophy of love – and by extension his philosophical thinking tout court – should be placed in the tradition of German Romanticism, rather than in that of, for instance, phenomenology, ontology, or philosophy proper. This claim is massive in its depth and scope and can impossibly be explored here in an exhaustive way. Instead, I will flesh out this perspective by advancing four successive hypotheses that enable to mark the contours of what I call Nancy’s romanticism. With this exploration, I hope to do three things at once: firstly, to underscore what I take to be the core or pulse of Nancy’s thinking: the issue of romance; secondly, to investigate to what extent this romantic pulse might be traced back to the Romantic tradition; and, thirdly, to emphasize why Nancy’s romantic thinking is relevant for us today. (shrink)

I argue for the view that there are important similarities between knowledge and acting for a normative reason. I interpret acting for a normative reason in terms of Sosa’s notion of an apt performance. Actions that are done for a normative reason are normatively apt actions. They are in accordance with a normative reason because of a competence to act in accordance with normative reasons. I argue that, if Sosa’s account of knowledge as apt belief is correct, this means that (...) acting for a normative reason is in many respects similar to knowledge. In order to strengthen Sosa’s account of knowledge, I propose to supplement it with an appeal to sub-competences. This clarifies how this account can deal with certain Gettier cases, and it helps to understand how exactly acting for a normative reason is similar to apt belief. (shrink)

Are epistemic reasons normative in the same sense as, for instance, moral reasons? In this paper I examine and defend the claim that epistemic reasons are normative only relative to an epistemic standard. Unlike moral reasons they are not substantially normative, because they fail to make an independent contribution to obligations or permissions simpliciter. After presenting what I take to be the main argument for this view, I illustrate that the argument has often been defended by examples which controversially presuppose (...) strong epistemic obligations or pragmatic reasons for belief. Opponents of the argument often deny the existence of obligations and reasons of these kinds. I therefore examine whether the argument can withstand that line of critique by employing new examples. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with the relation between motivating and normative reasons. According to a common and influential thesis, a normative reason is identical with a motivating reason when an agent acts for that normative reason. I will call this thesis the ‘Identity Thesis’. Many philosophers treat the Identity Thesis as a commonplace or a truism. Accordingly, the Identity Thesis has been used to rule out certain ontological views about reasons. I distinguish a deliberative and an explanatory version of the (...) Identity Thesis and argue that there are no convincing arguments to accept either version. Furthermore, I point out an alternative to the Identity Thesis. The relation between motivating and normative reasons can be thought of as one of representation, not identity. (shrink)

In this article I advocate a worldly account of normative reasons according to which there is an ontological gap between these and the premises of practical thought, i.e. motivating considerations. While motivating considerations are individuated fine-grainedly, normative reasons should be classified as coarse-grained entities, e.g. as states of affairs, in order to explain certain necessary truths about them and to make sense of how we count and weigh them. As I briefly sketch, acting for normative reasons is nonetheless possible if (...) the connection between normative reasons and motivating considerations is a competence-based correspondence. (shrink)

Agents sometimes act for normative reasons—for reasons that objectively favor their actions. Jill, for instance, calls a doctor for the normative reason that Kate is injured. In this article I explore a dispositional approach to acting for a normative reason. I argue for the need of epistemic, motivational, and executional dispositional elements of a theory of acting for a normative reason. Dispositions play a mediating role between, on the one hand, the normative reason and its normative force, and the action (...) on the other hand. Thereby, they help to deal with problem cases such as cases of deviant causal chains and improper instrumental motivation. (shrink)

Literatuur leeft. Na een betrekkelijk stabiel maar sluimerend bestaan in de marges van de cultuurbijlagen is de literatuur sinds een jaar zowel de inzet als het mikpunt van een felle discussie. Aanstichter van deze discussie is hoogleraar moderne letterkunde Thomas Vaessens, die met zijn De revanche van de roman een vurig pleidooi hield voor de terugkeer van de literatuur naar de binnencirkel van het actuele debat. Aan zijn pleidooi ligt een diepe onvrede ten grondslag over het feit dat de literatuur (...) in de loop van de twintigste eeuw haar waarde als betekenisvolle cultuuruiting lijkt te hebben verloren. (shrink)

Clarice Lispector has been studied thoroughly against the backdrop of Western ontology and feminism, but she has not often been read in relation to postcolonial theory and Black studies. Yet, their critique of coloniality and the radicality with which they conceive of a different world, can provide a fitting frame for understanding what is at stake in Lispector’s thought. When put in dialogue with the work of Édouard Glissant and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Lispector makes a key contribution to the (...) reconfiguration of the relation between the subject and the world that can be understood as an attempt to, echoing Sylvia Wynter, “unsettle the coloniality of being.” Where Glissant effectuates “creolization” and Silva a “hacking” of the subject, Lispector attempts to transgress our colonial relation to the world through a reconfiguration of fertility. In our study of The Passion According to G.H., supported by fragments from the Chronicles, we show: (1) how the passion of G.H., is the passion of a specifically colonial subject; (2) how fertility is an essential link between subjectivity and coloniality, ensuring an atavistic chain of filiation and hence the continuation of a colonially dominated world; and (3) how Lispector reconfigures fertility as a possibility of being deeply affected by the world, so much so that the colonial subject perishes and the chain of filiation is disrupted. As a consequence, we argue that Lispector’s project must not primarily be understood as ontological or in search of pre-discursivity, but as concerned with the revolutionary question of dismantling the colonial subject and its world in order to open up a potential of life otherwise. (shrink)

Payment reforms that link health care providers’ reimbursements to their performance on various metrics incentivize providers to improve the quality and efficiency of care they provide to patients. Unfortunately, these reforms also create strong incentives for providers to reject patients who do not adhere to medical advice. This commentary argues that providers’ avoidance of non-adherent patients flouts the medical profession's commitment to patients’ best interests, undermines patients' trust in health professionals, and aggravates disparities in health. Moreover, the economic incentives under (...) payment reforms that encourage quality and efficiency gains are weakened when providers can escape the financial penalties for poor outcomes by simply firing their non-adherent patients. (shrink)

In the scholarly debate, refugeehood is often understood to arise from a special need for basic protection, i.e., for protection of basic needs and rights. However, the main definitions of refugeehood shift to duties when aiming to develop this view. Either, refugees are defined as all those individuals who can receive basic protection from the international community, and thus arguably ought to be protected, or refugees are defined as all those to whom a special form of protection, namely protection by (...) admission is owed. The paper argues that either definition is incompatible with a commonsense desideratum on consistent and plausible criteria for refugeehood, since these definitions imply that refugeehood depends partly on the capacities of protecting states and on the needs of third parties. Instead, refugeehood is defined by the need for basic protection and by flight aiming to remedy this condition. (shrink)

The Normative Competence Account characterizes acting for a normative reason as action which manifests the agent’s complex normative competence. But which role does the correspondence between the n...

The rise of managed care initiated a steady decline in solo and small group physician practices and the emergence of new delivery models built around large health care organizations. Health care reform has only accelerated this trend as public and private payors shift to new payment methodologies that reward clinical and financial integration among providers. As a result, patients increasingly receive care from physicians and other health professionals organized into collaborative partnerships with one another and institutional providers, such as hospitals. (...) As described below, this new organizational dynamic profoundly influences the clinical judgment of physicians. No longer can society simply depend on the professionalism of individual physicians to ensure ethical integrity in the health care setting. Rather, ethical integrity in the health care setting also requires a strong foundation of organizational ethics. (shrink)

This book presents stipulated definitions, essays, ontological arguments and logic used to determine necessary basic assumptions of right and wrong, culminating in a practical procedure based upon the Universal Law that can permit everyone to eliminate misconceptions, avoid destructive interpretations, and develop an ethical conscience.

Der vorliegende Aufsatz prüft, unter welchen Bedingungen ein Psychologismus für motivierende Gründe der gegenwärtig wachsenden Kritik standhalten kann. Zwei zentrale antipsychologistische Argumente, das „Spezialfallargument“ und das „Idealfallargument“, werden rekonstruiert und zurückgewiesen. Sie werfen dem Psychologismus vor, unsere praktische Überlegung lediglich in Spezialfällen adäquat zu beschreiben und damit unvereinbar zu sein, dass Personen im Idealfall aus normativen Gründen handeln. Der Aufsatz zeigt auf, dass diese Argumente voraussetzen, dass der motivierende Grund identisch ist mit demjenigen, was aus der Sicht des Handelnden als (...) normativer Grund erscheint. Diese Voraussetzung wird zurückgewiesen, so dass ein Psychologismus zum Vorschein kommt, der von den antipsychologistischen Argumenten unberührt bleibt. Stattdessen wird eine Konzeption motivierender Gründe vertreten, welche die Handlungserklärung und die Rationalisierung von Handlungen als zentrale Funktion motivierender Gründe betrachtet. (shrink)

We argue that explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), specifically reason-giving XAI, often constitutes the most suitable way of ensuring that someone can properly be held responsible for decisions that are based on the outputs of artificial intelligent (AI) systems. We first show that, to close moral responsibility gaps (Matthias 2004), often a human in the loop is needed who is directly responsible for particular AI-supported decisions. Second, we appeal to the epistemic condition on moral responsibility to argue that, in order to (...) be responsible for her decision, the human in the loop has to have an explanation available of the system’s recommendation. Reason explanations are especially well-suited to this end and we examine whether – and how – it might be possible to make such explanations fit with AI systems. We support our claims by focusing on a case of disagreement between human in the loop and AI system. (shrink)

When states cooperate in refugee protection and implement a scheme with fixed rules allocating refugees to host states, should they consider refugees' interests and preferences regarding where they receive protection? This article briefly examines the kinds of preferences and interests that are relevant to both refugees and states before discussing the moral principles determining the respective weight that should be attributed to them. We conclude that states must adhere to some minimal constraints concerning the consideration of refugees' concerns, and should (...) promote some further moral goals that go beyond these constraints. Finally, we suggest a scheme that meets all the moral demands we argued for and seems feasible without posing serious threats to the destination states. (shrink)