I offer an interpretation of the target of Søren Kierkegaard’s corrective to Luther as not merely cultural Lutheranism but Luther's very conception of what it means to be receptive to grace. On this interpretation, while Kierkegaard affirms that salvation is by grace alone, and through faith alone, he thinks that Luther errs when he conceives of salvation as a process in relation to which the believer is merely passive. Instead, in Kierkegaard’s view, receptivity to grace involves a (...) distinctive, middle-voiced, form of human agency in which the believer learns to acknowledge her need for grace. With reference to Kierkegaard’s discourses on patience, and their thematic proximity to the spirituality of the Philokalia, I illustrate this conception of active-passivity and show how it is compatible with an uncompromising Lutheran emphasis on human powerlessness. With reference also to his insistence of the irreducible importance of the participant’s perspective, I further draw out from Kierkegaard an account of why the temptation may arise to erroneously interpret the core tenets of Luther's teaching, in the mode of a theory of soteriological passivity. (shrink)

In the Republic Plato holds that the philosopher must frequently glance in two directions: at ideal justice and at that justice which he can help to reproduce in this world. Philosophers have traditionally had trouble moving from the former to the latter glance; men of action have traditionally neglected the former glance altogether. King was by no means a great philosopher; nonetheless his enormous success at making our world a more just place—because of his vision of ideal justice—reminds us of (...) Plato’s description. Further, this vision depended just as heavily, we are told, on philosophy as theology. (shrink)

This book’s goal is to give an intellectual context for the following manuscript. -/- Includes bibliographical references and an index. Pages 1-123. 1). Philosophy. 2). Metaphysics. 3). Philosophy, German. 4). Philosophy, German -- 18th century. 5). Philosophy, German and Greek Influences Metaphysics. I. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich -- 1770-1831 -- Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus. II. Rosenzweig, Franz, -- 1886-1929. III. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, -- 1775-1854. IV. Hölderlin, Friedrich, -- 1770-1843. V. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel, 1952-. [Translation (...) from German into English of the-- Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus.]. -/- Note: the manuscript is in the handwriting of G.W.F. Hegel, but the actual authorship is disputed. No date is given. Franz Rosenzweig made up the title as it is known today. He published the text in 1917. At that time, F. Rosenzweig thought F.W.J. Schelling was the author. No one has read this book for errors. As always, any errors, mistakes or oversights etc. are mine alone. Given a couple more years, I could improve this book. This is a philosophical translation and not a philological translation. Martin Luther who did the famous early translation of the Bible into German wrote in a letter, “If anyone does not like my translation, they can ignore it… (September 15, 1530)”. There are no ‘correct’ translations. Some are just better than other translations. -/- The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism. The German title is: Das Älteste Systemprogramm Des Deutschen Idealismus. This title was made up by Franz Rosenzweig in 1917, when he first published the manuscript. He found the manuscript in the Royal Library in Berlin in 1913. The manuscript suggested date is around 1796 and was done by handwriting research. However, the manuscript is not dated. The Prussian State Library auctioned in March 1913 from the auction of the house Liepmannssohn in Berlin a single sheet on the front and back with Hegel's cursive handwriting. The manuscript was lost during WWII. But Dieter Henrich found it again in 1979 in the “Biblioteka Jagiellonska” in Krakow (Poland), where it is today. Address: Jagiellonian Library, Jagiellonian University, al. Mickiewicza 22, 30-059 Cracow, Poland. Later research suggests that manuscript had come from the estate of Hegel’s student Friedrich Christoph Förster (1791-1868). He was one of the editors of Hegel’s posthumous works and most likely had access to a number of Hegel’s manuscripts. This text actually being one of them. Hegel traveled around Bohemia with Marie and Friedrich Christoph Förster around the year 1820-21 (see Klaus Vieweg). -/- Philosophical mystery -- who is the author or authors of this text? -/- Take a plunge into the deep and cold waters. Maybe a quagmire or quandary, but decidedly interesting. This project is to contextualize an old handwritten manuscript which is about 225 years old. The actual author is a mystery. I offer my own assessment. You can make your own assessments. The mystery has continued to unfold since 1917. There is plenty to read. Otherwise, think about the authorship and read more of the German philosophers and authors from this period and enjoy the depth of thinking and philosophizing. On one hand, there is just the sheer fun in the puzzle of the authorship questions; and on the other hand, these are the alluring thoughts that lead to the nascent stage of German Idealism and our intellectual heritage. There is no end to the accolades for this group of philosophers. A heritage that we still hear in in our attempts to move forward into our future. -/- Do your own astute exegesis (ἐξήγησις) as all paths are still open. Let your thought take to the wings of what is called thinking with this text. Critical encounters (Auseinandersetzung, or a Gegenüberstellung) with at least: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) --- starts here! German Idealism. We are not going to study this situation endlessly, instead we make some broad strokes and provide you a general context. You are allowed to read between the lines too. Goal: to understand the overall affinity and differences between the intellectuals of this period in German history; and to come to grips with this demanding text within its large scholarly context in the last 100 years. There are no final answers. (shrink)

With the broad interest in the concept of "self-care" within popular discourse, there is a growing focus among philosophers, scholars of religion, political theorists, and others on the idea of "spiritual exercises," the ethics of "the care of the self," and attending concepts, yet little has been written on the politics of this broad class of concerns. This book investigates the political consequences of practices of the self in the work of several key 20th-century thinkers-Pierre Hadot, Georges Friedmann, Michel Foucault, (...) Martin Luther King, Jr., and Audre Lorde. Using Hadot's working definition of spiritual exercises as "voluntary, personal practices intended to bring about a transformation of the individual, a transformation of the self," Daniel Wyche frames his argument with the questions: how, and under what conditions, can the ethics of "the care of the self" take the form of "the care of the other" in the sense of material political transformation and vice versa? Are there historical examples in which the two are coterminous? How might we articulate a genuinely holistic relationship between the two? He argues that understanding the politics of self-change necessarily entails that we reframe the practical and conceptual relationships between individual moral action and collective, systemic political life in such a way that ethics and politics can be thought together-neither prior to the other-and finds in King's political self-purification and Lorde's self-preservation forms that such a politics might take. (shrink)

Since the 1830s thinkers in both the United States and India have sought to establish analogies between their respective countries. Although many have felt the US black experience to have obvious parallels in India, there has been a fundamental disagreement about whether being black is comparable to being colonized or to being untouchable. By examining these two competing visions, this essay introduces new topics to the study of black internationalism, including the caste school of race relations, B. R. Ambedkar's anti-caste (...) movement, and the changing significance of India for Martin Luther King, Jr. (shrink)

I remember the first time that I heard James Cone's voice. A well-established, white scholar had just given what I thought to be a solid presentation on Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion of the "beloved community." When he had finished, Cone was one of the first to speak in the question and answer period. His strong tenor was piercing: "You can't talk about the dream, if you're not going to talk about the nightmare." He went on to clarify his (...) worry that the heart of King's message was too often lost when white scholars failed to put his thought in the context of the history and reality of the oppression of and violence against blacks in America. I have become afraid that my own thinking and writing about King's... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Black Natural Law by Vincent W. LloydDaniel A. MorrisBlack Natural Law Vincent W. Lloyd NEW YORK: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016. XV + 180 PP. $49.95Black Natural Law introduces and analyzes a "tradition" (Vincent Lloyd's term throughout the text) of African American natural law reflection. In so doing, Lloyd dismantles stubborn boundaries between Christian ethics, black religion, and American religious history. Black Christian writers such as Frederick Douglass are (...) often confined to the category of "history" and rarely elevated to esteemed intellectual disciplines such as "theology" and "ethics." Lloyd reverses that tendency. Like Catherine Bell, Robert Orsi, Miguel De La Torre, and others, he makes us question the hierarchical dualism between thought and practice, and our habit of associating white Christianities with the former and nonwhite Christianities with the latter. This book is worth reading for that feature alone. But there are many other worthwhile arguments as well.In his surveys of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Martin Luther King Jr., Lloyd identifies a coherent tradition of natural law reflection in African American Christianity that imagines a concentric series of laws, including God's law, moral law, and civic law. The tradition emphasizes the image of God in all human beings and thus the "inherent value of human life" (22). Black natural law reflection is distinctive primarily because it is rooted in black experience. At its core, it is informed by experiences of oppression sponsored by the civic law. Critique of ideology (which Lloyd sometimes uses as a synonym for civic/worldly law) is at the heart of black natural law, as is the organizing of social movements as a practical outgrowth of that critique. Lloyd also shows that black natural law sets itself apart from its white/European counterparts by understanding reason and emotion as mutually informing: emotion does and indeed should inform reason in moral reflection. And because God privileges the oppressed, black natural law also emphasizes its own priority over white theological ethics. Through close readings of black theologians, Lloyd pulls all these features together and persuasively shows that there is a coherent tradition of black natural law thinking in American Christianity. This primary argument is clear and indispensable for scholars of either black theology or natural law (or both).Lloyd also makes a provocative historical argument: the tradition began to decline after the civil rights movement and is currently in a state of disarray. He writes that "elements of black natural law continued to be invoked in various [End Page 199] ways during the decades that followed the civil rights movement—invoked in ways that were disconnected from the tradition" (120). He shows that literary, activist, and political uses of natural law ideas within black communities have lost the coherence and distinctive features that they once had. This argument includes innovative interpretations and critiques of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Barack Obama, Clarence Thomas, and others. This argument is all the more worthwhile for scholars and students of ethics and American religious history because Lloyd notes that a coherent expression of black natural law could help meet the crisis of mass incarceration.The book could, at times, engage secondary sources more effectively; for example, which natural law theories "focus exclusively on the human capacity to reason" (38)? How have other scholars understood Douglass's invocation of natural law concepts? It also offers an underdeveloped critique of pragmatism. These quarrels are trivial, though, in light of the thought-provoking arguments that Lloyd offers. Scholars working on Christian ethics, American religious thought, and black Christianity should all read this book. Black Natural Law would fit well on upper-level and graduate syllabi in these fields.Daniel A. MorrisAugustana CollegeCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Books reviewed:Renate Egger‐Wenzel, Ben Sira's GodPaul J. Achtemeier, Joel B. Green and Marianne Meye Thompson, Introducing the New Testament, Its Literature and TheologyI. Boxall, Revelation: Vision and Insight. An Introduction to the ApocalypseS. Moyise, Studies in the Book of RevelationG. R. Osborne, Revelation: The Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New TestamentN. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of GodGillian Clark and T. Rajak, Philosophy and Power in the Graeco‐Roman World: Essays in Honour of Miriam GriffinRichard Paul Vaggione, Eunomius of (...) Cyzicus and the Nicene RevolutionStephen T. Davies, Daniel Kendall S. J. and Gerald O'Collins, The Incarnation. An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Incarnation of the Son of GodRichard Cross, The Metaphysics of the IncarnationHugh Connolly, SinAnthony W. Bartlett, Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian AtonementStanley Hauerwas, With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural TheologySarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and GenderChristopher Cocksworth and Rosalind Brown, Being a Priest Today: Exploring priestly identityRandall Balmer, Encyclopedia of EvangelicalismKate Armstrong, Crisis and RepetitionAnthony A. Barrett, Livia: First Lady of Imperial RomeGerhard Podskalsky, Von Photios zu Bessarion: Der Vorrang humanistisch geprägter Theologie in Byzanz und deren bleibende BedeutungNicola Coldstream, Medieval ArchitectureW. J. Armstrong, J. A. W. Hellmann and W. Short, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, IIIEllen E. Kittell and Thomas F. Madden, Medieval and Renaissance VeniceTheodor Dieter, Der junge Luther und Aristoteles: Eine historisch‐systematische Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Theologie und PhilosophieAndrew Brown, Church and Society in England, 1000–1500Renate Blumenfeld‐Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren, The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious LiteratureBarry Collett, Female Monastic Life in Early Tudor England, with an Edition of Richard Fox's Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517Marc R. Forster, The Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque. Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime 1648–1789Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France 1780–1804Catharine Edwards, Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945Bruce L. Kinzer, England's Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish QuestionJohn Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth CenturyPeter M. Chisnall, John Henry Cardinal Newman: A Man of Courage, Conflict and ConvictionVincent Ferrer Blehl, Pilgrim Journey: John Henry Newman 1801–1845Kester Aspden, Fortress Church. The English Roman Catholic Bishops and Politics 1903–63David Alvarez, Spies In The Vatican: Espionage and Intrigue From Napoleon to the HolocaustPeter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi, Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American JesuitsRuby Blondell, The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine the religious peace activists during the war in Vietnam: Catholic (Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton), Jewish (Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel), Protestant (Martin Luther King, Jr.) and Buddhist (Thich Nhat Hanh) who, together with many others, constituted the greatest example of interfaith peace activism in our nation’s history. I extract from their writings principles that would enable us to create an interfaith peace movement today in a world desperately in need of such ecumenical (...) activity. Recently the worldwide Muslim community has called upon Christian and Jewish clerics and scholars to enter into an interfaith dialogue with them for purposes of peace. “Without peace and justice between [our] two communities,” these 138 Islamic scholars and clerics wrote to their Christian counterparts in October 2007, communities that constitute 55% of the world’s population, “there can be no meaningful peace in the world.” Christian and Jewish religious leaders and scholars have responded with wholehearted enthusiasm to the Muslim initiative. Judeo-Christian reconciliation in the 1960s in the wake of the Holocaust, which accomplished what must have been judged impossible only twenty years earlier, should be the model used to bring together all the major religions in the present century. In a spirit of respect and reverence, trust and reconciliation, with recognition of the holiness of all the major religions and in opposition to exclusivist conceptions of salvation and without any desire to convert others to one’s religion, this Islamic invitation to dialogue and peacemaking must be vigorously pursued and developed within the communities of all relevant nations where interfaith groups must be established in mosques, temples, churches and synagogues, for teaching, discussion and joint good works in peace and justice activities. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. -- War on war, by Lewis Thomas -- 2. -- Silent genocide, by Abdus Salam -- 3. -- Error: a stage of knowledge, by Paulo Freire -- 4. -- Doing without a revolution?, by Tahar Ben Jelloun -- 5. -- Stop torture, by Manfred Nowak -- 6. -- Truth, force and law, by Rabindranath Tagore -- 7. -- Violence is an insult to the human being, by Federico Mayor -- 8. -- Totalitarianism banishes politics, by (...) Vaclav Havel -- 9. -- No one will stop us. , by Desmond Tutu -- 10. -- Colonialism and the youth bomb, by Joseph Ki-Zerbo -- 11. -- The shedding of blood -- 12. -- Letter from Nagasaki, by Takashi Nagai -- 13. -- Down with exclusion!, by Herbert de Souza -- 14. -- The nower to sav 'no'. bv loan Martin-Brown -- 15. -- Inquiry into a taboo, by Ouassila Si Saber -- 16. -- The illusions of rationalism, by Ernesto Sabato -- 17. -- The 'poisonous weed', by Ba Jin -- 18. -- Humanity, an ongoing creation, by Ali Ahmad Said Esber (Adonis) -- 19. -- Image, writing and the vandal, by Alberto Moravia -- 20. -- The charms of calumny, by Andres Bello -- 21. -- On the threshold of eternity, by the Abbe Pierre -- 22. -- The control of force, by Karl Jaspers -- 23. -- The nature of force, by Simone Weil -- 24. -- The debt of justice, by Martin Luther King -- 25. -- Democracy and barbarism, by Sergei S. Averintsev -- 26. -- If all the animals should disappear, by Richard Fitter -- 27. -- Irony and compassion, by Octavio Paz -- 28. -- Against all hatred, by Aime Cesaire -- 29. -- Creating differences, by Daniel J. Boorstin -- 30. -- I dislike the word 'tolerance', by Mahatma Gandhi. (shrink)

This volume includes the texts of Erasmus's 1524 diatribe against Luther,De Libero Arbitrio, and Luther's violent counterattack,De Servo Arbitrio.

Martin Luther, to the venerable D. Erasmus of Rotterdam, wishing Grace and Peace in Christ. hat I have been so long answering your Diatribe on Free-will, ...

continent. 2.3 (2012): 218–223 Vijay Prashad. Arab Spring, Libyan Winter . Oakland: AK Press. 2012. 271pp, pbk. $14.95 ISBN-13: 978-1849351126. Nearly a decade ago, I sat in a class entitled, quite simply, “Corporations,” taught by Vijay Prashad at Trinity College. Over the course of the semester, I was amazed at the extent of Prashad’s knowledge, and the complexity and erudition of his style. He has since authored a number of classic books that have gained recognition throughout the world. The Darker (...) Nations , a peoples’ history of the Third World, sent defibrillating shockwaves through an academic world that had almost forgotten the epic scope and historic dignity of the non-aligned movement and post-colonial struggles. In his recent, award-winning work, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter , Prashad delves into his capacious knowledge of the Third World to excavate the discourses and narratives surrounding the upheavals of 2011. “Revolutions have no specific timetable,” states Prashad in the opening line of this exciting and provocative look at contemporary events. Instantly, an atmosphere of suspense emerges. The reader is alerted to the problem of history. Does the making of history then involve a suspension of historical time, or is it a continuous narrative structure into which events must eventually be integrated? Arab Spring, Libyan Winter shows that the answer to the question, “How is history made?” lies just as easily in the asking. The first half of the book works through the events that transpired to bring about the explosive popular uprisings of Arab Spring: Tunisia and Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain. But the events are not put together in a cohesive, chronological fashion. Using an uncommonly gripping style more akin to the folk-story motif of the djeli than to traditionally Orientalist academia, Prashad suspends a given situation, points out its components, and traces back the characters and genealogies that define each link before resuming a narrative. Every moment is an end to itself, and an origin of something different. Thus, the making of history becomes the suspension of its own progress, it’s catastrophic 'stability,' in a process of differentiation through inclusion. Empirically, one might suggest that history is a condition of time, and by extension, of the subject, but history is also an eminent producer of the Subject and her concept of time through memory and narrative. Hence, history is often overdetermined by a dominant narrative of the sovereign. The apparently chaotic composition of Prashad’s historicity is, then, an interstitial morphology of resistance. It illustrates that the time to act for the revolutionary lies in the gaps within the dominant historical realities. It points out the sorties of signifiers constituting nothing in the obliterated ruins of history. Through such illuminations, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter breaks through “the surface of history” to elaborate revolution’s snapping synapses, exploding interruptions and breaches, connecting flows. Messianic Politics It is tempting to think, 'History is either singular, or it is diffuse. It is either one coherent factual narrative, or it is comprised of the aletheia of the multitude.' Yet the reader finds Prashad examining the structure of history on multiple levels. For Prashad, world history is shaped by geographically defined political movements, such as communism or national liberation, with historical agents like the working class for the former and the nationalist militant for the latter. Religion, however, is another matter: “Religion has an unshakable eschatology which a post-utopian secular politics lacks.” Within the telos of religion, there appears on the horizon the image of Benjamin’s thoughts on messianic time—time as “a small fissure in the continuous catastrophe,” a break with history, may contain an ultimate redemption of the human beyond the political power struggle. Succoring the split between geo-political and utopian-religious (messianic) time in the context of Arab Spring, Prashad indicates that the base of “the deep desire and commitment to some form of democracy” is forged by the affinity between eschatological Islamist politics with the People. To think about the Subject of messianic time in the context of the lack of a “coherent timetable” for emancipatory politics, it is perhaps best to return to the modern tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose prefigurative blending of liberation theology and emancipatory politics became most important during his works of 1963, the climactic year of “The Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the March on Washington, and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. In “The Letter,” King states the point bluntly: Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” The timing of rebellious action must not be a part of history. It must change history. The kairos appears spontaneous and untimely in its convulsive, shocking presence, yet it is, deeper still, a path, a longue durée , forged through diligent and rigorous praxis. King put a finer point on the path of historic liberation in his declaration in his 1963 speech at Western Michigan University: “[T]ime is neutral.... Somewhere along the way we must see that time will never solve the problem alone but that we must help time. Somewhere we must see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels on inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social stagnation. We must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.” Time, then, exists in “the neutral,” while action must turn to the kairos , not only of taking time, but taking the right time. By turning our relation to time into kairos , we move time from its context within history to a duration between histories—the longue dure?e of Messianic time. The implementation of neutrality in this context suggests a broad space of time to extend through the valley of positive and negative. In Roland Barthes’s lectures from 1978, the neutral takes place in this minimal distance of non-conflict that exists outside of two extremes. It is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, “the non-general, the non-generic, as well as the non-specific.” For Blanchot, the neutrality of time permeates life as death, impassive and beyond control; such is the neutrality of messianic time, which permeates the charge of history, changing the "I" into the "one." The neutrality of time therefore implicates history in a case against extremism, showing that the work of the radical is not to tend to any particular side, but to have the time to navigate through the terrible terrain of history by altering its course, its patterns and rhythms of movement, connection, sociality. Hence, one does not simply “make history,” one alters the course of history in accordance to “the right time.” The historical path toward emerging power is transmitted as a gesture to the outside of history, against history; a gesture as simple as reaching out. Thus a counterhistory, to use Foucault’s term, is brought forward as the guide of time past a point of no return, a Rubicon, the point where the normal path of history falls to the past. The subject, who must be the only true agent of history, facilitates time through helpfulness, and both the Subject and her history become decentered in relation to one another. Yet history negates the neutrality of time. As Barthes discloses, although the neutral is the “thought and practice of the nonconflictual, it is nevertheless bound to assertion, to conflict, in order to make itself heard.” Engaged with history, time is charged with a destiny, and becomes an opposition. As Prashad insists, “For Arab lands, the events of early 2011 were not the inauguration of a new history, but the continuation of an unfinished struggle that is a hundred years old.” The emergence of the Subject during Arab Spring did not conceive of a new history, but changed the path of history toward a different destiny. “Historical grievances combined with inflationary pressures now met with the subjective sense that victory might be at hand—this was not simply a protest to scream into the wind, but a protest to actually remove autocrats from their positions of authority. The facts of resistance had given way to the expectation of revolutionary change.” The negativity of this charge toward “revolutionary destiny” rendered control, as a positive force, seriously lacking. The lack of control lies in the problem that the Subject is not totally detemporalized or timeless, but untimely in her presence. The Subject is untimely, because her work is visionary, and it is only through such visionary work that the Rubicon can be crossed. Still, the crossing of this border is haunted by anxiety over an impending disaster that lays in wait. It is only through the form of what Benjamin calls divine violence, captivated not with the justice of the means, but the ends—the transformation of history—that a revelation of history’s traumatic foundations can be liberated, and patterns and rhythms of time developed throughout obscured traditions awakened. In this situation, the Subject appears to be outside of right, but setting the state to rights. Because her position is correct, in-so-far as the rebelling subject rebels due to a lack of recognition, her representation appears outside of the norm, which is mistaken as right. Therefore, such visionary work must be carried out through obscured traditions, underground, away from the surveillance of empire. Explaining his method from the start along the lines of Marx’s metaphor of the mole, Prashad insists, “It is the burrowing that is essential, not simply the emergence onto the surface of history.” Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a book on uncharted networks of time, spread out over the 252 pages like an elaborate spider’s web of passages intertwining with and overwhelming the machinery of the state. Although untimely, Arab Spring was not a flash in the pan, or a Facebook or Twitter revolution. Prashad notes that the government’s suspension of these tools led to further radicalism by furthering communications through face-to-face encounters. In existential terms, Arab Spring might be thought of as a revolution of Being over techne , an uprising of the unchartable, infinite potential of the Other. The name of this Other is found in Chance. The faith of the revolution lies in the proper decentering of the subject, its giving to the Other of time, for only with respect to time does history actually appear on the horizon of the subject, rather than as an imposition. This time of historical agency appears as a moment when anything can happen—a revolutionary truth event where everything comes into question while being realized in its Otherness as a community of the people begins anew in the streets amidst discourse, friendship, reconfigurations of hegemony, and a becoming of a constituent power. Throwing a wrench into the gears of the “cobwebbed tradition” of Orientalism, the decentering of history in Arab Spring, Libyan Winter is a defining quality of its impassioned revolutionary cry. But perhaps the most paradigmatic points of the book emerge from the unexpected voices. To make the connection between the particular manifestations of revolutionary demands to the general historic terms of revolution, Prashad quotes an anonymous young Egyptian in Tahrir Square, who reminds us, “[T]he French Revolution took a very long time so the people could eventually get their rights.” Far from timelessness, the historicization of Arab Spring must exist precisely within the most uncanny appearance of time, as something that does not appear to come from the natural state of time as we know it, but in arriving has completely transformed the way that we understand time. Strange Monsters Revolution is never as simple as a revolt from below against a rusting structure of elites trying to remain in power. As with the French Revolution, Arab Spring consisted of complex familial ties, outside interests, and religious factions fighting alongside, often in awkward juxtaposition to, liberals, working class parties, farmers, and students. It is perhaps because of this historically difficult and incongruous composition that the Arabic word for revolution is thawra , referring to the image of the bull, or thawr , which has religious significance as a pagan deity for the Ancient Semitic tribes and Cartheginians. If Daniel Guérin was correct in saying, “Anarchism and Marxism drink from the same spring,” then it is quite a different oasis that drove the thirsty beast of revolution through what Prashad calls, “the Libyan labyrinth.” Recalling Bataille’s Acéphale, the intestinal labyrinth gains significance as the mode of metabolism and rumination in which, “(the Acephale) has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words, as a monster.” Unraveling the discourse of the revolution, the flows of power and hegemony—from Qaddafi’s nationalist coup in 1969 to the wars with Chad from 1978 to 1987, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s to, finally, the War on Terror—we find that the metabolic process of Libyan Winter ends in the production of oil. In a process of what Prashad calls “involution,” Qaddafi’s bellicose policies, along with his attempts to nationalize Islam together with oil, mutated the source of his power, turning his house against itself. Already a divided nation, with its two major cities on opposite geographic sides of the country, Libya became split between two opposed political powers—liberal reformists and staunch nationalists—as Qaddafi’s political disengagement manifested through what can only be described in psychoanalytic terms as a recursive passage a l’act (mysteriously calling Wikipedia “Kleenex,” declaring that opponents drank hallucinogens with their instant coffee, and so on). Prashad declares, “The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty… did not have any ideological commitment to the system.” As in the case of other nations during Arab Spring, the true expression of revolt was an outward exposition of what had inwardly been happening in microcosmic societies throughout the realm—from indigenous tribes to political parties, for a century, the people, partly motivated by (and in resistance to) economic impositions of development, had been changing the traditional social compositions and participating in what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls, “the relative autonomy of the movement from the leaders.” It was this empowerment of political reconfigurations taking place under the context of new democratic assemblages that shocked the elites and evoked such a powerful response. Unlike Qaddafi’s awkward policy choices and rants, real acts of power from the West were clear and decisive. Prashad sets the stages of war and diplomacy, far removed from the deserts, mountains, and cities that forged the backdrop of popular politics. Taking place under the now-classic architecture of the “four pillars” of US interests—oil, the War on Terror, Israel, and the circumvention of Iranian hegemony—we find elites rubbing elbows in “Heliopolist cocktail parties and hushed conferences in Kasr al-Ittihadiya” as well as the Concorde-Lafayette hotel in Paris, which provides the setting for a meeting of anti-Qaddafi figures consolidating their power. These scenes are buttressed with the careful portraiture of key historical actors. As Prashad brings the stage of history to life, we find the diplomats and liberals like Frank Wisner, whose career has brought him from Enron in the late 1990s to the Obama Administration, under the aegis of which he was meeting with Mubarak about military support during Arab Spring. We spy the provocateurs, for instance, gauche cavalier , Bernard Henri-Levy, who telephones Sarkozy from Benghazi about the need for more NATO air strikes. We follow the rebel military establishment as it suffers mysterious deaths and even more mysterious assents (like that of apparent CIA cohort, Khalifa Hifter). In each of these intriguing characters, we find different representations of the security state biopolitique: an oil-injected reification that drives Arab Spring from the resentment of rising food prices to the brink of implosion in Libyan Winter. Reminiscent of the scenes of Cold War soirées represented in old Bond films, the aristocratic fight for oil against democracy that was Libyan Winter presents a harsh truth that the new global crisis is simply the continuation of the old history: the global exploitation of capitalism waged against the imagination of the people. As Benjamin laments, “The labyrinth is the right path for the person who always arrives early enough at his destination. This destination is the marketplace.” Yet, “(t)he labyrinth is the habitat of… a humanity (a class) which does not want to know where its destiny is taking it.” Thus, the labyrinth leads, like the desert, only further into itself. As Blanchot explains, “The desert is even less certain than the world; it is never anything but the approach to the desert.” Only the visionary can take time out of the involution toward oblivion. It is here, in this approach to and escape from history, that we find ourselves within Benjamin’s Golgotha, Blanchot’s desert: A space of indeterminate uncertainty where we become familiar only with our own exile. Blanchot writes, “For the moderated and moderate man, the room, the desert, and the world are strictly determined places. For the man of the desert and the labyrinth, devoted to the error of a journey necessarily a little longer than his life, the same space will be truly infinite, even if he knows that it is not, all the more so since he knows it.” The desert, as allegory, provides an eschatology, a mortality in the destiny of Arab Spring. But any allegory of nature might lead to a labyrinthine eschatology (for example, in Bachelard, the forest presents "a limitless world"); the prescience of the untimely is always an uncanny acceptance of the infinite within the finite—the outside of what is understood. Transgenerational and occupied with the image of the future, the untimely makes otherness its home as it proceeds toward liberation. In the work of helping time navigate this dangerous passage of history, Prashad illustrates that the more violent break with history may have occurred in the peaceable struggles of Tahrir Square, and not in the military clashes of Qaddafi with his former Generals who defected to the CIA and NATO countries. It might be possible to suggest, then, that in the case of Tunisia and Egypt, the historical subject of the people was drawn together in a Dionysian dance of different rhythms in the marvelous realm of the ancients, while we fear that the case of Libya suggests an Apollonian future where time, itself, may lay dying under the machinic hand of history. The properly Nietzschean inversion would follow: time is dead, for history has killed it. Yet, if time is dead, struck down in Golgotha, exposed in the desert, mauled by the thawra , it is only in the present sense that it is rendered impossible outside of the context into which the untimely has thrown us. Thus, if history becomes an art of revolution, life as being-towards-death (death as the provocation of the neutrality of time) becomes what Benjamin calls “the allegory of resurrection” through the glorious ruins of history. Prashad ends his work with a rousing finale: “The time of the impossible has presented itself. In Egypt, where the appetite for the possibilities of the future are greatest, the people continue to assert themselves into Tahrir Square and other places, pushing to reinvigorate a Revolution that must not die… For them the slogan is simple: Down with the Present. Long live the Future. May it be so.&rdquo. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Don’t hate the media, lie to the media. Defence and illustration of lying by the Italian Luther Blisset collective.

Mitte Oktober 1518 befand sich Luther in Augsburg, um sich einem Verhör durch den päpstlichen Sondergesandten Kardinal Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534) zu stellen. Die Zusammenkunft fand am Rande des gerade in der Reichsstadt tagenden Reichstags statt. Mit größtem Einsatz versuchte Luther, Cajetan von seiner Argumentation zu überzeugen, der Dominikaner lehnte eine inhaltliche Auseinandersetzung allerdings ab. Die katholische Kirche verfolgte mit dem Verhör einzig das Ziel, Luther zum Widerruf seiner Thesen zu bewegen, worauf dieser wiederum nicht einging. Die Augsburger (...) Ereignisse fasste Luther für die Öffentlichkeit Ende 1518 in den "Acta Fratris Martini Lutheri Augustiniani apud D Legatum Apostolicum Augustae", kurz "Acta Augustana", protokollartig zusammen. In das Dokument fügte er zusätzlich noch ein ursprünglich geheimes Schreiben Papst Leos X. (1513-1521) an Kardinal Cajetan ein. In dem Breve ermächtigte das Oberhaupt der katholischen Kirche Cajetan dazu, Luther zu verhaften und nach Rom bringen zu lassen, falls dieser in Augsburg weiter gegen die päpstliche Lehre anreden und seine Ansichten nicht revidieren sollte. Luther erfuhr von dem Brief und verließ Augsburg deshalb sofort nach dem letzten Verhör am Abend des 20. Oktober. // Autor: Matthias Bader // Datum: 2016. (shrink)

The debate over physicalism in philosophy of mind can be seen as concerning an inconsistent tetrad of theses: (1) if physicalism is true, a priori physicalism is true; (2) a priori physicalism is false; (3) if physicalism is false, epiphenomenalism is true; (4) epiphenomenalism is false. This paper argues that one may resolve the debate by distinguishing two conceptions of the physical: on the theory‐based conception, it is plausible that (2) is true and (3) is false; on the object‐based conception, (...) it is plausible that (3) is true and (2) is false. the paper also defends and explores the version of physicalism that results from this strategy. (shrink)

"a man cannot be thoroughly humbled until he comes to know that his salvation is utterly beyond his own powers, counsel, endeavors, will, and works, and absolutely depending on the will, counsel, pleasure, and work of another, that is, of God only." So speaks Luther in his greatest book, On the Bondage of the Will. In this book, Luther replies to the arguments of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had pointed to all the commands in Scripture, and believed that (...) they implied that man could obey them. Luther replied that such an argument emptied the Gospel of its power. Luther throwing plenty of entertaining bombshells and insults along the way, but he also gets right to the heart on issues such as grace, human sinfulness, predestination, and man's need for absolute grace and forgiveness. (shrink)

This paper argues that praise is governed by a norm of standing, namely the evaluative commitment condition. Even when the target of praise is praiseworthy and known to be so by the praiser, praise can be inappropriate owing to the praiser’s lacking the relevant evaluative commitment. I propose that uncommitted praisers lack the standing to praise in that, owing to their lack of commitment to the relevant value, they have not earned the right to host the co-valuing that is the (...) communicative aim of praise. (shrink)

According to Normativism, what an expression means has immediate implications for how a subject should or may (not) employ that expression. Many view this thesis as imposing substantive constraints upon theories of linguistic meaning. In this paper, I shall not consider that view; instead, I shall address the prior issue of whether or not one should accept Normativism. Against certain recent prominent lines of attack common to a number of different anti‐Normativist discussions, I shall defend both the Normativist thesis and (...) an attempt to appeal to a certain platitude in its support. (shrink)

1. Happiness, then and now -- Happiness, eudaimonia, and practical reasoning -- Happiness as eudaimonia -- Happiness and virtuous activity -- New directions from old debates -- 2. Happiness then: the sufficiency debate -- Aristotle's case against the sufficiency thesis -- 3. Happiness now: rethinking the self -- Socrates' case for the sufficiency thesis -- Epictetus and the stoic self -- The Stoics' case for the sufficiency thesis -- The embodied conception of the self -- The embodied conception and psychological (...) well-being -- The Stoics' case against the embodied conception. (shrink)

Descartes’ Method of Radical Doubt was not radical enough. –A. Marcel (2003, 181) In short, heterophenomenology is nothing new; it is nothing other than the method that has been used by psychophysicists, cognitive psychologists, clinical neuropsychologists, and just about everybody who has ever purported to study human consciousness in a serious, scientific way. –D. Dennett (2003, 22).

The problems of access—retrieving linguistic structure from some mental grammar —and disambiguation—choosing among these structures to correctly parse ambiguous linguistic input—are fundamental to language understanding. The literature abounds with psychological results on lexical access, the access of idioms, syntactic rule access, parsing preferences, syntactic disambiguation, and the processing of garden‐path sentences. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to combine models which account for these results to build a general, uniform model of access and disambiguation at the lexical, idiomatic, and syntactic levels. (...) For example, psycholinguistic theories of lexical access and idiom access and parsing theories of syntactic rule access have almost no commonality in methodology or coverage of psycholinguistic data. This article presents a single probabilistic algorithm which models both the access and disambiguation of linguistic knowledge. The algorithm is based on a parallel parser which ranks constructions for access, and interpretations for disambiguation, by their conditional probability. Low‐ranked constructions and interpretations are pruned through beam‐search; this pruning accounts, among other things, for the garden‐path effect. I show that this motivated probabilistic treatment accounts for a wide variety of psycholinguistic results, arguing for a more uniform representation of linguistic knowledge and for the use of probabilistically‐enriched grammars and interpreters as models of human knowledge of and processing of language. (shrink)

One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is aclosest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewisand Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics forindicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of themeaning of ``if ... then ...'' statements, one with manyadvantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such atreatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery ofobjections. This paper outlines a closest-worlds account of indicativeconditionals that does better (...) than some of its cousins in explaining thebehaviour of such conditionals. The paper then discusses objectionsoffered by Dorothy Edgington and Frank Jackson to closest-worldsaccounts of indicative conditionals, and shows that these objections canbe met by the account outlined. (shrink)