In den USA haben sich im Wesentlichen drei verschiedene Organisationsformen klinischer Ethikberatung entwickelt: der einzelne Berater, das große Komitee und das Beratungsteam teilweise mit Rückbindung an ein größeres Komitee. Bislang gibt es jedoch weder empirische Daten noch ein Ergebnis der anfänglichen theoretischen Diskussion, ob es ein favorisiertes Modell für die klinische Ethikberatung geben sollte und welches dieses sei. Dieser Artikel argumentiert, dass die Vorzüge, Nachteile und die Erfolgsfaktoren der verschiedenen Organisationsformen in Abhängigkeit von der Zielsetzung klinischer Ethikdienste (KED) bewertet werden (...) müssen. Diese Zielsetzung kann auf einem Spektrum vom „Patientenanwalt“ bis zum „Gewissen der Institution“ angesiedelt sein. Die Zielsetzung bestimmt dabei Aufgabenschwerpunkte, Zusammensetzung, die favorisierte Organisationsform und wünschenswerte Standards. Die Untersuchung stützt sich zum einen auf die Analyse von Interviews mit fünf Vorsitzenden klinischer Ethikkomitees von Harvard Lehrkrankenhäusern in Boston, die jeweils etwa 20 Jahre Erfahrung in klinischer Ethikberatung mit den drei unterschiedlichen Modellen gemacht haben. Zum anderen basiert sie auf der Rezeption der Literatur und empirischen Studien zu KEDs in den USA und Deutschland. Insgesamt scheint das Konsilteam mit Rückbindung an ein Komitee am besten geeignet, die Behandlung einzelner Patienten und das ethische Bewusstsein einer ganzen Organisation zu verbessern. Es vereint die Vorteile der anderen beiden Modelle auf sich, ohne unter deren Schwächen zu leiden. (shrink)

Background: Nursing home residents are a vulnerable population. Most of them suffer from multi-morbidity, while many have cognitive impairment or dementia and need care around the clock. Several ethical challenges in nursing homes have been described in the scientific literature. Most studies have used staff members as informants, some have focused on the relatives’ view, but substantial knowledge about the residents’ perspective is lacking. Objective: To study what nursing home residents and their relatives perceive as ethical challenges in Norwegian nursing (...) homes. Research design: A qualitative design with in-depth interviews with nursing home residents, and focus-group interviews with relatives of nursing home residents. The digitally recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim. Analysis was based on Interpretive Description. Participants and research context: A total of 25 nursing home residents from nine nursing homes in Norway, and 18 relatives of nursing home residents from three of these nursing homes. Ethical considerations: This study was reported to and approved by the Regional Ethics Committee in Oslo, Norway. Findings and discussion: The main ethical challenges in Norwegian nursing homes from the residents’ and relatives’ perspective were as follows: (a) acceptance and adaptation, (b) well-being and a good life, (c) autonomy and self-determination, and (d) lack of resources. The relationship with the staff was of outmost importance and was experienced as both rewarding and problematic. None of the residents in our study mentioned ethical challenges connected to end-of-life care. Conclusion: Residents and relatives experience ethical challenges in Norwegian nursing homes, mostly connected to “everyday ethical issues.”. (shrink)

Many nursing scholars are inspired by philosophy when investigating phenomena within nursing. This paper focuses on the everyday practical knowledge of nurses. Based on an empirical project carried out in a surgical ward the authors make an attempt, with help from philosophy, at identifying and conceptualizing elements of knowledge in everyday practice. With reference to texts by Heidegger and Wittgenstein the authors investigate two dimensions of nursing knowledge: a dimension of doing and a dimension of being. These dimensions are further (...) developed and concretized in the paper. The doing dimension is emphasized through the concepts of adapting and exploring. The being dimension has its basis in being understanding and being connected. These two dimensions constitute a form of knowledge which is mobile and flexible. This knowledge is in place in everyday situations and it works where it is supposed to work. (shrink)

Background: Organ donation and transplantation have made it possible to both save life and to improve the quality of life for a large number of patients. In the last years there has been an increasing gap between the number of patients who need organs and organs available for transplantation, and the focus worldwide has been on how to meet the organ shortage. This also rises some ethical challenges. Objective: The objective of this study was to explore healthcare professionals' experience of (...) ethics related to care and interaction with critically ill patients with severe brain injuries and their families. Research design: A hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used to explore the participants' experiences. Methods for collecting data were a combination of participant observations and in-depth interviews. Participants and research context: Two ICUs in a Norwegian university hospital were recruited for data collection. A total of 12 cases were observed, and 32 of the healthcare professionals involved were interviewed. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the Regional Committee for Research Ethics. Permission to the study in the ICUs was obtained from the Chief Physician in the two ICUs respectively. The right of the participants was ensured by written, voluntary, and informed consent. Findings: From the thematic analysis, a structure of the participants' experiences emerged as a process. While the patients' condition was clarified through phases of prognostic ambiguity, gradual clarification and prognostic certainty, interaction with the families was characterized by ambiguity that involved withholding. The prognostic process had a great impact on how the healthcare professionals interacted with the family. The interaction challenged the participants' caring values in various ways and captured an important structure in their experiences of the ethical interaction with the patients' families. These challenges distinguish caring for families in donation situations from caring for relatives of critically ill patients in general. Discussion: In the discussion we have illuminated how professional ethics may be threatened by more pragmatic and utilitarian arguments contained in regulations and transplant act. Conclusion: Ethical questions should be discussed more both in educations of healthcare professionals and in clinical practice. (shrink)

Abstract This article explores interview data from a study of 50 Norwegian generalist nurses' focus group accounts of caring for dying patients in the hospital and care home. An eclectic discourse analytic approach was applied to nurses' accounts of the patient and three discursive contexts of reference to the patient were identified: the 'taken as read' patient, the patient paired with particular characteristics and the patient as psychologically present. Talk about the patient falls mainly into the first two contexts, which (...) position the patient in relation to three closely related discursive processes: individualization, anonymization and objectification. The third context presents the patient as a person with a particular identity. The analysis is discussed in a broader philosophical and sociological context in which we return to some of the theoretical work on death and dying of the 1990s and the topic of sequestration. We suggest that nurses' talk about the patient can be heard to participate in a continuing sequestration of the dying patient in healthcare institutions focused on 'result-oriented' care. (shrink)

Background: While being prepared for abortions, some women experience decisional ambivalence during their encounters with health personnel at the hospital. Women’s experiences with these encounters have rarely been examined. Objective: The objective of this study was to explore ambivalent abortion-seeking women’s experiences of their encounters with health personnel. Research design: The data were collected in individual interviews and analysed with dialogical narrative analyses. Participants and research context: A total of 13 women (aged 18–36 years), who were uncertain of whether to (...) terminate their pregnancies during the first trimester, were interviewed before and after they made their decisions. The participants were recruited at six Norwegian outpatient clinics. Ethical considerations: Approval was granted by the Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics. Findings: The ambivalent pregnant women sought to make autonomous decisions while simultaneously involving their closest confidants and health personnel in the process. The following three types of narratives of women’s experiences with encounters with health personnel were identified: the respected women; the identified women; and the abandoned women. Discussion: The findings are discussed in terms of the ambivalent pregnant woman’s autonomous responsibility in considering an abortion and how her autonomy can be enabled or impaired during encounters with health personnel. Conclusion and implication: Although the women considered themselves autonomous and responsible for their final decisions, they wished health personnel were involved in their situations. The health personnel contributed by enabling or disabling the possibility of decision-making in accordance with the women’s values. The findings indicate that health personnel who care for women considering abortions must be trained in dialogical competence. (shrink)

During preparation for early abortion in Norway, an ultrasound examination is usually performed to determine gestation and viability. This article aims to provide a deeper understanding of women’s and health care personnel’s (HCP) experiences with ultrasound viewing during abortion preparation in the first trimester. Qualitative in-depth interviews with women who had been prepared for early abortion and focus group interviews with HCP from gynaecological units were carried out. A hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis, inspired by van Manen, was chosen. Thirteen women who were (...) pregnant and considering abortion in their first trimester and 20 HCP, namely, 19 registered nurses and one medical doctor, were recruited from gynaecological units at six hospitals. The study was approved by the ethics committee (2014/1276). The essential meaning structure of ‘autonomy under pressure’ consisted of two themes that expressed the different experiences of both the women and the HCP, namely, expectations versus precautions and choice versus protection. The women and HCP expressed different attitudes before the consultation that affected their experiences of the ultrasound examination. While the women had expectations of a clarification based on their choice to either see or not see the ultrasound image, HCP seemed to be more concerned with predetermined rules that they believed would protect the women. Consequently, the basis for dialogue was not optimal, and women’s autonomy was under pressure. Health care personnel are ethically challenged during preabortion ultrasound examinations. Meeting the individual woman’s needs and respecting her autonomy during preparation for abortion requires sensitivity, involvement, and dialogue skills by health personnel. According to the woman’s desire to be informed about the possibility of viewing the image during the abortion preparations, a dialogue that is focused in this direction should arise before the examination. (shrink)

In the last couple of years, increased attention has been directed at the question of whether there is such a thing as a distinctively political normativity. With few exceptions, this question has so far only been explored by political realists. However, the discussion about a distinctively political normativity raises methodological and meta-theoretical questions of general importance for political theory. Although the terminology varies, it is a widely distributed phenomenon within political theory to rely on a normative source which is said (...) to be political rather than moral, or at least foremost political. In light of this concern, the present paper moves beyond political realism in the attempt to explore alternative ways of understanding distinctively political normativity, in a way which may be useful for political theorists. More specifically, we investigate two candidate views, here labelled the “domain view” and the “role view,” respectively. The former traces distinctness to the “domain,” that is, to the circumstances of politics. This view has gained a lot of support in the literature in recent years. The latter traces distinctness to “role,” that is, the role-specific demands that normative-political principles make. Our twofold claim in this paper is that the domain view is problematic but that the role view is promising. (shrink)

When, if at all, can a federal political order expel a member state against its will? In political theory, expulsion has—unlike the scenario of secession as voluntary separation—so far received no...

Interrogating the ethical foundations of democracy, this volume provides an interdisciplinary understanding of key Gandhian concepts and their relevance to contemporary politics. It also re-interprets Gandhi's complex intellectual and political relations with other influential figures of Indian politics and culture such as B. R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

In recent years, some political realists have argued that there is a “distinctively political normativity” which should be used when construing and justifying political theories. Among realists focusing on a distinctively political normativity, one can identify two approaches. On the “moral view,” it is explicitly acknowledged that moral norms have a role to play in political normativity. On the “non-moral view,” distinctively political normativity is understood in terms of a non-moral kind of practical normativity. The non-moral view has received severe (...) criticism, not least pertaining to its instrumental versions. Recently, however, Carlo Burelli has attempted to develop a realist account that is faithful to the non-moral view, but which is said to avoid the criticism directed against non-moral accounts in general, and the purely instrumental ones, in particular. Burelli offers a functional account of distinctively political normativity, according to which the function of providing binding collective decisions generates a normative standard that is independent of morality. Despite its many innovative features, however, we argue that it fails with regard to the most pressing concern, which is not whether functional normativity is genuine normativity, but whether it is the right normativity for its assigned role. (shrink)

Political realists’ rejection of the so-called ‘ethics first’ approach of political moralists, has raised concerns about their own source of normativity. Some realists have responded to such concerns by theorizing a distinctively political normativity. According to this view, politics is seen as an autonomous, independent domain with its own evaluative standards. Therefore, it is in this source, rather than in some moral values ‘outside’ of this domain, that normative justification should be sought when theorizing justice, democracy, political legitimacy, and the (...) like. For realists the question about a distinctively political normativity is important, because they take the fact that politics is a distinct affair to have severe consequences for both how to approach the subject matter as such and for which principles and values can be justified. Still, realists have had a hard time clarifying what this distinctively political normativity consists of and why, more precisely, it matters. The aim of this paper is to take some further steps in answering these questions. We argue that realists have the choice of committing themselves to one of two coherent notions of distinctively political normativity: one that is independent of moral values, where political normativity is taken to be a kind of instrumental normativity; another where the distinctness still retains a justificatory dependence on moral values. We argue that the former notion is unattractive since the costs of commitment will be too high, and that the latter notion is sound but redundant since no moralist would ever reject it. Furthermore, we end the paper by discussing what we see as the most fruitful way of approaching political and moral normativity in political theory. (shrink)

The degree of doxastic revision required in response to evidence of disagreement is typically thought to be a function of our beliefs about (1) our interlocutor’s familiarity with the relevant evidence and arguments, and their intellectual capacities and virtues, relative to our own, or (2) the expected probability of our interlocutor being correct, conditional on our disagreeing. While these two factors are typically used interchangeably, I show that they have an inverse correlation in cases of disagreement about politically divisive propositions. (...) This presents us with a puzzle about the epistemic impact of disagreement in these cases. The most significant disagreements on (1) are the least significant disagreements on (2), and vice versa. I show that assessing the epistemic status of an interlocutor by reference to either (1) or (2) has uncomfortable consequences in these cases. I then argue that this puzzle cannot be escaped by claiming that we usually have dispute-independent reason to reject the significance of politically charged disagreement altogether. (shrink)

Although the concept of “AI governance” is frequently used in the debate, it is still rather undertheorized. Often it seems to refer to the mechanisms and structures needed to avoid “bad” outcomes and achieve “good” outcomes with regard to the ethical problems artificial intelligence is thought to actualize. In this article we argue that, although this outcome-focused view captures one important aspect of “good governance,” its emphasis on effects runs the risk of overlooking important procedural aspects of good AI governance. (...) One of the most important properties of good AI governance is political legitimacy. Starting out from the assumptions that AI governance should be seen as global in scope and that political legitimacy requires at least a democratic minimum, this article has a twofold aim: to develop a theoretical framework for theorizing the political legitimacy of global AI governance, and to demonstrate how it can be used as a compass for critially assessing the legitimacy of actual instances of global AI governance. Elaborating on a distinction between “governance by AI” and “governance of AI” in relation to different kinds of authority and different kinds of decision-making leads us to the conclusions that much of the existing global AI governance lacks important properties necessary for political legitimacy, and that political legitimacy would be negatively impacted if we handed over certain forms of decision-making to artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

Bodies in China uses Chinese philosophy to reframe Western scholarship on gender, body, and aesthetics. Does Confucianism rule out the capacity of women as moral subjects and hence as aesthetic subjects? Do forms of Chinese philosophy contribute or correspond to patriarchal Confucian culture? Can Chinese philosophy provide alternative perspectives for Western feminist scholars? The first section considers theoretical and philosophical discussions of Western traditions and how the ideas offered by Confucians and Daoists can provide alternative body ontologies for critical feminist (...) practices. The second section reviews female aesthetical representations ranging from The Book of Songs to the work of the controversial body artist He Chengyao. The third section traces changing perceptions of femininity from imperial to its current cosmopolitan era using a range of case studies including Ming dynasty literature, Hong Kong women's fashion in the 1960s, and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Overall, this book discusses new conceptual models that feminist scholars are using to displace dualism and emancipate notions of the body from Cartesian models and metaphors. (shrink)

The question of what role social and political practices should play in the justification of normative principles has received renewed attention in post-millennium political philosophy. Several current debates express dissatisfaction with the methodology adopted in mainstream political theory, taking the form of a criticism of so-called ‘ideal theory’ from ‘non-ideal’ theory, of ‘practice-independent’ theory from ‘practice-dependent’ theory, and of ‘political moralism’ from ‘political realism’. While the problem of action-guidance lies at the heart of these concerns, the critics also share a (...) number of methodological assumptions. Above all, their methodology is practice-dependent in the sense that an existing practice is assumed to put substantial limitations on the appropriate normative principles for regulating it. In other words, we cannot formulate and justify an appropriate principle without first understanding the practice this principle is supposed to govern. The aim of this paper is to map out and analyze the common denominators of these debates with regard to methodological commitments. We will investigate how this practice-dependent method may be understood and motivated. In particular, we point to challenges that must be met in order for the position to remain both distinct and attractive. (shrink)

Is it possible to build an authentically democratic system in politics without concrete ethical foundations? Addressing this question in the wake of the contemporary crisis in democracy worldwide, the volume re-evaluates Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s key thoughts. It foregrounds their relevance to the ongoing struggles that attempt to reconcile the apparently dissimilar orientations of politics and ethics. Collecting fresh interdisciplinary researches, the book provides insights into Gandhi’s complex — and occasionally turbulent — intellectual and political relationships with influential figures of Indian (...) society and politics, whether critics such as B. R. Ambedkar and friends like Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru. It also presents an informed political biography of Gandhi, encapsulating the salient details of his long trajectory as a unique mass mobilizer, socio-political activist and ideologue — from his days in South Africa to his death in independent India. This book will immensely interest scholars and students of political theory, philosophy, ethics, history, and Gandhian studies. (shrink)

The central ideas coming out of the so-called pragmatic turn in philosophy have set in motion what may be described as a pragmatic turn in normative political theory. It has become commonplace among political theorists to draw on theories of language and meaning in theorising democracy, pluralism, justice, etc. The aim of this paper is to explore attempts by political theorists to use theories of language and meaning for such normative purposes. Focusing on Wittgenstein's account, it is argued that these (...) attempts are unsuccessful. It is shown that pragmatically influenced political theorists draw faulty epistemological, ontological and semantic conclusions from Wittgenstein's view in their normative theorising, and it is argued that pragmatically influenced theories of language and meaning, however full of insight, cannot be put to substantial normative use in political theory. The general scope of the thesis is motivated by pointing to the general form of the argument and by moving beyond Wittgenstein to other philosophers of mind and language, illustrating how similar overextensions are made with regard to Robert Brandom's theory of language and meaning. (shrink)

_ This scholarly article explores the intricate dynamics of post-colonial politics, emphasizing the enduring legacies and continuous challenges faced by nations emerging from colonial rule. Analyzing the impact of historical colonization on contemporary political landscapes, the paper aims to shed light on the persisting influences, patterns, and complexities that shape post-colonial political structures. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the article engages with historical, sociological, and political perspectives to offer a comprehensive understanding of post-colonial politics._.

For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which (...) consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term “diaries.” By far the greater part of Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects—philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure—but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced. Volume 9 of this 11-volume series includes five of Kierkegaard’s important “NB” journals, which span from June 1852 to August 1854. This period was marked by Kierkegaard’s increasing preoccupation with what he saw as an unbridgeable gulf in Christianity—between the absolute ideal of the religion of the New Testament and the official, state-sanctioned culture of “Christendom,” which, embodied by the Danish People’s Church, Kierkegaard rejected with increasing vehemence. Crucially, Kierkegaard’s nemesis, Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster, died during this period and, in the months following, Kierkegaard can be seen moving inexorably toward the famous “attack on Christendom” with which he ended his life. (shrink)

In a previous article, we unpacked the so-called “ethics first premise”—the idea that ethics is “prior” to politics when theorizing political legitimacy— that is denied by political realists. We defended a “justificatory” reading of this premise, according to which political justification is irreducibly moral in the sense that moral values are among the values that ground political legitimacy. We called this the “necessity thesis.” In this paper we respond to two challenges that Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi raise against our (...) proposal. Their first claim is that our argument for the necessity thesis is question begging, since we assume rather than show that freedom and equality are moral values. The second claim is that Bernard Williams’s Basic Legitimacy Demand demonstrates the possibility of giving political legitimacy a non-moral foundation, since it allows for a distinction to be made between politics and sheer domination. We refute both claims. (shrink)

In this paper, two claims are made. The main claim is that a fruitful approach for theorizing the political legitimacy of global governance and the proper normative role of civil society actors is the so-called ‘function-sensitive’ approach. The underlying idea of this approach is that the demands of legitimacy may vary depending on function and the relationship between functions. Within this function-sensitive framework, six functions in global governance are analyzed and six principles of legitimacy defended, together constituting a minimalist account (...) of political legitimacy. This account suggests that civil society actors may strengthen political legitimacy by performing five of these functions under certain conditions and insofar as the proposed normative political principles are fulfilled: problem identification, agenda-setting, implementation, enforcement and monitoring, and evaluation. The second claim is critical and is chiselled out against the backdrop of this function-sensitive account, through which I demonstrate that much vagueness and confusion with regard to the proper role of civil society actors for strengthening the political legitimacy of global governance could be traced to the so-called ‘transmission belt’ model, which has gained popularity in international political theory. This model depicts civil society as a transmission belt between the public sphere and decision-making loci, where it is assumed that civil society actors contribute to the strengthening of political legitimacy by transmitting peoples’ preferences, beliefs, and opinions from the former to the latter space by indirectly or directly influencing the decision-making. It is argued that this picture is misleading and generates erroneous prescriptions of how civil society actors should act to increase political legitimacy. (shrink)

This book is about the status of political equality under global political conditions. The overall aim is to revitalize the debate on the status of political equality in transnational democracy.

Having encountered landmines in offering a critique of philosophy based on my experience as the mother of a cognitively disabled daughter, I ask, “Should I continue?” I defend the idea that pursuing this project is of a piece with the invisible care labor that is done by people with disabilities and their families. The value of attempting to influence philosophical conceptions of cognitive disability by virtue of this experience is justified by an inextricable relationship between the personal, the political, and (...) the philosophical. If one grants that the “special relationship” between mother and child requires moral recognition, then I need first to make vivid the case that this relationship in the case of a child who lacks some “normal capacities” is indistinguishable from any mother‐child relationship. If this is so, then I believe I can make a case that has as its conclusion that the moral personhood of even the severely cognitively disabled must be granted. Moreover, such recognition, I argue, necessitates the recognition of others who bear no special relationships to the child. (shrink)

In the modern age, the political secret has acquired a bad reputation. With modern democracy’s ideal of transparency, political secrecy is identified with political crime or corruption. The article argues that this repression of secrecy in modern democracies falls short of a substantial understanding of the structure and workings of political secrecy. By outlining a genealogy of political secrecy, it elucidates the logic as well as the blind spots of a current culture of secrecy. It focuses on two fundamental logics (...) of secrecy, deduced from the Latin terms ‘ arcanum’ and ‘ secretum’. Whereas the logic of arcanum regards secrecy as a legitimate dimension of government, a modern logic of secretum is marked by an inextricable dialectics between the withdrawal and communication of knowledge, between secrecy and publicity. Here, the secret is not so much a piece of withheld knowledge as a ‘secrecy effect’ that binds the realm of secrecy to the public sphere by a dialectics of permanent suspicion and scandal. Instead of falling into the trap of this ‘secrecy effect’ it is worth taking a closer look at the tradition of thought on the arcana imperii, from Tacitus to early modern doctrines of raison d’état to Carl Schmitt. What this tradition deals with is the functionality of secrecy and its complicated relation to the law. The arcana tradition elaborates the crucial point of secrecy: its potential, but also its profound ambivalence. Secrecy opens up a discretionary space of action exempt from the rule of law, and, according to Carl Schmitt, ignores the law so as to allow it to become effective. Secrecy serves to protect and stabilize the state, but at the same time it opens a space of exception from the rule of law that breeds violence, corruption and oppression. Instead of seeing secrecy as the opposite of a political culture of transparency, it is more productive to regard secrecy as transparency's complement – a counterpart, however, that is marked by the profound paradox of being both a consolidation of and a threat to democracy. (shrink)

Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents, "love's labors", figure neither in political ...

For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which (...) consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term "diaries." By far the greater part of Kierkegaard's journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects--philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure--but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Volume 5 of this 11-volume series includes five of Kierkegaard's important "NB" journals, covering the months from summer 1848 through early May 1849. This was a turbulent period both in the history of Denmark--which was experiencing the immediate aftermath of revolution and the fall of absolutism, a continuing war with the German states, and the replacement of the State Church with the Danish People's Church--and for Kierkegaard personally. The journals in the present volume include Kierkegaard's reactions to the political upheaval, a retrospective account of his audiences with King Christian VIII, deliberations about publishing an autobiographical explanation of his writings, and an increasingly harsh critique of the Danish Church. These journals also reflect Kierkegaard's deep concern over his collision with the satirical journal Corsair, an experience that helped radicalize his view of "essential Christianity" and caused him to ponder the meaning of martyrdom. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced. (shrink)

For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which (...) consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term "diaries." By far the greater part of Kierkegaard's journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects--philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure--but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Volume 4 of this 11-volume series includes the first five of Kierkegaard's well-known "NB" journals, which contain, in addition to a great many reflections on his own life, a wealth of thoughts on theological matters, as well as on Kierkegaard's times, including political developments and the daily press. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced. (shrink)