In “The Crisis in Education,” her only essay dedicated to the topic of education, Hannah Arendt presents a position that in many ways runs counter to her conception of the political based on participation, actions and the potential for radical change. In so doing, she provides her readers, both political and pedagogical, with a perspective on education that challenges its instrumentalization for the sake of the political. To appreciate the counter-cultural yet commonsense claim Arendt makes, I will first consider the (...) meaning of the term citizenship and its Arendtian interpretation in a political context. Second, focusing on Arendt’s 1958 essay, I will explain why education is not first and foremost a public issue and therefore should not be interpreted as belonging to a political context. Connected to this, I bring to light Arendt’s well known discourse of the ensuing dangers of a confusion of the private and public realms. Her somewhat unwelcomed pedagogical-political contribution confronts us with our assumption that the solution to the crisis in citizenship lies within schools, showing it as yet another symptom of the political crisis of modernity. Having shown how and why schools cannot be asked to create citizens, I will – immersed in a paradox that Arendt recognizes – consider several means by which education can, in a secondary role, help us to understand and reflect upon the contemporary crisis in citizenship. (shrink)

In Who Sings the Nation-State?, co-written with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Judith Butler identifies the paradox between the seemingly global decline of the nation-state and the steadfast strength of its genealogical force. According to Butler, “Arendt allows us to realise that this may also be because the nation-state as a form was faulty from the start.” In the first section of the article, I focus on Butler’s analysis of Israel/Palestine as a failed nation-state and seek to identify its faulty start. I (...) propose that the nation has been masked by the race-religion constellation in the creation of the Westphalian race-state and identify this as the “faulty start” of the nation-state in European history. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion” and the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term “religion.” I contend that it is this genealogical force of the nation that frames Israel/Palestine, which was, and is, Europe’s offspring, and at times its prodigal son. In the third and final section I discuss alternatives to the nation-state by means of the notion of diasporic political communities, as taken up by Butler and Paul Gilroy respectively, to assess what such communities can provide instead of the exclusionary racist binary that is the faulty start and driving force of the race-state. (shrink)

The construction of narrative wholes in historiography involves more than logic, but aesthetics as well. It is imagination as well as logic which generates the more or less concretized images constituting the background onto which the historian, "playing" with basic information, imposes some content and portrays some event by means of a narrative. These concretized images incorporate an aesthetic sense of order. Historical narratives also employ general terms which "bind together" the various elements of basic information which, when linked together, (...) form a historical narrative; these general concepts also invoke an aesthetic sense in virtue of which their identity is formed. In both these ways the aesthetic dimension is crucial in the formation of historical wholes. (shrink)

This article traces the hidden race-religion constellation in Europe. The term “race-religion constellation” refers to the connection or co-constitution of the categories of race and “religion.” Specifically, the term “race-religion constellation” is used to refer to the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term “religion.” This calls for a consideration of European history and forms of racism in Europe, such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. This article aims to provide an alternative non-secularized or (...) biological account of the origins of the socially constructed category of race in Europe. The alternative story begins in the sixteenth century, when the category of “religion” as a means for classifying peoples was both constructed and politicized. In tracing this alternative story, this article seeks to outline a framework for a critical philosophy of race focused on a European religion line that intersects with Du Bois's color line. (shrink)

By bringing Hannah Arendt’s politics into dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics, this book develops an approach to the political that is relational, inclusive, and empowering.

Эта книга - руководство к действию, которая может помочь читателю заново осмыслить важнейшие человеческие ценности.

?German warplanes fired on two hijacked military fuel trucks in the northern province of Kunduz killing an estimated 90 villagers?.? While the debate over what is now known as the Kunduz Air Strike in 2009 has by no means ended, it has ? or so I shall argue ? missed a key point. By allowing the media's witchlike hunt for a scapegoat to dominate the military debate, a critical consideration concerning the ethics of network-enabled operations has been overlooked. As such, (...) I take the tragedy of the Kunduz air strikes as a case study of the failure of network-enabled operations, focusing on the ethical questions that this raises. To do so, I will begin with a description of what happened before, during and after the air strike. Following this, I consider three ethical concerns that arise as a result of network-enabled operations. I end with a proposal to increase the possibility of ethically reflective decision-making in network-enabled operations, which calls for a relational type of thinking and a complementary form of training. (shrink)

This monograph by Prof. Karapetyan is an ambitious effort aiming at discovery of the concept of dual unionism as a universal element of the material world, human spirituality and philosophical consciousness, and therefore, of the mega-paradigmal principle of philosophy.

In attempting to establish a correspondence between the content of historical narrative and that of past facts, F. R. Ankersmit identifies a "mechanism" which enables one to arrive at a narrative representation of the past. He asserts that the mechanism cannot be called a "translation," since the correspondence is indirect. Narrative is, however, closer to the truth than he has stated. Historical narratives can be evaluated on their proximity to the truth by the degree of their coherence. Coherence can be (...) judged on two criteria: the kind of temporal content and the kind of conceptual organization of the worldview of the annalist. The chronicle emerged in the late Middle Ages. Temporally, the chronicler uses retrospection to introduce causal links in a chain of events. The worldview of the chronicler provides the conceptual organization. Strictly historical narratives took form in the nineteenth century and have a temporal organization which is both retrospective and prospective. The control of the theoretical organization of a narrative by an historian can be said to be one of the fundamental rules whereby historiography becomes a more and more coherent and integrated presentation of the past. (shrink)

A procedure of historical explanation is proposed which integrates two approaches used by contemporary historians. The motivational model, focusing on the various kinds of motives encountered in historical narratives, and the deductive- nomological model, which focuses on the importance of external events, can be linked together to yield a better integrated explanatory system. The two approaches can be bridged by establishing even more general laws underlying ones already applied, or by searching for substantiations of causes and laws in the origin (...) of the entire historical process. On the basis of analysis of actual historiographical problems it becomes clear that historians mingle explanations in terms of human motives and external occurrences, without making the relations between them sufficiently clear. One needs to recognize that both motives and external events can be found in the historical process. Sequences of causes and effects in narratives have as an essential feature the intertwining of causes interpreted as motives and causes interpreted as external events. The objective conditions explained by the deductive-nomological model should find their reflection in the motivational model in the way that agents take cognizance of these conditions. (shrink)