En este estudio se presentan las líneas directrices de una investigación que se propone analizar el sentido y el significado que se otorga a los conceptos de “bien común” e “interés general” en la retórica de los poderes públicos de nuestro tiempo. A continuación, trata de dar respuesta al interrogante de si ambos conceptos son perfectamente intercambiables en el debate público o, por el contrario, estamos ante conceptos que proceden de presupuestos antagónicos.

Ética, ludificación y marketing han constituido tres realidades cuyo desarrollo ha transcurrido separadamente hasta bien avanzado el siglo XX, momento en el que asistimos a una eclosión de las mismas. Recientemente surgen estudios que se proponen indagar si la ludificación y el marketing poseen un sustrato ético, a partir de los cuales, en este trabajo profundizamos en la repercusión moral que tiene la interrelación entre ludificación y marketing expresada a lo largo de tres tradiciones éticas de amplia trayectoria (utilitarismo, deontologismo (...) y ética de la virtud), como es puesto de manifiesto por la literatura especializada. (shrink)

Total Quality Management (TQM) is an overall management philosophy that includes a set of principles whose application is increasing. In fact, the business world and public institutions, such as hospitals, universities or city councils, are implementing quality programs. However, despite the wide diffusion of TQM, the success rate of this type of initiative is limited and the results, heterogeneous. Academics and professionals are therefore trying to identify the keys that explain the success or failure of this kind of initiative. Different (...) explanations have been given, but most of the literature agrees that managerial commitment, implication and leadership are indispensable elements in a successful implementation of TQM. Nevertheless, a study on the specialised literature shows a terminological confusion between managerial commitment and managerial leadership. Is it the same to have a committed manager in the implementation process as to have a leader of the implementation process? The author of this paper defends the thesis that "commitment" and "leadership" are not synonymous, and states that only managerial leadership is able to promote and sustain profound organisational changes. The paper will show that, to understand the previous distinction, it is necessary to consider the ethical dimension of leadership. While committed managers may lead the process by using exclusively their power (with the necessary resource assignment), those who are leaders need authority. Authority goes further than power by generating a kind of confidence (trust) that is able to influence the members of the organisation and bring about profound changes, more than power alone can do. (shrink)

En este estudio se presentan las líneas directrices de una investigación que se propone analizar el sentido y el significado que se otorga a los conceptos de “bien común” e “interés general” en la retórica de los poderes públicos de nuestro tiempo. A continuación, trata de dar respuesta al interrogante de si ambos conceptos son perfectamente intercambiables en el debate público o, por el contrario, estamos ante conceptos que proceden de presupuestos antagónicos.

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 32, Issue S2, Page 65-67, September 2023.

En este artículo se va a analizar el impacto de la correlación entre el fenómeno creciente de la individualización de nuestras sociedades y la proliferación de formas de violencia juvenil. Manifestaciones de lo primero las tendríamos en la reivindicación de la libertad negativa, en terminología de Isaiah Berlin, y en la exaltación del cuidado del yo, entendido en este caso de un modo muy restringido. Expresiones de lo segundo las tendríamos en el fenómeno de la creación de guetos que, a (...) su vez, se ramifica en una pluralidad de escenarios (no necesariamente vinculados a la marginación). La tesis que se va a defender en esta contribución se concreta en la necesidad de fortalecer la dimensión moral del vínculo social, como instancia superadora de formas de organización tecnocráticas que devienen incapaces de trascender un paradigma basado en el individualismo y en el pragmatismo. De hecho, aunque este paradigma técnico-funcional de la vida social se presenta a menudo suavizado por la revalorización de los aspectos emocionales de la vida, el énfasis en las emociones permanece en un plano puramente autorreferencial, limitado al logro del propio bienestar, despreocupado del contenido valorativo implícito en las reacciones emocionales y, por tanto, al margen de las exigencias éticas que en ellas se encuentran anunciadas. (shrink)

While acknowledging Hannah Arendt's keen philosophical and political insights, Kathryn T. Gines claims that there are some problematic assertions and oversights regarding Arendt’s treatment of the "Negro question." Gines focuses on Arendt's reaction to the desegregation of Little Rock schools, to laws making mixed marriages illegal, and to the growing civil rights movement in the south. Reading them alongside Arendt's writings on revolution, the human condition, violence, and responses to the Eichmann war crimes trial, Gines provides a systematic analysis of (...) anti-black racism in Arendt’s work. (shrink)

To write a history “from antiquity to the present” of classical art or literature (or, worst of all, classicism) is the ultimate nightmare aspiration for a scholar whose colleagues are attentive methodologists. The product, when there is one (which I add because the aspiration can yield paralysis), is always in part an apologetic treatise on historical method. Professor Vout—of Christ's College, Cambridge—apologizes with the first word of her subtitle, A, which stresses that many differing histories may be as valid as (...) her own. The next two words, Life History, imply that her study is unauthorized, conjectural, a bit personal or informal, and reliant to an extent on unconfirmable stories. Her book, she tells readers, is of necessity an arrangement of “fragments” and “a mapping not of facts, but of ways in which Greek and Roman artifacts experience history.” She sets down, moreover, as a rule that “classical” is not “a self-standing category: it is always relational” (which historians of the novel have been telling us for many decades about “realism”).We might expect the result of Vout's axioms to be evenhanded diffidence when treating definitions of the classical, and indeed she entertains even the idea of Jeff Koons—maker of Balloon Venus (Orange) and Gazing Ball (Barberini Faun)—as a classical sculptor. There is, however, one approach that she dismisses out of hand: the obsession of classical humanism with authenticity and its renascence. She objects especially to research into the original conditions of objects and to the application of increasingly intrusive methods of restoring them. As she writes, “ ‘Real knowledge’ comes not from antiquities that have been ripped from their original context, cleaned and reconstituted for display in galleries and glass cabinets. ‘Real knowledge’ comes from antiquities that carry their dirt with them.”What Vout, as a critic of humanism, means by dirt is patina—the residue, interesting and sometimes beautiful in itself, of the use and misuse of objects. Dirt is a word that would occur to a humanist art historian when examining the patina of a Greek or Roman object. Vout's use of the word is a parodic expression of reverse snobbery. When studying changes, whether mistakes or enhancements, in a Greek or Roman document, a humanist literary historian would speak of corruption and edit the corrupt text by means of processes that humanist editors invented and perfected. Despite the humanists’ devotion to the recovery of classical learning, however, once a Renaissance edition of a manuscript was in print, the original, however rare, was often destroyed or lost. In effect, the work was reborn, better than new. Rebirth is not the same as preservation: though both are perhaps conservative (or better, in Ulysses's words, “rere regardant”), a renascence or a resurrection is cataclysmic.The humanist approach to the past can appear unlovable and is certainly arrogant, but it can also inspire awe and gratitude. The work of Michelangelo depended on it, and so (more to the point) did Martin Luther's. Vout's attitude toward dirt (patina, corruption, misprision, insertions, recontextualizations, bowdlerizations, misappropriations, translocations) resembles that of Catholic theologians to the depositum fidei. Restoring the original conditions of the Christian church involved methods of research learned from Renaissance humanists and the removal, often destructive, of the “deposit” or residue or patina that adhered to, distorted, discolored, and obscured the conditions of the “primitive church.” A Roman Catholic may well dislike the processes that Luther set in motion, but imagine a scholarly history of Christianity that mentioned Protestantism only to regret its existence.Still, Vout's reasoning, it seems to me, is more sophisticated in its defense of dirt and in its criticism of restoration than any offered against the Protestants’ reasoning during the Counter-Reformation. Consider, for instance, this inspiring passage: “When the curators at the Munich Glyptothek removed Thorwaldsen's restorations from the Aegina pediments, they did not so much take them back to a pristine state as out of the feedback loop, rendering them damaged goods. It was not a restriction of avenues or a change of direction that was being enacted here, but a refusal to speak the language, or rather an insistence that the only language worth speaking was an academic [humanist, restorationist] one.... In 2011, the Glyptothek marked the two hundredth year of the pediments’ discovery by putting new versions of Thorvaldsen's restored figures on display. They had relearned the lingo. For art to be ‘classical,’ it has to know its place in the discourse.” May lingo and feedback loop have successful careers in the lexicon of classical scholarship. “Far from producing a nostalgic narrative,” as Vout informs us, “the lessons learned from looking back ensure that we keep traveling.”. (shrink)

This critical commentary is presented in two parts. The first section, “Intersecting Contracts: Conceptual Interventions and Aims,” provides an overview of Mills's analysis of the racia-sexual contract and the divergent positions of white men, white women, nonwhite men, and nonwhite women. The second section, “Privilege and Patriarchy: Does ‘Race Generally Trump Gender’?,” shows how Mills offers an uneven representation of critiques presented by women of color theorists. For example, he focuses on the critiques of white women, emphasizing the asymmetry between (...) white women and nonwhite men as well as the tensions between white women and nonwhite women. This article also problematizes Mills's claim that “race generally trumps gender” and argues for a more nuanced analysis of nonwhite men's participation in patriarchy and privilege. (shrink)

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge introduces a long-term project titled “Antipolitics: Symposium in Memory of György Konrád.” Konrád, who died in 2019, was a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board, and the symposium is meant to find present-day applications for the arguments of his book Antipolitics, published in 1982 in Hungarian. Although written under Cold War conditions and to that extent dated, the book is directed against politics and politicians as such: “What Machiavelli's Prince is (...) to would-be rulers, Antipolitics should be for those resistant to being ruled — a treasury of axioms and apothegms,” which this editorial collects, updates, and analyzes. Given that democratic systems and constitutions are “open and subject to further development,” Konrád urges us to devise and run experiments in governance that apply “creative imagination” to problems that, in better times, we might leave to politicians to resolve. “The crisis for democracy today,” Perl argues, “is that bad government (as Konrád, Václav Havel, and Adam Michnik defined it in the 1980s) appears to be what various electorates crave and therefore choose.” Realizing that elections produce, as Aristotle said, oligarchy rather than democracy, we should rethink majority rule and experiment with sortition as a counterpolitical means of self-government. (shrink)

In this chapter I problematize Beauvoir's analogical analyses in The Second Sex, arguing that her utilization of the race/gender analogy omits the experiences and oppressions of Black women. Furthermore, taking into account select secondary literature that emphasizes these issues, I argue that several of Beauvoir's white feminist defenders and critics share in common their non‐engagement with Black feminist literature on Beauvoir. Put another way, Black feminists who explicitly take up Beauvoir in their writings have remained largely unacknowledged in the secondary (...) literature on Beauvoir by white feminists. As a corrective to this erasure, I highlight the scholarly contributions of Black feminists including Loraine Hansberry, Chikwenye Ogunyemi, Deborah King, Oyeronke Oyewumi, and bell hooks. (shrink)

This essay, which is the editor's introduction to part 1 of a multipart symposium on quietism, also constitutes his call for symposium papers. The symposium is meant be comprehensive. It is described as political and broadly cultural as well as religious, and in religious terms is said to cover not only the Catholic and Protestant quietisms (most properly so called) of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also the proto-quietisms of the medieval Western church and reputedly quietist aspects of (...) the Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, early Hasidic, Shi'ite, Jain and other Indic, Taoist, and Zen religious traditions. This introduction emphasizes the secular approaches, mostly antipolitical or postphilosophical, that wear the adjective “quietist” metaphorically, including the postmodern currents that Martha Nussbaum has named “hip quietism” and the “minimalist” philosophical version developed by Wittgenstein and some of his successors, notably Richard Rorty. This introduction concludes with attention to Rorty's late essay “Naturalism and Quietism,” then with a dedication of the entire symposium to Rorty's memory. (shrink)

Is Jean-Paul Sartre to be credited for Richard Wright's existentialist leanings? This essay argues that while there have been noteworthy philosophical exchanges between Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Richard Wright, we can find evidence of Wright's philosophical and existential leanings before his interactions with Sartre and Beauvoir. In particular, Wright's short story "The Man Who Lived Underground" is analyzed as an existential, or Black existential, project that is published before Wright met Sartre and/or read his scholarship. Existentialist themes that (...) emerge from Wright's short story include flight, guilt, life, death, dread, and freedom. Additionally, it is argued that "The Man Who Lived Underground" offers a reversal of the prototypical allegory of the cave that we find in the Western (ancient Greek) philosophical tradition. The essay takes seriously the significance of the intellectual exchanges between Sartre, Beauvoir, and Wright while also highlighting Wright's own philosophical legacy. (shrink)

In the last homily he gave before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described modern life as ruled by a “dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely” of satisfying “the desires of one’s own ego.” An eminent scholar familiar with the centuries-old debates over relativism, Ratzinger chose to oversimplify or even caricature a philosophical approach of great sophistication and antiquity. His homily depicts the relativist as someone blown about “by every (...) wind of doctrine,” whereas the relativist sticks firmly to one argument—that human knowledge is not absolute. Gathering prominent intellectuals from disciplines most relevant to the controversy—ethics, theology, political theory, anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, epistemology, philosophy of science, and classics—this special double issue of _Common Knowledge_ contests Ratzinger’s denunciation of relativism. One essay relates the arguments of Ratzinger to those of two other German scholars—the conservative political theorist Ernst Wolfgang Böckenförde and the liberal philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas—since all three men assume that social order depends on the existence of doctrinal authority. The contributors here argue for an intellectual and social life free of the desire for an “infantilizing” authority. One proposes that the Christian god is a relativist who prefers limitation and ambiguity; another, initially in agreement with Ratzinger about the danger relativism poses to faith and morals, then argues that this danger is what makes relativism valuable. The issue closes with the first English translation of an extract from a book on Catholic-Jewish relations by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, one of the Catholic Church’s most progressive figures. _Contributors_. David Bloor, Daniel Boyarin, Mary Baine Campbell, Lorraine Daston, Arnold I. Davidson, John Forrester, Kenneth J. Gergen, Simon Goldhill, Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Julia Kristeva, Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, Christopher Norris, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Richard Shusterman, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Jeffrey Stout, Gianni Vattimo. (shrink)

In this introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor reflects on the difference between the contributions to parts 1 and 2. Whereas the first installment concentrated on ethnography, the second focuses on the peacemaking repertoire of the Greco-Latin tradition, whose basis is psychological. That tradition is characterized by its refusal of wishful thinking about human nature and, in particular, by its doubt about claims that human drives other than thumos — the (...) rage for self-aggrandizement — motivate the initiators of wars. Given this assumption about motive, the Greco-Latin tradition tends also to regard negotiations based on the rational discussion of material interests as unlikely to succeed. Success requires symbolic and ritual gestures — acts of self-humiliation on the part of those apparently with the greatest power — by which thumos is propitiated and pacified. Most of the introduction considers cases of such settlements, including two contemporary efforts at ritual peacemaking, a successful one by Queen Elizabeth II in Ireland and an unsuccessful one by Pope Francis in the Middle East. (shrink)

This editorial note introduces the second of three issues of Common Knowledge dedicated to experiments in scholarly form. The first appeared in Winter 1996 and was introduced by a dialogue between two editorial board members, Greil Marcus and Hugh Kenner, who differed over whether tampering with set scholarly forms should be regarded as a serious business or as a matter of fun. Philosophically, this note explains, the journal takes exception to distinctions of the form-versus-content variety — a resistance that stems (...) from desire for peaceful transactions in intellectual life. But though the desire for peace, like any other, can be uncompromising, this one recoils from its own strength and requires indirect expression. One way, it is argued, to achieve indirection is to tamper with forms in which a strong position finds natural expression. Tampering, for instance, with the distinction between narrative history and fiction, or between discursive philosophy and poetry, is a time-honored maneuver. Hence the appearance in this special issue of three pieces on microhistory, along with the first installment of a two-part symposium on “lyric philosophy” and a “pseudepigraphon” premised on its author's conviction that not-for-credit truths are credible only if they appear to be fabrications. (shrink)

In this introduction to Part 1 of “Contextualism—the Next Generation: Symposium on the Future of a Methodology,” the editor of Common Knowledge, a “journal of left-wing Kuhnian opinion,” reports that the new symposium responds to contextualist criticism of the previous CK symposium, which was on xenophilia. The content of the earlier symposium met with objections, from contextualists, on the grounds of methodology, and the new symposium questions the methodology of contextualism for the limits that it places on content as well (...) as on normative aims and degree of focus. Tracing the origins of contextualism to Kuhn and his theory that paradigms of scientific knowledge are incommensurable, this essay then argues that Kuhnian method is formal, with scant concern for content, and that Kuhn’s work was vatic, more than philosophical or historical. Kuhn’s depiction of his sudden, blinding realization that Aristotelian physics is correct in its own context is assessed as an ironic application of biblical scenes of revelation to what is, essentially, a process of scrupulous, piecemeal scholarship. What Kuhn unknowingly wanted, the essay concludes, was a combination of contextualism and phenomenology, as a means of knowing what it was like to believe in Aristotelian, as opposed to modern, concepts of matter, quality, space, void, position, change, and motion. The essay then introduces the first contribution to the new symposium: a monograph retrieving geometrical and taxonomic—Euclidean and Theophrastan—idioms of discourse about fictional characters and inquiring into their changing affective content. (shrink)

This introduction to the third and final part of the Common Knowledge symposium “Unsocial Thought, Uncommon Lives” is reprinted here in a special issue of representative pieces from the journal’s first twenty-five years. The title is taken from an article by Isaiah Berlin in CK. Perl’s essay argues against the Aristotelian presumption that “man is a social animal” and explains that the CK symposium on unsocial thought was meant to substantiate that “societies do as a rule smother instinctive behaviors, but (...) in the process they also as a rule incarnate the least respectable instincts with greater force than individuals can do independently.... If even heroism and altruism, let alone standard social conduct, are oblique expressions of aggression, cruelty, and the will to power, then the obvious conclusion to reach is that human beings are not fit company for each other.... The standard means of veering off from this conclusion is to blame one’s own society, or aspects of contemporary society, and then to propose improvements. Historically, evidence suggests, efforts of this kind are opportunities for controversy and thus for exercise of the will to power. Social order is such that even the discussion of social order occasions conflict.” Perl goes on to argue that individualists and communitarians are “fundamentally in accord”: they are “teams” agreeing to the rules of a dubious conflict from which only “stylites, dendrites, and mendicants” have done what is required to exempt themselves. (shrink)

Dans cette contribution nous interrogerons la notion d’alèthurgie pour vérifier si la critique dont parle Foucault doit passer par une manifestation de la vérité ou s’il est possible d’inclure dans l’alèthurgie des formes de critique qui refusent l’obligation de dire-vrai sur soi-même – ce qu’on désignera comme « alèthurgie négative ». Ensuite, on cherchera dans l’ Ecce Homo de Nietzsche des stratégies de la critique qui au lieu de s’indexer à la vérité semblent suggérer un renversement parodique qui ancre la (...) critique dans des formes autres de vérité. Enfin, sous l’angle de l’alèthurgie négative, on reviendra sur l’opposition entre parrêsia et rhétorique tracée par Foucault pour remettre en question le primat qu’il accorde à la première. (shrink)

Hybrid metaethical theories have significant promise; they would have important upshots if they were true. But they also face severe problems. The problems are severe enough to make many philosophers doubt that they could be true. My ambition is to show that the problems are just instances of a highly general problem: a problem about what are sometimes called ‘intensional anaphora'. I'll also show that any adequate explanation of intensional anaphora immediately solves all the problems for the hybrid theorist. We (...) should regard hybrid tools as among the most legitimate tools in our toolkit—at least when we use them properly. (shrink)

In this introduction to part 3 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” the journal's editor argues that, apart from sortition, the best guarantees of safety in a democracy are, first, to augment judicial oversight of all political processes and, second, to exclude politicians from the process of selecting judges. “There can never be too much judicial interference,” he writes, “in what politicians regard as their domain.” The author reached this conclusion during attempts by the newly elected Israeli government, in the (...) spring of 2023, to make itself absolute by eliminating checks on its conduct that the Supreme Court had been developing and applying since the 1950s. Traditional Jewry and Judaism being notoriously hypernomian, the resistance to legality on the part of the ruling coalition has conveyed an aura of antinomian heresy. The choice in Israel appears to be between antipolitics and antinomianism, rather than between Left and Right politically—and the antipolitical model in Israel of a superintendent judiciary and an autonomous attorney general is arguably superior to the American prototype, even from the perspective (“all men are created equal..., endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”) that we have come to regard as quintessentially American. (shrink)

This paper develops an argument that, if rule consequentialism is true, it’s not possible to defend it as the outcome of reflective equilibrium. Ordinary agents like you and me are ignorant of too many empirical facts. Our ignorance is a defeater for our moral intuitions. Even worse, there aren’t enough undefeated intuitions left to defend rule consequentialism. The problem I’ll describe won’t be specific to rule consequentialists, but it will be especially sharp for them.

DISCUSSIONS OF THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS of Plato’s forms too often take for granted that immanence and transcendence are opposed to each other: if the forms are in instances then they are not separate from them, while if the forms are separate then they are not in instances. This assumption is sometimes associated with the theory that there is a change in Plato’s thought between the early or Socratic dialogues, in which forms are regarded as immanent, and the middle dialogues and (...) Timaeus, in which they are seen as separate. I will argue, however, that immanence and transcendence are not opposed but that, on the contrary, the former implies the latter. That is to say, precisely in that the forms are present in their instances, they are ipso facto also separate from them in all the senses which Plato claims. The idea of sensibles as images of the forms, in turn, is an expression not of transcendence alone, but rather of the conjunction of immanence and transcendence: the paradigm is at once transcendent to and immanent in the image. The movement from the early to the middle dialogues, then, is not the rejection of one position and the adoption of another, but simply the express articulation of what was implicit in the original position. Thus we find, not a fundamental change in Plato’s thought from one period to another, but a single consistent and coherent theory of forms which is developed throughout these dialogues. (shrink)

Socioeconomic status (SES) is a complex and multidimensional construct, encompassing both independent objective characteristics (e.g., income or education) and subjective people’s ratings of their placement in the socioeconomic spectrum. Within the growing literature on subjective SES belongingness and psychological well-being, subjective indices of SES have tended to center on the use of pictorial rank-related social ladders where individuals place themselves relative to others by simultaneously considering their income, educational level, and occupation. This approach, albeit consistent with the idea of these (...) social ladders as summative or cognitive SES markers, might potentially constrain individuals’ conceptions of their SES. This research ( N = 368; M age = 39.67, SD = 13.40) is intended to expand prior investigations on SES and psychological well-being by revisiting the role of subjective SES. In particular, it (a) proposes an innovative adaptation of the traditional MacArthur Scale of subjective SES to income, education, and occupation, thus resulting in three separate social ladders; and (b) tests the empirical contribution of such three social ladders to psychological well-being. Overall, our findings showed that the novel education and occupation ladders (excluding the income ladder) are predictive of a significant part of the variance levels of psychological well-being that is not due to canonical objective metrics of SES (i.e., income, education, and occupation), or to the conventional MacArthur Scale of subjective SES. Although preliminary, these results underscore the need to further reconsider (subjective) SES-related conceptualization and measurement strategies to gather a more comprehensive understanding of the SES-psychological well-being link. (shrink)

In this piece, the editor of Common Knowledge offers excerpts from his two-year correspondence with a reader in Hong Kong, who was drawn to arguments made in the journal about maintaining “quietism and resistance in the face of vile behavior.” In the summer and fall of 2019, during the insurrection in Hong Kong, his correspondent shifts rapidly from taking comfort in CK’s defense of quietism to a full embrace of “uncivil disobedience.” She implies that the solidarity the editor expresses with (...) Hong Kong is merely rhetorical, and he responds by writing this article and quoting in it the entire text of the 1984 Joint Declaration of the Chinese and British governments on the question of Hong Kong. The declaration’s guarantees of autonomy and civil rights appear in bold italics. The editor concludes by suggesting that it falls to the United Nations Security Council to enforce the terms of the treaty. (shrink)

This essay is the journal editor's introduction to part 3 of an ongoing symposium on quietism. With reference to writings of James Joyce, Francis Picabia, J. M. Coetzee, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Elaine Pagels, and Karen King—and with extended reference to Jonathan Lear's study of “cultural devastation,” Radical Hope—Jeffrey Perl explores the possibility that the fear of anomie (“anomiphobia”) is misplaced. He argues that, in comparison with the violence and narrowness of any given social order, anomie may well be preferable, (...) and, in any case, may be no more than another name for quietism. (shrink)

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, introduces the sixth and final installment of “Fuzzy Studies,” the journal's “Symposium on the Consequence of Blur.” Suggesting that “Fuzzy Studies” should be understood in the context of a desultory campaign against zeal conducted in the journal for almost twenty years, he explains that the editors' assumption has been that any authentic case for the less adamant modes of thinking, or the less focused ways of seeing, needs to be unenthusiastic and carefully (...) ramified. To establish the distinction between overenthused and unemphatic approaches to blur, he contrasts the ecstatically amorphous “Blur building” (on Switzerland's Lake Neuchâtel) with examples of classical Chinese landscape painting. Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio, in their book blur: the making of nothing, chronicle the development of their plans for the Blur building and, in the process, inadvertently show that, to overbear various negative associations of blur and fog, the authors/architects grew self-contradictorily emphatic about the need to produce de-emphasis in architecture and in modern life. Perl shows how this self-contradiction appears also in phenomenology-inflected writings on blur by T. J. Clark, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Kraus, J.-P. Sartre, and Georges Bataille, but not in the work of the phenomenologist (and sinologist) François Jullien, whose book The Great Image Has No Form analyzes the role of blur in classical Chinese art theory and practice. Where traditional Western painting, Jullien argues, calls for voyeuristically intense focus, traditional Chinese painting stimulates “dé-tente, relaxation or ‘untensing’.” Intense focus on a blur is still, Perl observes, an intense focus. In describing a painting by the Yuan Dynasty master Ni Zan, Perl concludes that the only way to be un-self-contradictorily positive about fuzziness, whether in logic or aesthetics, is to de-reify and de-differentiate with the aim of achieving blandness. (shrink)

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, responds to a piece by Dionigi Albera that, in turn, responds to Jeffrey Perl’s introduction, published in May 2017, to CK’s multipart symposium on xenophilia. Albera argues that the ambivalence that Perl observes in many instances of xenophilia needs genealogical explanation, and Albera turns for this purpose to analysis of the relationship between Aphrodite and Ares in Greco-Roman mythology. In the present piece, Perl extends that exploration in analysis of a series of (...) images in which the gods of love and war, along with their illegimate children Eros and Phobos, are given comical and often vulgar treatment by artists ranging from Botticelli and Mantegna, in the fifteenth century; to Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, in the sixteenth; to Rubens, Jan Bruegel the Elder, and Poussin, in the seventeenth; to Lagrenée, in the eighteenth; to David and Guillemot, in the nineteenth; to Jeff Koons in our own day. Perl and Albera agree with these artists that the antithetical pair, Aphrodite and Ares, have a fully logical, if furtive relationship in mythology, iconography, and psychology. The idealization to which the comic images respond—that when warriors make love, there is no warfare—is laughed, again and again, out of court. But Perl’s concern, unlike Albera’s, is that this cynicism on the part of artists and advanced intellectuals means that, despite their ostensible preference for peace over conflict, they will always find cause to undermine every effort to make way for peace. (shrink)

We propose a new approach to conditional donkey sentences that allows us to face successfully the often called proportion problem. The main ingredients of the proposal are van Benthem's generalized quantifier approach to conditionals, and Barwise's situation semantics. We present some experimental data supporting our proposal.

This essay introduces the second of three installments of an “elegiac symposium” in Common Knowledge on figures and concepts devalued in what Thomas Kuhn refers to as “paradigm shifts.” The essay suggests that Kuhn’s idea is provincial, in three specified senses, and then goes on to show how differently Japanese culture regards and manages major change. The author of this introduction, who is also the journal’s editor, begins by evaluating a triptych of 1895 by Toshikata as a response to the (...) seemingly revolutionary changes brought by the Meiji Restoration a generation before. He then goes on to discuss, as exemplary of Japanese attitudes toward change, the Shinto ritual during which the sacred shrines of Ise Jingū are torn down and rebuilt every twenty years. The essay concludes by explaining how the impetus for this ritual is also involved in less-exalted aspects of Japanese culture; for example, in the peculiarities of the market for ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Overall, this essay shows that Japanese ways of regarding concepts such as “old” and “new,” “continuity” and “change,” differ so radically from those presupposed in the West that the latter should be regarded as provincial rather than as universally valid. (shrink)

This paper defends Plotinus’ reading ofSophist248e-249d as an expression of the togetherness or unity-in-duality of intellect and intelligible being. Throughout the dialogues Plato consistently presents knowledge as a togetherness of knower and known, expressing this through the myth of recollection and through metaphors of grasping, eating, and sexual union. He indicates that an intelligible paradigm is in the thought that apprehends it, and regularly regards the forms not as extrinsic “objects” but as the contents of living intelligence. A meticulous reading (...) ofSophist248e-249d shows that the “motion” attributed to intelligible being is not temporal change but the activity of intellectual apprehension. Aristotle’s doctrines of knowledge as identity of intellect and the intelligible, and of divine intellect as thinking itself, are therefore in continuity with Plato, and Plotinus’ doctrine of intellect and being is continuous with both Plato and Aristotle. (shrink)

The classic “retorsion” argument that any claim that all thought is relative is a self-refuting dialectical contradiction not only decisively refutes relativism but also demonstrates the presence of absolute truth in all thinking as its implicit enabling condition. In Augustine’s version, this takes the form of showing that truth itself, which Augustine identifies as God, is the “light of minds,” found within the soul by thought’s self-reflexive discovery of the ever-present condition for its own acts of judgment. In recent philosophy (...) this argument is taken up in the transcendental Thomism of Pierre Scheuer, S.J., and, with important clarifying distinctions, in the objective idealism of Vittorio Hösle. Thomas Nagel uses the same argument to reach what amounts to the same conclusion, though he does not call this conclusion ‘God.’ This concurrence indicates that there is no third alternative between complete nihilism and divinity as conceived by Augustine, Scheuer, and Hösle. (shrink)

In his introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the journal's editor tours the reader through two private apartments and through two public art collections in an effort to establish that aesthetically coherent mixtures of apparently immiscible objects from widely divergent cultures are possible and also morally glamorous. Xenophobia at its least reprehensible, he argues, is a fear of ecumenism and its consequences, as well as a fear of one's own conversion — of “turning Turk.” Xenophilia (...) at its most admirable is a pursuit of coherent mixtures where others cannot imagine their possibility. Bits lifted from reputedly pure and organic wholes may be transformed by means of overlap and mediated juxtaposition into a novel milieu that has a wholeness, authenticity, and charisma of its own. Such coherence depends on minds that are capable of loving what does not satisfy their narcissism and that can sense in the products of their own culture elements or signs of enervation, anomie, lack, derangement, waywardness, rigidity, preciousness, or warping. The author concludes that xenophilia neither signals nor facilitates the adulteration that xenophobes so fear. (shrink)

In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the editor explains the rationale of the new project, citing increases in aggressive xenophobia internationally. He comments on the intergroup-relations theorist Todd Pittinsky's argument that, since tolerance is not logically the antithesis of negative feelings toward out-groups, even long-established traditions of toleration are inadequate to prevent intergroup aggression. Pittinsky proposes that tolerance be replaced, as a principle of peacekeeping, by the encouragement of positive feelings toward out-groups, (...) and the author of this essay responds by showing how the Freudian theory of ambivalence and the history of literature on which Freud drew in constructing it support Pittinsky's viewpoint. Enemies regularly fall in love, above all in Shakespearean drama, which Freud explains by arguing that all human relations are love-hate relations. Thus, this essay suggests, it takes as much psychic energy to repress the love in what appear to be relationships of hatred as to repress the hatred in what appear to be relationships of love. There is a metaphysical component as well to this argument: the xenophobe and xenophile equally presuppose that the identity principle is applicable to society as well as to mathematics; both assume that each discrete social group is self-identical and differs from all other groups more or less radically. The main difference between –phile and –phobe is the latter's relative incapacity to live with ambivalence. Given these arguments, one must expect to find negative as well as positive motives in the etiology and conduct of xenophilia—and the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium is said to focus on cases of xenophilia in which varieties of enmity accompany that singular and underrated variety of love. (shrink)

In this brief introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” the journal’s editor asks why Rorty was dependent on Thomas Kuhn, rather than Paul Feyerabend or the then-rising stars of “science studies” (such as Bruno Latour), for science-centered arguments to support his own philosophical neopragmatism. The editor cites a letter from Rorty sent to him in the early 1990s, suggesting that the differences between Feyerabend and himself were temperamental more than philosophical. Rorty enjoyed (...) referring to himself and others like him as “we atheists,” by which he seems to have meant “those of us repelled by extravagant or overheated claims and absolutes.” His tendency was thus to pull back in what might seem to be bored alarm from treatments of science as superior, perilous, or in any essential way different from other forms of intellectual discourse. Rorty’s understanding of these approaches to science as temperamentally religious appears lately to have been vindicated by the emergence of the primeval goddess “Gaia” in the rhetoric of science studies. (shrink)

This essay review is focused on Andrew Strathern and Pamela J. Stewart's book Peace-Making and the Imagination: Papua New Guinea Perspectives but also discusses in some detail other ethnographic and historical works. The reviewer finds that, in every case of peacemaking in Papua New Guinea that Strathern and Stewart consider, the exodus from one conflict proves to be the genesis of another, and he concludes that the insuperable question posed by their study is whether any peace ever transcends the war (...) that it supposedly concludes. The reviewer also finds that, unobtrusively, Strathern and Stewart offer transcultural wisdom about conflict resolution, and he lists seven exemplary instances. To this list, he adds a few more of his own, drawn from his reading of works by the ethnographer Rupert Stasch and the historians Rogers Brubaker and Tara Zahra. This set of principles, which is commended to the improbable attention of students of diplomacy, is founded on belief that imagination, rather than instrumental reason, and ritual action, rather than negotiation, are the best means of achieving peace. (shrink)

A juvenile. Not unique, but a rarity for a university press. The publisher characterizes Skammy (about Skamandrios) as: an exciting story of adventure and mighty deeds, Skammy...struggles with great questions of life, death, and immortality. It offers models of human thought, behavior, and morality ranging from heroism, courage, integrity, and endurance to cowardice and treachery.".

This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge, comprises the introduction to an issue of the journal dedicated to experiments in scholarly form and to discussion of them. He explains the choice of articles and other pieces in the issue on the basis of their contributions either as experiments themselves or as discussions of experimental principles. The introduction itself contributes to the latter by suggesting a distinction between “triumphalist” and “defeatist” calls for poets and fiction writers to do the work (...) of scholars. In the latter variant, poets in general are challenged by dissident colleagues to write exclusively didactic poetry, and to write it with the logical, linear clarity and straightforward syntax of rigorous yet easily followed argumentative prose. In the triumphalist variant, professors are challenged to write like poets — more specifically, like modern lyric poets: Jan Zwicky's essays on “lyric philosophy,” analyzed by several contributors in this and the immediately preceding issue of the journal, are cited as examples. What these experiments along the frontier between poetry and philosophy share is an aspiration toward what Friedrich Schlegel described as the “poeticizing philosopher” and the “philosophizing poet.” But, unlike other advocates of experimental mixtures, Schlegel was chiefly interested in historical discourse. He thought that history, like poetry, could be a means of addressing in a nontheoretical way what appear to be theoretical issues — and the present essay argues that attention to the line between fiction or poetry and philosophy is of trivial consequence compared with attention to that between fiction and historiography. The essay concludes with remarks about the state of history teaching in places, notably the Middle East, where historiography is presumed to be a simple study of who did what to whom — an approach to learning that instills in students an aspiration to “even the score.” Alternative approaches, whether empirical or pluralist, are considered, but the author directs his hope, instead, toward the as-yet-unachieved possibility of an experimental historiography that in equal measure is charitable, imaginative, and irenic. (shrink)

This essay, coauthored by the editor and a member of the editorial board of Common Knowledge, introduces the fifth installment of the journal's symposium “Fuzzy Studies,” which is about the “consequence of blur.” Beginning with a review of Enlightenment ideas about ideas — especially Descartes's argument that a mind “unclouded and attentive” can be “wholly freed from doubt” (Rules III, 5) — this essay then turns to assess the validity of counter-Enlightenment arguments, mostly Russian but also anglophone and French, against (...) the association of clarity and certainty. A line of descent is drawn from the speaker of Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy to Dostoevsky's underground man, and the latter is shown to differ from the former mainly in that the underground man sympathizes consciously with Descartes's bête noire, the “evil deceiver” (Descartes's speaker sympathizes perhaps unconsciously). Enlightenment, in other words, is not as it appears to be, for rationalists too insist on their caprice. Hyperrationality, it is argued, can be a form of madness, a mania over clarity, distinctions, rules, principles, and unquestionable truths. Examples from Russian and anglophone literature are given of how easily the distance from idée claire to idée fixe is to traverse. The end product of un-self-doubting rationality tends to be delay or stoppage of the intellect, which this essay terms noostasis (and proposes is the opposite of ekstasis). (shrink)

In a monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on contextualism, the journal's editor decontextualizes and then recontextualizes the medieval iconographic trope of Ecclesia and Synagoga in an effort to make plausible a news story about Pope Francis that received little coverage in the press. During 2015, the fiftieth anniversary of the Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate, Francis paid a surprise visit to a new statue in the United States, “Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” by Joshua Koffman, as a (...) sign of his endorsement of its radical reconsideration of a trope long associated with anti-Jewish sentiment in the Catholic Church. This article, which begins with a detailed analysis of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI's essay on the Nostra Aetate treatise De Iudaeis, deals primarily with twelfth- and thirteenth-century uses of the iconography. Special attention is paid to the Anagogical Window of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis and to the Ecclesia, Synagoga, and King Solomon statues on the south facade of Strasbourg Cathedral, in both of which is found previously overlooked evidence of philo-Semitic, rather than anti-Semitic, thinking on the part of the designers. The article concludes that contextualist scholars of medieval art have found what they expected to find and ignored contrary indications. (shrink)

In this introduction to part 4 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor assesses the argument made by Peace, the spokesperson of Erasmus in his Querela Pacis, that the desire to impute and avenge wrongs against oneself is insatiable and at the root of both individual and social enmities. He notes that, in a symposium about how to resolve and prevent enmity, most contributions have to date expressed caveats about how justice and truth must take (...) precedence over peace, how recovery from ill treatment may be impossible, how quietism is not a moral option, and how realism demands a national policy and a personal strategy of, at best, contingent forgiveness. He concedes that the attitudes of those opposed to quietism are healthy but suggests that there may be goods worthier than health of human devotion. This essay concludes that the main differences between what it terms “judgmental” and “irenic” regimes are disagreements over anthropology and metaphysics. The presumptions that truths are objectively knowable and that human beings are moral and rational agents characterize judgmental regimes; irenic regimes are characterized by disillusionment with those assumptions. (shrink)