Drawing on recent phenomenological discussions of collective intentionality and existential phenomenological accounts of agency, this article proposes a novel interpretation of shared action. First, I argue that we should understand action on the basis of how an environment pre-reflectively solicits agents to behave based on (a) the affordances or goals inflected by their abilities and dispositions and (b) their self-referential commitment to a project that is furthered by these affordances. Second, I show that this definition of action is sufficiently flexible (...) to account for not only individual action (in which both (a) and (b) refer only to an individual) but also several distinct subtypes of shared action. My thesis is that behaviour counts as shared action if and only if it is caused by a solicitation in which either (a) the goals, or (b) the commitments, or both (a) goals and (b) commitments are joint, i.e., depend on several individuals. We thereby get three distinct subtypes of shared actions: (i) jointly coordinated individually committed action, (ii) individually coordinated jointly committed action, and (iii) jointly coordinated jointly committed action. (shrink)

Some moral philosophers argue that we hold others and ourselves morally responsible for acting on second-personal reasons. This article connects this idea with the emerging literature on the moral responsibility of groups by exploring in which sense, if any, groups can be held accountable for acting on second-personal reasons. On the developed view, groups are second-personally competent if and only if they possess capacities for sympathy, acting on that sympathy, and related self-reactive attitudes. Focusing especially on loosely structured groups without (...) unifying decision-making procedures, the article goes on to argue that the required group-level capacities can be realized through the interdependent exercise of member-level capacities. (shrink)

We investigate the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (often assumed to reflect corporate voluntarism) and government (often assumed to reflect coercion). We distinguish two broad perspectives on the CSR and government relationship: thedichotomous(i.e., government and CSR are / should be independent of one another) and therelated(i.e., government and CSR are / should be interconnected). Using typologies of CSR public policy and of CSR and the law, we present an integrated framework for corporate discretion for engagement with public policy for (...) CSR. We make four related contributions. First, we explain the dichotomous and the related perspectives with reference to their various assumptions and analyses. Second, we demonstrate that public policy for CSR and corporate discretion coexist and interact. Specifically, we show, third, that public policy for CSR can inform and stimulate corporate discretion and, fourth, that corporations have discretion for CSR, particularly as to how corporations engage with such policy. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 51, Issue 2, Page 140-165, Spring 2023.

Heidegger is often criticised for having next to nothing to say about human sociality. Yet, his work provides neglected resources for understanding the nature of social life. Drawing on his celebrated philosophy of mind and philosophy of action, the book systematically reconstructs Heidegger’s social ontology. It argues that Heidegger’s famous claim that human mindedness and agency is constitutively being-in-the-world implies that we can only understand others, do things with others, and form lasting groups with others if we pre-reflectively correlate their (...) behaviour with our own projects and the world that lies between us. Drawing on both his published texts, lecture courses, and notebooks, the book puts Heidegger into dialogue with contemporary debates on social cognition, collective intentionality, and social normativity, while also reassessing the significance of his account of authenticity and criticising his affiliation with Nazism. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book is an essential contribution to contemporary phenomenology and social ontology. (shrink)

This article traces the development of how the early Heidegger tried to integrate the structures of social life into phenomenological ontology. Firstly, I argue that Heidegger's analysis of the three elements of the lifeworld—the with-world (Mitwelt), the environing world (Umwelt), and the self-world (Selbstwelt)—is ambiguous, because it shifts between defining sociality as a domain of entities and a mode of appearance. This is untenable because the social as a mode of appearance constantly overflows the definition as a domain by implicating (...) social structures in phenomenological explications of entities that, formally, belong to other domains. Secondly, I argue that Heidegger realized this and subsequently changed his terminology from Mitwelt to Mitsein in order to avoid confusing the mode of appearance with the innerworldly entities. The systematic consequence of this line of argument is that the object of social ontology must be the world as such rather than a particular domain. Lastly, I respond to the common worry that this position is unable to explain the significance of interpersonal encounters by arguing that the world not only makes the appearance of others possible but also that the world is itself at stake in these encounters. (shrink)

Advancing a general Darwinian framework to explain culture is an exciting endeavor. It requires that we face up to the challenge of identifying the specific components that are effective in replication processes in culture. This challenge includes the unsolved problem of explaining cultural inheritance, both at the level of individuals and at the level of social organizations and institutions.

This book philosophically and creatively examines ways in which independent filmmakers may explore, through practice, the discovery and development of a personal voice in the making of their films. Filmmaker and academic, Professor Erik Knudsen, uses a combination of autoethnographic experience derived from his own filmmaking practice and new insights gained from a series of ethnomediaological StoryLab workshops with independent filmmakers in Malaysia, Ghana and Colombia to drive this innovative examination. The book contextualises this practice exploration within an eclectic (...) pschological and philosophical framework that ranges from Jungian psychological theories of the collective unconscious to Sheldrakian scientific theories of morphic resonance, from Christian mystical ideas about creative motivation to structuralist theories that underpin our linguistic understanding of story and narrative. Why should we create? What is a creative act? This in-depth study tackles these questions by examining the early ideation stages of cinematic expression and ultimately seeks to understand the practical ways in which ideas are shaped into stories and narratives"--Back cover. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Gottesbeweise im Deutschen Idealismus" verfügbar.

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are (...) shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication. (shrink)

This article provides a detailed analysis of the function of the notion of _Volk_ in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. At first glance, this term is an appeal to the revolutionary masses of the National Socialist revolution in a way that demarcates a distinction between the rootedness of the German People and the rootlessness of the modern rabble. But this distinction is not a sufficient explanation of Heidegger’s position, because Heidegger simultaneously seems to hold that even the Germans are characterized by _a (...) lack of identity_. What is required is a further appropriation of the proper. My suggestion is that this logic of the _Volk_ is not only useful for understanding Heidegger’s thought during the war, but also an indication of what happened after he lost faith in the National Socialist movement and thus had to make the _lack of the People_ the basis of his thought. (shrink)

In Derrida’s reflection on hospitality, the figures of Oedipus and Antigone play a decisive role. Derrida describes Oedipus as being anomos, an outlaw, since he transgresses the established nomos. According to Derrida, both Oedipus and Antigone are involved an unsolvable tension between conditional and unconditional hospitality. A closer look at Sophocles’ Antigone, however, fits poorly with this understanding of the relation between hospitality and the nomos. Arguing against Derrida, I propose a phenomenological reading of Antigone’s actions as an attempt to (...) disclose her suffering with the community. In this way, she demands hospitality not for herself nor for her infinitely removed father but for the world disclosure that she embodies. Within this phenomenological framework, hospitality is not caught in an aporia between the general and the singular, the conditional and the unconditional; rather, it constitutes a site of dispute between conflicting configurations of the shared world. (shrink)

Under the umbrella terms, ‘agnotology’, ’strategic ignorance’, and ‘willful ignorance’, scholars have identified and unpacked the mechanisms and strategies involved in producing and maintaining ignorance. These analyses tend to have in common that strategic ignorance is about avoiding, hiding, or rendering existing knowledge unreliable. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s sociological concept of communication, we supplement these accounts with an analysis of how ignorance can be produced and maintained by means of communicative selection. Taking the emergence of the zoonotic disease LA-MRSA in (...) Denmark as our empirical case, we explore the management of ignorance under conditions of non-knowing. Our analysis demonstrates how ignorance may be not only maintained but also multiplied without hiding knowledge, keeping secrets, or creating doubts. The analysis thus sheds new light on the dynamics through which ignorance is produced, while knowledge is on full display and acknowledged. The analysis furthermore shows how strategic interests are coupled to ignorance by means of communicative selection. (shrink)

Dad jokes, I argue, are a manifestation of a much older fatherly impulse to tease one’s children. On the surface, dad jokes are puns that are characterized by only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, which makes them lame and unfunny. Only violating a pragmatic norm and nothing else, however, is itself a violation of the norms of joke-telling, which makes dad jokes a type of anti-humor. Fathers may in turn seek to embarrass their children by purposively violating the (...) norms of joke-telling in this way, thus weaponizing the lame pun against their children as a type of good-natured teasing. Given their personality profile, it makes sense that fathers should be particularly prone to weap­onize dad jokes teasingly against their children like this, with the phenomenon bearing an illuminating resemblance to the rough-and-tumble play that fathers have engaged their children in since before the dawn of our species. (shrink)

This article argues that Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of kairos and messianic time are essentially to be understood in terms of experience. This becomes clear when we identify the methodological similarities between Agamben’s reading of Paulus in The Time That Remains and Heidegger’s lectures on Paulus from 1920-21: the doctrine of kairology is different from any eschatology, insofar as it involves an instantaneous modulation of our factical conditions, rather than a removal of them to come. In this way, I argue that (...) Agamben echoes Heidegger’s conception of formal indication and enactment-sense. But whereas Heidegger understood this modulation as an anticipatory resoluteness, in which Dasein identifies itself with its calling, Agamben emphasizes the very impossibility of such an identification. This is indeed a decisive difference between Agamben and Heidegger. I show, however, that Agamben phrases this difference in a language that recalls Heidegger’s thought, thus implicitly suggesting that the emancipatory potential of his philosophy is to be understood as the experiential enactment of an impotentiality that undermines any factical condition and any social identity. (shrink)

This commentary presents an epistemological perspective on grand challenges (GCs) suggesting that the distinction between Umwelt (what social systems observe) and environment (the surrounding but unobserved world) can help us provide deeper analyses of GCs. I argue that indifference to the environment outside the observed Umwelt is a root cause of GCs and suggest that organizations must compensate for society’s inability to address GCs by developing forms of intelligent self-limitation.

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Gottesbeweise im Deutschen Idealismus" verfügbar.

The Danish critic Georg Brandes (1842–1927) visited Warsaw in 1885 and 1886, with the pretext of lecturing—in French—on modern literature, making thereby the Polish cause for freedom his own. It was his endeavor not to take sides in the smoldering strife between radical and catholic circles, freedom from the brutal Russian regime being the chief common issue. During his second visit he lectured on Polish literature, though only knowing it through translations. This demonstration of solidarity was received with enthusiasm.In his (...) book Impressions from Poland—Danish 1888, in English, German and Polish 1898—he gives a vivid description of the Polish passion for freedom, not hiding more negative sides of the national character as he found them, such as improvidence and bohemianism. The book was understood as an act of solidarity, and during a visit to Krakow in 1898 he was hailed as the spokesman of freedom and one of the few West-European supporters of the Polish cause.When, by November 1914, Brandes learned about Polish religious pogroms he did not hesitate to condemn them in two articles born by indignation. The articles, immediately published in many languages, aroused much attention worldwide, at the same time costing him most of his Polish popularity. (shrink)

How are we to understand Agamben’s philosophical anthropology and his frequent invocations of the relation between bios and zoe? In Remnants of Auschwitz Agamben evokes a quasi-phenomenological account of shame in order to elucidate this question thus implying that the phenomenon of shame carries an ontological significance. That shame has an ontological significance is also a belief held in current debates on moral emotions and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, but despite this common philosophical intuition phenomenologists have criticized Agamben’s account of (...) shame. In this paper, I will try to show how these criticisms often rely on misreadings of Agamben’s terminology. Once Agamben’s analysis of shame have been properly placed in the broader context if his work, I will outline how Agamben’s analysis of shame and his ontology of life feeds into a rethinking of community and belonging. (shrink)