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)

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 2 Seiten: 195-213.

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)

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)

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 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)

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)

Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism. By Arthur Green xi + 226 pp. $35 cloth. Mystic Tales From the Zohar. Translated and edited by Aryeh Wineman 161 pp. $12.95 paper. Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary. By Janet Gyatso xxiii + 360 pp. $39.50 cloth.

Compilation of articles originally published in Common knowledge.

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. (shrink)

Goethes Ästhetik.--Wahrheit, Freiheit und Liebe in der griechischen Tragödie.--Plato und Kant, ein Dialog.--Der Tyrann in Platos Werk.--Die Autonomie der Ästhetik.--Wissen und religiöser Glaube in Platos Werk.

In this introduction to part three of the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” the journal’s editor argues that blur is not a medium of concealment, confusion, or evasion. Making distinctions between kinds of relative unclarity, he reserves the word blur for the kind that results from de-differentiating objects or qualities or states of affairs whose differences have been overstated. To refine what blur is and is not, he compares kinds of unclarity found in images by (...) Giotto, Rubens, Hokusai, Kunitora, Manet, Zeshin, and Richter. With reference to art criticism by Hubert Damisch, Wayne Andersen, Anthony Hughes, Robert Storr, Julian Bell, Christopher Prendergast, and especially T. J. Clark, he agrees that choosing between focus and blur can be a moral decision, though not in the sense for which Clark arraigns the Impressionists. Characterizing the way of seeing that Clark encourages in The Painting of Modern Life as a form of staring, this essay argues that “lean and hungry looking” is indecent, whereas unfocused receptivity is irenic. What Bell calls the “aestheticized halfheartedness” of Manet is redescribed here as a genre of moral heroism, and the essay concludes that it is differentiation that is on morally shaky ground. (shrink)

Kant, sans connaître les textes originaux, reproche à Platon nombre d’infractions au criticisme. La synthèse de sensibilité et d’intelligence dans la théorie de l’expérience, l’échelle des valeurs, les concepts de cause naturelle et de cause libre, la séparation entre âme et corps anticipent l’unité synthétique de l’aperception, le jugement synthétique a priori, l’amphibolie des concepts de réflexion, la topique transcendentale de la doctrine des antinomies. Anticipation du libre arbitre en morale, du génie et du plaisir désintéressé en esthétique.

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.".

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)