This article argues that only a developmental approach-one that views Derrida's 1967 work on Husserl, La Voix et la phénomène, in light of Derrida's three earlier encounters with Husserl's work and recognizes significant differences among them-is able to resolve the bitter controversy that has lately surrounded Derrida's Husserl interpretation. After first reviewing the impasse reached in these debates, the need for "a new hermeneutics of deconstruction" is set out, and, then, the reasons why strong development has been rejected internal to (...) Derrida's corpus are discussed. After this, in a discussion of interest with respect to Husserl's own late teachings, as well as Derrida's standpoint, this article focuses on Derrida's 1962 "Introduction to Husserl's Origin." Against the prevailing interpretation, an argument is made showing that Derrida is much closer to Husserl's own positions than has been suspected, most importantly, in section VII of the "Introduction" where the theme of writing is first introduced. Thanks to this, that significant development in Derrida's thought does take place between 1962 and 1967 is demonstrated-and the present piece concludes by providing a brief sketch of the development of deconstruction overall as it came about through Derrida's repeated encounters with Husserlian phenomenology in the years 1954–67. (shrink)

Today, liberals face a predicament: how to defend liberal principles, when adherence to them seems to constitute a fatal disadvantage against unprincipled opponents. The challenge is not new. In the early years of the twentieth century, liberalism was attacked, by critics on both the right and, especially, the left for being hypocritical, naïve, irresponsible, and impotent. It couldn't, for example (anti-liberalists thought), address the acute inequality of imperial rule, racial segregation, and socio-economic poverty. These issues of social justice it was (...) claimed by critics required a politics marked by an uncompromising commitment to ultimate ends, and an unrelenting use of power. Faced with such sentiments and the practical successes of anti-liberal ideologies (i.e. Fascism, Nazism, and Communism) liberals felt pressure to silence their scruples and doubts, and embrace the confidence, ruthlessness, and intransigence exhibited by their opponents. But doing so seemed tantamount to abandoning liberal hopes for, and commitments to, human freedom and all they valued in the first place. In Liberalism for Dark Times, Cherniss tells the story of the liberal response to this challenge in the twentieth century. Through a close study of five leading intellectuals engaged in these debates-Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin-Cherniss reconstructs a distinctive, neglected strand of liberal thought. This strand defines and defends liberalism as a political ethos: a complex of dispositions, temperament, and sensibility and style-which include skepticism; openness to experience; and careful, discriminating judgment-that shape how individuals make choices, meet challenges, understand and pursue possibilities, and conduct themselves toward others in the course of political struggle. In reconstructing the history of, what he calls, a tempered liberalism, and formulating it as a distinctive political perspective, Cherniss offers an alternative to the prevalent ways of thinking about both, liberalism's history and the intellectual resources available to it today. (shrink)

Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God illustrates a distinctive way of understanding the relationship between ideas and history, while posing several connected questions. Among these are how the human condition of alienation may be overcome in a way that is ethically and intellectually defensible; how the search for reconciliation may generate, paradoxically, further alienation, and inspire terrible inhumanity; and whether a meaningful and good human life can be lived without the assurance of future justice—or, indeed, future existence. Rosen evokes the (...) emotional pull of the quest for reconciliation, and reveals the argumentative richness it has generated; yet reflection on human evil and suffering should chasten our aspirations to attain historical reconciliation or rational understanding. We may have good reason to turn away from both the project of theodicy, and the tendency to identify human value in something detached from living individuals, in favor of a reaffirmation of the value of the personal. Rosen’s own work illustrates how a reaffirmation of the personal, and respect for the freedom of others, may be practiced in and through the history of ideas. (shrink)

The upstream framework presented in public health and medicine considers health problems from a preventive perspective, seeking to understand and address the root causes of poor health. Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) have demonstrated the value of this upstream framework in the practice of law and engage in upstream lawyering by utilizing systemic advocacy to address root causes of injustices and health inequities. This article explores upstreaming and its use by MLPs in reframing legal practice.

There is a thinking animal in your chair and you are the only thinking thing in your chair; therefore, you are an animal. So goes the main argument for animalism, the Thinking Animal Argument. But notice that there are many other things that might do our thinking: heads, brains, upper halves, left-hand complements, right-hand complements, and any other object that has our brain as a part. The abundance of candidates for the things that do our thinking is known as the (...) Thinking Parts Problem. Animalists who endorse the Thinking Animal Argument must solve this problem by giving reasons for privileging the animal over its rivals. In order to meet this challenge, some animalists have argued that the best solution is a biological minimalist one. In what follows, I argue that every extant biological minimalist solution to the Thinking Parts Problem fails. (shrink)

Liberalism in Dark Times seeks to reconstruct an ethically oriented form of liberalism that is demanding, skeptical, and non-perfectionist. My friendly, astute interlocutors appropriately hold me t...

This paper discusses Maharal’s conception of the human being and its four major aspects, namely body, soul, intellect, and tselem (image or form). I suggest that some of his apparently inconsistent remarks concerning the human body may be reconciled by distinguishing two different senses of badness or evil. Secondly, I show that Maharal embraces what might be termed “moderate rationalism.” Thirdly, I elucidate his conception of the tselem by discussing parallel ideas in Kabbalistic literature.

The papers published in this issue of the EJPT discuss facets of the work of Isaiah Berlin from different perspectives and making use of varying intellectual approaches. At the same time, they focus attention on a few, central themes of Berlin's work: his complex relationship to liberalism and nationalism, his theories of liberty and value pluralism, and his perception and uses of the history of ideas. Consideration of the differences and overlap between these articles presents an occasion to take stock (...) of Berlin's work as a whole; and a critical response to the interpretations and criticisms of Berlin presented here afford an opportunity to re-evaluate, criticize and defend central aspects of Berlin's intellectual position. This article goes beyond summary to present a critical, interpretive adjudication between the claims of Berlin's work, and the interpretations of that work presented in the other articles in this issue. Drawing on each of these, I present an interpretation of Berlin's contributions to thinking about the Enlightenment, nationalism and cultural pluralism, utopianism and political ethics, liberty, and value pluralism; I also consider the difficulties of interpreting Berlin's work, and applying his ideas today. (shrink)

Many philosophers who do not analyze laws of nature as the axioms and theorems of the best deductive systems nevertheless believe that membership in those systems is evidence for being a law. This raises the question, “If the best systems analysis fails, what explains the fact that being a member of the best systems is evidence for being a law?” In this essay I answer this question on behalf of Leibniz. I argue that although Leibniz’s philosophy of laws is inconsistent (...) with the best systems analysis, his philosophy of nature’s perfection enables him to explain why membership in the best systems is evidence for being a law of nature. (shrink)

One issue in the debate about faith concerns the stance a religious person is committed to take on “God exists.” I argue that this stance is best understood as an assumption that God exists for the purpose of pursuing a good relationship with God. The notion of an “assumption for practical purpose” is distinguished from notions such as “belief” and “hope.” This stance is contrasted with others found in discussions of faith, and its ramifications for the problem of whether it (...) is rational to have faith are discussed. (shrink)

This book proposes that parties on both sides of this debate might shift their attention in a different direction, by focusing on the question of whether it is ...

Legal, medical, and public health professionals have been complicit in creating and maintaining systems that drive health inequities. To ameliorate this, current and future leaders in law, medicine, and public health must learn about racism and its impact along the life course trajectory and how to engage in antiracist practice and health equity work.

The present study investigates the importance of emotional disclosure and vulnerability in the production of hegemonic masculinities. Of particular interest is the role that silence and invisibility play in how men talk about recent stressful life events. One-on-one interviews with men who experienced a stressful life event in the past year illustrate how men often talk about these events in simultaneously visible and invisible ways. We use the term “cloudy visibility” to describe this engagement, identified both in terms of what (...) men articulate in relation to their past stressful experiences and how they articulate these experiences within the present moment of the interview. The conversational consequences of these linguistic devices are analyzed to illustrate how men obscure their inner emotional lives, thus reproducing hegemonic masculine ideals of staying strong and stoic in the face of adversity, while they also seek to make aspects of their inner lives seen and heard to an interviewer. (shrink)

A detailed study of Isaiah Berlin: historian, philosopher, and political theorist. Situates his evolving ideas in the context of British society and world politics. Offers a new interpretation of Berlin's influential writings on liberty and his debts to philosophy, and makes clear his relationship to the political debates of his times.

Calpain (Cp) is a calcium (Ca2+)‐dependent cysteine protease. Activation of the major isoforms of Cp, CpI and CpII, are required for a number of important cellular processes including adherence, shape change and migration. The current concept that cytoplasmic Cp locates and associates with its regulatory subunit (Rs) and substrates as well as translocates throughout the cell via random diffusion is not compatible with the spatial and temporal constraints of cellular metabolism. The novel finding that Cp and Rs function relies upon (...) tenacious hydrophobic interactions with organelle membranes offers a unifying explanation for the paradoxical and puzzling features of Cp activation and regulation such as how nM concentrations of intracellular Ca2+ can activate Cp molecules requiring μM to mM concentrations of Ca2+ for in vitro activation, and how this protease can spatially and temporally locate specific substrates and translocate throughout the cell. We hypothesize that Cp and its regulatory moieties associate with organelles to facilitate the activation of this protease resulting in the cleavage of substrates and aid in its translocation throughout the cell. BioEssays 28: 850–859, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Many have attempted to respond to arguments for the incompatibility of freedom with divine foreknowledge by claiming that God’s beliefs about the future are explained by what the world is like at that future time. We argue that this response adequately advances the discussion only if the theist is able to articulate a model of foreknowledge that is both clearly possible and compatible with freedom. We investigate various models the theist might articulate and argue that all of these models fail.

Isaiah Berlin was a central figure in twentieth-century political thought. This volume highlights Berlin's significance for contemporary readers, covering not only his writings on liberty and liberalism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Russian thinkers and pluralism, but also the implications of his thought for political theory, history, and the social sciences, as well as the ethical challenges confronting political actors, and the nature and importance of practical judgment for politics and scholarship. His name and work are inseparable from the revival of (...) political philosophy and the analysis of political extremism and defense of democratic liberalism following World War II. Berlin was primarily an essayist who spoke through commentary on other authors and, while his own commitments and allegiances are clear enough, much in his thought remains controversial. Berlin's work constitutes an unsystematic and incomplete, but nevertheless sweeping and profound, defense of political, ethical, and intellectual humanism in an anti-humanistic age. (shrink)

Necessary Existence breaks ground on one of the deepest questions anyone ever asks: why is there anything? Pruss and Rasmussen present an original defence of the hypothesis that there is a necessarily existing being capable of providing an ultimate foundation for the existence of all things.

Gilead et al.'s theory presupposes that traversing temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical distances are largely interchangeable acts of mental travel that co-occur in human ontogeny. Yet, this claim is at odds with recent developmental data suggesting that children's reasoning is differentially affected by the dimension which they must traverse, and that different representational abilities underlie travel across different dimensions.

This Editorial reports an exchange in form of a comment and reply on the article “History and Nature of the Jeffreys–Lindley Paradox” (Arch Hist Exact Sci 77:25, 2023) by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and Alexander Ly.

Human sleeping arrangements have evolved over time and differ across cultures. The majority of adults share their bed at one time or another with a partner or child, and many also sleep with pets. In fact, around half of dog and cat owners report sharing a bed or bedroom with their pet. However, interspecies co-sleeping has been trivialized in the literature relative to interpersonal or human-human co-sleeping, receiving little attention from an interdisciplinary psychological perspective. In this paper, we provide a (...) historical outline of the “civilizing process” that has led to current sociocultural conceptions of sleep as an individual, private function crucial for the functioning of society and the health of individuals. We identify similar historical processes at work in the formation of contemporary constructions of socially normative sleeping arrangements for humans and animals. Importantly, since previous examinations of co-sleeping practices have anthropocentrically framed this topic, the result is an incomplete understanding of co-sleeping practices. By using dogs as an exemplar of human-animal co-sleeping, and comparing human-canine sleeping with adult-child co-sleeping, we determine that both forms of co-sleeping share common factors for establishment and maintenance, and often result in similar benefits and drawbacks. We propose that human-animal and adult-child co-sleeping should be approached as legitimate and socially relevant forms of co-sleeping, and we recommend that co-sleeping be approached broadly as a social practice involving relations with humans and other animals. Because our proposition is speculative and derived from canine-centric data, we recommend ongoing theoretical refinement grounded in empirical research addressing co-sleeping between humans and multiple animal species. (shrink)

However widely--and differently--Jacques Derrida may be viewed as a "foundational" French thinker, the most basic questions concerning his work still remain unanswered: Is Derrida a friend of reason, or philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes--writing, semiosis--his central concern, or does he really write about something else? And does his thought form a system of its own, or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? This book seeks to address these questions by returning to (...) what it claims is essential history: the development of Derrida's core thought through his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. Joshua Kates recasts what has come to be known as the Derrida/Husserl debate, by approaching Derrida's thought historically, through its development. Based on this developmental work, Essential History culminates by offering discrete interpretations of Derrida's two book-length 1967 texts, interpretations that elucidate the until now largely opaque relation of Derrida's interest in language to his focus on philosophical concerns. A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns. (shrink)

This article explores what it calls the “documentarist” hypothesis: the belief that the subject matter of history, the past, is structurally absent and thus can be reached only by way of documents, testamentary traces of various sorts . The first part of the article works out the documentarist position through interpretations of creative works that embody it and of a variety of reflections on historiography—those of Michel de Certeau and Paul Ricoeur, as well as some “postmodern historiography.” It argues that (...) documentarism ultimately faces an insoluble problem: it presupposes the pastness of the past, yet it cannot give itself the latter by way of the documents to which it believes itself confined. Documentarism assumes as already at hand a historical-temporal horizon of past, present, and future, for which it itself cannot account. In the second part of the article, accordingly, I turn to the historiographical portion of Faulkner's The Bear to expose the operativity of this always already given temporality. Faulkner's tale gives us access to a more radical historicity than any upon which documentarists reckon; yet this historicity turns out to sit askew from the usual frameworks of history as we know them, especially those of periods and epochs. The tension in Faulkner's own work between periodizing and event-laden explanations, I conclude, points to questions that fall beyond history as currently conceived. (shrink)

Calling into question all structural rules and principles relating to language, Joshua Kates presents a radical new path for interpreting this every day, taken-for-granted tool of communication. Traversing theory, literary criticism, philosophy, and the philosophy of language, the book speaks to contemporary debates on analytical and humanistic modes of inquiry. Language and texts are thought of as active 'events', replete with allusions to history, context and tradition that are always in the making. This emphasis makes the case for (...) a rigorous inquiry of text and talk in all their forms, bridging the continental and analytical divide in the process. (shrink)

This paper explores what may be happening with information and also with happening itself: those versions of the event, of historicizing, deemed suitable to interrogating information. It pairs Claude Shannon’s foundational work on information theory with Martin Heidegger’s meditation on technology (and his evolving understanding of history), investigating each in light of the other. For Heidegger, the question concerning technology does not primarily concern an invention or tool, but a mode of revealing or truth. Similarly, Shannon’s invention is not a (...) device, but a new theory, a new way of viewing all media. Heidegger’s take on technology and Shannon’s theorization of information both ultimately rely, however, on events (of communicating and of appropriation, Ereignis, respectively). This permits, by way of conclusion, questioning how our own talk and thinking stand in information’s context, as well as our and Heidegger’s understanding of epochs and ages themselves. (shrink)

Ethics dumping is the practice of undertaking research in a low- or middle-income setting which would not be permitted, or would be severely restricted, in a high-income setting. Whilst Kenya operates a sophisticated research governance system, resource constraints and the relatively low number of accredited research ethics committees limit the capacity for ensuring ethical compliance. As a result, Kenya has been experiencing cases of ethics dumping. This article presents 11 challenges in the context of preventing ethics dumping in Kenya, namely (...) variations in governance standards, resistance to double ethics review, resource constraints, unresolved issues in the management of biological samples, unresolved issues in the management of primary data, unsuitable informed consent procedures, cultural insensitivity, differing standards of care, reluctance to provide feedback to research communities, power differentials which facilitate the exploitation of local researchers and lack of local relevance and/or affordability of the resultant products. A reflective approach for researchers, built around the values of fairness, respect, care and honesty, is presented as a means of taking shared responsibility for preventing ethics dumping. (shrink)

Introduction: Fielding Derrida -- Jacques Derrida's early writings : alongside skepticism, phenomenology -- Analytic philosophy, and literary criticism -- Deconstruction as skepticism -- Derrida, Husserl, and the commentators : a developmental approach -- A transcendental sense of death : Derrida and the philosophy of language -- Literary theory's languages : the deconstruction of sense vs. the deconstruction of reference -- Jacques Derrida and the problem of philosophical and political modernity -- Jacob Klein and Jacques Derrida : the problem of modernity (...) -- Jacob Klein and Jacques Derrida : historicism and history in two interpretations of Husserl's late writings -- Derrida's contribution to phenomenology : a problem of no species -- Foretellese : futures of Derrida and Marx. (shrink)

In a pioneering book, Philosophy of Microbiology, Maureen O’Malley argues for the philosophical importance of microbes through an examination of their impact on ecosystems, evolution, biological classification, collaborative behavior, and multicellular organisms. She identifies many understudied conceptual issues in the study of microbes. If philosophers follow her lead, the philosophy of biology will be expanded and enriched.

Bruno Latour's work represents a powerful attempt to move beyond our usual constructions of knowledge and disciplinarity, as well as of history. Nevertheless, in his often playful appeals to metaphysics, Latour, I argue, sometimes revives that subject/object dichotomy he contests; similarly, at moments, he recurs to an unthematized model of history as periodized to motivate his own project. Latour's discussion of Heidegger, as well as Heidegger's own writings provide the occasion for pursuing these questions — of the disadvantages and advantages (...) of Latour for thought. The advantages, it is further maintained, ultimately direct us towards a radical conception of discourse and an inherently multiple notion of historical becoming or historicity, shorn of history en bloc. The article concludes by questioning Heidegger's own singular conception of an epochal history in his discussions of the thing. (shrink)