The central argument of this book is that Western political philosophy is a coherent tradition dominated by an agreement that the nature of man should serve as the standard for evaluating political things.

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as (...) a reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

_The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere_ represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does—or should—religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept (...) of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as (...) a reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Male Reproductive Strategies in Sherwood Anderson's "The Untold Lie"Judith P. SaundersSingled out repeatedly as one of the finest stories in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, "The Untold Lie" (1919) has attracted surprisingly little sustained critical comment.1 Like all the stories in the Winesburg cycle, this one delineates a revelatory moment of inner turmoil. There is little outward action; conflict and suspense are generated chiefly in the interior of the (...) protagonist's psyche, focusing on his ambivalence as husband and father. Readers become privy to "the buried life" of unacknowledged impulses and the "hidden truth" of repressed resentments,2 as Anderson's central characters struggle with the antithetical "choices available to the individual as biology works its will."3 A portrait of the male mind deliberating the relative advantages of alternative reproductive strategies, the story notably repays biosocial investigation. The theoretical framework, as well as the intellectual rationale, for undertaking biosocial investigation of literary texts has been explained ably by critics and aestheticians such as Joseph Carroll, Brett Cooke, Ellen Dissanayake, Robert Story, and others. Readers unfamiliar with the historical and theoretical foundations of Darwinian literary criticism will find useful commentary in works by these and other thinkers in this rapidly growing field.4Anderson concentrates on the interactions between two men at different stages in life, one middle-aged, perhaps fifty, and one youthful, "only twenty-two."5 The older man, Ray Pearson, has made his most important reproductive decisions well before the story begins: he has been married for many years and fathered half a dozen children (p. 203). He works as a farm hand, eking out a meagre living for his family by means of hard physical labor. A few details are sufficient to suggest [End Page 311] his poverty: his house is "tumble-down," his children "thin-legged," his coat torn and shiny with age (pp. 203, 206). Ray's wife, "sharp" in both features and voice, appears to be a perpetually anxious scold, concerned with fundamental problems of family subsistence. Ray's direct fitness (as measured by reproductive success) promises to be respectable, but the task of rearing his numerous offspring to adulthood has required and will continue to require his utmost effort and full-time commitment. He is just barely able to support his family (food is being purchased on a day-by-day basis), and there is little margin of safety in his situation.As foil to Ray, Anderson presents Hal Winters, a man not only younger but different in physique, in temperament, and in social class. Hal is big, tall, and broad shouldered; by way of contrast, Ray's shoulders are described as "rounded by too much and too hard labor," and he is "almost a foot shorter" than the robust Hal (p. 203ff). Inclined to prototypical masculine display, Hal is observed "roistering" about the town at night, dressing in "cheap flashy clothes." He challenges his own father in a fist fight, and as a result he is arrested and jailed. His brash and often reckless behavior is very unlike that of the "quiet, nervous," and "altogether serious" Ray. In the community Hal has the reputation of "a bad one." A fighter, a drinker, and a womanizer, he is "always up to some devilment." Unsurprisingly, Hal's family background is said not to be particularly respectable. The fathers of both Hal and Ray are small-business owners: the Winters operate a sawmill, the Pearsons a bakery. (The narrator never explains why Ray did not join or succeed his father in the bakery business, which presumably would have offered him a better income and a physically less onerous profession.) The stated difference in social standing appears to derive from the two families' differing records of conduct.Hal's aggressive propensities seem to be at least in part hereditary. He is "the worst" of three notoriously bad brothers, all sired by "a confirmed old reprobate" (pp. 202–3). The father, old Windpeter Winters, is remembered best for the gratuitous violence of his death. Drunk, he drove his team of horses along the railroad tracks straight into the path of an oncoming train, having slashed with his whip at a neighbor who... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Receiving the Gift of Life: My Kidney Transplant StoryJudith W. RyanAs one of three siblings who all inherited an unfortunate gene from our mother, I was born with polycystic kidney disease (PKD). None of us knew of this, however, until later middle age, and my mother not until she was 76. I was the last sibling diagnosed at the age of 56. My brothers had been diagnosed some years (...) before and jokingly started to look at me as a universal donor. Since I had a 50-50 chance of having PKD and with a mother who was one of eight children with none of her siblings known to have the disease, I had not felt an urgency to be tested. Besides, I had no signs or symptoms. But now there was a reason. I made an appointment for a renal ultrasound and while having the procedure, I tipped the screen so that I could see the results. Although the technician was not happy with this, I was repaid with the view of my kidneys looking full of bubbles. Yes, our family was three for three in the genetic game of roulette.I knew immediately how I was going to navigate this health issue. As an adult nurse practitioner I had a very good understanding of what was to come. I knew my blood type “O” was the most common and would mean the longest wait for a deceased donor transplant, at least five years if I were lucky and only after enduring several years of progressing renal failure. In addition, I had cared for dialysis patients and watched my mother endure with difficulty both peritoneal and hemodialysis prior to her death a year before my diagnosis. Knowing I would not choose dialysis left me hoping for a miracle of a living donor or, more realistically, managing my disease as best I could until I died.The next step was managing PKD symptoms and issues as my kidneys continued to fail. One of the errors in my thinking during this time turned out to be that because I had two brothers who had the same disease and were ahead of me in their disease progression, I could follow their lead. It turned out that we manifested our disease very differently. My younger brother, who was diagnosed first, had to deal with significant pain from persistent cyst ruptures, monthly, biweekly then weekly. This continued even after his transplant until he had his native kidneys removed. The other two of us did not have to deal with cyst ruptures. Additionally, anemia was no problem for my younger brother but was for us older siblings. Significant fatigue and weariness were a problem for both of my brothers but not for me.And so it went, as we compared our blood test results, that the idea of a living donor entered the conversation. I knew this would be a problem for me because how do you ask people to consider being a donor? I had difficulty asking friends for a ride to the airport. This is where the grace and kindness of others and divine intervention enter [End Page 107] our story—word about our medical dilemma spread through the visibility of my younger brother, a minister in New England.Fortunately for me, my much beloved younger brother had dozens of people who wanted to be his donor. About 12 of these potential donors were actually tested before finding a match. One of his unmatched donors became the donor for my older brother (our first family transplant). Two years later, my other brother received his transplant. Three years later, after being told he was not a good match for my brother, this dear man came forward to be a possible donor for me. Hence, I got my transplant from an unused donor from my younger brother’s group. Overall, we had living donors from three different churches located within an hour of each other in New England. I even lucked out and acquired the minister of one of the churches as my donor. All three of us received kidneys over five years from living donors who did not know my older brother... (shrink)

Philosophical treatments of natural kinds are embedded in two distinct projects. I call these the philosophy of science approach and the philosophy of language approach. Each is characterized by its own set of philosophical questions, concerns, and assumptions. The kinds studied in the philosophy of science approach are projectible categories that can ground inductive inferences and scientific explanation. The kinds studied in the philosophy of language approach are the referential objects of a special linguistic category—natural kind terms—thought to refer directly. (...) Philosophers may hope for a unified account addresses both sets of concerns. This paper argues that this cannot be done successfully. No single account can satisfy both the semantic objectives of the philosophy of language approach and the explanatory projects of the philosophy of science approach. After analyzing where the tensions arise, I make recommendations about assumptions and projects that are best abandoned, those that should be retained, and those that should go their separate ways. I also recommend adopting the disambiguating terminology of “scientific kinds” and “natural kinds” for the different notions of kinds developed in these different approaches. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal VirtuesJudith W. KayRedeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal Virtues Bruce K. Ward Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 230 pp. $26.00.Bruce Ward has written a remarkably rich intellectual history whose theological diagnosis yields refreshing interpretations of ethical norms. Each chapter treats one of liberalism’s cherished virtues (equality, authenticity, tolerance, and compassion) and argues for the Christian roots of each in order (...) to show how Christianity is “the fulfillment of what the Enlightenment, at its best, sought” (196).Ward uses the Christian humanism of Dostoevsky to redeem the equality espoused by Rousseau and Kant in light of Nietzsche’s attacks. Equality is grounded neither in a human capacity nor in obedience to a principle, but in the imago Dei. While hardly original, this foundation with attention to immanence can create an enlivened perception of others in their richness while being transformed by love from “the other world.” Ward redeems authenticity with agapic self-dispossession rather than self-assertion, which liberates it from individualism and opens it to the “call of God.” Liberal compassion finds its fulfillment in the love of particular, suffering humans, which requires discernment, respect, and effective action. Such compassion is rooted in and revelatory of divine love.Ward’s most compelling chapter, on tolerance, begins by noting how this ideal often inhibits moral judgment or promotes indifference. Ward is a student of neither Mill’s nor Nussbaum’s libertarian versions of tolerance. Instead, Ward draws upon René Girard to argue that tolerance must account for the perpetrator’s demonization of social outcasts that leads to the victim’s resentment. Victims must lead the way in exposing and then exiting this cycle. Dostoevsky recommends a practice of taking responsibility for all persecution (“all are guilty for all”) as an expression of active love. Such a practice forges points of human contact between groups in conflict, even if prejudices are slow to change. In response to intolerant religions, Christians should assume such universal responsibility rather than rely on the “restrained” violence of the liberal state. Although Ward derides multicultural versions of tolerance that “celebrate difference,” he observes that the universal human of Enlightenment ontology cannot exist except through the particularity of a lived story—precisely multiculturalism’s insight. [End Page 213]The deep lament motivating this book is that an inadequate Christian theology lost its power to explain the world. The resulting defense of humanism by Enlightenment philosophes was deeply shaped by Christian ideals, but they were unable to articulate a foundation for moral norms, which made Nietzschean nihilists appear sane. Both groups are ill equipped to respond to current religious terrorism. As Charles Taylor explores in The Secular Age, the third contenders are those who affirm a good beyond this world. Ward differs from Taylor by arguing that the problem is not a lack of transcendent grounding for norms but an inadequate conceptualization of immanence and transcendence. Ward uses the Trinitarian approach of Dostoevsky to reorder transcendence and immanence, which avoids translating “Christianity into liberalism” or injecting transcendence into secularism.Ward’s project succeeds if one accepts Nietzsche as the major critic of the Enlightenment. Readers who have accepted as legitimate other criticisms of the philosophes may be disappointed. His discussion of compassion lacks Catholic interlocutors such as Edward Vacek who argue that agape avoids the polarity between self-love and compassion; feminists who critique Enlightenment dichotomies between savage and civilized or reason and emotion; and Marxists who argue that capitalism denies human equality, thus making Ward’s “capitalist liberal humanism” sound naive. It is not clear how Ward would redeem the Enlightenment from such criticisms.Nevertheless, Ward’s rereading of the Enlightenment is majestic in its sweep, compelling in its close textual analysis, and brimming with fresh insights. The text assumes much familiarity with the philosophes; its pedagogical use is recommended for graduate students and scholars. [End Page 214]Judith W. KayUniversity of Puget SoundCopyright © 2012 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Accumulating evidence for the unique social, behavioral, and physical health benefits of positive emotion and related well-being constructs has led to the development and testing of positive psychological interventions (PPIs) to increase emotional well-being and enhance health promotion and disease prevention. PPIs are specifically aimed at improving emotional well-being and consist of practices such as gratitude, savoring, and acts of kindness. The purpose of this narrative review was to examine the literature on PPIs with a particular focus on positive emotion (...) outcomes. We evaluated the evidence on the effects of PPIs on positive emotion specifically, and discussed the range of evidence regarding the relative responsiveness of emotion measures to PPIs in order to gain a better understanding of the specific emotional pathways through which PPIs influence psychological and physical well-being. We conclude with recommendations for best evaluating effects of PPIs on positive emotion outcomes. (shrink)

The presence of general intelligence poses a major evolutionary puzzle, which has led to increased interest in its presence in nonhuman animals. The aim of this review is to critically evaluate this question and to explore the implications for current theories about the evolution of cognition. We first review domain-general and domain-specific accounts of human cognition in order to situate attempts to identify general intelligence in nonhuman animals. Recent studies are consistent with the presence of general intelligence in mammals (rodents (...) and primates). However, the interpretation of a psychometricgfactor as general intelligence needs to be validated, in particular in primates, and we propose a range of such tests. We then evaluate the implications of general intelligence in nonhuman animals for current theories about its evolution and find support for the cultural intelligence approach, which stresses the critical importance of social inputs during the ontogenetic construction of survival-relevant skills. The presence of general intelligence in nonhumans implies that modular abilities can arise in two ways, primarily through automatic development with fixed content and secondarily through learning and automatization with more variable content. The currently best-supported model, for humans and nonhuman vertebrates alike, thus construes the mind as a mix of skills based on primary and secondary modules. The relative importance of these two components is expected to vary widely among species, and we formulate tests to quantify their strength. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the textual evidence for the thesis that the so-called “aesthetic sphere” of existence as depicted in Either/Or, Part I, is best described as a certain mode of relation to the social: a relation of distrust and despite. Throughout that work, themes of distrust, misunderstanding, offense, and deliberate deception recur in different profiles; I offer a social diagnosis of the “aesthetic” and support the analysis through interpretation of the text.

Abstract:This article analyzes contrasting descriptions and prescriptions for women’s friendships in six recent books in comparison with earlier Second Wave idealizations. “A History” of “the Social Sex,” “Tales of Sisterhoods and Fierce Friendships,” and “In Solidarity: Friendship, Family, and Activism Beyond Gay and Straight” provide optimistic, progressive pictures in comparison with skepticism about “Postfeminist Sisterhood,” while a memoir chronicles a “Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend” and a self-help book tells us how to choose, lose, and keep up (...) with friends. (shrink)

This paper challenges the assumption that reasons are intrinsic to rational action. A great many actions are not best understood as ones in which the agent acted for reasons--and yet they can be understood as rational, and as open to rational criticism. The relative paucity of explicit reason-giving, practical arguments in daily life presents a general philosophical problem. It reflects the existence of a class of ways in which reason can regulate action, which goes far beyond producing reasons or (...) applying principles. Much practical reasoning takes the form of what H. P. Grice called 'thought-transitions'. These are neither in the form of standard practical arguments, nor can they be so reconstructed without distorting the ways in which an agent thinks. Some actions to which one is led by a thought transition are rational, namely when what Grice called a 'propension' towards a given class of actions--a standing inclination to act in certain ways--would itself stand up to rational evaluation. The paper examines two bases for such endorsement, one local and limited, and one much more speculative, due to Grice himself. (shrink)

The paper presents a set of games of competition between two or three players in which reward is jointly determined by a stochastic biased mechanism and players’ choices. More specifically, a resource can be found with unequal probabilities in one of two locations. The first agent is rewarded only if it finds the resource and avoids being found by the next agent in line; the latter is rewarded only if it finds the former. Five benchmarks, based on different psychological and (...) game-theoretic assumptions are derived and their predictions compared to actual behavior of 120, 40, and 48 participants playing repeatedly. Of the five benchmarks—the unique (Nash) equilibrium, reinforcement learning, trust-based efficiency, maximum unpredictability, and regret-based (Impulse Balance) equilibrium—regret for missed opportunities best accounts for the qualitative aspect of participants’ behavior and regret attenuated by randomization best accounts for the quantitative aspect of behavior. (shrink)

For a very long time, the scientific and animal welfare communities have faced each other across a seemingly unbridgeable divide. Each side tends to view the other in simplistic and distorted terms. Animal welfare advocates see scientists as, at worst, sadists who enjoy torturing animals, and at best, as self-interested careerists intent on building careers out of publishing more papers and getting more grants, irrespective of the cost to animals. Scientists committed to research see the animal movement as consisting (...) of, at best, ignorant, simple-minded people awash in emotion and sensationalism, and at worst, violent and dangerous fanatics who claim to care for animals but are indifferent to human suffering. (shrink)

The growing assumption thattransnational corporations (TNCs) will apply``best practice'''' and ``international standards''''in their operations in developing countries hasseldom been checked against close observationof corporate behavior. In this article, Ipresent a case study, based on field research,of one voluntary initiative to useinternational standards and best practice forenvironmental protection in the AmazonRainforest, by a US-based oil company,Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) in Ecuador. The moststriking finding is that the company refuses todisclose the precise standards that apply toits operations. This, and the refusal (...) todisclose other important environmentalinformation, make it impossible to verifyindependently Oxy''s claims of environmentalexcellence, or assess the effectiveness of theinitiative. At the same time, Oxy uses theinvocation of international standards to wrapitself in a veneer of corporate responsibility;reassure government officials and localresidents; cultivate confusion about standardsand practices that apply to the operations;deflect meaningful oversight and transparency;and arbitrarily legitimize norms that have beendefined by special interests. In short,international standards offer great promise forneeded environmental improvements; but can alsobe used to impede, rather than advance,corporate responsibility and the development ofeffective environmental law at the nationallevel. These findings suggest that for theapplication of international standards to bemeaningful, the international community needsto move beyond statements of principle anddevelop mechanisms that can be used toevaluate, verify, and monitor independentlyenvironmental claims by TNCs. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

Humans interact with animals in numerous ways and on numerous levels. We are indeed living in an “animal”s world,’ in the sense that our lives are very much intertwined with the lives of animals. This also means that animals, like those dogs we commonly refer to as our pets, are living in a “human’s world” in the sense that it is us, not them, who, to a large degree, define and manage the interactions we have with them. In this sense, (...) the human-animal relationship is nothing we should romanticize: it comes with clear power relations and thus with a set of responsibilities on the side of those who exercise this power. This holds, despite the fact that we like to think about our dogs as human’s best friend. Dogs have been part of human societies for longer than any other domestic species. Like no other species they exemplify the role of companion animals. Relationships with pet dogs are both very widespread and very intense, often leading to strong attachments between owners or caregivers and animals and to a treatment of these dogs as family members or even children. But how does this relationship look from the dogs’ perspective? How do they perceive the humans they engage with? What responsibilities and duties arise from the kind of mutual understanding, attachment, and the supposedly “special” bonds we form with them? Are there ethical implications, maybe even ethical implications beyond animal welfare? The past decades have seen an upsurge of research from comparative cognition on pet dogs’ cognitive and social skills, especially in comparison with and reference to humans. We will therefore set our discussion about the nature and ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship against the background of the current empirical knowledge on dog (social) cognition. This allows us to analyze the human–dog relationship by applying an interdisciplinary approach that starts from the perspective of the dog to ultimately inform the perspective of humans. It is our aim to thereby identify ethical dimensions of the human–dog relationship that have been overlooked so far. (shrink)

We identify a social phenomenon in which large numbers of people seem to work towards a shared goal without explicitly trying to do so. We argue that this phenomenon – implicit coordination – is best understood as a form of joint agency differing from the forms most commonly discussed in the literature in the same way that individual actions driven by “explicit” intentions (those available for reflection and report) differ from individual actions driven by “implicit” intentions (those not thus (...) available). More precisely, implicit coordination is both analogous to wholly implicit individual intentions, and constituted by the partly implicit intentions of participants. We discuss the significance of this category for action theory, social ontology, and social criticism. (shrink)

Spanning nearly two decades, from 1980 to 1996, this Reader investigates the debates which have best characterized feminist theory. Including such articles as Pornography and Fantasy, The Body and Cinema, Nature as Female, and A Manifesto for Cyborgs, the extracts examine thoughts on sexualtiy as a domain of exploration, the visual representation of women, what being a feminist means, and why feminists are increasingly involved in political struggles to negotiate the context and meaning of technological development. With writings by (...) bell hooks, Alice Jardine, and Andrea Dworkin, this mulit-cultural Reader reflects the dynamic nature of feminist debates and the genuine diversity within current feminist theory. Capturing the sense of the rapid movement within feminist theory and criticism, Feminisms is ideal for anyone interested in feminism and the history behind it. (shrink)

In this vivid memoir, Denis Guénoun excavates his family's past and progressively fills out a portrait of an imposing, enigmatic father. René Guénoun was a teacher and a pioneer, and his secret support for Algerian independence was just one of the many things he did not discuss with his teenaged son. To be Algerian, pro-independence, a French citizen, a Jew, and a Communist were not, to René's mind, dissonant allegiances. He believed Jews and Arabs were bound by an authentic fraternity (...) and could only realize a free future together. René Guénoun called himself a Semite, a word that he felt united Jewish and Arab worlds and best reflected a shared origin. He also believed that Algerians had the same political rights as Frenchmen. Although his Jewish family was rooted in Algeria, he inherited French citizenship and revered the principles of the French Revolution. He taught science in a French lycée in Oran and belonged to the French Communist Party. His steadfast belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity led him into trouble, including prison and exile, yet his failures as an activist never shook his faith in a rational, generous future. René Guénoun was drafted to defend Vichy France's colonies in the Middle East during World War II. At the same time, Vichy barred him and his wife from teaching because they were Jewish. When the British conquered Syria, he was sent home to Oran, and in 1943, after the Allies captured Algeria, he joined the Free French Army and fought in Europe. After the war, both parents did their best to reconcile militant unionism and clandestine party activity with the demands of work and family. The Guénouns had little interest in Israel and considered themselves at home in Algeria; yet because he supported Algerian independence, René Guénoun outraged his French neighbors and was expelled from Algeria by the French paramilitary Organisation Armée Secrète. He spent his final years in Marseille. Gracefully weaving together youthful memories with research into his father's life and times, Denis Guénoun re-creates an Algerian past that proved lovely, intellectually provocative, and dangerous. (shrink)

The ability to analyze arguments is critical for higher-level reasoning, yet previous research suggests that standard university education provides at best modest improvements in students’ analytical reasoning abilities. What techniques are most effective for cultivating these skills? Here we investigate the effectiveness of a 12-week undergraduate seminar in which students practice a software-based technique for visualizing the logical structures implicit in argumen- tative texts. Seminar students met weekly to analyze excerpts from contemporary analytic philosophy papers, completed argument visualization problem (...) sets, and received individualized feedback on a weekly basis. We found that Seminar students improved substantially more on LSAT Logical Reasoning test forms than Control students (d = .71, p < .001), suggesting that learning how to visualize arguments in the seminar led to large generalized improvements in students’ analytical reasoning skills. Moreover, blind scoring of final essays from Seminar students and Control students, drawn from a parallel lecture course, revealed large differences in favor of seminar students (d = 0.87, p = .005). Seminar students understood the arguments better, and their essays were more accurate and effectively structured. Taken together, these findings deepen our understanding of how visualizations support logical reasoning, and provide a model for improving analytical reasoning pedagogy. (shrink)

The purpose of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer is to offer translations of the best modern German editions of Schopenhauer's work in a uniform format for Schopenhauer scholars, together with philosophical introductions and full editorial apparatus. The World as Will and Representation contains Schopenhauer's entire philosophy, ranging through epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, to ethics, the meaning of life and the philosophy of religion. This second volume was added to (...) the work in 1844, and revised in 1859. Its chapters are officially 'supplements' to the first volume, but are indispensable for a proper appreciation of Schopenhauer's thought. Here we have his most mature reflections on many topics, including sex, death, conscious and unconscious desires, and the doctrines of salvation and liberation in Christian and Indian thought. Schopenhauer clarifies the nature of his metaphysics of the will, and synthesizes insights from a broad range of literary, scientific and scholarly sources. This new translation reflects the eloquence and power of Schopenhauer's prose, and renders philosophical terms accurately and consistently. It offers an introduction, glossary of names, bibliography, and succinct editorial notes. (shrink)

We welcome Tomasello’s new book on the natural history of human morality as an important confirmation of the evolutionary approach, which sees adaptive behaviors and their psychological underpinnings as linked to a species’ socioecology (the package of subsistence, social, mating, and rearing systems). This perspective automatically leads to the conclusion that the basic set of moral preferences is a straightforward human adaptation to the derived cooperative foraging niche of nomadic foragers, which involves a high degree of interdependence. We provide more (...) background information in support of this evolutionary approach, call for work on defining the contents of the innate core of moral preferences it implies, and urge philosophers to pursue its implications more seriously. Tomasello also offers a historical reconstruction, but his scenario is not compatible with recent comparative data showing a surprising overlap with aspects of human morality, nor does it fit the currently best-supported evolutionary scenario of hominin foraging. We offer a better-fitting alternative, but also call for more behavioral work in child development and on nonhuman primates to improve this reconstruction. (shrink)

The continuing spread and development of electronic data interchange in health care settings is fuelling a significant global debate about the practicality, ethics, and legality of such a practice. The uncertainties implicit in this debate are particularly acute in the context of disease or population groups for whom multidisciplinary, multipleagency teamworking has become acknowledged as the “best practice” for providing effective and timely care or support. The greying of the population is a demographic phenomenon that will have a profound (...) impact on the health care system, social care agencies, and caregivers, and will require a greater degree of service coordination in order to meet the complex care needs of both care-receiver and caregiver. (shrink)

THOMSON, Judith Jarvis (1929– ) Judith Jarvis Thomson received her BA from Barnard College in 1950, her MA from Cambridge University in 1956, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1959. Her first teaching position was at Barnard where she was a lecturer from 1955–9, an instructor from 1959–60, and then Assistant Professor from 1960–2. In 1963, she moved to Boston, first as an Assistant Professor at Boston University (1963–4), and then to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where (...) she has remained ever since. She became full Professor in 1969, and between 1990 and 1996 held the Laurence S. Rockefeller Chair in Philosophy at MIT. She has received a large number of awards and honours, and contributed in many ways to professional philosophy in America. In 1992, she held the Presidency of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division), and in 1999, she gave the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University. She is Chair of the American Philosophical Association's Board of Officers for 2002-5, and gave the Association's Carus Lectures in 2003. She is also widely acknowledged as one of the best teachers of philosophy, and the excellence of the graduate program at MIT is due in no small measure to her influence. Thomson’s philosophical work ranges widely but her main areas of concentration are moral philosophy and metaphysics. In moral philosophy, Thomson has made seminal contributions to all three sub-fields of that discipline, applied ethics, moral theory and metaethics. (Indeed, the nature of her work makes these divisions seem somewhat artificial.) The papers gathered together in Rights, Restitution and Risk, and, since then, papers such as, ‘Self- Defence’, ‘Physician Assisted Suicide: Two Moral Arguments’ and ‘Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers Brief’ (written jointly with John RAWLS, Robert NOZICK, Ronald DWORKIN. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper contributes to inquiries into scientific personae by employing a rhetorical approach. It analyzes the persuasive strategies of Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Rhetorical analysis of Harris' self-fashioning in this remarkable best-seller and the reactions of the press to her persona demonstrates the resilience of specific archaic cultural repertoires for constructing scientific identities. While historical studies investigate how repertoires for scientific self-fashioning evolve through time, rhetoric reveals how (...) identity models from an earlier age may be appropriated in the present. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue on Judith N. Shklar starts with a brief outline of her early life, her emigration, and the academic circumstances of and influences on her major works. A second part elucidates how the negativism and skepticism that constitute the central tenets of her political thought can best be described as a “phenomenology of the vulnerability of the Other.” Her empha- sis on active historical remembrance, wariness towards communitarianism, and distrust of overly harmonious models (...) of society puts her in the company of recent theories of political dissensus. A final look at the problems arising from her nega- tivism identifies the weak spots in Shklar’s argument, drawing out the difficulty of institutionalizing such a position and the internal incoherence of a perspective that historically is aimed at the twentieth century and theoretically at the seventeenth. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm Of Rights Harvard University Press, 1990, viii, 383pp.

In examining Judith Butler's treatment of Spinoza insofar as it reflects the tenacity of a commitment to the need to "honor the death drive," a need often justified by the ethical and political resources it provides, this essay asks about the basis of this need for feminist theory. From whence does it come? What ethical and political work does a primary vigilance toward our destructive and death-bent urges do? Thus, I begin with a review of Butler's treatment of Spinoza, (...) and proceed to make some suggestions about what motivates her creative appropriation of his principle of conatus. Finally, without demanding that Butler represent Spinoza's philosophy accurately, I propose that Spinoza's philosophy allows a very strong acknowledgment of destruction, including self-destruction, without conceding the necessity of an ethics or politics of anxiety. Like Butler, and perhaps even more radically, Spinoza insists upon our opacity to ourselves, our irreducible and original multiplicity and constitutive relationality, as well as the inability finally to demarcate the boundaries of the self. Yet his ethics culminates in what he calls a "remedy for the affects," in an endeavor to displace and minimize sad passions, like anxiety. In concluding, the question for feminist theory remains: Which are the best fictions, models of selfhood, and modes of speculation for the displacement of anxiety, aggression, and the passions that trigger violence agianst ourselves and others in a misogynist, homophobic, and racist culture? If I am not able to answer these questions in the course of this brief essay, I hope to underline the importance of asking them. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between the ideas of cruelty and injustice in Judith Shklar’s political theory. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is sometimes read as an instantiation of the liberalism of fear, which regards cruelty and the fear that it inspires as the summum malum. I challenge this interpretation and instead argue that her account of injustice should be read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear. In doing so, I show how her exploration of the (...) faces of injustice—especially the importance she accords to passive injustice and the sense of injustice—raises important challenges for the liberal case for putting cruelty first. Although democratic attitudes and institutions constitute the best available remedy for the sense of injustice, on Shklar’s account, those who focus too much on the requirements of democratic citizenship risk treating injustice as a greater evil than cruelty, which could, in turn, facilitate cruelty and undermine liberal democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice, which Shklar outlines in response to the problem of passive injustice, reflects a distinct strand of her political theory that goes beyond the more familiar defense of law-bound constitutional government associated with the liberalism of fear. (shrink)

This article is part of a symposium on property-owning democracy. In A Theory of Justice John Rawls argued that people in a just society would have rights to some forms of personal property, whatever the best way to organise the economy. Without being explicit about it, he also seems to have believed that protection for at least some forms of privacy are included in the Basic Liberties, to which all are entitled. Thus, Rawls assumes that people are entitled to (...) form families, as well as personal associations which reflect their tastes as well as their beliefs and interests. He seems also to have assumed that people are entitled to seclude themselves, as well as to associate with others, and to keep some of their beliefs, knowledge, feelings and ideas to themselves, rather than having to share them with others. So, thinking of privacy as an amalgam of claims to seclusion, solitude, anonymity and intimate association, we can say that Rawls appears to include at least some forms of privacy in his account of the liberties protected by the first principle of justice. -/- However, Rawls did not say very much about how he understands people’s claims to privacy, or how those claims relate to his ideas about property-ownership. This is unfortunate, because two familiar objections to privacy seem particularly pertinent to his conception of the basic liberties. The first was articulated with customary panache by Judith Thomson, in a famous article on the moral right to privacy, in which she argued that talk of a moral right to privacy is confused and confusing, because privacy rights are really just property rights in disguise. The second objection has long been a staple of leftist politics, and is that the association of privacy with private property means that privacy rights are just a mask for coercive and exploitative relationships, and therefore at odds with democratic freedom, equality and solidarity. If the first objection implies that Rawls is wrong to think that protection for privacy can be distinguished from protection of personal property, the second objection implies that Rawls cannot hope to protect privacy without thereby committing himself to the grossest forms of capitalist inequality. -/- In this paper I will not discuss Rawls’ views of property-owning democracy. However, by clarifying the relationship between claims to privacy and claims to property-ownership, I hope to illuminate some of the conceptual, moral and political issues raised by Rawls’ ideas, and by work on the concept of a property-owning democracy, which he inspired. As we will see, privacy-based justifications of private ownership are not always unappealing, and privacy is sometimes promoted, rather than threatened, by collective ownership. The conclusion draws out the significance of these claims for the idea of a property-owning democracy. (shrink)

Consequentialists claim that their theory is simply that the right action is whichever one will lead to the best state of affairs - and that this formulation provides a powerful intuitive ground for accepting consequentialism. Recent arguments in value theory threaten to show that this formulation lacks either coherent meaning, because states of affairs cannot be good simpliciter, or philosophical power, because their goodness provides no reason to bring them about. I respond to two such arguments - from (...) class='Hi'>Judith Jarvis Thomson and Richard Kraut - contending that none can be made to work in a way which undercuts consequentialism's simple formulation. (shrink)

_The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere_, co-edited by Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does, or should, religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public (...) sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics. (shrink)

Gilbert Harman and Judith Thomson have argued that moral facts cannot explain our moral beliefs, claiming that such facts could not play a causal role in the formation of those beliefs. This paper shows these arguments to be misguided, for they would require that we abandon any number of intuitively plausible explanations in non-moral contexts as well. But abandoning the causal strand in the argument over moral explanations does not spell immediate victory for the moral realist, since it must (...) still be shown that moral facts do figure in our best global explanatory theory. (shrink)

This is the first major study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker. Written in clear prose, Foucault and the Political explores the ramifications for political theory of the whole range of Foucault's writing, including materials only recently made available. Jon Simons argues that Foucault's work is animated by a tension between his presentation of modern life as "unbearably heavy" and his temptation to escape its limitations by aiming for "unbearable lightness." Through expositions of Foucault's ideas on power/knowledge, subjectification, governmentality, (...) political rationality and the aesthetics of existence, Simons demonstrates how Foucault resists both extremes. Foucault's thought entails an ethic of permanent resistance, best embodied in radical democracy. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers, such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, as well as to scholars challenging conventional political categories, especially feminist and gay theorists such as Judith Butler. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 28.1 (2004) 220-223 [Access article in PDF] Doing Our Own Thing. The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like Care, by John McWhorter; xiv & 279 pp. New York: Gotham Books, 2003, $26.00. In 2002, the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks was marked in New York City by the reading of the Gettysburg Address. It was, as many commentators noted, an (...) odd choice of eulogy, comparing as it did the unwitting and innocent victims of a terrorist attack to the willing and active [End Page 220] participants in a bloody civil war. In Doing Our Own Thing, the Berkeley linguist John McWhorter asserts that this strange choice was the result of a decline in American public discourse. A "particular kind of artful English, formerly taken for granted as crucial to legitimate expression on the civic stage has" he argues, "virtually disappeared" (p. xiv). For McWhorter, this lack of contemporary public oratory is merely part of a broader linguistic decline that has affected all aspects of American life and culture.There has, he suggests, been a dumbing-down of the language. Whereas Americans once took care to craft their language, public and private, McWhorter argues, there is now a casualness to their speech and writing which affects all aspects of their existence. The nature of this decline is best captured by McWhorter's anecdote about his research into Gullah, an obscure Creole dialect. In response to his inquiries about local speech patterns, an elderly black woman in Greenwood, Mississippi responded: "Well, seems like most folks, they speak pretty good English, but some people, it seems like they just talk" (p. 2). Whereas Americans once spoke pretty good English, McWhorter believes, now, for the most part, they just talk. In Doing Our Own Thing, he seeks to identify not only evidence for his thesis, but also the causes and consequences of this decline.Evidence of linguistic decline is, McWhorter believes, to be found in our public discourse (as evidenced by the contemporary use of the Gettysburg Address), and in the rise of rap music and popular lyrics at the expense of poetry—he notes that as late as the 1960s, the poet Marianne Moore was a guest on The Tonight Show twice. Less intuitively perhaps, he identifies the same decline in the decreased popularity of piano bars, and the rising popularity of cell-phones. What all these examples of have in common, McWhorter suggests, is a turn towards an oral as opposed to a written culture. Speech has, he says, become something of a "dress-down affair" (p. 49), and this has infected both our written word and public oratory. The "modern American speech writer" he notes, "tends strongly to operate under a guiding imperative not to sound too high a note" (p. 47). McWhorter contrasts this with examples from the nineteenth-century—with letters from ordinary soldiers to their sweethearts, and with Edward Everett's two-hour plus address at Gettysburg—which show that "we live in an America with a distinctly different relationship to the English language than an America still within living memory" (p. 167).For McWhorter, the causes of this decline are clear. The 1960s counterculture, in its efforts to "Speak Truth to Power, abandoned the formal conventions of previous generations' speech, and adopted its own more casual approach to public discourse. Indeed, McWhorter feels confident enough to identify "a single year when America lost its love for its language": 1965 (p. 183). The consequences of this decline are, for McWhorter, similarly obvious. Among them, the shift to an oral culture is held to be responsible for: the election of George W. Bush—Al Gore's "studied articulateness is certainly one of the major [End Page 221] factors that blocked him from winning the presidency" (p. xxi); the decline of contemporary political debate—more formal written language is, says McWhorter, "a better vehicle for objective argument than speech" (p. 35); and the increasingly obtuse nature of academic language. Indeed, McWhorter asserts that Judith Butler... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Giving an Account of OneselfChris LundbergGiving an Account of Oneself. Judith Butler. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Pp. x + 149. $18.95, softcover.Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler's recent foray into moral philosophy, is a lucid interrogation of the problem of responsibility in the wake of contemporary critiques of the subject. In it, Butler moves beyond her concern with the conditions of subjectivity and (...) its performances towards a fuller consideration of life with others. Butler proffers an answer to the problem of post-subjective responsibility that resonates with the best elements of the rhetorical traditions, [End Page 329] though perhaps Butler's project might also benefit from a more thorough engagement with the problem of rhetoric in its specificity.Though works such as Gender Trouble earned a reputation (perhaps unfairly) for being theoretically dense to the point of obscurity, Giving an Account of Oneself is clearly and elegantly argued. Butler's argument is that moral philosophy relies on the ability of subjects to give an account of themselves and their actions. Such an account seems difficult in the face of blistering critiques of an autonomous, self-possessed, transparent, and naturally given subject of intention. How can one affirm responsibility in the post-subjective moment? As Butler puts it: "does the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding … whose conditions of emergence can never fully be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself" (19)? What are the assumptions latent in critiques of the humanist subject that might deny the possibility of giving an account of oneself? Inspired by Foucault's interrogation of a naturalized truth of the subject, Lacan's account of a subject produced and dispossessed by the Symbolic Order, and Derrida's critique of presence, such critiques locate the subject as an effect of the operations of discourse, conceived broadly. Despite the force of these critiques, Butler claims that a view of the subject nested in and dispossessed by discourse provides possibilities for ethics. Butler's reframing of ethics draws on two assumptions that underwrite "post" accounts of the subject: that the subject is both an effect of discourse and of differential relation to others.The first assumption is that a subject produced within discourse is also a subject that is dependent on and interpenetrated by others. Drawing on her continuing engagement with Hegel, the work of Adriana Cavarero, Levinas's conception of alterity and Laplanche's theory of seduction, Butler argues that the subject is endowed with a "fundamental sociality" (33). The markers of fundamental sociality differ for each of these theorists: Hegel relies on the concept of recognition; Cavarero appropriates Arendt's space of appearance; Levinas argues for the priority of an ethical relation to the other over ontology; and Laplanche conceives of the emergence of subjectivity as a primal seduction of a child by the adult world. But each of these framings of the subject is united by a basic commitment that subjects are produced in relation to others both as a generative point and as a horizon.The second assumption is that when a subject dependent on other subjects attempts to give an account of itself, it does so within a structure of address. A subject makes a claim for itself only in the presence of others—an account of oneself both aims at the self but also simultaneously aims at presenting the self to another. On this reading, accounts of oneself are not transparent descriptions [End Page 330] of a subject's interiority: rather, an account of oneself must be a narrative, a discursive gathering of the self that can never fully recover the conditions of its emergence. Narrative is not simply a mode of communicating the content and intentions of a self to the other. Narrative is simultaneously the precondition for a subject naming and providing retroactive order to its own subjectivity. But where there are narratives, there is always the risk of narrative closure, or that the narrative is repeated without interruption. Put in terms of Butler's concern with ethics, is there not always a risk that a narrative becomes a self... (shrink)

The original essays in this volume, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy that seem not readily allied: Wittgenstein, who urges us to bring our words back home to their ordinary uses, recognizing that it is our agreements in judgments and forms of life that ground intelligibility; and feminist theory, whose task is to articulate a radical critique of what we say, to disrupt precisely those taken-for-granted agreements in (...) judgments and forms of life. Wittgenstein and feminist theorists are alike, however, in being unwilling or unable to "make sense" in the terms of the traditions from which they come, needing to rely on other means—including telling stories about everyday life—to change our ideas of what sense is and of what it is to make it. For both, appeal to grounding is problematic, but the presumed groundedness of particular judgments remains an unavoidable feature of discourse and, as such, in need of understanding. For feminist theory, Wittgenstein suggests responses to the immobilizing tugs between modernist modes of theorizing and postmodern challenges to them. For Wittgenstein, feminist theory suggests responses to those who would turn him into the "normal" philosopher he dreaded becoming, one who offers perhaps unorthodox solutions to recognizable philosophical problems. In addition to an introductory essay by Naomi Scheman, the volume’s twenty chapters are grouped in sections titled "The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject," "Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions," "Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds," "Being Human: Agents and Subjects," and "Feminism’s Allies: New Players, New Games." These essays give us ways of understanding Wittgenstein and feminist theory that make the alliance a mutually fruitful one, even as they bring to their readings of Wittgenstein an explicitly historical and political perspective that is, at best, implicit in his work. The recent salutary turn in philosophy toward taking history seriously has shown how the apparently timeless problems of supposedly generic subjects arose out of historically specific circumstances. These essays shed light on the task of feminist theorists—along with postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists—to "rotate the axis of our examination" around whatever "real need[s]" might emerge through the struggles of modernity’s Others. Contributors are Nancy E. Baker, Nalini Bhushan, Jane Braaten, Judith Bradford, Sandra W. Churchill, Daniel Cohen, Tim Craker, Alice Crary, Susan Hekman, Cressida J. Heyes, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Christine M. Koggel, Bruce Krajewski, Wendy Lynne Lee, Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Deborah Orr, Rupert Read, Phyllis Rooney, and Janet Farrell Smith. (shrink)

Many feminist sociologists would agree that most breastfeeding research to date has been primarily undertaken from the perspective of medical and public health discourses. While there is evidence of a shift in research on breastfeeding to qualitative studies that focus on the lived experiences of breastfeeding women, this article addresses a number of concerns remaining in the literature surrounding breastfeeding. First, it questions the absence of breastfeeding as a legitimate philosophical topic, and, as a corollary, the invisibility of breastfeeding women (...) as moral or ethical subjects. Second, by drawing on Michel Foucault's account of ethics and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, it is suggested that breastfeeding is best conceptualized as a gendered and embodied ethical practice rather than an aspect of one's being. Finally, this materialist approach to theorizing breastfeeding is discussed in relation to the Lucy Lawless poster that was released in Aotearoa New Zealand to launch World Breastfeeding Week in August 2002. (shrink)

Verträgt sich Religion mit Aufklärung? Was für eine Rolle spielt die Theologie dabei? Kants Der Streit der Fakultäten kommt zu dem Schluss, dass der unendliche Streit um die Religion nicht zwangsläufig zum Problem für die Aufklärung werden muss, sondern seine Institutionalisierung die beste Hoffnung für Freiheit ist: Ohne Kritik kein Fortschritt, ohne Streit bloß Irrglaube. F.W.J. Schellings, Jacques Derridas und Judith Butlers Auseinandersetzung mit Kants Werk zeigen jedoch auch, dass dabei auch die Regeln des Streites strittig werden müssen: Wer (...) legt die Regeln fest? So wird die Kritik an Religion selbst zwangsläufig mit Kritik konfrontiert: Wer hat die Macht über den vernünftigen Diskurs? Eine antagonismustheoretische Perspektive auf dieses Problem zeigt: Aus Feinden können Gegner werden und aus Krieg Streit. Doch ob sich Fortschritt und Freiheit aus braven Debatten und Reformen oder als harter Kampf einstellt - oder eben überhaupt nicht - ist eine offene Frage. (shrink)

Recent thinking on human rights, at least among the left, has divided along lines that have become familiar from other contemporary political debates. There are those who ground the discourse of rights in an ethical responsibility to fellow human beings in situations of suffering and oppression; for others, suspicion with respect to just such an ethical stance is their point of departure. They see in the ethical perspective at best a radical depoliticization of the struggle for human rights—its biopolitical (...) reduction to humanitarian aid to suffering others who are thereby accorded the status of ‘bare life’—and at worst a cover for a quasi-imperialist imposition of neo-liberal values according to which what ultimately deserves political protection and preservation is the right to entrepreneurial initiative and aspiration. Yet another form of leftist critique of the ostensibly post-political, ethical inflection of rights discourse takes aim at a line of thought most often linked to a series of mostly French philosophers—above all Emmanuel Levinas, but also Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and more recently Judith Butler—who in various ways have sought to ground philosophy in an ‘ethics of the Other’. The essay explores these positions and proposes a new thinking about human rights oriented by what Hannah Arendt referred to as the ‘dark background’ of human life. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of _caritas_, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, as she was completing or reworking her most influential studies of (...) political life, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works of the same period. The disseration became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change. In _Love and Saint Augustine_, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues during her later years. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Queering Buen AmorGregory S. Hutcheson (bio)The naturalization of both heterosexuality and masculine sexual agency are discursive constructions nowhere accounted for but everywhere assumed....—Judith Butler, Gender TroubleAmérico Castro’s España en su historia: Cristianos, moros y judíos (1948) not only instigated the “culture wars” that rocked Hispanism in the mid-twentieth century, but also made the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor a centerpiece of debate.1 In a crucial chapter of his (...) study, Castro tackles head-on Eurocentric readings of the Libro de buen amor by arguing for its cultural hybridity, or in more extreme terms, its fixedness in the cultural prerogatives of Arabic-speaking al-Andalus. “Los métodos usados para entender la poesía románico-cristiana fallan,” he affirms in an opening salvo, “porque el Libro de Buen Amor es un reflejo castellano de modelos árabes [The methods used to comprehend Romance-Christian poetry are doomed to failure because the Libro de buen amor is a Castilian reflection of Arabic models]...” [España en su historia 355]. By relocating the author’s poetic impulse in the Arab world, Castro seeks to explain not only the Libro de buen amor’s open, “arabesque” structure—its spontaneous gliding from holy to profane, serious to comical, generic-abstract to concrete-sensible—but also the ambiguous nature of buen amor. For Castro, buen amor is the simultaneous compulsion toward spiritual transcendence and sexual fulfillment, best understood within the context of an Islamic theological system in which sexual desire is not categorically opposed to godliness.Not surprisingly, Castro’s scholarship was judged harshly by his critics as historical revisionism of the most pernicious sort, a deliberate erosion of those values and certainties that make it possible to read Spain as a full player in the march of Western civilization. Most vehement in his attack was Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, who authored the two volumes of his España: Un enigma histórico (1956) as both an explicit defense against the “magnetic seduction” [1: 9] of Castro’s prose and a reaffirmation of national consciousness. Sánchez-Albornoz’s take on the Libro de buen amor falls neatly in line with the thinly disguised nationalism of his opus as a whole. He rejects soundly Castro’s claims of cultural hybridity in favor of a Libro de buen amor located safely on this side of the cultural “abyss” between Latin Christendom and the Islamic world. What is more, he resists the queernesses that spin out of Castro’s scholarship, the threat of contamination of the national character in unspeakable ways. If Spain had been exposed to the cultural proclivities of al-Andalus, Sánchez-Albornoz argues, so too would it have been exposed to al-Andalus’s “ambiguous” notion of love, a love “que no excluía las ‘amistades particulares,’ ni la sentimental inclinación, e incluso la pasión carnal, de varón a varón [that did not exclude ‘special friendships,’ nor sentimental inclination–and even carnal passion [End Page 104] –between one man and another]” [458].2 Here Sánchez-Albornoz slams the closet door shut by constructing Spain as the bastion of straight desire and Juan Ruiz as its virtual posterboy: “En el clérigo de Hita triunfaba la robusta, natural y simplista concepción heterosexual del amor de la Castilla de su época [There triumphed in the cleric of Hita a robust, natural, uncomplicated heterosexual concept of love characteristic of the Castile of his period]” [458–59].I begin with the Castro/Sánchez-Albornoz polemic because it exposes the presence and functions of “normativity” in Libro de buen amor studies throughout much of the twentieth century. With few exceptions, readings prior to Castro’s overlooked what was odd about the Libro de buen amor in order to engage in an obsessive archaeology of sameness, a plotting of conventional values and meanings that served to render the work as familiar, if not necessarily equal to other master works of the Western canon. Félix Lecoy emerged as the doyen of this critical school, publishing in 1938 an excruciatingly detailed study of the work’s language, structure, and sources whose primary objective was... (shrink)