In _Leviathan_, Thomas Hobbes's landmark work on political philosophy, James Martel argues that although Hobbes pays lip service to the superior interpretive authority of the sovereign, he consistently subverts this authority throughout the book by returning it to the reader. Martel demonstrates that Hobbes's radical method of reading not only undermines his own authority in the text, but, by extension, the authority of the sovereign as well. To make his point, Martel looks closely at Hobbes's understanding of (...) religious and rhetorical representation. In _Leviathan_, idolatry is not just a matter of worshipping images but also a consequence of bad reading. Hobbes speaks of the "error of separated essences," in which a sign takes precedence over the idea or object it represents, and warns that when the sign is given such agency, it becomes a disembodied fantasy leading to a "kingdom of darkness." To combat such idolatry, Hobbes offers a method of reading in which one resists the rhetorical manipulation of figures and tropes and recognizes the codes and structures of language for what they are-the only way to convey a fundamental inability to ever know "the thing itself." Making the leap to politics, Martel suggests that following Hobbes's argument, the sovereign can also be seen as idolatrous—a separated essence—a figure who supplants the people it purportedly represents, and that learning to be better readers enables us to challenge, if not defeat, the authority of the sovereign. (shrink)

The use of AI algorithms in criminal trials has been the subject of very lively ethical and legal debates recently. While there are concerns over the lack of accuracy and the harmful biases that certain algorithms display, new algorithms seem more promising and might lead to more accurate legal decisions. Algorithms seem especially relevant for bail decisions, because such decisions involve statistical data to which human reasoners struggle to give adequate weight. While getting the right legal outcome is a strong (...) desideratum of criminal trials, advocates of the relational theory of procedural justice give us good reason to think that fairness and perceived fairness of legal procedures have a value that is independent from the outcome. According to this literature, one key aspect of fairness is trustworthiness. In this paper, I argue that using certain algorithms to assist bail decisions could increase three diferent aspects of judges’ trustworthiness: (1) actual trustworthiness, (2) rich trustworthiness, and (3) perceived trustworthiness. (shrink)

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism -- The political theology of sovereignty -- In the maw of sovereignty -- Benjamin's dissipated eschatology -- Waiting for justice -- Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision -- The Hebrew republic -- Conclusion : the anarchist hypothesis.

In this paper I argue that archism, a form of political power that is ubiquitous in the world and is based on hierarchy and violence, effectively denies us a future. Archism in invested in continuing the current power dynamics. Accordingly, it projects a false sense of the future which is actually only a continuation of the present on and on forever. I look at two thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, who try to take the future back from archism (my (...) word, not theirs). In doing so, they do not seek to determine the future but on the contrary, to allow it to actually occur in all of its infinite complexity and unpredictability, that is to say, to submit it to anarchist forms of temporality. (shrink)

Over the past two decades many social studies educators have called for history to be taught as interpretation, which has included arguments for the teaching of history through inquiry. This case study examined four secondary social studies teachers and their development of beliefs and practices related to teaching history as interpretation. The data were collected longitudinally from their student teaching through the completion of their first year in the classroom. Corroborating arguments found in the pre-existing research, this study found that (...) classroom control and a limited understanding of history content were major barriers preventing teachers from teaching history as interpretation. However, the results also revealed that teachers desired a better development of their own practical “toolkit” and they believed this would have helped them overcome many of the barriers to teaching history as interpretation. (shrink)

Although Haitian revolutionaries were not the intended audience for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they heeded its call, demanding rights that were not meant for them. This failure of the French state to address only its desired subjects is an example of the phenomenon James R. Martel labels "misinterpellation." Complicating Althusser's famous theory, Martel explores the ways that such failures hold the potential for radical and anarchist action. In addition to the Haitian Revolution, Martel shows (...) how the revolutionary responses by activists and anticolonial leaders to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech and the Arab Spring sprang from misinterpellation. He also takes up misinterpellated subjects in philosophy, film, literature, and nonfiction, analyzing works by Nietzsche, Kafka, Woolf, Fanon, Ellison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others to demonstrate how characters who exist on the margins offer a generally unrecognized anarchist form of power and resistance. Timely and broad in scope, _The Misinterpellated Subject_ reveals how calls by authority are inherently vulnerable to radical possibilities, thereby suggesting that all people at all times are filled with revolutionary potential. (shrink)

In _Anarchist Prophets_ James R. Martel juxtaposes anarchism with what he calls archism in order to theorize the potential for a radical democratic politics. He shows how archism—a centralized and hierarchical political form that is a secularization of ancient Greek and Hebrew prophetic traditions—dominates contemporary politics through a prophet’s promises of peace and prosperity or the threat of violence. Archism is met by anarchism, in which a community shares a collective form of judgment and vision. Martel focuses on (...) the figure of the anarchist prophet, who leads efforts to regain the authority for the community that archism has stolen. The goal of anarchist prophets is to render themselves obsolete and to cede power back to the collective so as to not become archist themselves. Martel locates anarchist prophets in a range of philosophical, literary, and historical examples, from Hobbes and Nietzsche to Mary Shelley and Octavia Butler to Kurdish resistance in Syria and the Spanish Revolution. In so doing, Martel highlights how anarchist forms of collective vision and action can provide the means to overthrow archist authority. (shrink)

In much of the literature on Hobbes, he is considered a proto-liberal, that is, he is seen as setting up the apparatus that leads to liberalism but his own authoritarian streak makes it impossible for liberals to completely claim him as one of their own. In this paper, I argue that, far from being a precursor to liberalism, Hobbes offers a political theory that is implicitly anti-liberal. I do not mean this in the conventional sense that Hobbes was too conservative (...) for liberalism. On the contrary, I will argue that in his writing, Hobbes evinces a concept of collective interpretation, theories of individualism and the nature and possibilities for democratic politics, that is radical and offers a completely developed alternative to liberalism even as it eschews conservative and reactionary models as well. I focus in particular on the idea of individualism and how the model offered by liberals and conservatives offers far less in terms of individual choice and justice than Hobbes’s own theory does, however paradoxical this may seem. (shrink)

It is one thing for two or more persons to perceive the same object, and it is quite another for two or more persons to perceive the same object together. The latter phenomenon is called joint attention and has recently garnered considerable interest from psychologists. However, contemporary psychological research has not succeeded in clarifying how persons can share perception of an object. Joint attention thus stands in need of phenomenological clarification. Surprisingly, this has yet to be offered. Phenomenologists have provided (...) thoroughgoing analyses of perceptual experience, but have overlooked the perceptual experiences of co-perceivers; and, while a number of well-known phenomenologists have offered accounts of how one encounters other persons, they have neglected the phenomenon of perceptually attending to an object with other persons. This paper addresses a shortcoming of both contemporary psychological research and the phenomenological tradition by providing a phenomenological analysis of joint attention. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 33-42. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a challenge to Gideon Rosen’s defence of moral contingentism against Jamie Dreier’s moral luck argument. Dreier argues that if moral contingentism is true, acting in a morally permissible way always depends on a form of moral luck, because we could be in a descriptively identical possible world where the moral laws are different. Rosen’s response is that such a world is too remote from ours for us to count it as lucky that we are not (...) in it. I argue that, given Rosen’s method of assessing the remoteness of possible worlds, worlds like the one Dreier describes are close enough to ours to justify his worry, and consequently that Rosen’s counterargument fails. I take this strongly counterintuitive conclusion as a reason to be optimistic that Rosen’s argument for moral contingentism can be resisted. (shrink)

Beginning right at the start of the recently published volume II of Donner le temps, at its ‘bord’ or ‘boarding’ upon or out of a calmy oceanic surface, this essay examines the functions and movements of distinct surfaces in between Heidegger and Derrida. Confronting thus the tradition of the ‘Grund’, ‘Abgrund’, ‘Urgrund’, ‘Ungrund’, with the khôra-like surface of archi-writing and dissemination, the essay proposes an investigation of the philosophical and writerly space of Derrida/Heidegger not through their marks and letters, but (...) instead through the different surfaces of inscription and – simultaneous – effacement as the ‘proper places’ of thought and experience, of Destruktion and deconstruction. (shrink)

If the word ‘devastated’ feels most appropriate when thinking of the passing of a beloved one, it also undergirds, through the waste of its desert, two essential notions of Western philosophy and literature: chaos and khōra. Looking at our world twenty years after Derrida’s passing, and at how for more than five decades he thought and wrote on the notion of world, this essay examines the radicality of Derrida’s deconstruction for our past and future conceptions of a world, of ourselves, (...) and of each and any threshold between these terms. (shrink)

Although critical of what she calls the `antipolitical' forces of love and sovereignty, Arendt reluctantly embraces these aspects as the basis of politics itself. I explain this paradox by arguing that Arendt seeks to balance Greek and Roman notions of freedom with modern conceptions of the will. The solipsistic will poses a threat to politics (it is the source of sovereignty itself). Yet the will is a fact of modern life and cannot be ignored. I argue that despite her embrace (...) of classical understandings of freedom as contingency, Arendt seeks to limit contingency and even freedom itself. She does this to accommodate the will which must have some sense of agency and continuity in order to be able to function at all. Arendt argues that sovereignty can, if properly constrained, produce a `certain limited reality' and can (along with love) serve as a basis for politics. I claim that Arendt sacrifices her classical ideals, allowing for the possibility of a modern, lesser version of freedom (which in her view is better than no freedom at all). (shrink)

Nancy Cartwright believes that we live in a Dappled World– a world in which theories, principles, and methods applicable in one domain may be inapplicable in others; in which there are no universal principles. One of the targets of Cartwright’s arguments for this conclusion is the Causal Markov condition, a condition which has been proposed as a universal condition on causal structures.1 The Causal Markov condition, Cartwright argues, is applicable only in a limited domain of special cases, and thus cannot (...) be used as a universal principle in causal discovery. I have no dispute with any of these claims here. Rather, I wish to argue for a very limited thesis: that the Causal Markov condition is applicable in the specific domain of microscopic quantum mechanical systems; further, that the condition can fruitfully be applied to the much discussed EPR setup. This is perhaps a surprising conclusion, for it is precisely in this domain that Cartwright’s arguments against the Causal Markov condition have been considered to be the most successful. (shrink)

This paper creates a dialogue between Ernst Cassirer, one of the last prominent representatives of Neo-Kantian thought, and Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. In Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer criticizes Husserl’s distinction between hylē and morphē. His criticism is based in part on the work of several figures belonging to the early phase of the phenomenological movement, including Wilhelm Schapp. By developing Cassirer’s criticism and considering the responses that Husserl could have offered, the dialogue helps to clarify the complex (...) relationship between Cassirer’s philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology. It also reveals some of the ways in which early phenomenology influenced other philosophical movements. But dialogue between Cassirer and Husserl is of more than historical interest. I argue that Husserl would not have had an adequate response to Cassirer’s objections. Cassirer’s criticism of Husserl thus remains relevant for present day research in phenomenology. (shrink)

Introduction : a slight adjustment -- The one and only law -- The law of the break with law : Badiou and legal ethics -- Raving with reason : Kant and the moral law -- A "useful illusion" : H. L. A. Hart and legal positivism -- The Haitian revolution : one law in action -- Conclusion : how lawful is one law?.

A presença de sintomas depressivos em pacientes crônicos é comum e está associada com a redução da qualidade de vida. Esse estudo em questão, objetivou levantar a sintomatologia depressiva em pacientes fibromiálgicos crônicos e identificar sua relação com características de personalidade. Trata-se de um estudo transversal, descritivo e correlacional. A amostra consistiu de 20 indivíduos, homens e mulheres, com idades entre 32 a 62 anos, com diagnóstico de fibromialgia e em processo de tratamento clínico. Para a coleta de dados utilizou-se (...) o Inventário de Depressão Beck (BDI-II) e a Bateria Fatorial de Personalidade (BFP) e as análises foram descritivas e correlacionais. Identificou-se sintomas depressivos moderados a graves na maioria dos pesquisados e houve associação entre Neuroticismo, Extroversão, Realização e Abertura, indicando que pacientes com fibromialgia se mostram em sofrimento psicológico, com possível dificuldades na tomada de iniciativa, na abertura a novas experiências e na automotivação. (shrink)

Using interpretative case study methods, the researchers examined the beliefs and practices of 10 preservice social studies teachers with self-described preferences to teach for justice. While all...

Although Arendt rejects all manifestations of what she calls “the absolute,” the way that theology trumps politics, she yet overlooks the theological basis of one of her most cherished models of political origins, the story of the Mayflower Compact. Arendt sees the Mayflower Compact as affording a basis for a community that is joined only through mutual promising, allowing a maximal amount of individualism and struggle within a collectively determined entity. Yet she downplays the role that theology serves in supporting (...) this compact. In overlooking the connection between the Pilgrim’s ideology and Rousseau’s concept of the general will which has its own Calvinist origins, Arendt evinces a tendency to forgive a basis for politics in America which she vehemently rejects in the European context. Insofar as liberalism is itself redolent of this Calvinist form of pseudo-individualism, Arendt demonstrates an alternative model even as it remains tangled with its theological origins. (shrink)

Lors d’une conférence à l’université de Iéna, Paul Klee construit une ana­lo­gie entre la création artistique et la morphologie de l'arbre. Dans cette para­bole, qui a depuis connu une fortune critique internationale, il associe les racines au flux des apparences et des expériences et l'artiste au tronc, celui-ci ordonnant et acheminant dans l’œuvre ce courant qui l'assaille. Cette démons­tra­tion, qui a pour intention de justifier les développements abstraits de l'art moderne, réserve à l'ar...

In this essay, I comment on Andrew Benjamin’s recent book, Working with Walter Benjamin. I claim that in this book, Professor Benjamin has done a great deal to illuminate certain complicated aspects of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy. In particular, I focus on his distinction between theology and religion, his treatment of divine violence and the ways that it differs from any human actions, and the nature of what Professor Benjamin calls counter-measures, that is measures which not only challenge but actually unmake (...) certain aspects of our contemporary sense of reality and temporality. (shrink)

What is a society? What is political power? John Searle claims that previous political philosophers not only neglected these fundamental questions but also lacked the means to effectively address them. Good answers, he thinks, depend on theories of speech acts, intentionality, and constitutive rules first developed by analytic philosophers. But Searle is mistaken. Early phenomenologists had already developed the requisite theories. Reinach’s philosophy of law includes a theory of speech acts. This theory is based on Husserl’s account of intentionality. Edith (...) Stein extended that account by offering a detailed description of collective intentionality. And it was Stein who brought these strands of early phenomenological research together to address the very questions of political philosophy Searle regards as both fundamental and neglected. In this paper, I recount Stein’s answers to these questions and argue that they compare favourably withthose of Searle. (shrink)

En este artículo se trata de explicar la influencia de algunos novelistas rusos en la vida y obra de Gabriela Mistral, ya que en su existencia artística son nombrados con cierta frecuencia, además de recomendarlos como lectura obligatoria, citándolos para referirse a ellos como ejemplo para la educación y el cambio social. En un primer momento, se describe y analiza la influencia de estos autores, a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX en Chile, a través de hitos significativos (...) como: el primer encuentro que, gracias a la biblioteca de Bernardo Ossandón, Mistral tuvo con estos en 1904; la recomendación que Mistral hizo a Neruda sobre su lectura en 1920; y algunos escritos posteriores en prosa, entrevista y diarios íntimos donde se refiere a ellos. En un segundo momento, se intenta mostrar cómo algunos novelistas rusos no son solo inspiración literaria para Mistral, sino personas con las que se identifica plenamente, por las coincidencias que observa entre estos y ella misma, en el ámbito de los sufrimientos, dificultades y carencias, que se dan a lo largo de sus vidas. (shrink)

In this essay, I will describe the way that Peter Fitzpatrick takes a deep dive into law in its most abstract and mythopoetic form. I will argue that in doing so, Fitzpatrick reveals the way that an intangible and ethereal non thing can and does shape laws in all of their authority and violence. By looking at this strata of legal formation, Fitzpatrick demonstrates the way that law bridges the gap between its own non-being and its power in the world. (...) He shows us not only how this works but also how in some ways this process can be resisted and diverted, how the violence of law can sometimes be mitigated by its own mythopoetic sources. In doing so, Fitzpatrick reveals the inner logics, the determining myths and abstractions that suggest, not only the foundations of law, but also the possibility of other laws, other forms of engagement and authority. (shrink)

In a footnote of Monolingualism of the Other Derrida describes the plot of a ‘Japanese film whose name [he does] not know,’ but which presents a familial history of incest, violence and tattoos, and which relates to the dream of his style, his ‘ductus,’ what he wants to make arrive to language. By analysing this film together with other instances of tattooing in Derrida's body of work, this essay will show how, if Derrida's dreamt style is a colourful tattoo, this (...) is because his texts are an undecidable inscription, a violent penetration and loving transfusion, between images and words. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that atheism is different from secularism. Secularism is based on a faux elimination of theology which effectively preserves that theology in the guise of overcoming it. To achieve atheism (a term that I draw from the work of Maria Aristodemou), I argue that one needs to directly confront the theological element in order to come to terms with it. In this essay I look at how two political theological thinkers, Nietzsche and Benjamin, accomplish this. Nie-tzsche (...) accomplishes atheism via his thesis of the “death of God,” a death that is not always literal but which creates a space for human life that is not determined by theological terms. Benjamin does the same thing with his idea that God vacates divine powers of judgment and determination in order to allow an atheistic space where human beings can engage in their own self-determination (even as the notion of God remains to challenge any would be human spokespersons for that role). I ultimately argue that atheism and anarchism are related concepts based not just on a rejection of certain forms of theology and all forms of archism, but also in terms of the way they allow a posi-tive and undetermined human response. (shrink)

En este trabajo, analizaremos algunos temas que evidencian la preocupación que Gabriela Mistral tenía por la formación de las mujeres de su tiempo; especialmente, en el hecho de que ellas no podían tener una educación más científica (al contrario de lo que sucedía con los hombres), en la formación de las mujeres obreras (quienes eran prácticamente ignoradas) y en el estímulo de la lectura femenina (como una oportunidad para elevar su cultura). En concreto, veremos las ideas relevantes de tres escritos (...) en tres momentos de su vida: un texto publicado en el diario regional _La voz de Elqui_: “La instrucción de la mujer” (1906), cuando tenía 17 años, vivía aún en Coquimbo y trabajaba como ayudante de preceptora; el segundo, publicado en el diario _El Magallanes_, “Educación popular” (1918), a los 29 años, ya como experimentada directora de un liceo en Punta Arenas y conocida en Chile y en muchos países de la región. Finalmente, en _Lectura para mujeres_ (1923), a los 34 años, radicada en México, invitada por el ministro de Instrucción Pública, José de Vasconcelos, para colaborar con la reforma educacional de ese país. En esta obra, Mistral muestra su absoluta resolución de ofrecer una oportunidad para que la mujer de entonces adquiriera una fina cultura. En síntesis, se busca presentar el deseo que Mistral tenía de mostrar a la sociedad de entonces lo importante que era reconocer la igualdad de la mujer frente al hombre, en los procesos que cada uno experimentaba durante su educación. (shrink)

Dans cet essai, nous voulons contribuer à poser les bases épistémologiques et ontologiques d’une approche composite de la théorie de l’interprétation que nous désignerons sous le nom d’« interprétationnisme pluraliste ». À l’encontre de l’intentionnalisme hypothétique, mais à l’instar de la théorie du patchwork dont il s’inspire, l’interprétationnisme pluraliste admet une variété de modes d’interprétations sans concéder de statut privilégié à aucun. Cette approche s’accorde avec la thèse de l’interprétation imputationnelle que l’on justifie sur la base d’une analyse de la (...) nature et de la formation des concepts interprétatifs. Elle est aussi compatible avec un modèle tripartite de l’ontologie de l’oeuvre littéraire qui permet d’éviter les critiques habituelles soulevées contre l’interprétation imputationnelle, à savoir le singularisme et l’objection de la dissolution de l’oeuvre.In this essay, we want to contribute to lay down some epistemological and ontological bases for a composite view of the theory of interpretation that we are calling “pluralist interpretationism”. Contrary to hypothetical intentionalism, but like the patchwork theory from which it is derived, pluralist interpretationism recognizes a variety of modes of interpretation without conceding to any a privileged status. This view agrees with the thesis of imputationalist interpretation which can be justified by an analysis of the nature and formation of interpretive concepts. It is also compatible with a tridimensional model of the ontology of literary works that avoids the usual criticisms raised against interpretative imputationalist such as singularism and the reductio ad absurdum. (shrink)

En 1994, Sue Rodriguez se suicide avec l’aide d’un médecin après une intense bataille judiciaire en Cour suprême du Canada dont l’objet était la décriminalisation du suicide assisté. À la suite de ce suicide, aucune accusation criminelle ne fut portée contre la ou les personnes ayant présumément aidé Sue Rodrigues à mettre fin à ses jours, et ce malgré le fait que le suicide assisté est un acte criminel au Canada. Cette non-intervention du droit pénal est examinée en fonction du (...) rôle que l’affaire Rodriguez a pu jouer dans la transformation des moralités au Canada. Dans ce livre, le suicide assisté de Sue Rodriguez est envisagé comme un « crime » utile (au sens durkheimien du terme), car il met en évidence une inconsistance entre les moralités dominantes inscrites dans le droit pénal et les conditions sociales qui ont rendu ce « crime » possible. Apparenté au crime de Socrate, le « crime » de Sue Rodriguez est analysé comme un héraut annonciateur de nouvelles moralités, comme un prélude préparant directement la voie à des changements dans le poids accordé aux moralités dominantes. Dans ce contexte, le rôle du droit pénal comme mode privilégié de régulation morale est remis en question. (shrink)

Se estudian los orígenes de la radiodifusión en España con la creación de Radio Ibérica que comienza a emitir en 1924 y cesa su actividad en 1927 con su adquisición por su rival Unión Radio, que tras la guerra civil y hasta nuestros días pasaría a denominarse Sociedad Española de Radiodifusión (SER). La participación de las mujeres en las tareas de la radio se describe cronológicamente, comenzando con la labor de la escritora y periodista Teresa de Escoriaza y siguiendo con (...) locutoras como María Sabater, la técnica de sonido María Ángeles García, la actriz Carmen Seco, loas escritoras y periodistas Josefina Carabias, Matilde Muñoz, Concha Espina y Luisa Alberca. El trabajo finaliza con un resumen del inicio de la actividad de revistas consultorios femeninos con la participación de María del Patrocinio Alba, Mercedes Fortuna, Julita Calleja, Petrita Tamayo y Mercedes Lastra. (shrink)