The ArgumentThis essay examines the prospects and plans of a family of small-scale French papermakers, the Serves, from the 1780s to the 1830s. It explores the interplay of risk, the state, labor discipline, and technological diffusion. Pierre Serve petitioned the monarchy, the Revolutionary state, and the Napoleonic regime for a subsidy to install Hollander beaters, a machine that macerated rags, in his shops. His son pursued a law to humble the journeymen paperworkers, whose custom and skill continuously challenged the Serves' (...) mastery of their mill. Timely responses from the state, which favored large producers, never came. Consequently, the Serves fell back on their own resources and the market, which determined their fate. (shrink)

Published in 1967, when Derrida is 37 years old, Voice and Phenomenon appears at the same moment as Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. All three books announce the new philosophical project called “deconstruction.” Although Derrida will later regret the fate of the term “deconstruction,” he will use it throughout his career to define his own thinking. While Writing and Difference collects essays written over a 10 year period on diverse figures and topics, and Of Grammatology aims its deconstruction at (...) “the age of Rousseau,” Voice and Phenomenon shows deconstruction engaged with the most important philosophical movement of the last hundred years: phenomenology. Only in relation to phenomenology is it possible to measure the importance of deconstruction. Only in relation to Husserl’s philosophy is it possible to understand the novelty of Derrida’s thinking. Voice and Phenomenon therefore may be the best introduction to Derrida’s thought in general. To adapt Derrida’s comment on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, it contains “the germinal structure” of Derrida’s entire thought. Lawlor’s fresh translation of Voice and Phenomenon brings new life to Derrida’s most seminal work. (shrink)

In diesen Vorlesungen behandelt Nelson den Abschnitt in der Geschichte der Philosophie, in dem, angeregt durch die Entwicklung der klassischen Physik, die Frage nach der Begründung philosophischer Lehren die Forscher mehr und mehr zu beschäftigen beginnt. Er verfolgt kritisch die Bemühungen, diese Frage zu klären und Ansätze für ihre Lösung zu gewinnen, deckt alte Vorurteile auf, die diesen Versuchen entgegenstehen und sie immer wieder zurückwerfen und verdunkeln, kurz, er hat – auch darin ein Schüler seines Lehrers Fries – den Mut (...) zur eigenen Stellungnahme, zum Urteil darüber, wo in diesem Ringen um gesicherte Grundlagen philosophischen Denkens Fortschritte erzielt und wo Rückschritte getan wurden. (shrink)

Cet article cherche à travers une étude des textes, et en suivant l'évolution de la pensée de Frege, à dégager le rôle prédominant - à la fois positif et regrettable - qu'a joué la philosophie dans la construction du système fondationnel des Grundgesetze. En premier lieu, sa conception exhaltante de la logique, qui fonde son logicisme est exposée; ensuite, il apparaît que le concept "autonome” d'ensemble n'entrant pas, selon Frege, dans ce domaine pur, ne peut pas fonder l'arithmétique; ensuite, on (...) voit que les types violent à la fois la simplicité privilégiée de la logique et la nature métaphysique des fonctions et en dernier lieu, les raisons philosophiques de la théorie des entités incomplètes sont développées. Il apparaît qu'une vision philosophique empêche de sauver le système des Grundgesetze à moins de le détruire. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science” by Stuart A. Umpleby. Upshot: This commentary looks at the parallel developments in contiguous fields that include and encourage multiple viewpoints and the validity of multiple positions. I contend that necessity will overcome the resistance to disturbing the status quo of power structures when the stakes become high enough.

Einfühlung wird ideengeschichtlich an das Konzept der Selbstperfektionierung geknüpft und insofern im Modus der Defizienz verhandelt. Dabei fungieren antike und mittelalterliche Diskurse um Gotteserkenntnis als historisch-konzeptionelle Vorläufer neuzeitlichmoderner Erklärungsfolien zwischenmenschlicher Alterität, mithin als semantische Vorform der zeitgenössischen Einfühlungs-Idee. In diesem Kontext ist eine ethisch-epistemologische Asymmetrie zu konstatieren, die Gott einerseits als den All-Empathischen beschreibt und zugleich die Erkenntnisbemühungen des Menschen als unabgeschlossen und prozessual vorstellt. Einfühlung produziert sich als regulative Idee im doppelten Sinne: Während Gott als empathische Transzendenz erscheint, bedarf (...) es unendlicher Annäherungsbewegungen, damit der Mensch sich in einem Akt transzendenter Empathie in Gott einfühlen kann. Durch die Etablierung dieser Vorstellungsverbindung hat das Innenleben des Anderen eine transzendente Aufladung erfahren. Das Fremdpsychische wurde zum modernen Mysterium. (shrink)

This essay attempts to answer three types of question concerning the images of violence found in deconstructive discourse. First, there is the question of confusion between real violence and transcendental violence. Second, there is the question of a lack of vigilance in regard to real violence. And finally, third, there is the question of the need for a moral principle of non-violence. The response to the first type of question lies in the recognition that the violence Derrida attributes to the (...) transcendental level of experience lies in the openness of experience. This openness amounts only to the potential for real or factual violence. The response to the second type of question lies in the recognition that more vigilance is needed since the transcendental level cannot be characterized in mundane terms, and that resistance to the mundane means no images of factual violence. Finally, the response to the third and most difficult question lies in an examination of Derrida’s statement that “tout autre est tout autre.” Through this statement we approach something like a principle, even a moral principle. The statement presents us with an imperative to respect every single other as if he, she, or it were absolutely other. (shrink)

This article tries to show the irreducible connection between vulnerability and violence. This connection leads us back to the ethical level of experience. If vulnerability makes violence irreducible, then at least two reactions to violence are possible. On the one hand, a reaction is possible in which one attempts to negate vulnerability in order to close down the very thing within us that allows violence to enter. This negative reaction is actually the worst violence. On the other hand, a reaction (...) is possible in which one attempts to affirm vulnerability, even though its affirmation opens us to the violence that will happen. Affirming vulnerability is the least-violent reaction. If the formula for the worst violence is apocalypse without remainder, then the least violence is the maintenance of the remainder. The maintenance would happen only by not possessing the remainders, which places us in a new situation of poverty. (shrink)

Improving the health and life of individuals living in poverty requires new models and new approaches, moving healthcare away from today's medical mindset of acute care toward a conception of healthcare as value-based, which necessarily means connecting disparate impacts with the healthcare services that are delivered.

Two types of conception of a Way of Life are important for a consideration of the question of the forming and testing of ideals of conduct, and consequently for a consideration of our questions regarding the relation of ideals to practice. The one type is more, the other type less general. The one has reference to man as man, the other to particular classes of man, with relation to their specific function in society. The former issues in the idea of (...) a universal ethic, the latter in the idea of a professional code. Thus the former has a wider generality, the latter has a greater concreteness. Ethical progress seems to me to require that both types should be kept in view, and used to guide man's efforts. (shrink)