The article argues for a shift of perspective in identity management (IDM) research and development. Accessibility and usability issues affect identity management to such an extent that they demand a reframing and reformulation of basic designs and requirements of modern identity management systems. The rationale for the traditional design of identity management systems and mechanisms has been security concerns as defined in the field of security engineering. By default the highest security level has been recommended and implemented, often without taking (...) end-user needs and accessibility issues into serious consideration. The article provides a conceptual framework for inclusive IDM, a brief overview of the regulatory status of inclusive IDM and a taxonomy of inclusive identity management methods. Several widespread IDM approaches, methods and techniques are analyzed and discussed from the perspective of inclusive design. Several important challenges are identified and some ideas for solutions addressing the challenges are proposed and discussed. (shrink)

The environmental crisis, one of the great challenges of our time, tends to disenfranchise those who come after us. Arguing that as temporary inhabitants of the earth, we cannot be indifferent to future generations, this book draws on the resources of phenomenology and poststructuralism to help us conceive of moral relations in connection with human temporality. Demonstrating that moral and political normativity emerge with generational time, the time of birth and death, this book proposes two related models of intergenerational and (...) environmental justice. The first entails a form of indirect reciprocity, in which we owe future people both because of their needs and interests and because we ourselves have been the beneficiaries of peoples past; the second posits a generational taking of turns that Matthias Fritsch applies to both our institutions and our natural environment, in other words, to the earth as a whole. Offering new readings of key philosophers, and emphasizing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, Taking Turns with the Earth disrupts human-centered notions of terrestrial appropriation and sharing to give us a new continental philosophical account of future-oriented justice. (shrink)

"Fritsche's book, which is closely researched, carefully argued, and philologically rigorous, will become an indispensable point of reference for further debates on Heidegger's ambiguous political and ethical legacy."—Richard Wolin, author of The Politics of Being "Unquestionably, Fritsche has a highly unusual command of the Heideggerian idiom, which he uses to very good effect."—Tom Rockmore, author of On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy.

Argues for a closer connection between memories of injustice and promises of justice as a means to overcome violence.

ABSTRACTIn the Black Notebooks, Heidegger ascribes in 1938/9 to the Jewish race an “empty rationality and calculative ability,” in his view the cause of its “worldlessness.” To assess this characterisation, I present Heidegger’s theories of history as a decline in Being and Time and in his later history of Being. For this purpose, I discuss his notions of Rechnen, Machenschaft, and Geviert, several existentialia from Being and Time, and Heidegger’s identification of modern machination and modern technology. Furthermore, I examine Heidegger’s (...) attitude toward the Jews and the Holocaust. I present his alignment of the unconcealment of modernity and the Jewish race, and compare his theory of machination with the texts “Positionality” and “The Question concerning Technology”. Heidegger’s notes about the Jews in the Black Notebooks after 1944 confirm that he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently,” as I already argued in a paper from 1995. (shrink)

BackgroundHospitalized older adults frequently have impaired cognition and must rely on surrogates to make major medical decisions. Ethical standards for surrogate decision making are well delineated, but little is known about what factors surrogates actually consider when making decisions.ObjectivesTo determine factors surrogate decision makers consider when making major medical decisions for hospitalized older adults, and whether or not they adhere to established ethical standards.DesignSemi-structured interview study of the experience and process of decision making.SettingA public safety-net hospital and a tertiary referral (...) hospital in a large city in the Midwest United States.ParticipantsThe study included 35 surrogates with a recent decision-making experience for an inpatient aged 65 or older.MeasurementsThe key factors that surrogates considered when making decisions. Interview transcripts were coded and analyzed using the grounded theory method of qualitative analysis.ResultsSurrogates considered patient-centered factors and surrogate-centered factors. Patient-centered factors included: respecting the patient’s input, using past knowledge of the patient to infer the patient’s wishes, and consider ing what is in the patient’s best interests. Some surrogates expressed a desire for more information about the patient’s prior wishes. Surrogate-centered factors included: surrogate’s wishes as a guide, surrogate’s religious beliefs and/or spirituality, surrogate’s interests, and family consensus.ConclusionOur study indicates that surrogate decision making is more complex than the standard ethical models, which are limited to considerations of the patient’s autonomy and beneficence. Because surrogates also imagine what they would want under the circumstances and consider their own needs and preferences, models of surrogate decision making must account for these additional considerations. Surrogates’ desire for more information about patients’ preferences suggests a need for greater advance care planning. (shrink)

In the context of the recent proliferation of nationalisms and enemy figures, this paper agrees with the desirability of retaining some of the explanatory and motivational potential of an agonistic account of politics, but gives reasons not to accept too much of Carl Schmitt's account of citizenship. The claim as to the necessarily antagonistic exclusion of concrete others can be supported neither on its own terms nor on Derridian grounds, as Chantal Mouffe, in particular, attempts to do. I then indicate (...) that différance may nonetheless account for strong (but not necessary) tendencies toward exclusion as well as for the intrinsic contradictions of liberal universalism. (shrink)

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument (...) thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that, inPolitics I, Aristotle uses the method of his biological investigations and nine principles regarding causation and the working of nature known from his physics, psychology, and biology to demonstrate that the barbarians are natural slaves. His procedure is in line with his general way of thinking.

According to Trawny, Heidegger’s Black Notebooks show that he turned away from any National Socialism in 1938 and that his thinking could be “contaminated” by National Socialism and anti-Semitism only between 1931 and 1944/1945. However, in this paper it is argued that already in Being and Time Heidegger had made a case for National Socialism; that he discovered in 1938 the “true” National Socialism, and that Trawny’s main criterion regarding Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is false. Heidegger’s case is compared with Max Scheler, (...) who, because of Hitler, turned from the right to the centre. In addition, alternatives to Trawny’s detailed interpretations of three of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic remarks are offered, it is shown that Trawny misconstrues Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, and the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s history of Being are presented. (shrink)

Challenging the undesirability of disability is a shared responsibility that requires us to imagine disability differently. In order to imagine disability differently, we need to understand how the neoliberal hegemonic social imagination—key to processes that create good disabled and able-bodied neoliberal subjects—works to curtail who is perceived to have a desirable body. In order to desire disability differently, we must begin with marginal, heterotopic imaginations whereby disability is not something to overcome, but rather is part of a life worth living. (...) In this article, I build on Foucault’s concepts of heterotopia (1998), milieu, and the government of things (2007), and Karen Barad’s agential realism (2007), as well as draw on the work of Mel Chen (2012) and Rod Michalko (1999) in order to argue that the heterotopic imagination reconfigures how we consider disability to emerge, with whom, and where. By mobilising the heterotopic imagination, we can come to recognise that disability does not emerge as an individualised human body, but rather is an intracorporeal, non-anthropocentric multiplicity. To desire disability differently through the heterotopic imagination is not simply to allow the current formulation of disability to become desirable, but rather to radically alter how we desire disability, in addition to altering what disability is, how it is practised, and what it can be. (shrink)

Presque tous les interprètes considèrent qu’il va de soi qu’en Physique Β, 1, 192b8-193a9, Aristote présente ce qui constitue le cœur de sa propre théorie de la nature et des choses naturelles, par opposition à d’autres théories dont il avait connaissance. La question de savoir si, avec ses deux définitions, il renvoie à un principe actif, à un principe passif ou à quelque chose d’autre, a par ailleurs fait l’objet de discussions. Dans cet article, je cherche à montrer qu’en 192b8-193a9, (...) il ne met pas en place sa propre théorie, mais ne fait que préparer le terrain pour le déploiement d’une théorie, et qu’à l’évidence il renvoie à un principe actif, moteur. En outre, je montre comment il élabore au cours de Physique Β sa réponse à la question principale d’une théorie de la nature et des choses naturelles au niveau le plus général, et en quoi cette réponse est constitutive pour sa biologie. (shrink)

Seeking to contribute to the recent emergence of critical phenomenology by clarifying the relation between ontology and ethics, this article offers a new account of the sources of normativity in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technological enframing (Gestell) and Derrida’s political philosophy. I distinguish three levels of normativity in Heidegger and show how moving between the levels permits the critical deployment of the affirmation (Zusage) in response to being’s address. On this view, not only are humans constitutively claimed by (...) being, but the claim calls for its express hearing and critical elaboration. I then show how Derrida reconceives Heidegger’s normativity by developing a notion of double affirmation that communicates with key concepts from his moral-political work, such as the gift, the advance, and friendship. I conclude by indicating what double affirmation entails for critique today. (shrink)

Responding to Derrida's Death Penalty Seminar of 1999–2000 and its interpretation by Michael Naas, in this paper I argue that Derrida's deconstruction of the theologico-political concept of the sovereign right over life and death in view of abolishing capital punishment should be understood in terms of the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty that dominates Derrida's later political writings, Rogues (2005) in particular. My reading takes seriously what I call the functional need for a “theological” moment in sovereignty beyond a merely historicist (...) or genealogical interpretation of the European monotheistic heritage. Further, I ask how Derrida can follow through on his goal of developing the allegedly first principled philosophical stance against capital punishment. To this end, I assemble some ingredients of this complex but “unconditional” abolitionism, one that doubts our comprehension of and active relation to death to the point of questioning the commonsense distinctions among murder, suicide, and legal putting to death. I conclude that, for Derrida, letting another die of hunger or AIDS may be understood as a form of a death sentence, so that a deconstructive abolitionism leaves no room for the development of a good conscience. (shrink)

In a paper entitled “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud into Philosophy?”, Thomas Sheehan accuses Faye of committing many blunders in Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. In this paper, I address what is according to Sheehan himself the most important part of his paper, namely his charges against Faye’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. I show that they are all wholly unfounded. All the aspects of Being and Time that Sheehan addresses speak not only not against Faye (...) but rather even for Faye. (shrink)

Time has often been understood as either linear or cyclical, sometimes in Eurocentric ways that enclose Indigenous peoples in natural cycles with little or no historical development. This article explores an alternative to the line and the circle. In the context of environmental destruction, Indigenous scholars have suggested that traditional Indigenous accounts of spiraling time, from the Anishinaabe and Māori to the Aztecs and Muskoke, better connect nature with human history as well as more appropriately link human generations, including ancestors (...) and descendants. Exploring its connection with the hermeneutic circle and other notions, I will propose the spiral as indeed a promising way to grasp these important connections. In conclusion, I will discuss the question of whether Indigenous spiral ontologies can be proposed for all of humanity beyond knowledge extractivism. (shrink)

To respond to the charge of context-insensitivity, discourse ethics distinguishes justification discourses, which only require that we consider what is equally good for all, and subsequent application discourses, in which the perspective of concrete others must be adopted. This article argues that, despite its pragmatic attractiveness, the separation of justification and application neglects the co-constitutive role that applicability plays for the meaning of normativity. Norms that do not, in a machine-like fashion, produce their cases, cannot already contain their appropriateness to (...) the cases that nonetheless alone justify the existence of norms in th first place. The higher-order norm of appropriateness that enters normativity with th dependence on applications is one that remains implicit, and impossible to determine in advance. Thus, the justification of a norm is always incomplete for conceptual and not merely empirical reasons, as fallibilism typically has it. (shrink)

A collection bringing together a wide-varietyof world-renowned scholars on the import of Derrida's philosophy with respectto the current environmental crisis, our ecological relationships to 'nature'and the earth, our responsibilities with respect to climate change, pollution, and nuclear destruction, and the ethics and politics at stake in responding tothese crises.

This chapter develops an eco-deconstructive account of normativity in relation to well-known but divergent accounts of the emergence of ‘value’ in nature. Value has been argued to emerge with the individual capacity for suffering, with individual self-valuing, or with holistic ecological entities (species, eco-systems, etc.), these three often being seen as at odds with one another. I argue that an entity can become individualized, and thus acquire individual ‘value,’ only in on-going confrontations with other beings and the wider environment. Each (...) living being can be seen as valuing its own life, then, only in response to a vulnerable exposure to its environment that it cannot just claim as its own: its self-affirmation necessarily affirms others and its environment. In this way, the three sources are interconnected in an aporetic matrix of ecological normativities. (shrink)

This chapter offers an overview of the serious challenges with which democracies must contend in the face of increasing climate destabilization and menacing environmental breakdown. After a brief introduction, the second section will discuss various accounts of what democracyDemocracy is or should be, from liberal and republican to deliberative and radical, and briefly indicate which difficulties these accounts face. The third section diagnoses democracy’s climate-related weaknesses. As a global and long-term intergenerational problem that is connected to deeply entrenched economic fossil (...) fuel infrastructure, climate change challenges national and usually short-termist democratic governments to consider noncitizens (especially the global poor, nonhuman beings, and future generations) as well as safeguard the basic safety of the populace and secure constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens. The fourth and fifth sections provide an overview of the many remedies found in the literature, including eco-authoritarian proposals for less democracy, which some authors either recommend or predict and fear. Section “More Democracy” discusses a host of proposals for more democracy, from expansion to previous noncitizens and deeper citizen participation, including climate disobedience, to institutional reforms, especially regarding future people. The chapter ends with suggestions for how climate change might force democracies to adapt, including the alternative between eco-fascism and eco-socialism that some see as a likely prospect. (shrink)

While it is generally accepted that deconstruction’s principal target is the “metaphysics of presence” and thus a presentist conception of time and being, it is less well known that Derrida connected the deconstruction of presence to an idea of justice that is from the beginning intergenerational, that is, concerned with the dead and the unborn. The first section of this paper re-inscribes the idea of “my life” or “our life” in Derrida’s concept of life as “living-on” to show that justice (...) arises with a disjointed time that began before me and is already in the process of outstripping my life toward a future without me. In the second section, I sketch a concept of indirect intergenerational reciprocity in conversation with Derrida as well as with extant work on reciprocity in normative theory and economics. While Derrida’s ideas can be operationalized and fleshed out with the help of this other literature, the disjointed time pertaining to living-on permits new responses to some common objections to intergenerational reciprocity. (shrink)

In response to the claim that democracies are inherently short-termist, this article argues for a new way to understand them as being committed to future generations. If taking turns among rulers and ruled is a normative idea inherent to the concept of democracy, then such turn-taking commits democrats to a fair turn with future generations.

Malgré leurs divergences, les interprètes sont en général d’accord sur le fait que pour Aristote, le lieu est bidimensionnel et peu significatif du point de vue de l’ontologie. Dernièrement, ces présupposés ont cependant été remis en question par Casey et Lang. Dans cet article, c’est la position traditionnelle qui est défendue, et j’argumente en faveur de l’idée qu’Aristote développe sa théorie du lieu à partir du point de vue d’une mécanique du mouvement spatial et des outils nécessaires à un corps (...) organique pour son mouvement dans l’espace – et non à partir d’une théorie de la localisation des corps. Pour finir, la méthodologie aristotélicienne est comparée avec la physique contemporaine depuis Descartes. (shrink)

There is a remarkable difference between Plato scholarship and Aristotle scholarship. Despite Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Socrates was the ironic philosopher par excellence, and Plato’s own writing style quite obviously preserved, or even further enhanced, this distinguished quality of his teacher. Although Plato himself left no doubt that Socrates’ questioning and irony was no play, but rather quite literally a matter of life and death, Plato had recourse to playfulness in his presentation of such deadly matters, be it only in order to (...) cope with his own mourning for Socrates and to express, as well as hide, his bitter sarcasm, scorn, and anger for those people who finally sentenced Socrates to death. Teaching, learning, and interpretation often have an aspect of assimilation. Thus, there is a large tribe whose members—sometimes playfully, sometimes less so—claim that studies on Plato should adopt the peculiar quality of the object of their studies. Even some of the members of the other tribe of Plato scholarship, the Vlastonians, sometimes cannot avoid doing so, and one can gratefully acknowledge that they often perform this half-voluntary exercise in a graceful manner. None of this can be found in scholarship on Aristotle. Aristotle’s texts, which were almost exclusively notes for lectures, are for the most part extremely sober. So, too, is the scholarship on Aristotle. The division of playfulness and labor within Plato scholarship itself, as well as between research on Plato and Aristotle, is certainly very fruitful and by no means unreasonable. Still, a certain playfulness in Reiner Schürmann’s thinking has always waited for an echo in Aristotle studies; for a response to one aspect of his wide-ranging interests. In this paper, I will first comment upon some fragments of one of Aristotle’s dialogues. This will be followed by a few general remarks on the notions of τί ἦν εἶναι and οὐσία. Thereupon, I will address aspects of Metaphysics VII:4-6, in which Aristotle discusses the notion of τί ἦν εἶναι. Finally, in light of the preceding sections of this paper, I will take up Reiner Schürmann’s interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of ἀρχή. (shrink)

Whether deconstruction is relevant to environmental philosophy, and if so, in what ways and with what transformations, has been subject to considerable debate in recent years. I will begin by discussing some reservations regarding deconstruction’s relevance to environmental thought, and argue that they stem from an older misreading of Derrida’s work in particular as hostile to the natural sciences, and as a cultural textualism of relevance only to the interiority of a traditional canon, but unable to reach the materiality of (...) the outside environment. This attempt at refutation will permit a better understanding of the deconstructive argument for what has been called an ‘originary environmentality’ of life. On this basis, I seek to argue that deconstruction tends to be most promising to environmental questions when it shows responses to the call, not primarily for a new ethics, but for far-ranging analyses of our conception of politics. The reason for this lies in the overall deconstructive goal of exposing political and legal sovereignty, including its modern democratic understanding, to what I will elaborate as contextual or environmental finitude. (shrink)

In Being and Time, Division One, Chapter 4, Heidegger develops the structures “Being-with and Dasein-with [Mitsein and Mitdasein]” and “what we might call the ‘subject’ of everydayness—the ‘they’”. In the last section of the chapter, Section 27, Heidegger presents six characters of the ‘they’, namely, “distantiality, averageness, levelling down, publicness, the disburdening of one’s Being, and accomodation”. The meaning of the last five characters is relatively unproblematic. For instance, by “averageness” Heidegger obviously wants to indicate that the ‘they’ establishes a (...) set of behavioural patterns as normal and ‘natural’. For example, at certain junctures of their lives, individual Daseine have to choose, or are able to choose, among several options within a given set of options. However, the entire set of options as such has already been adopted by them in a self-evident way and without much thought. The ‘they’ forces this choice by suppressing other possibilities and other ways of handling given possibilities. Thus, the respective averageness results from a screening process in which the ‘they’ constantly rules out other possibilities or prevents them from emerging in the first place. Heidegger calls this “the ‘levelling down’ [Einebnung] of all possibilities of Being”. However, the first character, distantiality, seems more difficult to understand. In the English translation, Heidegger characterizes it thus. (shrink)

The kairos is the decisive moment in the course of an event; often a disease or battle. Prior to the kairos different forces interact or fight with each other in changing constellations and with changing fortunes. The kairos, however, is the moment of final decision. If, in the case of a disease, at that moment the “powers of life” prevail, the patient will survive and recover. If, to the contrary, the “powers of death” predominate, the patient will die. The art (...) of medicine consists in recognizing the kairos and supporting the powers of life. In a way, it is only in the kairos that humans have responsibility. They can, and must, influence the course of events. In a strict sense, they cannot but have responsibility, for there is no neutrality in the kairos. The physician must be faithful to his commitment to the powers of life and must not defect to the powers of death. To do nothing is already defection, for it strengthens the powers of death by not supporting and thus weakening the powers of life. It also happens that, in paying heed to the demands of the powers of life in the kairos, some realize that they have been on the wrong side and return to the powers of life. In the kairos, a mixture is cleansed and is reduced to an either-or; either life or death, either socialism or fascism. No longer is there the possibility for a neither-nor, in-between, or balance of the opposites. Several authors experienced the 1920s in Germany as a kairos situation and called upon individuals to take their stand in the either-or. Others recognized that it was precisely the call for the either-or that destroyed life, and they called for a balance of the opposites. One of them was the late Max Scheler, after he himself had propagated the politics of either-or, the politics of decision. Another one was Scheler’s successor in Frankfurt, Paul Tillich. (shrink)

Joseph Heath's Communicative Action and Rational Choice may be read as a critical commentary upon Habermas's critical social theory, but it may also be read as merely using the latter as “scaffolding” for the presentation of Heath's own version of critical theory. In what follows, I will focus on the second option and thus largely ignore the exegetical question to what extent Heath provides a fair reading of Habermas. This does not mean, however, that I will not make comparative judgements. (...) On the contrary, my overall claim will be that Heath's new critical theory is more functionalist, and. partly as a result, less critical than Habermas's. Since lack of space does not permit me to argue this in accordance with the standards of detail that Heath's own book generally observes, my procedure may be justified by the attempt to provoke a clarificatory response from Heath. (shrink)

The notions of sustainability that are most widely accepted, domestically and internationally, are underwritten not only by duties to contemporaries, but also, and crucially, by responsibilities to non-overlapping generations. The point of this chapter is to argue that intergenerational dependence suggests that such responsibility is grounded in a form of reciprocity that is often called indirect: A gives to B but B gives ‘back’ to C. On this view, a current generation takes responsibility for the well-being of future generations because (...) it is indebted to previous generations. In conversation with economic and philosophical literature, including so-called care ethics, I develop the basic idea further toward a concept I call asymmetrical intergenerational reciprocity. This concept connects reciprocity with altruistic concerns and with asymmetrical responsibility for the next generation. The basic point is that, as opposed to construing reciprocity as mutual advantage, asymmetrical reciprocity demands the return of benefits to a previously uninvolved third party, and thus invites the combination with an other-regarding concern for the well-being of this third party, future people in this case. (shrink)