Michel Foucault’s Punitive Society lectures make clear that, for him, punishment presents a critical problem. On the one hand, Foucault struggles to develop a conceptual vocabulary adequate to punishment, and particularly to the prison-form as a penal development. On the other hand, the Punitive Society lectures clearly indicate the stakes of punishment. How, Foucault asks, might punishment focalize relations of power? How might it serve as a field of struggle? What does a punitive technology of power look like, if it (...) exists? Indeed, across numerous works from the 1970s and 1980s, Foucault traces the varying place of penalties within penal and punitive tactics, showing how punishment reciprocates historical relations of power and problems of power. Yet it remains necessary to develop Foucault’s account of punishment, which is never formalized. In this paper, I develop punishment as a polyvalent technology. Foucauldian punishment may be an analytic, a technology, and—in the allegorical “punitive city” from Discipline and Punish—a diagram of power. I argue that Foucauldian punitive power seizes the body in the name of an authority or a reified power to subordinate individuals to that authority, and with an objective to correct the individual’s relation to a multiplicity. It operates “above,” at the level of, and in “fragments” of embodied individuals. Further, with Foucault’s account of the “punitive city,” we find a theoretical model in whichpunishment becomes the ordering force of the social, and therein a diagram of punitive power exerted in extensive form across the social field. (shrink)

The word 'materialism' is ambiguous: it designates a moral doc trine as well as a philosophy and, indeed, an entire world view. Moral materialism is identical with hedonism, or the doctrine that humans should pursue only their own pleasure. Philosophical ma terialismis the view that the real worId is composed exclusively of material things. The two doctrines are logically independent: hedonism is consistent with immaterialism, and materialism is compatible with high minded morals. We shall be concerned ex c1usively with philosophical (...) materialism. And we shall not confuse it with realism, or the epistemological doctrine that knowIedge, or at any rate scientific knowledge, attempts to represent reality. Philosophical materialism is not a recent fad and it is not a solid block: it is as old as philosophy and it has gone through six quite different stages. The first was ancient materialism, centered around Greek and Indian atomism. The second was the revival of the first during the 17th century. The third was 18th century ma terialism, partly derived from one side of Descartes' ambiguous legacy. The fourth was the mid-19th century "scientific" material ism, which flourished mainly in Germany and England, and was tied to the upsurge of chemistry and biology. The fifth was dialec tical and historical materialism, which accompanied the consolida tion of the socialist ideology. And the sixth or current stage, evolved mainly by Australian and American philosophers, is aca demic and nonpartisan but otherwise very heterogeneous. Ancient materialism was thoroughly mechanistic. (shrink)

I. L'ordine della mente e le forme del pensiero al tempo delle rivoluzioni nelle tecnologie della comunicazione.

The gambler’s probing of luck in games of chance cannot be reduced to rational calculation. The art of gambling flourishes at the margins of societies and undermines the correlation of effort and entitlement. This paper interprets the peculiar thrill of gambling in modern times by drawing on social systems theory and critical theory. It argues that gambling is a specific mode of agency that consists in a playful engagement with risk and contingency. The gambler reveals a highly aroused and yet (...) passive consciousness. Success in gambling depends on the art of proper timing as well as a preconscious awareness of fortune. (shrink)

Classical Chinese philosophy, and Daoism in particular, has emphasized the importance of rhythm for performing actions well. Drawing on this insight, the paper argues that rhythm is an essential element of nourishing life. A focus on the relationship between rhythm, action, and life becomes necessary in societies that are experiencing a crisis of temporal relationships. Modern agents are pressured to adapt to accelerating speeds that are increasingly experienced as undermining the conditions necessary for human flourishing. A critical theory of temporal (...) relationships is committed to (1) revealing and explaining the increase of rhythmic pathologies and to (2) recovering “eurhythms” that enable exemplary action and human flourishing. (shrink)

It is part of a global trend today that new relationships are being forged between religion and society, between spirituality and materiality, giving rise to announcements that we live in a ‘postsecular’ or ‘desecularized’ world. Taking up two educational movements, the mindfulness movement in the West and the revival of Confucian education in China, this paper examines what and how postsecular orientations and sensibilities penetrate educational discourses and practices in different cultural contexts. We compare the two movements to reveal a (...) new quality of hybrid modernization in that they react, in different ways, to certain pathologies that are identified as consequences of secular modernity. Burnout syndrome, the sense of a spiritual void, but also the loss of a spiritual and cultural identity are being perceived as correlating to a one-sided push towards a modernity that emphasizes secular rationalization over mindfulness and Westernization over cultural particularity. The two case studies mark a critical insight on the present condition and limits of secularism and highlights the ongoing negotiations of values and modes of self-cultivation in schools. In an increasingly pluralistic world, the entanglement of the secular, spiritual, religious and wisdom traditions provides the opportunity to rethink education as a creative realm and an impossible possibility to re-engage the minds and lives of those in the hybrid pedagogical time. (shrink)

El artículo se centra en el imaginario europeo sobre China durante la Edad Moderna temprana y su contribución al pensamiento ilustrado. Parto recordando la precaria condición del misionero jesuita en cuanto “medio complejo” de intercambio intercultural. Luego abordo la misión jesuita desde la perspectiva de la filosofía de los medios de comunicación e investigo la forma específica de subjetividad que fomentó. Finalmente, analizo las disputas intestinas de la Iglesia Católica y el protagonismo del misionero Domingo Navarrete, quien contribuyó al desarrollo (...) de un discurso misionero ilustrado y crítico, el cual culminó en una política de tolerancia y en el surgimiento del secularismo europeo. (shrink)

The chapter begins with the idea that fostering emotions that acknowledge one's role, whether direct or indirect, in causing harm to the environment can encourage eco-friendly behavior. In Western environmental discussions, guilt is often emphasized, whereas Eastern perspectives lean towards shame when addressing responsibility for environmental damage. While guilt discourse is prevalent, ecoshame remains unexplored in the context of environmental ethics. Hence, the chapter draws on Chinese texts to offer an exploration into the potential of this affect to promote responsible (...) environmental actions. This exploration enables a reevaluation of what it means to live on a planet that experiences ecocide. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 1 Seiten: 146-164.

The paper addresses the largely unknown debate on the relationship between politics and theology between Schmitt and Blumenberg. This exchange gains new significance at a time in which the topic of secularization and religion is back at the center of focus. Both Blumenberg and Schmitt agree in their endeavor to make sense of the event of modernity, but fundamentally disagree about its relationship to the transcendent. Schmitt defends his notorious definition of the political as rooted in a friend-enemy distinction that (...) can only be understood from the vantage point of political theology. Blumenberg, it is shown, has good reasons to be convinced that modernity is capable of asserting itself without creating the absolute antagonisms that are the essential features of a political theology or relying on appeals to a transcendent dimension. (shrink)

People can represent temporal stimuli (e.g., pictures depicting past and future events) as spatially connoted dimensions arranged along the three main axes (horizontal, sagittal, and vertical). For example, past and future events are generally represented, from the perspective of the individuals, as being placed behind and in front of them, respectively. Here, we report that such a 3D representation can also emerge for facial stimuli of different ages. In three experiments, participants classified a central target face, representing an individual at (...) different age stages, as younger or older than the reference face of 40 years. Manual responses were provided with two keys placed along the horizontal axis (Experiment 1), the sagittal axis (Experiment 2), and the vertical axis (Experiment 3). The results indicated that the younger faces were represented on the left/back/top side of the space, whereas the older faces were represented on the right/forward/bottom side of the space. Furthermore, in all experiments, the latencies decreased with the absolute difference between the age of the target face and that of the reference face (i.e., a distance effect). Overall, this work suggests that the spatial representation of time includes social features of the human face. (shrink)

Para Frege, o erro de base do psicologismo é a sua concepção de sujeito, que se concentra no princípio de que meus únicos objetos são conteúdos imanentes da consciência. Entretanto, essa tese não é meramente falsa, mas também refutável. A refutação da mesma aparece, não obstante, tardiamente em Der Gedanke. É esse o sentido último da crítica do idealismo oferecida neste texto. Ela é um passo necessário e imprescindível para assegurar a possibilidade de que captemos pensamentos, possibilidade com a qual (...) se ocupa boa parte do artigo de 1918. (shrink)

A semantical and methodological analysis of physical theories is performed in order to find out their relation to reality and to human experience. It is shown that every physical theory refers immediately to an idealized model of waht is supposed to be a piece of reality‐the mediate referent of the theory. Two kinds of physical interpretation of physical symbols are distinguished : objective and operational, and the difference between reference and evidence is stressed. It is claimed that for a theory (...) to be physically meaningful it is necessary that it includes rules of objective reference. In some cases a theory contains, in addition, evidential reference rules, i.e. correspondences between some of its concepts and empirical items. But the test. of any theory requires, rather than operational rules, further theories that can bridge the gap between what the theory refers to and its remote symptom . The conditions for the semantical consistency are sketched and it is argued that there does not exist a semantically consistency inter‐pretation of any of the formalisms of quantum theory. From this analysis arguments in favor of critical realism are drawn. (shrink)