The original essays in this volume discuss ideas relating to democracy, political justice, equality and inequalities in the distribution of resources and public goods. These issues were as vigorously debated at the height of ancient Greek democracy as they are in many democratic societies today. Contributing authors address these issues and debates about them from both philosophical and historical perspectives. Readers will discover research on the role of Athenian democracy in moderating economic inequality and reducing poverty, on ancient debates (...) about how to respond to inborn and social inequalities, and on Plato’s and Aristotle’s critiques of Greek participatory democracies. Early chapters examine Plato’s views on equality, justice, and the distribution of political and non-political goods, including his defense of the abolition of private property for the ruling classes and of the equality of women in his ideal constitution and polis. Other papers discuss views of Socrates or Aristotle that are particularly relevant to contemporary political and economic disputes about punishment, freedom, slavery, the status of women, and public education, to name a few. This thorough consideration of the ancient Greeks' work on democracy, justice, and equality will appeal to scholars and researchers of the history of philosophy, Greek history, classics, as well as those with an interest in political philosophy. (shrink)

While linguistic and analytical interpretations of the Euthyphro are usually circumscribed to two passages of the dialogue, there is a general tendency to disregard the distinc­tion between the ὅσιον and the θεοφιλές. Consequently, one makes hardly any attempt to understand Plato’s criticism of religion. The concepts of θεραπεὶα τοῦ θεοῦ and ἀπεργασία provide us with the possibility of positively characterizing piety and distinguishing it from pure love affection. Contrary to the views of Schleiermacher and Gigon, but following Willamowitz, the present (...) paper shows that the idea of service to the god consists in the doric harmony of Λόγος and Ἔργον, combined with various duties and services to the state. While this is precisely what justice is, the criticism of religion is not solely negative. Through justice, the ὅσιον becomes elevated to εὖ ζῆν and the highest ἀγαθόν in private as well as in public dimension. Without justice, one is left with the neccessity to flee to the other world and embrace the ὁμοούσια with the god, as shown in the Theaetus. If that is the meaning of Socrates’ death, then the idea resembles Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul, for in both cases one is faced with the neverending task of realizing the highest good. The question is whether it is possible to realize the δικαιοσύνη in a political life. Plato considers the issue in his the Republic, Sophist, Statesman and Laws. In the Statesman, justice is the primary goal of any political life that can only be attained through cultivting the divine relationship of harmoni­ous elements in the ὅσιον. It is here that Plato’s doctrine of the ὅσιον becomes completed. (shrink)

I argue that one of the fundamental conflicts between Socrates and his interlocutors in the Gorgias concerns the nature of human freedom. Against the increasingly grandiose and aggressive claims of his interlocutors, Socrates sees true freedom as requiring discipline in speech and deed. Plato has Socrates argue for a concept of human freedom that finds its fulfillment in happiness only by being channeled through the funnels of philosophy and justice. Central to this Platonic understanding of freedom is the role of (...) eros and imitation. Socrates’s love of truth is the foundation for freedom because it motivates the search for a vision of the true good and therefore provides a formation in justice, creating the space for friendship in community life, that is, for civilization. By contrast, Callicles’s love of the dēmos is an extension of disordered self-love, impelling him to seek the means to placate the masses so that he can enlarge his appetites and continually fill them. Such love enslaves Callicles, corrupts political life, and vitiates the possibility of friendship. Finally, I connect these Platonic insights to central themes in Catholic Social Teaching. (shrink)

You'd never know Athens was locked in a life-or-death struggle from the tranquil and leisurely philosophical discussion that unfolds through the pages of the Republic...Plato's masterpiece continues to inform our questions and our thinking when it comes to being, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, community, the soul, and more." -From Dr. Littlejohn's Introduction. On the way back from a festival, Socrates is waylaid by some friends who compel him to go home with them. There he and his companions engage in a (...) long discussion about whether it is worse to suffer evil or to commit it. Far from being dry or abstract, Plato's dialogue is full of practical questions about the nature of justice, education, power, and virtue, and it ends with two of the most vivid myths ever devised by man. This Canon Classic is translated clearly by Benjamin Jowett, and unlike all other works of philosophy, it's actually fun to read. The Canon Classics series presents the most definitive works of Western literature in a colorful, well-crafted, and affordable way. Unlike many other thrift editions, our classics are printed on thicker text stock and feature individualized designs that prioritize readability by means of proper margins, leading, characters per line, font, trim size, etc. Each book's materials and layout combine to make the classics a simple and striking addition to classrooms and homes, ideal for introducing the best of literary culture and human experience to the next generation. This Worldview Edition features an introduction divided into sections on The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Setting, Characters, & Plot Summary, Worldview Analysis, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Socrates' Trial and Conviction of the Jurors in Plato's ApologyDougal BlythI am going to argue in this paper that, in the three speeches constituting his Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the judicial proceedings that led to Socrates' execution as having precisely the opposite significance to their superficial legal meaning. This re-evaluation will lead to some reflections on the politics of Socrates' defence, and, similarly, on Plato's own aims in (...) writing the Apology. I want to show not only that the trial as portrayed demonstrates an inevitable dereliction of duty by the democratic jury, but also, more interestingly, that throughout the proceedings Socrates understands the meaning of the trial precisely in terms of his anticipation of the jurors' judicial incapacity.In the prooimion to his defence speech, Socrates requests that the jurors ignore his manner of speaking and concentrate on whether his case is just, "since this is a judge's virtue (), while that of a rhêtôr is to speak the truth" (18a5-6, cf. 35c2-5). We can gloss the expression "a judge's aretê" in this context as his function, or responsibility.1 Socrates claims that he, himself, fulfills his own responsibility as a defendant to tell the truth (17b4-c4, 33c1-2, cf. 34b5, 35b9-c2) in a speech that asserts his exemplary piety in Apollo's service and his beneficial influence on the Athenian youth. But if, in claiming that he is innocent of the charge, Socrates does tell the truth, then those jurors who thereupon convict him of impiety and corruption, and subsequently sentence him to death, have failed in their duty to judge rightly.My claim is that Socrates sees the trial as a test of the jurors' abilities. It is characteristic of Socrates to test people regarding their concern for virtue and justice, a habit to which he devotes extended discussion during his defence, even dramatising it provocatively in a central passage (29d7-e5) that I aim shortly to analyse in detail. Moreover, Socrates specifically withholds from the jury the title of dikastai or judges; he does finally award the title in his address following the sentence, but only to those who have voted [End Page 1] to acquit him (40a2-3).2 The possibility thus emerges that Socrates has treated the legal proceedings all along as a moral (and intellectual) test, or trial, of the empanelled jurors themselves, to see whether they are capable of the legal function to which they have been allotted. In that case, Socrates is putting on trial, not just those individual citizens, but the very legal system of democratic Athens.Socratic irony and truthfulnessBefore considering Socrates' own explicit judgement during those final remarks on the jurors' moral offence and punishment, I should first address briefly the issue of Socrates' irony. In the past, some writers have asserted that this irony involves him in not telling the truth about himself during his defence, in which case the jury might well have been justified in convicting him. Actually, there does seem to be a consensus among the more extended treatments of the Apology that have emerged during the last decade, at least on the point that Plato presents Socrates as committed to making as sincere an attempt at a defence of his case as is consistent with his philosophical commitment to virtue, and so to telling the truth.3I shall not re-argue this point in detail, but shall take it to be secured by two basic considerations: consistency with the Crito would require Socrates to recognise a legal obligation to make a sincere attempt at defence while his obligation to Apollo to continue his mission in Athens if possible would motivate that attempt with the goal of acquittal.4 Instead, I want to show what role irony does have in Socrates' defence, given that his principled law-abidingness requires him to attempt to persuade the jury, in accordance with truth and justice, that he is innocent (cf. 19a6-7, 18a7-b1, 18e5).Where Socrates acknowledges the obligation to defend himself, he remarks on the difficulty he faces, a difficulty that has resulted from the slander to which he has long... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Socrates' Trial and Conviction of the Jurors in Plato's ApologyDougal BlythI am going to argue in this paper that, in the three speeches constituting his Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the judicial proceedings that led to Socrates' execution as having precisely the opposite significance to their superficial legal meaning. This re-evaluation will lead to some reflections on the politics of Socrates' defence, and, similarly, on Plato's own aims in (...) writing the Apology. I want to show not only that the trial as portrayed demonstrates an inevitable dereliction of duty by the democratic jury, but also, more interestingly, that throughout the proceedings Socrates understands the meaning of the trial precisely in terms of his anticipation of the jurors' judicial incapacity.In the prooimion to his defence speech, Socrates requests that the jurors ignore his manner of speaking and concentrate on whether his case is just, "since this is a judge's virtue (), while that of a rhêtôr is to speak the truth" (18a5-6, cf. 35c2-5). We can gloss the expression "a judge's aretê" in this context as his function, or responsibility.1 Socrates claims that he, himself, fulfills his own responsibility as a defendant to tell the truth (17b4-c4, 33c1-2, cf. 34b5, 35b9-c2) in a speech that asserts his exemplary piety in Apollo's service and his beneficial influence on the Athenian youth. But if, in claiming that he is innocent of the charge, Socrates does tell the truth, then those jurors who thereupon convict him of impiety and corruption, and subsequently sentence him to death, have failed in their duty to judge rightly.My claim is that Socrates sees the trial as a test of the jurors' abilities. It is characteristic of Socrates to test people regarding their concern for virtue and justice, a habit to which he devotes extended discussion during his defence, even dramatising it provocatively in a central passage (29d7-e5) that I aim shortly to analyse in detail. Moreover, Socrates specifically withholds from the jury the title of dikastai or judges; he does finally award the title in his address following the sentence, but only to those who have voted [End Page 1] to acquit him (40a2-3).2 The possibility thus emerges that Socrates has treated the legal proceedings all along as a moral (and intellectual) test, or trial, of the empanelled jurors themselves, to see whether they are capable of the legal function to which they have been allotted. In that case, Socrates is putting on trial, not just those individual citizens, but the very legal system of democratic Athens.Socratic irony and truthfulnessBefore considering Socrates' own explicit judgement during those final remarks on the jurors' moral offence and punishment, I should first address briefly the issue of Socrates' irony. In the past, some writers have asserted that this irony involves him in not telling the truth about himself during his defence, in which case the jury might well have been justified in convicting him. Actually, there does seem to be a consensus among the more extended treatments of the Apology that have emerged during the last decade, at least on the point that Plato presents Socrates as committed to making as sincere an attempt at a defence of his case as is consistent with his philosophical commitment to virtue, and so to telling the truth.3I shall not re-argue this point in detail, but shall take it to be secured by two basic considerations: consistency with the Crito would require Socrates to recognise a legal obligation to make a sincere attempt at defence while his obligation to Apollo to continue his mission in Athens if possible would motivate that attempt with the goal of acquittal.4 Instead, I want to show what role irony does have in Socrates' defence, given that his principled law-abidingness requires him to attempt to persuade the jury, in accordance with truth and justice, that he is innocent (cf. 19a6-7, 18a7-b1, 18e5).Where Socrates acknowledges the obligation to defend himself, he remarks on the difficulty he faces, a difficulty that has resulted from the slander to which he has long... (shrink)

By emphasizing that a political entity is a communal partnership, Aristotle implies that Plato’s city is not yet bona fide political. Due to his reluctance to draw a clear distinction between the private and public realms, Plato’s political theory tries to meet conflicting demands. By examining his solution to Plato’s paradox, we will be able to appreciate the peculiar relation between Aristotle’s political justice and justice per se, and the political significance of Aristotle’s distinction between the public and (...) private realms. (shrink)

In this book, Sara Monoson challenges the longstanding and widely held view that Plato is a virulent opponent of all things democratic. She does not, however, offer in its place the equally mistaken idea that he is somehow a partisan of democracy. Instead, she argues that we should attend more closely to Plato's suggestion that democracy is horrifying and exciting, and she seeks to explain why he found it morally and politically intriguing.Monoson focuses on Plato's engagement with democracy as he (...) knew it: a cluster of cultural practices that reach into private and public life, as well as a set of governing institutions. She proposes that while Plato charts tensions between the claims of democratic legitimacy and philosophical truth, he also exhibits a striking attraction to four practices central to Athenian democratic politics: intense antityrantism, frank speaking, public funeral oratory, and theater-going. By juxtaposing detailed examination of these aspects of Athenian democracy with analysis of the figurative language, dramatic structure, and arguments of the dialogues, she shows that Plato systematically links democratic ideals and activities to philosophic labor. Monoson finds that Plato's political thought exposes intimate connections between Athenian democratic politics and the practice of philosophy.Situating Plato's political thought in the context of the Athenian democratic imaginary, Monoson develops a new, textured way of thinking of the relationship between Plato's thought and the politics of his city. (shrink)

In Books Three and Four of The Republic, Socrates and Plato's brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, discuss the best way to educate leaders for a just republic. In the course of their dialogue, the meaning of justice in individuals and in society shifts from external order imposed through rules and regulations to the harmony and balance internal to every person in the republic. Only then will an individual be ready to act—whether in acquiring wealth, in the care of the body, or (...) in any public or private affairs. This dramatized version is an adaptation of the Benjamin Jowett translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of PhilosophyDavid EngelAndrea Wilson Nightingale. Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiv + 222 pp. Cloth, $57.95.The old saw "Everybody's a comedian" has its counterpart in contemporary academia: "Everybody's a philosopher." Biologists. Psychologists. Linguists. Physicists. Anthropologists. Historians. Even jurists. Many scholars of comparative literature, English, and history can be heard describing what they (...) do, not as literary criticism or history, but as "philosophy." One may even wonder whether we need philosophy departments anymore. Philosophy's private domain has shrunk from what it was under Aristotle (just about every subject short of wagon repair) to its present emaciated condition: it can claim almost nothing for itself alone. The other disciplines have encroached upon it bit by bit. This book is a timely contribution to an important current issue: what is philosophy, [End Page 316] and what does it have to offer? Nightingale argues that Plato faced similar questions. Rhetoricians, tragedians, and comedians all peddled what they had to say as wise (sophon), while dismissing other claims and pursuits as foolishness or worse. Against them and their respective discourses Plato proposed a new candidate: philosophia.Prior to Plato, philosophia meant just "intellectual cultivation." According to Nightingale, it was Plato who made it into a full-blown discipline--or, as she says, invented the discourse. As a way of privileging philosophia (in Plato's new sense of the word) above rival discourses, he parodied them. Nightingale's claims about the parody of other genres and Plato's privileging of philosophia are novel, insightful, and very persuasive. Perhaps it is overstatement to credit Plato with inventing philosophy, but that hardly diminishes the overall impression of this fine book's main arguments.Among Plato's contemporaries, the foremost challenger for the title "practitioner (and teacher) of sophia" was Isocrates. Nightingale uses his Antidosis to show that (1) Isocrates wanted to claim philosophia for himself, and (2) his version of philosophia was significantly different from Plato's. She concludes that the term was still a subject of genuine contention: its meaning mattered to both Plato and Isocrates. As Isocrates advocates rhetorike as philosophia, Plato argues that philosophy is both different from rhetoric and better than rhetoric. Rhetoric aims, ultimately, at public utility as the public perceives that utility, and rhetoric's value is gauged only by the political influence of those who practice it. Plato rejects that entire value system. At bottom it is also the value system of the other genres which, as Nightingale persuasively shows, Plato also parodies.Plato's "parody" (Nightingale's use of the word is broad, but unexceptionable) is "a device for defining and privileging his own pursuits" (59). Moving from rhetoric to tragedy, she considers Gorgias' echoes of Euripides' Antiope. Plato's parody of tragedy subtly criticizes tragedy qua discourse. The tragedian is "ignorant of truth... imitating appearances... gratifying the multitude... fostering the inferior part of the soul," that is, he is precisely what the philosopher is not (67). Socrates and Callicles evoke Euripidean characters: respectively, Amphion (who advocates a private life devoted to the liberal arts) and Zethus (who argues for a life of political activity) (69-70). Plato's unambiguous allusions to Antiope juxtapose not only Socrates and Callicles (and, through them, two irreconcilable views of what philosophy is) but also the tragic hero and the philosophical one (72-73). Plato's "life of the mind for its own sake" orientation wins, ultimately, in both comparisons. Furthermore, just as Amphion's arguments fail to persuade Zethus in Antiope but are eventually vindicated by Hermes' appearance at the play's conclusion, so too Socrates' arguments fail to convince Callicles, and Gorgias' concluding underworld myth parallels Antiope's deus ex machina: affirmation that the view which had been rejected (Amphion's and Socrates') was right, after all (87-88). [End Page 317]Nightingale then examines encomium. Publicly performed epitaphioi and their fictive counterparts (e.g., Menexenus) influenced one another, and the techniques of the encomium, although salient in that genre, occurred elsewhere, including deliberative and forensic situations. In her view, Plato's concern is not narrowly with encomium... (shrink)

I start this paper by addressing Kant’s question why rightful interactions require both domestic public authorities (or states) and a global public authority? Of central importance are two issues: first, the identification of problems insoluble without public authorities, and second, why a domestic public monopoly on coercion can be rightfully established and maintained by coercive means while a global public monopoly on coercion cannot be established once and for all. In the second part of the (...) paper, I address the nature of the institutional structure of individual states and of the global authority. Crucial here, I argue, is Kant’s distinction between private and public right. Private right concerns rightful relations between individual legal subjects, where public right concerns their claims on their public institutions. I propose that the distinction between private and public right should be central to liberal critiques of current legal and political developments in the global sphere. (shrink)

Plato's Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the grounds that a good city would be just and that defining justice as a virtue of a city would help to define justice as (...) a virtue of a human being. Socrates is finally close to answering the question after he characterizes justice as a personal virtue at the end of Book Four, but he is interrupted and challenged to defend some of the more controversial features of the good city he has sketched. In Books Five through Seven, he addresses this challenge, arguing (in effect) that the just city and the just human being as he has sketched them are in fact good and are in principle possible. After this long digression, Socrates in Books Eight and Nine finally delivers three "proofs" that it is always better to be just than unjust. Then, because Socrates wants not only to show that it is always better to be just but also to convince Glaucon and Adeimantus of this point, and because Socrates' proofs are opposed by the teachings of poets, he bolsters his case in Book Ten by indicting the poets' claims to represent the truth and by offering a new myth that is consonant with his proofs. (shrink)

This book, which inaugurates the Princeton Monographs in Philosophy series, starts from Plato's analogy in the Republic between conflict in the soul and conflict in the city. Plato's solution required reason to impose agreement and harmony on the warring passions, and this search for harmony and agreement constitutes the main tradition in political philosophy up to and including contemporary liberal theory. Hampshire undermines this tradition by developing a distinction between justice in procedures, which demands that both sides in a conflict (...) should be heard, and justice in matters of substance, which will always be disputed. Rationality in private thinking consists in adversary reasoning, and so it does in public affairs. Moral conflict is eternal, and institutionalized argument is its only universally acceptable restraint and the only alternative to tyranny.In the chapter "Against Monotheism," Hampshire argues that monotheistic beliefs are only with difficulty made compatible with pluralism in ethics. In "Conflict and Conflict Resolution," he argues that socialism, seen as the proposal of extended political solutions for natural human ills, is still a relevant, yet strongly contested, ideal. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I examine Socrates' defense of justice in Plato's Republic. I contend that recognizing the problematic character of Socrates' defense of justice in the Republic is a key to understanding his teaching regarding justice. In response to the request made by Glaucon and Adeimantus at the beginning of Book Two, Socrates tries to show, in the bulk of the Republic, that justice is intrinsically good and that it is better than injustice. In doing so, he relies especially on (...) the definition of the justice of the individual that he provides at the end of Book Four, i.e., allowing each of the parts of the soul to mind its own business. But this definition is paradoxical and appears to have little link with justice as ordinarily understood. It contrasts with the more commonsensical definitions of justice offered in Book One, e.g., that justice is giving to each what is owed and telling the truth. In Book Five through Book Ten, Socrates continues his defense of justice by equating the just man and the philosopher--indeed, by making clear that the philosopher is just more or less in the sense outlined in Book Four. But Socrates implicitly points to the problematic character of the equation of the just man and the philosopher by revealing, among other things, that the philosophers must be compelled to rule in the best regime even though it would be a matter of justice for them to rule willingly. I attempt to comprehend why Socrates provides such a problematic defense of the justice of the individual in the Republic. So too, I explore Socrates' equally problematic defense of the justice of the city. In particular, I consider the possibility and goodness of Socrates' three paradoxical proposals aimed at bringing about the greatest justice attainable within a city--namely, the community of women and children, the equality of the sexes, and the philosopher-kings. (shrink)

This article proposes to address the relationship between philosophy and politics through the 5th-4th Century's intellectual debate on ethics and politics in Athens. A debate which takes place in the wake of the rise of a new individuality, marked by the discovery of the tragicity of the soul. What stands out in this debate is the redefinition of a philopolitical stand in all its historical ambiguity and ethical idealism. Aristophanes, Thucydides, Euripides, Gorgias and, obviously, Plato himself are striving to define (...) the possibility of the encounter between philosophy and the city, public and private, justice and interests, individual and community. The Platonic solution for the problem reveals complexity and articulation typical of his thought: the philosopher that shelters himself from the storm behind an academic wall is the same who "in order for himself not to seem nothing but words" sails towards the uncertain Syracusan project. (shrink)

The main thesis of this essay is that the practice of Socratic political speaking and the practice of Platonic political writing are intimately interconnected but distinct. The essay focuses on the famous passage from the Gorgias in which Socrates claims to be one of the few Athenians who attempt the political art truly and goes on to articulate the nature of his political practice as a way of speaking toward the best (521d6-e2). It then traces the ways Socrates attempts to (...) use words to turn Gorgias, Polus and Callicles toward the best in the course of the dialogue. What emerges is a picture of a philosophical friendship between Gorgias and Socrates rooted in a common concern for justice. Yet, Socrates’ success with Gorgias is overshadowed by his failure to convince Polus or Callicles to allow a concern for truth, justice and the good to animate the course of their lives. Even so, the political practice of Platonic writing is shown in the essay to be designed to awaken in us, the readers, precisely such a concern to live a life in which words are spoken in ways that uncover the truth and are directed toward the best. (shrink)

The opposition between Socrates’ views and the sophists’ teachings reflects the conflict of ethics and politics and of philosophy and democracy, the form of state regarded by Plato as an outcome of sophistical relativism. Socrates saw the task of a politician in betterment of his own soul and of the citizens’ characters while the sophists taught their disciples utilitarian efficacy in politics and everyday life, essential to achieve success in the system of direct democracy. Cognitive nihilism was created by Gorgias (...) who pointed out the difference between logos, that is, thought and word, and the reality, and, using his dialectical method, criticised the whole previous Greek cultural tradition. The proper ability needed in life was, according to him, rhetorical skill, which however should be used only to achieve just goals. A product of sophists’ education is Callicles, the fictitious personage created by Plato. As an opponent of education based on self-restraint and as an adherent of the theory that according to the laws of nature stronger individuals should rule over weaker ones, he symbolises the negative moral and political consequences of relativism. Moreover, he criticises philosophy as an activity contrary to his pragmatic notion of excellence in public and private life. The law of the stronger was also upheld by Thrasymachus of Chalcedon who claimed that justice is always in agreement with the interest of the mighty. Another disciple of the sophists, Critias, famous for his ruthlessness as an oligarch, was convinced that people obey the laws thanks to their faith in the gods. That faith, according to him, was invented by eminent lawgivers. A negation of immoralism can be found in a treatise by an anonymous sophist, quoted by Iamblichus. Its author glorifies law-abidingness of great men and their devotion in the service of the state and the laws. That text should be regarded as a synthesis of the sophists’ pedagogical views, based on the cult of the society as a community. (shrink)

"A climate crisis and other pressures on planetary ecology are causing profound anxieties. Climate change threatens to trap hundreds of millions of people in dire poverty and to separate further an already deeply divided world. However, a new generation of activists is offering inspiration, serving as a hope-maker. This book offers an accessible and empirically informed philosophical discussion of climate change, global poverty, justice, and the importance of political responses, both internationally and domestically, that offer hope. There are reasons enough (...) to worry that the era of pervasive human planetary impact, the Anthropocene, could produce terrible global injustices and massive environmental destruction. But that need not be so. Since the Industrial Revolution growth in productive capacity and the egalitarian struggles to share its benefits widely have made another world possible. We still have reason to hope for a world in which international cooperation to manage Earth systems sustainably prevails, in which the natural treasures of the Earth are valued, in which a vision of prosperity is realized and the scourges of disease, ignorance, and poverty are overcome, in which powerful lobbies defending private interests that threaten sustainability are minimized and contained, and in which democratic politics responding to the values of an educated public prevail. The work of bringing about such a world is the work of mobilizing hope"--. (shrink)

« Real politics » : Some remarks on justice and politics The focus of the article is on the foreclosure of justice from the constellation of modern political concepts, that is, the erosion which modernity operates concerning the conditions which would enable us to pose the question of justice. The failure of all modern attempts to formulate the right of resistance shows the collapse of the idea of justice, henceforth reduced to being either a purely formal procedure or the will (...) of majority. From this point of view, justice is merely the advantage of the stronger, as we can see in the position of Thrasymachus, already criticised by Plato. The essence of the crisis we are facing today involves more than just economics. It also involves law and politics. The moment is thus an opportunity to re-open the question of justice. To do so, we must go beyond the principle of majority decision. True politics, an idea which traverses Kant and Walter Benjamin, envisages the question of justice beyond the doxastic horizon. It re-opens the Socratic conflict between truth and opinion. The core of the problem hinges on the possibility of a real political change in this political form, the form of a modern democracy which represents itself as absolute and un-transcendable. (shrink)

In The Idea of Justice (2009), Amartya Sen advocates democracy defined as ‘public reasoning’ and ‘government by discussion’. Sen’s discursive approach facilitates the exercise of political freedom and development of one’s public capacities, and enables victims of injustice to give public voice and discussion to specific injustice. It also responds to the contested nature of ‘universal human rights’ and the need to clarify and defend them via public reasoning. However, Sen’s approach leaves intact the hegemony of (...) a liberal form of democracy that prioritizes political and civil rights over social and economic rights and thus precludes alternative democratic forms, most notably a form of cooperative democracy that politicizes social and economic activities in the pursuit of local and global justice. Sen’s ‘government by discus- sion’ must combine with cooperative democracy and a global ethos emphasizing cooperation (and action) over privatization in order to address our most serious global injustices, including exploitation, inequality and poverty in the Global South, accelerating destruction of the environment and biodiversity, and global warming and climate change. (shrink)

This book is an important effort to fill a notable void in moral and political philosophy, for there has been, according to Sharon K. Vaughan, “no formal study of the treatment of poverty in Western political thought” . Vaughan attempts to rectify this with a survey of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Mill, de Tocqueville, Hegel, Marx, Rawls, and Nozick on the subject of poverty, the poor, the redistribution of wealth, and justice. Her effort is valuable, (...) even if more work remains to be done.The time is well chosen for Vaughan’s undertaking, both because of the resurgence of political philosophy in the past forty years and also because of a more recent interest in the relationship between the empirical sciences and philosophy. An account of poverty, and a philosophical theory of how to respond to poverty, are clearly of importance to the justice project, central to contemporary political philosophy; but it is unlikely to be carried out well without attention to empirical details concerning the sources of poverty, the demographics of the poor, analyses of programs that have, and have not, been effectively used in the past, and the like. As Daniel Shapiro has recently shown in Is the. (shrink)

English version of: "Il personale e politico? Il confine fra pubblico e privato nella sfera della giustizia distributiva." --- Italian text published in Carter, Ian, Otsuka, Michael and Trincia, Francesco Saverio Discussione su "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?" di G.A. Cohen. Iride, XIV. pp. 609-634. ISSN 1122-7893.

This paper begins with a brief examination of the contemporary American political landscape. I describe three recent events that illustrate how attempts to control the narrative about events that transpired threaten to undermine our shared reality. I then turn to Book I of Plato’s Republic to explore the potentially tyrannizing effect of Socrates’s narrative voice. I focus on his descriptions of Glaucon, Polemarchus and his slave, and Thrasymachus to show how Plato presents Socrates’s narrative activity as a process that controls (...) how the auditor understands the events that follow. I then turn to an alternate understanding of Socratic narrative which extols its philosophically and politically liberatory possibilities. I use my own previous work on Socratic narrative, Jill Frank’s Poetic Justice, and Rebecca’s LeMoine’s Plato’s Cave as three examples that emphasize the more positive dimensions of Socratic narrative. Finally, I end with a brief exploration of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters, and bell hooks’ works on pedagogy to argue for the possibility a Socratically-informed public space for political discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cynthia B. Cohen THE TRIALS OF SOCRATES AND JOSEPH K. No two trials could have been more unlike than those of Socrates and Joseph K. As portrayed in Plato's Apology,' Socrates was the conscience of Athens, a thoughtful and courageous man whose life was devoted to the pursuit of wisdom. He challenged others to examine themselves and to transform themselves into lovers of truth and goodness. This gadfly of (...) Athens was put on trial by those whom he had stung and was dispatched with a final slap. He died the bravest, wisest, and most upright man of his time. By contrast, Joseph K., the protagonist of Kafka's novel, The Trial, was an ordinary bank clerk locked into a life of unreflective routine. His arrest one day by the agents of a Court he could not comprehend failed to change his rote approach. Like a fly stuck fast to flypaper, he was glued to the details of his immediate experience, and would not rise above these to find meaning in his dreary life, or even in his shameful death. Socrates was an original and constructive thinker who died rather than deny the purpose that he found in human life; Joseph K. was a leaden bureaucrat whose life was one long moment of guilty hesitation before a broader vision of things. Or is it that Socrates was an arrogant, peculiar, conniving failure who was engaged in an insidious attempt to undermine the moral and political values of Athens? And is it that Joseph K. was a successful young businessman who had established himself as a conscientious, decent, and eminently reasonable man struggling bravely for justice against an alien and capricious authority? Or perhaps these two trials should be seen as very similar. Each man was tried on charges of which he claimed to be innocent; each wanted to restore order and meaning to a disintegrating world; each led a life that became the cause of his death; and each was condemned for claiming that the unexamined life was not worth living. Or is it that Joseph K. was condemned for maintaining that it was the examined life that was not worth living...? 212 Cynthia B. Cohen213 Difficulties in the interpretation of works of literature are to be expected when their subjects are complex and subtle individuals set in an atmosphere in which basic questions of human significance are raised. Both the Apology and The Trial are such works. Socrates initially seems a model of clarity to the interpreter. He responds to his accusers in a form of direct discourse that can be taken at face value. He presents his arguments openly and cogently. There can be no doubt that his general position is coherent, consistent, and reasonable. Yet the interpreter 's initial satisfaction fades as Socrates' irony creates confusion about what Socrates professes to know. His lines of reasoning seem to intersect in paradox; his answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of human life curve around to miss each other. The interpreter emerges confused and perplexed. These transformations of perspective and significance are repeated in The Trial. Joseph K., too, is described in a straightforward manner that is clear and quite detailed. His reactions and arguments appear sensible and well-reasoned. Yet on closer examination, his simple statements turn out to have hidden meanings; his responses often contradict one another; his logical arguments appear pointless. His answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of human life are immediately challenged by a horde of competitors. To the interpreter, The Trial metamorphizes into a model of intentional obscurity. The problem of interpretation is compounded in the case of Socrates by the question of the accuracy of our information about him. The "Socratic problem" is well known. Each of the four major sources about his life and thought, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle, presents a somewhat different person. There has been strong support for the view that the portrayal of Socrates in the earlier dialogues of Plato is essentially sound, even though this earlier Socrates seems at variance with the later one. The resolution of this problem is irrelevant to this endeavor. Our purpose is to consider the life and... (shrink)

Regardless of unpredictable and contingent geopolitical events such as last year’s surprising rejection of the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, this coming year will certainly witness a large surge in patriotism. The Winter Olympics in February, and the World Cup in the summer, both promise to whip national sentiments into a fever pitch. One other thing is certain, though: journals of philosophy and ethics will continue to debate the virtues of cosmopolitanism, as this number of Ethical Perspectives does (...) through its contributions below.Why is this? Why do philosophers and academics hold on to this idea of cosmopolitanism, an idea utterly lacking in the convictions of the general public? Is it perhaps because the first cosmopolitans were in fact philosophers? The first to identify himself as a cosmopolitan was Diogenes the Cynic, and Plato’s dialogues paint many of the Sophists in cosmopolitan hues. Although people generally support the idea of internationalism as far as it promotes trade, travel, and football tournaments, once it begins to meddle in internal affairs, as it does with outsourcing and transnational constitutions, they tend to fall back upon the patria. They killed Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, not the youth of the world.Whether it is the service and manufacturing industries of Asia and India ‘stealing’ American jobs, or widespread fears of Brussels’ legendary bureaucrats, the non-academic public consistently turns from its tepid embrace of cosmopolitanism to patriotism whenever threatened. Are we too quick to label this as self-interest or even selfishness? Or is there something else at work in the debate between cosmopolitanism and patriotism? Some approaches to cosmopolitanism are certainly guilty of an absolute removal of difference, of wishing away the nation state, of replacing it with an international body based on purely universal principles, and of wiping away the competencies of nations on many levels. The call for the world state can come across as an appeal for an anodyne and internationalist homogeneity based on a clinical morality that, for all its sensitivity, runs roughshod over the well-engrained cultural, legal, and social beliefs of many peoples.Clearly, this is what many Europeans fear, and to a large degree, Americans as well in their dislike for the International Court of Justice. Even the economic hegemony of outsourcing removes national power, and replaces it with pure economic rationality.Our contributors below do not advocate these reductions, although some may point to them. Key to each contribution below is sensitivity to the world as it is, to its need for difference even in the face of an ever-increasing globalisation that sometimes is connected with cosmopolitanism. Yet, every proponent of cosmopolitanism must sketch how it is possible in practice. Of course, an obvious problem is how to dwell consequently as a cosmopolitan. Not many contemporary cosmopolitans would be prepared to follow Diogenes’ commitment to rootlessness: living in exile after having been included in a forgery conviction aimed at his father, the ascetic Diogenes called a barrel his home. Such was his drive to live a levelled life that he cast away his only bowl upon seeing a poor peasant boy drinking from cupped hands. Today’s cosmopolitan leads a much more prosaic life, and hence the problem with cosmopolitanism begins as something mundane. Does not a cosmopolitan still pay national taxes? Does not a cosmopolitan still need a national passport and second country visas? But, the questions quickly turn ontological: how can one shed oneself of one’s nationality, of one’s belonging, as if it is just an accident of one’s own constitution, instead of as an important property of one’s own constitution? In other words, belonging is important: a citizen of the world still values citizenship. Clearly, the absolute cosmopolitan reduction is an absurdity: one is always rooted, in some sense. Even cosmopolitanism is rooted in a specific Western mindset, and is no self-evident preference of human existence.As Rudi Visker’s contribution so clearly shows through an investigation of the narcissism of minor differences, these questions revolve around the question of confrontation with alterity. What I am, in no small way plays off what I am not. I cannot be everything, if I am something. Freud’s analysis of minor differences reveals that members of a group identify with that group on the basis these minor differences. What is self-evident to a particular culture marks that culture off from another culture, a culture that by definition does not share the same set of the self-evident. To be a foreigner, as any ex-patriot can attest, is to stand outside of the self-evident, whether this means interpreting gestures, understanding commercial practices, or, as Freud would have it, staying on the correct side of national taboos. There is thus a dialectic of inner and outer, a dialectic which refuses a reduction of one to the other. As Visker puts it, recognising the stranger within oneself is quite different than recognising the stranger outside of oneself, and to confuse these as being the same is not only to misunderstand the very issue at stake, it is also a dangerous trivialisation of difference.But clearly, there is something viable and laudable in the idea of cosmopolitanism, since it stresses the universal moral community of humanity. Cosmopolitanism is an attempt to see all human subjects as subject to the same moral law. Indeed, the sort of federation to which cosmopolitanism leads, at least in a modified Kantian expression as Bert van Roermund tells us, even gives us good grounds to recognise the legitimacy and moral equivalence of states. Importantly, the international legal order does not draw its power from any supranational force, but from the choice of independent national actors to recognise it. Hence, this cosmopolitan order depends on nationhood, and good standing within this order depends on the degree to which a country decides to participate. Again, the universal here depends on well-rooted particularity, a particularity able to choose for the universal.What do we do, then, with outlaw nations, those nations that are hostile to the choice for the universal? Through a clear reading of Hegel, Paul Cobben proposes that the metric for a state’s legality is the measure to which it permits the moral freedom of its citizens to bloom. A free person requires a free legal order; only in such can a person obtain the full measure of human rights due. States that do not permit this blooming are illegitimate; they contradict the nature of the human person, and citizens dwelling under the yoke of these have the right to ask for outside assistance in removing this illegitimate power above them. However, for this plea to be met, two conditions must obtain: the oppressed people must have the wherewithal to form a political order after the removal of the illegitimate state, and the action must be grounded in the principles and support of a legal community, which in essence would be a world federation of states. In fact, it is morally incumbent upon all legal states to aim at such a world federation, upon pain of contradiction.Our duty to others does not end with the politically oppressed; the economically oppressed also lay a moral claim upon us. So, as Toon Vandevelde asks in his contribution, what about the global poor? The poor are hungry and in need of shelter and a future, but to address these issues at the level of rights is in a way heartless: what good does it do to legislate that everyone has the right to food, when this right can never be called upon, or enforced, in any meaningful sense? Moreover, approaches that demand non-prioritised generosity not only ignore the fundamental economic fact of scarcity, they also run the risk of creating the moral hazard of dependence on charity. The true cosmopolitan approach is the recognition of our common humanity and of our concomitant duty to help others as far as this help does not endanger us. This duty is compounded by the marginalisation of the poor through globalisation, a globalisation that they did not ask for. The extent of our help is indeterminate, but its direction is clear: it must aim to integrate those poor who wish it within our international systems, and so to ease their own transitions from poverty.Both Gil Anidjar and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher continue this theme of economy, but each from a highly specific viewpoint. Indeed, their contributions are perhaps somewhat darker, delving into an aspect of the unspoken underneath the choice for the universal. Anidjar begins with the relation between religion and economy within the interplay of Judaism and Christianity, whereas Bonnafous-Boucher focuses on the development of political economy through a Foucaultian lens. Although highly distinct contributions, both share the insight that the economy is now the central theme of our power structures, and that economy, isolated from questions of morality or justice, must likewise play a decisive role within the structure of cosmopolitanism, or, at minimum, the political unity of peoples. For, national government long ago ceded to a promiscuous mix of governance, and religion to economy. This nexus enthrones governance as an economic rationale stripped of all other trappings, and inscribes any possible cosmopolitanism within a framework of an aggressive capitalism, a kind of economic theology, a kind of hegemony in which state boundaries are essentially liquefied. Capital, after all, knows no boundaries. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper I examine the ways in which the concept of “public interest” is used in biomedical policymaking to justify the preemption or overruling of decisions made by individuals about their own, their family's, or group interests in the field of healthcare. I discuss six variants of public-interest justification, before going on to consider a concrete example, the use of personal health data in health services management and medical research. I distinguish between the global public interest (...) and particular public interests and consider critically how the global public interest can be said to arise from private interests. I show that there is always room for the private individual to defeat appeals to public interest on moral grounds, and hence that public interest cannot have overriding moral force. Hence, public-interest claims need to be considered as political appeals about competing claims and conceptions of justice, rather than as shortcuts to defining the universal solidary interest. (shrink)

Plato argued that knowledge of human nature can be reached through dialogue and dialectical method in accordance with the Socratic heritage. In his philosophy, man can be defined as being capable of rationally answering a rational question. By giving rational answers to himself and others, human also becomes a moral subject. In Plato's philosophy, we see a clear program based on human nature. Issues related to human nature are discussed in the process of applying Plato's theory of ideas to the (...) field of morality, art, politics and education. What emerges in practice, for example, right and fair behavior is a manifestation of the principle of truth and justice. According to Plato, man reflects the character of the state he lives in. To understand a person, it is necessary to consider the society in which he lives. The state is not an institution that people come together and establish with their own will, but an organism, a whole. According to Plato, in order to grasp the true meaning of human society and to arrange it properly, one must first comprehend the astronomical cosmos. Because, knowing the meaning of the concepts of harmony and order is possible only by understanding the astronomical cosmos, which is the expression of an eternal order. While studying the astronomical cosmos, a man comes to the idea of harmony and order itself. Indeed, the infinite canonical and harmonious movements of the stars in this pre-eternal order on their perennials lead to the concept of law itself. People who admire this harmony and order in the sky want to realize a model of it on earth. He concludes that the laws that will rule over the human world must be continuous and compatible, just like the laws in the world of stars. Thus, the state must be an earthly model of the astronomical cosmos. If a person lives in the state, he should realize this harmony and order in the state in his own spirit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics and Eros in Aristophanes' Speech:Symposium 191E–192A and the ComediesPaul W. LudwigFor many of Plato's modern readers, Aristophanes' encomium of eros is the most memorablnvincing speech in the Symposium. Yet a key passage in the speech is not well understood. About three–fifths of the way through the speech, Aristophanes asserts that boys who are unashamed to lie with men are the most manly boys by nature. A great proof (...) of this, he says, is the fact that they alone end up in politics, where they become "real men."1 Since the same connection between sex and politics is the object of derision in Aristophanes' comedies, 2 many commentators have seen irony in this assertion.3 More have implicitly favored a straight reading, however, relying on the strength of the speech taken at face value. The type of irony at issue, dramatic or verbal, is also open to competing interpretations. Nor have the implications of either type of irony for the rest of the speech and for the dialogue as a whole been adequately treated. Does Plato make his character Aristophanes speak more wisely than he is aware of, in playful revenge for the comedian's own distorted portrait of Socrates?4 Or does Plato make use of the professional jester to clear the way for Socratic morality, on the assumption that Aristophanes' views about male homosexual eros were sufficiently well known to leave little doubt that his explicit praise of pederasty was tongue–in–cheek? [End Page 537]I. The Passage in ContextSymp. 191e–192aThe safest exegesis would first make sense of what Aristophanes professes to mean, comparing the philosophic content, which ought to stand or fall on its own merits, with the rest of the speech and with the other speeches in the dialogue, especially Socrates'. Irony could then emerge either as an alternative or as a supplement to the face–value reading. Assessment of the dialogue's own internal logic, as well as comparison with other Platonic dialogues, should precede recourse outside the authorship of Plato, viz. to the Aristophanic comedies.Aristophanes not only legitimates male–male desire, he asserts that it is best. He argues for his assertion on the grounds that male–male desire is connected to politics. This argument resonates with two themes sounded earlier in the dialogue, by Phaedrus and by Pausanias. The former praises male–male relations by saying that if by some chance a city or armed camp could come into being made up entirely of lovers and their boyfriends, their desire to refrain from all that is shameful and to seek honor in one another's eyes would result in their city's having the best possible government. If such were to fight side by side, even if their city or army happened to be small, they would well nigh conquer all mankind. For an in love would rather die than be seen in any act of cowardice () by his boyfriend (178d 4–179a 2). In other words, lovers make the best citizen–soldiers because the private aim of impressing the beloved serves the public goal of bravery in battle.Pausanias plays a variation on the same theme. He argues that barbarian tyrants outlaw pederasty because they are afraid of strong attachments arising among their subjects. Since proud thoughts are engendered by love, Pausanias reformulates the unwillingness to tolerate disgrace in battle into an unwillingness to acquiesce in tyranny. He cites the example of Harmodius and his lover Aristogeiton, who, in popular lore, dissolved the tyranny of the Peisistratids at Athens, thus clearing [End Page 538] the way for democracy (182b 6–c 7). Like Phaedrus, he mentions unmanliness as the crucial political defect that breeds tyranny (cf. 178d 4–6 with 182c 7–d 2). Like Phaedrus, he sees manliness as the willingness to take up arms, this time not in battle, but in a tyrannicide. And like Phaedrus, he sees male–male relations as the breeding ground for manliness.Unlike Phaedrus, Pausanias is especially concerned with education. The mature lover is assumed to possess already the civic virtues as well as a modicum of philosophy.5 He can initiate his younger... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Just Share: Justice and Fairness in Resource Allocation*Pat Milmoe Mccarrick (bio) and Martina Darragh (bio)Each of us has some basic sense of what the words “fair” or “just” or “fairness” or “justice” mean. Each of us probably also has an idea of what is “fair” in health care. The attempt by the state of Oregon in the mid-1980s to quantify this notion made a previously private exercise a (...) public one. This transition has been chronicled in the bioethics literature that focuses on resource allocation. These works examine both theories of justice and concepts of “health”; the fair distribution of health resources has been of continuing interest since the beginning of bioethics in the 1960s. Early writing on justice includes authors Tom L. Beauchamp, Robert H. Blank, James F. Childress, H. Tristram Engelhardt, Paul T. Menzel, Paul Ramsey, and Robert M. Veatch (VII).During the 1980s, bioethicists such as Daniel Callahan and Norman Daniels proposed thinking of health care decisions not as moments of personal crisis but as choices that span a lifetime, possibly involving tradeoffs in other areas of one’s life, e.g., education. The Oregon experience added another dimension to the discussion. The initial rank-ordering of health services by cost produced a skewed list—for example, surgery for life-threatening conditions ranked below minor, elective procedures. For the project to make sense, the ranking algorithm could not be based on cost alone, but rather on a combination of costs and benefits both to individuals and to the community—“concatenations of individual and group goods” (I, Jecker and Jonsen 1995). Various metaphors have been used in the literature to facilitate discussion of this shift from individual to individual/community trade-offs: medical services as a “commons” (I, Asch 1995, Jecker and Jonsen 1995, Michels 1994); resource allocation as a “lifeboat” (I, Campbell 1995; III, Kaveny 1994); medical care as “shares” in a community health (III, Nelson 1992, Ford and Kissick 1995; II, Anderson 1993); and rationing as traveling through the desert with one jug of water for two people (a story from the Halachah literature) (I, Zoloth-Dorfman 1995). [End Page 81]Such metaphors do not promote any one “theory of justice” but rather draw from the work of a number of bioethicists as well as from theological, sociological, economic, and business literature. The five major conceptions of justice that are referenced most frequently are: “(1) a libertarian conception, which takes liberty to be the ultimate political ideal; (2) a socialist conception, which takes equality to be the ultimate political ideal; (3) a welfare liberal conception, which takes contractual fairness or maximal utility to be the ultimate political ideal; (4) a communitarian conception, which takes the common good to be the ultimate political ideal; and (5) a feminist conception, which takes a gender-free society to be the ultimate political ideal” (I, Sterba 1995).The use of new metaphors also draws on expanded concepts of “health.” “As health care is currently practiced, the most powerful symbols for public and professional alike are those that promise the defeat of time” (I, Campbell 1995). When medical care is perceived as an unrelated series of individual cures, the fact that health care resources are finite cannot be addressed.Reflections concerning the difficulties in limiting the use of health care resources have an ancient lineage and reveal a tight bond with the obsession to postpone death at all costs. Plato in Book 3 of the Republic recognizes the quandary of infinite expectations and finite resources that characterizes the challenge of health care choices. (I, Engelhardt 1996)The proliferation of expensive medical technologies and the loss of autonomy by health care professionals further complicates perceptions of the crucial issues at hand. Some have said that Americans place too much emphasis on individualism to address these issues. Daniels et al. believe that this is too pessimistic a view and that the American commitment to protecting equal opportunity for all provides a firm basis for developing a public consensus on what is fair in health care (III, Daniels, Light, and Caplan 1996). Finally, several authors suggest that the nature of all four principles of medical ethics, not justice alone, must be... (shrink)

At a House hearing on December 5, 2023, the presidents of three universities—Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania—refused to state that certain kinds of hate speech, specifically calls for genocide of Jews, are prohibited on their campuses. The backlash against two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, was swift and devastating; both of them were successfully pressured to resign. Still, while Professors Gay’s and Magill’s responses were widely criticized as tone-deaf, they were legally correct. At many (...) private, and all public, colleges and universities, even the worst hate speech is generally protected unless it is accompanied by aggressive, threatening, or violent conduct. -/- These “demotions” augur even worse consequences, including termination, for less powerful faculty who say the “wrong” thing, in particular statements in support of Trumpism, an increasingly mainstream ideology that stitches together white supremacy, misogyny, a preference for autocracy over democracy, and several phobias—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia. The question I address in this paper is whether these consequences are constitutional at public schools. Whose right is stronger—a public-school teacher’s First Amendment right to express pro-Trumpist sentiments or a public school’s right to maintain a fair, inclusive, and welcoming learning environment? In this article, I argue that the public school has the upper hand here, that it is indeed constitutionally permitted to prohibit political hate speech that contributes to a hostile learning environment. Still, I narrowly limit this prohibition to dehumanizing speech—that is, speech explicitly suggesting that some human beings are “lesser”, intrinsically less valuable, than other human beings. -/- One objection to this position is that public schools may not prohibit any speech, no matter how dehumanizing, because such prohibition amounts to constitutionally impermissible viewpoint discrimination. I argue, however, that viewpoint discrimination is an integral part of education and therefore constitutionally permissible. Education necessarily involves promoting some values over others. These values fall into seven categories: constitutional principles, the humanist virtues, successful character traits and behaviors, knowledge and truth, art and beauty, health (both mental and physical), and social goods (such as justice, peace, and rule of law). (shrink)

Plato's _Republic_ is one of the best-known and most widely-discussed texts in the history of philosophy. But how might we get to the heart of this work today, 2,500 years after its original composition? Alain Badiou breathes life into Plato's landmark text and revives its universality. Rather than producing yet another critical commentary, he has instead worked closely on the original Greek and, through spectacular changes, adapted it to our times. In this innovative reimagining of Plato's work, Badiou has removed (...) all references specific to ancient Greek society--from lengthy exchanges about moral courage in archaic poetry to political considerations mainly of interest to the aristocratic elite--and has expanded the range of cultural references. Here, philosophy is firing on all cylinders: Socrates and his companions are joined by Beckett, Pessoa, Freud, and Hegel, among others. Together these thinkers demonstrate that true philosophy endures, ready to absorb new horizons without changing its essence. Moreover, Badiou--who is also a dramatist--has transformed the Socratic dialogue into a genuine oratorial contest. In his version of the _Republic_, the interlocutors do much more than simply agree with Socrates. They argue, stand up to him, put him on the spot, and show thought in motion. In this work of dramatic scholarship and philosophy, we encounter a modern version of Plato's text that is alive, stimulating, and directly relevant to our own world. (shrink)

Debates over the privatization of formerly public industries and services are common in contemporary politics. The overall goal of this paper is to suggest a normative framework within which deliberations over public ownership might take place. I draw this framework from Plato's Republic, which I claim justifies public ownership as a means for ensuring that citizens labour as craftsmen rather than moneymakers; according to Plato's social ontology, only craftsmen can constitute a genuine society and hence enjoy access (...) to the full array of goods for the sake of which society comes into existence. This justificatory structure implies that public ownership is only a means for ensuring the appropriate teleology of labour; if there turn out to be better means, so be it. But what does turn out to be indispensable on this view, as G. A. Cohen understood, is an ethos of justice, especially among those in charge of regulating social institutions. (shrink)

Early in Plato’s Republic, two cities are depicted, one healthy and one with “a fever”—the so- called luxurious city. The operative difference between these two cities is that the citizens of the latter “have surrendered themselves to the endless acquisition of money and have overstepped the limit of their necessities” (373d).i The luxury of this latter city requires the seizure of neighboring lands and consequently a standing army to defend those lands and the city’s wealth. According to the main character, (...) Socrates, war thus finds its origin in communities living beyond the natural limits of necessity. In short, the healthy or true city is sustainable, limiting its consumption to actual needs, while the luxurious city seems not to be sustainable, living beyond its needs in a perpetual quest for more. Plato spends the rest of the Republic in the attempt to reveal the political organization and virtues—in particular, the virtue of moderation—necessary for the luxurious city to be just, healthy and thereby sustainable. The contrasting images of the two cities and Plato’s subsequent discussion raise important questions about the interrelations between justice, consumption and sustainability. In this paper we appropriate Plato’s images of these metaphorical cities to discuss over-consumption and unsustainable practices by the nations of the contemporary “first world”, which in turn perpetuate poverty and environmental degradation in the nations of the “two-thirds world”. Matters of equity and justice are preeminent in our discussion. (shrink)

At the beginning of Republic 2 (358e–359b), Plato has Glaucon ascribe a social contract theory to Thrasymachus and ‘countless others’. This paper takes Glaucon’s description to refer both within the text to Thrasymachus’ views, and outside the text to a series of works, most of which have been lost, On Justice or On Law. It examines what is likely to be the earliest surviving work that presents a philosophical defence of law and justice against those who would prefer their opposites, (...) On Excellence by an anonymous author usually referred to as ‘Anonymus Iamblichi’; the views on these topics among the Socratics, including Crito, Simon the Cobbler, Aristippus of Cyrene, and Antisthenes; and Socrates’ debate with Hippias ‘On Justice’ in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (4.4.5–25). Its main contention is that the ‘countless others’ referred to by Glaucon points chiefly, but not solely, to the members of the circle of Socrates, who themselves espoused a range of views on justice and law, and their relations. (shrink)

This paper examines two central arguments raised byfeminist theorists against the coherence andconsistency of political liberalisms, a recentrecasting of liberal theories of justice. They arguethat due to political liberalisms' uncritical relianceon a political/personal distinction, they permit theinstitution of the family to take sexist and illiberalforms thus undermining its own aims and politicalproject. Political liberalisms' tolerance of a widerange of family forms result in two fatalinconsistences. Firstly, it retards or completelyprevents women from developing the necessary politicalsense of self required for citizenship, (...) and secondly,it prevents children from acquiring the requisitepolitical virtues and sense of justice necessary forthe viability and long-term stability of such asociety. In the paper, I argue that despite theirinitial appeal these feminist criticisms are notcompelling. Firstly, they misunderstand what politicalliberalisms mean by unjust family forms, secondly,they trade on a misunderstanding of thepolitical/personal distinction and, finally, they makequestionable empirical claims about the effects of theilliberal family on a viable political conception ofjustice. (shrink)

Against "political philosophy" -- Politics as thought -- Althusser -- Politics unbound -- A speculative disquisition on the concept of democracy -- Truths and justice -- Rancière and the community of equals -- Rancière and apolitics -- What is a thermidorean? -- Politics as truth procedure.

A distinct logic to Gadamer's early writings makes them more than mere precursors to the mature thought that appeared in _Truth and Method_. They contain their own, new and different, "philosophical hermeneutics" and are worth reading with a fresh eye. The young Gadamer began his publication career by arguing that Plato's ethical writings did not "express" doctrine but rather depended upon the "play" of language among speakers in an ethical discourse community. This was the key idea of _Plato's Dialectical Ethics_, (...) Gadamer's first book. Following the classical formula of seeing politics as the continuation of ethics, Gadamer's writings in the 1930s and 1940s concentrated on the Platonic idea of the state and argued two key points. First, the exiling of poets from the city was a way of banishing monologue and clearing the way for a dialogue as the language form appropriate to political discourse communities. Second, the Platonic state's defining task was the educational one of shaping the soul, and this could not be achieved monologically but rather had to take place as a dialogical play between the educator and the soul. The mature philosophical hermeneutics of _Truth and Method_ is a metaphor taken from the literary experience of constructing textual meaning out of the play of parts and whole. The philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer's early writings rests on a play between the ethical whole initially the Gestalt figure of the "Platonic Socrates" but later the Platonic state and the individual soul in need of ethical guidance. There is no conflict between the early and the later hermeneutics, but the early hermeneutics retain a freshness of spirit and boldness of interpretation that is characteristic of the Weimar culture of Gadamer's Marburg youth.From beginning to end, Gadamer's early writings remind us that Plato's dialogues really do record the conversational essence of Western philosophy at its birth. (shrink)

Within the framework of the contemporary discussions of the presuppositions of democracy, the author of this paper poses the question whether discussing justice primarily from the social rather than the personal aspect and level is, perhaps, more appropriate. This ties in with the question of the primary object of justice – is justice the trait of social institutions or individuals? Thus the question of what kind of justice matches democracy. The author explicates this network of questions through three underlying models (...) of the theory of justice – Plato, Aristotle and Rawls’s model. Plato’s model is about the realisation of a good life in a political community in view of the idea of justice that one should do that which is proper to one. Aristotle’s understanding of justice sets forth from a systematic analysis of the concepts that differentiate between the levels of general and particular justice. Rawls’s model of distributive justice rests on the mechanism of the forces of the institutional functional frameworks in well-organised societies. The author’s conclusion is that both forms of justice correspond well to the realisation of democracy. It is best when one’s personal disposition to justice provides strength and support to the social institutions of democracy. Without an adequate institutional framework there is, most certainly, no democracy. Without the personal support of citizens, which issues from fundamental consent, democracy can neither be sustained nor developed. In a democratic system, the private sphere of citizens cannot be fully separated from their public actions. Democracy always and necessarily contains in itself some of the political ideals, which citizens cannot, in their worldviews, relate to neutrally. The questions of the institutional and political shaping of relations, and the questions of the good and just life should be in the interest of the citizens. If they do not accomplish their democratic ideals through their own belief and virtue, then there is no substance that would shape identity for a just system of social institutions. If they do not relate to it as to their own common sense and good to be preserved, democracy has no prospects. (shrink)

Philodemus’s On Frank Criticism offers a unique conception of friendship that relies on frank speech, or truth-telling. The ability to have frank conversations with one another is the heart of a conception of friendship in which we are seen, heard, and acknowledged. This is the friendship through which we become better citizens and better selves. In particular, Philodemus is offering this truth-based friendship to students and their mentors. Yet, one would be hard put to find such trust and deep friendship (...) in the university philosophy classrooms of today. Our professionalized and content acquisition focused culture in the academy all too often inhibits fostering these kinds of relationships with our students. We begin the essay by tracing the roots of this kind of frank friendship in Plato’s Lysis, and then contextualize its emerging role in the ancient philosophical classroom by exploring its place in Philodemus’ Epicurean philosophical community at Herculaneum. We do so to see how such friendship moves beyond discourse and into practice. Next, we use Arendt and Foucault to unpack the public and private dimensions of frank friendship in the philosophical learning environment and its role in a good life and good politics. Finally, we show how the classroom practice of Modern Socratic Dialogue (MSD) can re-enliven frank friendship as a spiritual exercise in the contemporary university-philosophy classroom. Specifically, we argue that MSD is a particular method of dialogue suited for the public realm of friendship and that it contributes to the care of one’s soul, thus modeling in our classrooms a method of dialogue for both the public and private dimensions of life. (shrink)

To a world assaulted by private interests, this book argues that peace must be a public thing. Distinguished philosophers of peace have always worked publicly for public results. Opposing nuclear proliferation, organizing communities of the disinherited, challenging violence within status quo establishments, such are the legacies of truly engaged philosophers of peace. This volume remembers those legacies, reviews the promise of critical thinking for crises today, and expands the free range of thinking needed to create more mindful and (...) peaceful relations. With essays by committed peace philosophers, this volume shows how public engagement has been a significant feature of peace philosophers such as Camus, Sartre, Dewey, and Dorothy Day. Today we also confront historical opportunities to transform practices for immigration, police interrogation, and mental health, as we seek to sustain democracies of increasing multicultural diversity. In such cases our authors consider points of view developed by renowned thinkers such as Weil, Mouffe, Conway, and Martín-Baró. This volume also presents critical analysis of concepts for thinking about violence, reconsiders Plato’s philosophy of justice, and examines the role of ethical theory for liberation struggles such as Occupy! (shrink)

Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badiou’s seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou’s year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital (...) aspect of his thinking. In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan’s theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the “anti-philosopher,” a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou’s own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou’s more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential. (shrink)

Resumo O artigo trata da análise crítica de Jürgen Habermas a respeito das consequências do modelo neoliberal de integração global via mercado, em especial o desequilíbrio entre política e mercado, o fim do compromisso com o Estado social e o déficit democrático no nível transnacional. Para o filósofo alemão, a concepção neoliberal de sociedade desestatizada do capitalismo global atinge o nexo entre Estado nacional, democracia e justiça social, marginalizando o Estado e a política, em favor da privatização dos serviços públicos (...) e sendo insensível às questões de justiça social, aos custos sociais do crescente aumento da pobreza, desigualdade e exclusão social, mesmo em países abastados da Europa e América do Norte. Ao deslocar o fiador da integração social para além das fronteiras nacionais, o capitalismo global foge ao controle estatal e esvazia o poder dos Estados nacionais, em termos de substância democrática e de política social, e gera um déficit de legitimação, ao transferir competências nacionais para agências ou organismos transnacionais, cuja legitimação não deriva da sociedade civil ou de uma esfera pública politicamente constituída. Em contrapartida, Habermas defende um poder democrático capaz de domesticar politicamente o mercado globalizado, reconstruir a democracia estatal-social num nível transnacional, em vista de uma ordem socialmente mais equilibrada, e compensar o déficit social e de legitimação democrática, no âmbito transnacional. Depois de recapitular alguns problemas que se solucionaram nas formas de Estado nacional, o artigo descreve como a globalização econômica afeta a soberania cultural, econômica, administrativa e jurídica, política, social e trabalhista dos Estados nacionais, e quais as possibilidades de reenquadrar politicamente os mercados, estendendo a democracia estatal para além das fronteiras nacionais. Com isso, quer-se mostrar que a obra de Habermas não é cega para a relação democracia-capitalismo, para os efeitos colaterais da “colonização da política pela economia”, para a influência corrosiva da economia capitalista na despolitização da esfera pública e da política.The article presents Jürgen Habermas critical analysis of the consequences of the neoliberal model of global market integration, in particular the imbalance between politics and market, the end of the commitment to the welfare state and the democratic deficit at the transnational level. For the German philosopher, the neoliberal conception of the privatized society of global capitalism undermine the nexus between national state, democracy and social justice, marginalizing the state and politics in favour of privatization of public services and being insensitive to questions of social justice, the costs increasing poverty, inequality and social exclusion, even in wealthy countries in Europe and North America. Moving the guarantor of social integration across national borders, global capitalism is beyond the state control and exhaust the power of national states in terms of democratic substance and social policy and creates a legitimacy deficit by transferring national powers to agencies or transnational corporations whose legitimacy does not derive from civil society or from a politically constituted public sphere. In contrast, Habermas advocates a democratic power able to politically neutralize the global market, rebuild the welfare-state democracy in a transnational level in view of a more socially balanced order, and compensate the social deficit and democratic legitimacy in the transnational order. After reviewing some problems that have been solved in national state forms, the article describes how economic globalization affects the cultural, economic, administrative, juridical, political, social and labor sovereignty of the national states, and what are the possibilities of politically reframing markets, extending welfare-estate democracy beyond national borders. In this way, we want to show that Habermas’ work is not blind to the relation between democracy and capitalism, to the collateral effects of the “colonization of politics by the economy”, to the corrosive influence of the capitalist economy on the depoliticization of the public sphere and politics. (shrink)

This paper uses distinctions between differing senses of “private,” “public” and “political” in the United States to argue for the value of framing food issues as a collective problem that calls for broadscale demands for justice. We argue that food choices do not simply belong to the realm of private preferences and market transactions. Rather, they are a set of decisions that have systemic causes and public consequences. They are shaped and constrained by public policies that underwrite (...) the transportation of food over long distances as well as particular crops and foodstuffs, and by the vendors and advertisers who try to convince us to eat more of the foods they produce. Because the consequences of eating an abundance of empty calories are not easily remedied at the personal level, citizens need to demand public, systemic solutions, including better food information, youth food education, and a healthier food supply. (shrink)

Children are affected by poverty more often than adults, and growing up in poverty has severe and long-lasting negative consequences for a child’s well-being. How-ever, children are also in a very weak position, both to escape poverty on their own and to publicly and politically enforce their claims to a better life. Accordingly, children living in poverty are victims of two intersecting forms of powerlessness: they are children and they are poor. In this article, we analyze this particular type of (...) powerlessness from a children’s rights perspective and argue that, in order to effectively restore justice to children in pov-erty, the State has to implement a comprehensive children’s rights regime. We argue that the State is obliged to consider children’s best interests in all its policies – even those that are not directly related to children – in order to compensate for the lack of political agency during childhood. This demand reflects the particular social and political status of children, namely: that they are dependent on others for their well-being, that childhood is a phase of particular vulnerability and that (young) children lack certain competencies that are needed to enforce their claims. (shrink)

In Plato’s Apology of Socrates we see a philosopher in collision with his society—a society he nonetheless claims to have benefited through his philosophic activity. It has often been asked why democratic Athens condemned a philosopher of Socrates' character to death. This anthology examines the contribution made by Plato’s Apology of Socrates to our understanding of the character of Socrates as well as of the conception of philosophy Plato attributes to him. The 11 chapters offer complementary readings of the Apology, (...) which through their different approaches demonstrate the richness of this Platonic work as well as the various layers that can be discerned in its presentation of Socrates. -/- While the contributions display variety in both topics and angles, they also share common features: An awareness of the importance of the literary aspects of Plato’s courtroom drama, as well as a readiness to take into consideration the historical context of the work. Thereby they provide contributions to a manifold understanding of the aims and impact of the work, without losing sight of the philosophical questions that are raised by Socrates’ confrontational and unrepentant defense speech. Allowing the character of Socrates to take center stage, the chapters of this volume examine the philosopher in relation to ethics, and to politics and democracy, as well as to the ideology, religion, and virtue shared by the Athenians. -/- Readers will also find reflections on classical Platonic subjects such as the nature of Socratic philosophical inquiry and of philosophy itself, as well as on the notoriously ambiguous relationships between philosophy, sophistry and rhetoric, and their several relationships to truth and justice. The anthology emphasizes and explores the equivocal and sometimes problematic aspects of Socrates as Plato presents him in the Apology, illuminating why the Athenians let the verdict fall as they did, while drawing out problematic features of Athenian society and its reaction to Socrates’ philosophic activity, thereby encouraging reflection on the role philosophy can play in our modern societies. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...) supérieure. The book in question is Meillassoux’s revised doctoral dissertation L’Inexistence divine (or The Divine Inexistence ), with its seemingly bizarre vision of a God who does not yet exist but might exist in the future. Without literally accepting this view, I will claim that it is philosophically interesting in ways that even a hardened sceptic might be able to appreciate. Third and finally, I will speculate on the possible future of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism itself. And here I mean its future development not by Meillassoux, but by those readers who might be inspired by his book. Plato could never have predicted the emergence of Aristotle’s philosophy, despite the obvious debt of the latter to the former. Nor could Descartes have predicted Spinoza and Leibniz, nor Kant the German Idealists, and neither could Husserl in 1901 have foreseen the later emergence of Heidegger. How are the works of interesting philosophers transformed by later thinkers of comparable importance? While it may seem that there are countless ways to do this, I think there are only two basic ways in which this happens: you can radicalize your predecessors, or you can reverse them. I will close this article with a few words about these two methods, and try to imagine how Meillassoux might be radicalized or reversed by some future admirer. My view is that the more important thinkers are, the easier they are to radicalize or reverse. This helps explain why the great philosophers of the West have so often appeared in clusters, succeeding one another at relatively brief intervals during periods of especial ferment. 1. After Finitude After Finitude is unusually short for such an influential book of philosophy: running to just 178 pages in the original French, and an even more compact 128 pages in the English version, despite the introduction of roughly eight pages of new material for the English edition. Rather than summarizing Meillassoux’s book in the order he intended, I will focus on six points that strike me as the pillars of his debut book. Along the way, I will offer a few criticisms as well. The first pillar of the book is Meillassoux’s own term “correlationism.”1 Although he introduces this term as the name for an enemy, it is striking that Meillassoux remains impressed by correlationism much more than his fellow speculative realists are. This continued appreciation for his great enemy influences the shape of his own ontology. Is there a world outside our thinking of it, or does the world consist entirely in being thought? Traditionally, this dispute between realism and idealism has been dismissed in continental philosophy as a “pseudo-problem,” in a strategy pioneered by Husserl and extended by Heidegger. We cannot be realists, since following Kant we have no direct access to things-in-themselves. But neither are we idealists, since the human being is always already outside itself, aiming at objects in intentional experience, deeply engaged with practical implements, or stationed in some particular world-disclosing mood. The centuries-old dispute between realism and idealism is dissolved by saying that we cannot think either real or ideal in isolation from the other. There is neither human without world nor world without human, but only a primordial correlation or rapport between the two. This is what “correlationism” means: philosophy trapped in a permanent meditation on the human-world correlate, trying to find the best model of the correlate: is it language, intentionality, embodiment, or some other form of correlation between human and world? Among other problems, this generates some friction between philosophy and the literal meaning of science. When cosmologists say that the universe originated 13.5 billion years ago, they do not mean “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” but literally 13.5 billion years ago, well before conscious life existed, and thus at a time when there was no such thing as a correlate. Meillassoux also coins the term “ancestrality” (10) for the reality that predated the correlate, and later expands this term to “dia-chronicity,” (112) to refer to events occurring after the extinction of human beings no less than to those occurring before we existed. Up to this point, Meillassoux’s focus on ancestral entities existing prior to consciousness might seem like a straightforward realist who wants to unmask correlationism as just another form of idealism. Yet Meillassoux also admires the correlationist maneuver, which can obviously be traced back to Kant. Unlike a thinker such as Whitehead, Meillassoux feels no nostalgia for the pre-critical realism that came before Kant: “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism,” he says (29). What impresses Meillassoux about correlationism is something both simple and familiar. If we attempt to think a tree outside thought, this is itself a thought . Any form of realism which thinks it can simply and directly address the world the way it is fails to escape the correlational circle, since the attempt to think something outside of thought is itself nothing other than a thought, and thereby collapses back into the very human-world correlate that it pretends to escape. For Meillassoux this step, suggested by Kant but first refined by the ensuing figures of German Idealism, marks decisive forward progress in the history of philosophy that must not be abolished. Any attempt to break free from the correlate must first acknowledge its mighty intellectual power. Realist though he may seem, Meillassoux’s works are filled with praise of such figures as Fichte and Hegel, not of so-called “naïve realists.” It is also the case that for Meillassoux, not all correlationisms are the same. The second pillar of his book is a distinction between various positions that I have termed “Meillassoux’s Spectrum,” though of course he is never so immodest as to name it after himself. He distinguishes between at least six different possible positions, and perhaps we could add even subtler variations if we wished. But in its simplest form, Meillassoux’s Spectrum allows for just four basic outlooks on the question of realism vs. anti-realism. Three of these are easy to understand, since we have already been discussing them. At one extreme is so-called “naïve realism,” which holds that a world exists outside the mind, and that we can know this world. Meillassoux rejects this naïve realism as having been overthrown by Kant’s critical philosophy. At the other extreme is subjective idealism, in which nothing exists outside the mind. For to think a dog outside thought immediately turns it into a thought, and therefore there cannot be anything outside; the very notion is meaningless. In between these two is what we have called correlationism. And here comes a crucial moment for Meillassoux, since he distinguishes between the two forms of “weak” and “strong” correlationism, and chooses the strong form as the launching pad for his own philosophy. Weak correlationism is easy to explain, since we all know it from the philosophy of Kant. The things-in-themselves can be thought but not known. They certainly must exist, since there cannot be appearances without something that appears. And we can think about them, which idealism holds to be impossible. They are simply unknowable due to the finitude of human thought. Strong correlationism is the new position introduced by Meillassoux (though he sees it at work in numerous twentieth century thinkers), midway between weak correlationism and subjective idealism. The major difference between the three positions is as follows. Weak correlationism says: “The things-in-themselves exist, but we cannot know them.” The subjective idealist says: “This is a contradiction in terms, since when we think the things-in-themselves, we already turn them into thoughts.” But the strong correlationist says: “Just because ‘things-in-themselves’ is a meaningless notion does not mean that they cannot exist. No one has ever traveled to the world-in-itself and come back to make a report on it. Thus, the fact that we cannot think things-in-themselves without contradiction does not prove that they do not exist anyway. There may be things-in-themselves, we simply are not capable of thinking them without contradiction form within the correlational circle.” This step is crucial for Meillassoux, since strong correlationism is the position he attempts to radicalize into his own new standpoint: speculative materialism. As I see it, this step of the argument fails. Strong correlationism cannot avoid collapsing into subjective idealism, since the statements of the strong correlationist are rendered meaningless from within. All three of the other positions in the Spectrum make perfectly good sense even for those who disagree with them. The naïve realist says that things-in-themselves exist and we can know them; the meaning of this statement is clear. The weak correlationist can say that things-in-themselves exist but lie forever beyond our grasp; this too makes perfect sense, even though the German Idealists try to show a contradiction at work here. We can also understand the claim of the subjective idealist that to think anything outside thought turns it into a thought, and that for this reason we cannot think the unthought. The strong correlationist, alone among the four, speaks nonsense . This person says “I cannot think the unthought without turning it into a thought, and yet the unthought might exist anyway.” But notice that the final phrase “the unthought might exist anyway” is fruitless for this purpose. For we have already heard that to think any unthought turns it into a thought. But now the strong correlationist wants to do two incompatible things simultaneously with this unthought. On the one hand, he neutralizes the unthought by showing that it instantly changes into just another thought. But on the other hand, he wants to appeal to the unthought as a haunting residue that might exist outside thought, thereby undercutting the absolute status of the human-world correlate found in idealism. But this is impossible. If you accept the argument that thinking the unthought turns it into a thought, you cannot also add “but maybe there is something outside that prevents this conversion from being absolutely true,” because this “something outside” is immediately converted into nothing but a thought for us. In short, Meillassoux here seems to be offering a kind of Zen koan: his “strong correlationism” is reminiscent of the gateless gate, or the sound of one hand clapping, or the command to punch Hegel in the jaw when meeting him on the road. We cannot at the same time both destroy the realist challenge of the things-in-themselves in order to undercut realism and reintroduce that very realist sense in order to undercut idealism. In a world where everything is instantly converted into thought, we cannot claim that there might be something extra-mental anyway, because this “might be something” is itself converted into a thought by the same rules that condemned dogs, trees, and houses to the idealist prison. This brings us to the third pillar of Meillassoux’s argument, which is the key to all the rest: the necessity of contingency. His strategy is to transform our supposed ignorance of things-in-themselves into an absolute knowledge that they exist without reason, and that the laws of nature can change at any time for no reason at all. In this way the cautious agnosticism of Kantian philosophies is avoided, but so is the collapse of reality into thought as found in German Idealism. Meillassoux does try to prove the existence of things-in-themselves existing outside thought; he simply holds that they must be proven after passing through the rigors of the correlationist challenge, not just arbitrarily decreed to exist in the manner of naïve realism. As he puts it, “Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing” (53). If idealism thinks that the human-world correlate is absolute, for Meillassoux it is the facticity of the correlate that is absolute. He tries to show this with a nice brief dialogue between five separate characters (55-59) which is covered in detail in my forthcoming book,2 but which I will simplify here for reasons of time. In this simplified version, we first imagine a dogmatic realist arguing with a dogmatic idealist. The realist says that we can know the truth about the things-in-themselves; the idealist counters that we can only the truth about thought, since all statements about reality must be turned into statements concerning our thoughts about reality. Here the correlationist enters and proclaims that both of these positions are equally dogmatic. For although we have access to nothing but thoughts, we cannot be sure that these thoughts are all that exist; there could be a reality outside thought, there is simply no way to know for sure. And this latter position is the one that Meillassoux attempts to transform from an agnostic, skeptical point into an ontological claim about the contingency of everything. Consider it this way. How does the correlationist defeat the idealist? The idealist holds that the existence of anything outside thought is impossible. The correlationist, by contrast, holds that something might exist outside the human-world correlate. But this “something might” has to be an absolute possibility. It cannot mean that “something outside thought might exist for thought ,” because that is what the idealist already says. No, the correlationist must mean that something might exist outside thought quite independently of thought. In other words, the correlationist says that idealism might be wrong, and this means it is absolutely true that idealism might be wrong. Thus, correlationism is no longer just a skeptical position. It holds that all the possibilities of the world are absolute possibilities. We have absolute knowledge that any of the possibilities about the existence or non-existence of things-in-themselves might be true, and this means that correlationism flips into Meillassoux’s own position: speculative materialism. As Meillassoux sees it, there are only two options here. Option A is to absolutize the human-world correlate, which is what the idealist does: there absolutely cannot be anything outside thought. Option B, by contrast, is to absolutize the facticity of the correlate: its character of simply being given to us, without any inherent necessity. The correlationist cannot have it both ways by saying: “there absolutely might be something outside thought, yet maybe this is absolutely impossible.” In other words, once we escape dogmatism we can only be idealists or speculative materialists, not correlationists. The human-world correlate is merely a fact, not an absolute necessity. But this facticity itself cannot be merely factical: it must be absolute. Here Meillassoux coins the French neologism factualité , which has been suitably translated into the English neologism “factiality.” (7, 122-3) Factialty means that for everything that exists, it is absolutely possible that it might be otherwise, not just that we cannot know whether or not it might be otherwise. Just as Kant transformed philosophy into a meditation on the categories governing human finitude, Meillassoux wishes to turn philosophy into a meditation on the necessary conditions of factiality, which he calls “figures”—a new technical term for him. (80) One such figure is that the law of non-contradiction must be true, and for an unusual reason. Since everything is proven to be contingent, nothing that exists can be contradictory, for whatever is contradictory has no opposite into which it might be transformed, and thus contingency would be impossible.3 Another such figure is that there must be something rather than nothing: for since contingency exists, something must exist in order to be contingent. It is a daring high-wire act, one that sacrifices realism to the correlational circle in order to rebuild it from out of its own ashes. Some might conclude that the lack of reason in things is a byproduct of the ignorance of finite humans, Meillassoux is making precisely the opposite point. For in fact, the doctrine of finitude usually leads directly to belief in a hidden reason. The fact that it lies beyond human comprehension merely increases our belief in this arbitrarily chosen concealed ground. By defending anew the concept of absolute knowledge Meillassoux evacuates the world of everything hidden. The reason for things having no reason is not that the reason is hidden, but that no reason exists. Thus, even while insisting on the necessity of non-contradiction, he rejects the other Leibnizian principle: sufficient reason. Everything simply is what it is, in purely immanent form, without deeply hidden causes. Or as Meillassoux puts it: “There is nothing beneath or beyond the manifest gratuitousness of the given—nothing but the limitless and lawless power of its destruction, emergence, or persistence” (63).The world is a “hyper-chaos”(64). But this is not the same thing as flux. For the chaos of the world is such that stability might occur just as easily as constant, turbulent change. Let’s now digress a bit, and return to the question of ancestrality, which Meillassoux transforms later in the book into “dia-chronicity.” Correlationism holds that all talk of a world outside the correlate is immediately recuperated by the correlate. The phrase “13.5 billion years ago” becomes “13.5 billion years ago for us ,” and the phrase “the universe following the extinction of humans” becomes “the universe following the extinction of humans for humans .” But notice that whether we talk about the world before or after humans, in both cases it is time that is used to challenge the correlate. Meillassoux has no interest in challenges that might be posed by space. For example, what about a vase in a lonely country house that topples to the floor and smashes when no one is there to watch it? Isn’t this also a challenge to correlationism, no less than the Big Bang or the heat death of the universe long after humans have vanished? In an eight-page supplement to the English translation of After Finitude ,4 possibly in response to my own 2007 review of the French original,5 Meillassoux bluntly denies that space is of any relevance to the question. Spatial distance is a merely harmless challenge to the human-world correlate. After all, even though no one is there in the lonely country house to witness the shattering of the vase, we can say that had there been an observer , that observer would have witnessed the toppling and destruction of the vase. For this event still occurs in a world in which the human-world correlate already exists, whereas the diachronicity of events both before and after the existence of humans makes it impossible to say that had there been an observer they would have witnessed the Big Bang occurring in such and such a fashion. However, it seems to me that Meillassoux merely asserts that the temporal simultaneity of our existence with that of the vase in the lonely country house is enough to render it harmless. It is true that the house does not exist prior to the correlate, but nonetheless it exists outside the correlate, and that is enough to make the same challenge. It is difficult to see why the “had there been an observer” maneuver succeeds in the case of a vase in the countryside in April 2011 but fails in the case of the Big Bang. This is not just a matter of nitpicking Meillassoux’s argumentative style: the fact that he bases his argument on time has at least two important consequences for his position. For in the first place, even though Meillassoux insists that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense. That is to say, it is a paradoxical feature of Meillassoux’s philosophy that he does allow for the existence of laws of nature, and simply believes that they can change at any moment without reason. Within any given moment, laws of nature do exist. He never suggests that different parts of the universe can have different laws at the same time, nor does he have any interest in the laws of part/whole composition that take place within any given instant. Could it be the case that rather than being made of gold atoms, a small chunk of gold could be made of silver atoms, cotton, horses, or that this same small piece of gold could be made of gigantic vaults filled with even more gold? These are not topics that draw Meillassoux’s attention, since he is focused solely on how the laws of nature might change or endure from one moment to the next . Another implication for Meillassoux’s system is that his concept of things-in-themselves turns out to be to be inadequate. For when he proves that things-in-themselves can exist without humans, this turns out to be true only in a temporal sense as well. Namely, things-in-themselves existed ten billion years ago, and they will continue to exist after all humans have succeeded in exterminating themselves. However, being able to exist before our births and after our deaths is just one small part of what it means to be a thing-in-itself. The more important part is that even if a thing is sitting on a table right now, in front of me, even if I stroke it lovingly or press my face up against it directly, I am still dealing only with a phenomenal version of the thing; the thing-in-itself continues to withdraw from all access. Yet no such thing is acknowledged by Meillassoux. For him finitude is a disaster, and absolute knowledge is in fact possible. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exists in independence only of the human lifespan , not of human knowledge. The fifth pillar of Meillassoux’s argument is his use of Cantor’s transfinite mathematics to show that even if the laws of nature are contingent, they need not be unstable, and thus we cannot use the apparent stability of nature to disprove his metaphysics of absolute contingency. What Cantor showed is that there are different sizes of infinity, and that all these infinities cannot be totalized in a single infinite number of infinities. Meillassoux sees this as crucial, since it allows him to discredit any “probabilistic” argument against his theory. The probabilistic argument (as defended quite clearly by Jean-René Vernes)6 would say this: given that the laws of nature seem so stable, it it is extremely improbable that there is no hidden reason for their remaining so stable. As Meillassoux sees it, probability is of value only when we can index an accessible total of cases. These can even be infinite: for example, there are an infinite number of points where a rope can break when stretched tight, but this does not stop us from calculating probabilities for various sections of the rope to break. By contrast, there is no way to sum up the number of possible laws of nature. For here there is no way to totalize; we cannot stand outside of nature and calculate the possible number of laws so as to determine the probabilities that any one of them might change. Therefore, although we can speak of probability when dealing with intraworldly events such as elections, horse races, and coin-flips, we cannot use the words “probable” or “improbable” when describing alterations at the level of nature as a whole. Rather than commenting on the validity of this argument and its use of Cantor, let me simply note that it once again creates a dualistic ontology. We already saw that Meillassoux treats time differently from space. In analogous fashion, he now treats the level of world differently from that of intraworldly events. The emergence of worlds is purely contingent and virtual and governed by no probability at all, while events within the world necessarily follow laws (even if these laws can change at any moment without reason), and thus their probabilities can be calculated. It is a strategy deeply reminiscent of Badiou’s (2005) own dualism between the normal “state of the situation” and the rare and intermittent “event.” The sixth and final pillar of Meillassoux’s book can be dealt with briefly, since we have already touched on it elsewhere. It comes at the very beginning of the book, when Meillassoux says that we must revive the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and that the primary qualities are the ones that can be mathematized. He admits that he has not yet published a proof of this idea, though in fact it is already known as one of his primary doctrines. And here we encounter the familiar problem with Meillassoux’s inadequate conception of things-in-themselves. “Primary qualities” refers to those qualities that a thing has independently of its relations with us or anything else. But if the primary qualities can be mathematized, this means that they are not entirely independent of us, since our knowledge can get right to the bottom of them. The mathematized qualities of things are independent of us only in Meillassoux’s sense that they will still have those qualities even when all humans are dead. But to repeat, autonomy from the human lifespan is not the same as autonomy from human access. Here once more Meillassoux is concerned only with independence from the human-world correlate across time, not in any given instant. 2. L’Inexistence divine In 1997, the same year in which he turned thirty years old, Meillassoux earned his doctorate at the École normale supériuere with a brazen dissertation entitled L’Inexistence divine ( The Divine Inexistence ). The work was substantially revised in 2003. But even then, with typical fastidiousness, Meillassoux decided that the work was not yet ready for press. It has now been scrapped in favor of some future, multi-volume work bearing the same title. While writing my book on Meillassoux for Edinburgh University Press, I was permitted to translate excerpts from this unpublished work for use as an appendix in my own book; in total, the appendix contains approximately twenty percent of Meillassoux’s 2003 manuscript, the first time any of it will be published in any language. Nonetheless, a portion of the argument was already tested in the article “Spectral Dilemma,” published in English in the journal Collapse (2008: 261-75). There the philosophical motives for the virtual God are already made clear. What troubles us most are early deaths, brutal deaths, deaths of especial injustice– the sorts of deaths in which the brutal twentieth century was so abundant. And here, neither the atheist nor the believer can help us. The atheist can offer nothing but a sad and cynical resignation when reflecting on the victims of these terrible crimes. The believer does little better, being unable to explain how God could have allowed such things to happen, due to the famous intractability of the problem of evil. The solution offered to this dilemma by Meillassoux is bold, and all the more so given that he emerges from such a deeply Leftist, materialist, and unreligious background. His solution is that God does not yet exist, and therefore is not blameworthy for these catastrophes. Given that everything is contingent in Meillassoux’s philosophy, this God and divine justice might never exist, but they can at least exist as an object of hope. Let’s begin by jumping to the end of L’Inexistence divine , where the alternatives are laid out so nicely. There are four basic attitudes that humans can have towards God, Meillassoux says. First, we can believe in God because he exists. This is the classical theist attitude, rejected for the simple reason that it would be amoral and blasphemous to believe in a God who allows children to be eaten by dogs, to use Dostoevsky’s example. Second, we can disbelieve in God because he does not exist: the classical atheist attitude. But this leads to sadness, cynicism, and a sneering contempt for the greatness of human capacity. The third option, rather more complex, is to disbelieve in God because he does exist: in other words, to exist in rebellion against God as the one who must be blamed for the evils of the earth. The examples here might range from Lucifer himself, to the more human figure of Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby-Dick , to Werner Herzog’s even more recent catchphrase, “Every man for himself, and God against all.” That leaves only the fourth option: believing in God because he does not exist. Meillassoux closes his book by saying that the fourth option has now been tried (namely, in the course of his own book), and that now that all four have been specified, we must choose. The first reaction to this theory of the inexistent God will be laughter. Few readers will ever be literally convinced by it, and probably none will immediately be convinced by it. But if we ask ourselves why we laugh, the answer is because it sounds so improbable that an inexistent God might suddenly emerge and resurrect the dead. It obviously sounds more like a gullible theology than a rigorous piece of philosophical work. Yet two things need to be kept in mind. First, Meillassoux’s theories are hardly more unlikely than those of great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Plotinus, Avicenna, Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, or Whitehead. We read the great philosophers not because their systems are plausible in commonsense terms that can be measured by the laws of probability. Instead, we read them precisely because they shatter the existing framework of common sense and open up new window on the universe. Second, and even more importantly, Meillassoux has already rejected probability as a valid measuring stick in philosophy. Or rather, he accepts probability in the intra-worldly realm (where it is linked with potentiality), and rejects it at the level of the world itself (where potentiality is replaced with what he calls virtuality). The virtual God can appear at any moment for no reason at all, just as any other new configuration of laws of nature can appear: in a manner that the laws of probability cannot calculate. Responding to those who might ridicule the idea of a sudden emergence of God and a resurrection of the dead, Meillassoux cites Pascal, who asserts that the resurrection of the dead would be far less incredible than the fact that we were born in the first place. This shifts philosophy onto new ground. Rather than concerning ourselves with what is likely to happen in the world as we know it, we focus instead on the most important things that could happen. For this reason, the expected objection that a virtual God is no more likely to appear than a virtual unicorn or a virtual flying spaghetti monster misses the point. Unicorns and spaghetti monsters could also appear, just like any other non-contradictory thing. But these would just be novel bizarre entities among others, not the heralds of completely new worlds. For Meillassoux, the emergence of matter, life, and thought have been the three truly amazing advents of the world so far, each of them dependent on the advent(s) preceding them. As he sees it, there can be no greater intraworldly entity than the human beings who already exist, since nothing in the world is better than the absolute knowledge of which humans alone are capable. This means that the next great advent must be something that perfects human beings rather than superseding them. And this can only be the world of justice, in which the dead are resurrected and their horrible deaths partially cancelled (Meillassoux never considers the possibility of a God who would literally erase the pre-divine past so that it never happened at all). The only immortality worth having is an immortality of this life, not an existence in some ill-defined afterworld. Human existence, he holds, must always be governed by a “symbol” that gives us the “immanent and comprehensible inscription of values in a world.” And just as cosmic history made the three great contingent leaps of matter, life, and thought, with a leap to justice as the only one still to come, a similar structure occurs within human culture and its symbols, which consist so far of the cosmological, naturalistic, and historical symbols, with a “factial” symbol still to come. We can review each of these symbols briefly. The cosmological symbol refers to the ancient dualism between the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Here below everything is conflict, corruption, and decay; but in the heavens nothing is perishable, all movement is circular, and everything is arranged in mutual harmony. This symbol is ended by modern physics when Galileo discovers such blemishes as sunspots and craters on the moon, and when Newton integrates both celestial and terrestrial movement into a single gravitational law. Next comes the naturalistic or romantic symbol, in which perfection comes not from the sky but from nature itself. The world is filled with pretty flowers (Meillassoux claims that the ancients never discussed the beauty of flowers until Plotinus in the third century) and with living creatures naturally moved by pity, at least until society corrupts them. This symbol collapses in the face of reality as we know it, since pity is no more common than war, corruption, and violence. This brings us to the historical symbol, which only now is passing away. Bad things may happen, but history has an inner logic of its own, such that everything works out in the end. The ultimate form of the historical symbol is the economic symbol, whether in a Marxist or neo-liberal form. Just as the Marxist holds that the inner economic logic of the capitalists will inexorably lead them to self-destruction, the neo-liberal assumes that the sum total of individual selfish actions will lead, in the long run, to the greatest possible good. We worship the economy and let it guide history for us, just as the ancients worshipped celestial bodies and held them to be free from blemish. The final remaining symbol is the factial symbol, which Meillassoux hopes will now emerge. Factiality, we recall, is his term for the absolute contingency of everything that exists. Once we have grasped this absolute contingency, we are free to expect the dramatic advent of the coming fourth World: the world of justice, inaugurated by a virtual God and even mediated by a messianic human figure. There is the added feature, however, that this messiah must abandon all claims to special status once the messianic realm of justice is achieved. The messianic figure will then be no more special than any person on the street, since a reign of human equality will have arisen. Although this focus on human being might seem like a return to standard humanism, Meillassoux holds that human pre-eminence has never truly been maintained. Previously, humans have been treated as special only because they contemplate the Good, because they resemble their omnipotent creator, or because they happen to be the temporary victors in a cruel Darwinian death-match between millions of living species. For Meillassoux, by contrast, humans have value because they know the eternal. But it is not the eternal that is important, since this merely represents the blind, anonymous contingency of each thing. What is important is not knowledge of the eternal , but knowledge of the eternal. We should not admire Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods; Prometheus is simply as bad as all the gods, no matter how much he increased our power. Feuerbach and Marx were wrong to say that God is a projection of the human essence, since for Meillassoux the usual concept of God represents the degradation of the human essence. If the traditional God was allowed to inflict plagues and tsunamis on the human race, the Promethean human of the twentieth century simply assumes the right to inflict death camps and atomic fireballs instead. In this respect, we have simply begun to imitate the degradation of humanity that was formerly invested in an omnipotent and arbitrary God. In response to charges that absolute contingency might lead to political quietism, Meillassoux counters that the World of justice would mean nothing unless we had already hoped for it beforehand. A World of justice that came along at random would merely be an improved third World of thought: indeed, a perfect one. But it would have satisfied no craving, and would therefore have no redemptive power. For this reason, we must actively hope for the fourth World of justice for such a fourth World ever to arise. Not only justice, but beauty is dependent on such hope: for Meillassoux, who is here somewhat dependent on Kant, beauty means an accord between our human symbolization and the actual world, which could never be present in a World of the blessed any more than justice could. And just as a messianic figure is needed to incarnate our hope and then abandon power once the World of justice is realized, it is the figure of the child whose fragile contingency shows us a dignity and a demand for justice beyond all power. 3. Meillassoux Radicalized or Reversed Given the promising reception of Meillassoux’s first book, it would not be groundless to engage in early speculation about what it might take to earn him a place in the history of philosophy. Maybe this will never happen—who knows?—but quite possibly it will: his lucid argumentative methods and sheer philosophical imagination at least make him a good candidate to be read well into the future, especially following further elaboration in print of his mature system. Philosophy is often practiced as thought it were nothing more than the amassing of “knockdown arguments.” But this is no more insightful than saying that good architecture is the amassing of steal beams. It is true that poorly constructed building cannot stand for long, but sound construction is merely the first, indispensable step in building. In fact, I am inclined to say that what really makes a philosopher important is not being right, but being wrong . I mean this in a very specific sense. I once heard the interesting remark about twentieth century culture that “you have to remember that the sixties really happened in the seventies.” That is to say, it was in the 1970’s rather than the more honored 1960’s that civil rights, free love, long hair, and the rock and roll drug culture really took root. With respect to the history of philosophy, we might just as easily say: “you have to remember that Plato really happened in Aristotle,” that “Kant really happened in Hegel” or “Hume really happened in Kant,” or that “Husserl’s phenomenology first achieved its truth in Heidegger.” One becomes an important philosopher not by being right, but by attracting rebellious admirers who tell you that you are wrong , even as their own careers silently orbit around your own. To recruit faithful disciples may be comforting and flattering, but the greatest thinkers have generally had to experience refutation at the hands of their most talented heirs. For this reason, I would propose that we size up the magnitude of living thinkers not by deciding how many times they are right and wrong, but by asking instead: who would take the trouble to refute this author? For this reason I do not ask: “Is Meillassoux right?”, since I do not believe in the virtual God myself, nor am I convinced by any important aspect of Meillassoux’s philosophy. Instead, I ask if there are interesting ways to overturn him. Only by being overturned, by no longer remaining a contemporary, does one become a classic. Let’s begin with a simple model of refutation, which can be refined further at a later date once the basic point is established. One kind of refutation simply consists in saying: “This author is a complete idiot.” The refuter now walks away in celebration, and no link between the present and the future is built; all is reduced to rubble. But this sort of mediocre triumphalism is generally practiced by those who achieve little of their own, and is not especially interesting. Much more interesting is the sort of refutation that does not take its target to be a complete idiot. I would like to suggest that there are just two basic ways in which this can be done: radicalization and reversal . It has not escaped my notice that this is a fairly good match for the Deleuzian distinction between irony and humor. Whereas irony critiques and adopts the opposite principle of what it attacks, humor accepts what it confronts but pushes it into highly exaggerated form. The ironist is like the worker who sows chaos by rebeling and contradicting the boss, while the humorist is like the worker who follows orders to an absurdly literal degree, with equally chaotic results. Let’s start with a few examples. In Aristotle’s treatment of Plato, and Heidegger’s of Husserl, we find reversal. Plato’s eidei are transformed by Aristotle into mere secondary substances, and the individual worldly things despised by Plato become what is primary. For Husserl what is primary is whatever is present to consciousness, while for Heidegger this is precisely what is secondary, since the primary stuff of the world withdraws from any form of presence at all. As for radicalization, it is most easily found in the transformation of Kant by German Idealism: “Kant was right to wall off the things-in-themselves from human access, and simply should have realized that the thought of the Ding an sich is also a thought, and thereby the noumena are just special cases of the phenomena,” with much following from this discovery. It would also be easy to read Spinoza as a radicalizer of Descartes, and Berkeley and Hume as radicalized versions of Locke. Perhaps the distinction is now sufficiently clear. Admiring refutations are not those that say “Professor X is an idiot,” which is merely the flip side of the eager disciple’s fruitless “Professor X got everything right.” Instead, it will be some variant of one of the following two options: “Professor X is important, but got it backwards,” or “Professor X is important, but didn’t push things far enough.” In the history of philosophy these two latter cases have often been painful in purely human terms: Aristotle expresses sadness at refuting Plato, Kant is openly annoyed at Fichte, and Husserl feels betrayed and used by Heidegger. Rude handling from later figures almost seems to be the sine qua non of being a great philosopher. Now, it has already been claimed that Meillassoux is an emerging philosopher of the first importance, and by no less a figure than Alain Badiou: “It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy…” (Preface, vii). But rather than taking Badiou’s word for it, or rejecting his word, we might experiment by asking how Meillassoux could be radicalized or reversed. Are there interesting ways of doing this that might launch whole new schools of philosophy, unexpected or even condemned by Meillassoux himself? While no one can see the future, the present is poor when it is not riddled with virtual futures. The relation between philosophers and their predecessors and successors is always somewhat complicated, of course. But generally there is one central divergence at stake, which might be taken as the key to all the others. On this basis we could say that new thinkers primarily radicalize or primarily reverse the main ideas of their chief philosophical forerunner. There may be specific historical conditions and perhaps even personality traits connected with these two types, but this question can be left aside for now. More important for us is that radicalizers will generally be followed by reversers, and vice versa. Consider the textbook example of a reversal in the history of philosophy: Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which inverts the so-called dogmatic tradition that addresses the world itself, and makes the world revolve instead around the conditions by which it is known. While it is not completely impossible that Kant’s successors might have re-reversed this principle back into a new and stronger dogmatic realism, conditions were premature for such a move. Anyone doing this too early would likely have been an angry anti-Kantian reactionary rather than an original thinker in command of a genuinely new realist principle. The far more likely outcome is the one that actually happened: Kant’s reversal of his predecessors was viewed as incomplete, or as retaining lamentable bits of the traditional view, which despite his admirable breakthrough he was unable to shake off. This was the view of German Idealism, anyway. In similar fashion, Spinoza could also be viewed as a radicalizer of Descartes, who is equally accused of preserving various Scholastic dogmas in an otherwise radical project of philosophical reversal. The point is this: reversals in the history of thought tend to be followed soon thereafter by radicalizations of those reversals. The same may hold true in reverse: radicalizations might generally be followed by reversals, given that it is not always possible to be more radical than the radicals have already been. Consider the case of Husserl, who radicalizes Brentano’s early vagueness about what lies beyond immanent objectivity, and Twardowski’s assertion that there must be an external object lying outside the intentional content, by collapsing everything into the intentional sphere: there is no difference between the Berlin in my consciousness and the actual Berlin that is home to millions of people. It is difficult to see how one could be even more radical than Husserl’s idealist turn here. And thus the road is paved to Heidegger’s reversal of classical phenomenology, in which the key point is what lies deeper than any presence to consciousness: the Sein whose power and obscurity cannot be made exhaustively present, but only sends itself in historical epochs. In similar fashion we might also read Leibniz as a reverser of Spinoza’s radicalization, retrieving a strong sense of individual substance and a certain validity of what the Scholastics had said. Returning to Meillassoux, we might ask which kind of philosopher he is: a radicalizer or a reverser? At present, Meillassoux looks to me like a radicalizer (though for now his future remains shrouded in mist). He takes the correlationist tradition, which allows us to speak only of the relation between human and world, and tries to raise it into an even more extreme claim about the absolute contingency of everything. But whereas German Idealism did this by trying to collapse the distinction between thought and world entirely into the “thought” side, Meillassoux does it by trying to shift the non-absolute contingency of the thought-world correlate from epistemology to ontology. It is no longer a question of the inability of human knowledge to know what lies outside the correlate, but the inability of reality itself to be rooted in any definite laws. Furthermore, if we look at the various features of Meillassoux’s philosophy identified earlier tonight, all but one are already so radical that there is no obvious way to push them further. The one exception would be his claim that the world as a whole can change for no reason at any moment, coupled with the inconsistent claim that within a given world there are laws of nature that everything must follow. If gravitational attraction between all masses is a current law in our world, then for Meillassoux there can be no exceptions to this law for as long as it remains in force. A toppled vase will fall to the floor every time for sure,unless there is a cosmic change by which the laws of nature as a whole have altered. (This is reminiscent of the late medieval distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God, according to which God has the power to set or change the laws of nature, but not to contravene those laws locally once they are set.) On this point, to radicalize Meillassoux would simply be to say: there are no laws of nature even in the local sense. Everything that happens, even in the world here and now, is purely contingent and not governed by even a trace of law. And while this would be a more consistent development of Meillassoux’s thoughts on contingency, it is difficult to see how it could lead to a new philosophy. Instead, the admiring successors of Meillassoux are more likely to reverse one of his already sufficiently radical points. At least four candidates come to mind: *First, we have seen that Meillassoux thinks correlationism is challenged by a time before or after consciousness, but not by a space lying outside it. Perhaps this could be reversed into saying that spatial exteriority is the really crucial point. The arguments on this point are perhaps the least convincing in After Finitude (and do not even occur in the original French edition), and therefore it might be a candidate for the “blind spot” of which no philosopher is ever free. *Second, Meillassoux uses Cantor to claim that the contingency of laws of nature would not entail that they are unstable. A successor of Meillassoux might claim that it does make them unstable, and celebrate this fact. This person would then have to explain why common sense seems to encounter a relatively stable world despite its truly rampant instability. Whereas Meillassoux’s problem is to show how stability might exist despite contingency, this successor’s problem would be slightly different: to show why actual, full-blown instability might have the appearance of stability. *Third, Meillassoux claims that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. He might be reversed by a successor who says the opposite: the mathematizable qualities are the secondary ones, and the primary ones are those that elude symbolic formulation. While this is a perfectly valid possible objection to Meillassoux, it is one that is made in advance by some of his predecessors and is still made by some of his peers, making it less interesting for futurology than some of his other points. *Fourth and finally, whereas Meillassoux claims that God does not exist but might exist in the future, a successor might argue even more bizarrely that God has always existed but might vanish in the future. Let’s arbitrarily select the first of these possibilities, and imagine briefly where it might lead, if pursued in the future by admiring detractors. Meillassoux comes from the circle of Badiou, and some of Badiou’s most ardent admirers are found in Latin America. So, let’s imagine that towards mid-century some ingenious reversers of Meillassoux emerge in that portion of the Spanish-speaking world. Just for fun, let’s call them Castro and Chávez. And in order to avoid any confusion with the present-day politicians of those names, we will stipulate that Meillassoux’s great successors are both women. The philosopher Castro (we will suppose she comes from Peru) reverses Meillassoux’s argument that the ancestral or diachronic are what most threaten the human-world correlate. Instead, she claims that the diachronic does not threaten the correlate at all, and that we must instead look at space as what ruins the correlate and demands a strange new realism. What would such a philosophy look like? In order to determine this, we might ask what price Meillassoux pays for doing it the opposite way. As I see it, he pays in two separate ways. One is that laws of nature for him are contingent over time . The laws of nature apply to the universe as a whole at any given moment, and would be changed globally if they are ever changed at all. The second price he pays is that Meillassoux has no mereology , or theory of parts and wholes. Everything for him is on the level of the given, or immanent in experience, with the sole proviso that the laws governing this immanence might change without notice at any given moment. In reversing Meillassoux, Castro makes the following claims in the preface to her stunning debut book of 2045, The Cosmos and its Neighborhoods , rapidly translated from Spanish into all the languages of the world: Despite his brilliant analysis of the contingency of laws of nature over time, Meillassoux gets two important assumptions wrong. First, he allows for only one set of contingent laws to govern nature as a whole. Second, he allows laws to govern only the world that is immanent in experience, and thereby fails to explore the contingency among part-whole relations. In this book I will argue, first, that the laws of nature vary in any given instant between one region of the universe and the next; and second, that the world is made up of layers of parts and wholes that are also contingent with respect to one another. Those are the words of Castro. This may sound like a hopeless free-for-all of chaos, yet the book somehow succeeds in drawing some compelling deductions about how laws must vary from one place or level in the world to the next. Trapped in the limited horizon of 2011, and not yet inspired by the heavily balkanized political and technological situation of 2050 that somehow lends additional credence to Castro’s vision, we can only vaguely grasp what such a philosophy might look like. After this reversal of Meillassoux by Castro, the usual pattern leads us to expect a radicalization by Chávez, a young Argentine student of Castro. How could the already strange theories of Castro be radicalized? Perhaps as follows, in a disturbing new book entitled The Implosion of the Neighborhoods , which argues as follows: Castro was right to shift the Meillassouxian framework of contingency from time to space. However, in this respect she retained a surprisingly traditional opposition between the two. In this book I will show that time and space collapse into one another. This may sound too much like the discredited four-dimensional block universe of twentieth century physics and philosophy. However, the four-dimensional universe is a model biased in favor of space, merely adding an extra dimension to the commonsense spatial continuum while stipulating that the serial passage of time is an illusion. In this book I will argue instead for a one-dimensional space-time modeled after our experience of time, in which there is no simultaneous co-existence at all between different parts of the universe, or ‘neighborhoods’ as my esteemed teacher Castro has called them. Instead, the various portions of the universe link to one another by succession rather than by coexistence. Buenos Aires, New York, and Amsterdam do not exist simultaneously in the same landscape, but one after the other in the mind of some observer, and this observer can only be an observer much larger than any human. Against Meillassoux’s notion of a virtual God that does not exist now but might exist in the future, I will argue for an actual God that surveys the universe in sequence, thereby generating the illusion of spatial diversity and even the illusion of individual minds located within that diversity. Once this divine observer dies, the universe as a whole must perish. Again, these ideas are so bizarre that we of 2011 can barely comprehend them, just as Aristotle would have had a difficult time grasping the theories of Descartes. We could then perhaps imagine a further reversal of this theory, emanating from the intellectually resurgent Philippines of the twenty-second century. The Filipino School might argue that the universe is already dead, given the collapse of its spatial richness into the serial observations of a flimsy and mortal God. The virtual universe does not yet exist, but might exist in fully spatial form in the future, and this would require the death of God and the resulting liberation of God’s succession of images as independent, spatially situated realities. With a bit of sharpening, we might be able to make all of these imaginary thinkers more intuitively clear. Along with the history of philosophy, there might arise a new discipline generating imaginary futures for philosophy. The richness of Meillassoux’s system comes not from the fact that he is plausibly right about so many things, but because his philosophy offers such a treasury of bold statements ripe for being radicalized or reversed. He is a rich target for many still-unborn intellectual heirs, and this is what gives him the chance to be an important figure. NOTES 1. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude . Trans. R Brassier. (London: Continuum, 2008.) Page 5. The word “correlationism” does not appear in his doctoral thesis. As Meillassoux informed me in an email of February 8, 2011, he first coined this term in 2003 or 2004, while editing for publication a lecture he had given at the École normale supérieure on a day devoted to the theme of “Philosophy and Mathematics,” an event including Alain Badiou as one of the participants. 2. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making . (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2011). 3. In an email of December 6, 2010, Meillassoux clarifies that in After Finitude he only deduces the impossibility of a “universal contradiction,” not of a determinate contradiction. In the same email he suggests that he can also prove the latter, though the proof is somewhat lengthier than the one found in After Finitude . 4. After Finitude (18-26), in the passage falling between the two sets of triple asterisks. These pages were sent by Meillassoux to translator Ray Brassier (in French) during the translation process, and do not appear in the original French version of the book. 5. Graham Harman, “Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher.” Philosophy Today 51.1 (2007): Pages 104-117. The passage where I raise the question of space can be found in the first column of page 107. 6. Vernes is first cited on p. 95 of After Finitude . See Jean-René Vernes, Critique de la raison aléatoire, ou Descartes contra Kant . (Paris: Aubier, 1982).  . (shrink)

Consecutive constructivism is a moral and political theory which mitigates structural injustice by securing individuals' perception of private morality--that is, inventing procedural devices to make people enhance their moral consciousness--and, at the same time, encourages people to voluntarily concern themselves with procedural justice and public morality. The crucial reason for this position is that a detouring method of not directly dealing with the problem of justice but rather discussing the problem of morals is required to avoid the lucid criticisms (...) of statists that the sovereign ruling states with authority or the world government does not exist. This book suggests a new approach to the problem of global justice, termed here consecutive constructivism. It provides a way of coping with procedural justice at the global level, while also alleviating the problem of structural injustice insofar as it exacerbates procedural injustice. Acknowledging the fact that the discussion of global justice is difficult in a world constituted of lots of sovereign states, it sketches out a political theory which begins with the problem of morals and then consecutively moves on to the matter of justice. The result is a novel normative theory narrowing the gap between Neo-Westphalian and Post-Westphalian traditions. (shrink)