국가의 구성원들이 더 훌륭해지도록 돌보는 플라톤적 보살핌의 통치가 국가 구성원들이 모두 저마다 다른 방식으로 능동적으로 산출하는 공공적 유용성을 포괄할 수 있는 앎의 관점을 획득함으로써 그들에게 동의를 얻을 수 있는 것이어야 한다는 함축을 살펴본다. 플라톤의 정치철학을 그의 여러 대화편에 편재하는 다양한 문제의식의 직조물에서 찾는다면, 보살핌으로서의 통치에서 동의는 교육과 상호작용하는 중대한 주제로 보인다. 『고르기아스』의 칼리클레스와 『카르미데스』의 크리티아스가 각각 대표하는 왜곡된 정치적 삶의 유형이 공통적으로 대중의 동의를 배제하는 양상에 대한 플라톤의 비판적 고찰을 살펴보고, 이를 토대로 『정치가』가 제기하는 보살핌으로서의 통치에서 동의가 필요한 이유를 짚어본다. (...) 보살핌으로서의 통치에 대한 플라톤의 탐색은 앎으로서의 덕성을 돌보는 소크라테스적 윤리에, 인간의 정치적 삶의 구체적 조건을 이루는 상호의존성, ‘기하학적’ 동등성, 다양한 능동성에 대한 특유의 고찰을 더해 정치적 앎과 동의를 결합시키는 독특하게 플라톤적인 ‘정치적인 것’을 제시한다. (shrink)

The leading scholars represented in _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ examine six key Platonic dialogues and the most important of the epistles, moving from Plato's most public or political writings to his most philosophical. The collection is intended to demonstrate the unity of Plato's concerns, the literary quality of his writing, and the integral relation of form and content in his work. Taken together, these essays show the consistency of Plato's understanding of the political art, the art of writing, and the (...) philosophical life. Studies emphasizing the unity of Plato's lifework have given way in recent scholarship to specialized and overspecialized examinations of individual dialogues. While each of the contributors to _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ studies one text, his or her work is oriented toward illuminating the whole of Plato's project. Each of the essays is an innovative contribution to scholarship on its topic; as a collection, they constitute a unique reading of Plato's political philosophy. Plato scholars have generally divided themselves into two camps: those who concentrate on the analytic or logical aspects of the dialogues, and those who concentrate on the literary-critical features. In one camp are the philologists and classicists, and in the other, the writers of inventive interpretive commentaries. By avoiding distinctions between Plato the poet and Plato the philosopher, _Politics, Philosophy, Writing_ allows a deeper exploration of the comprehensiveness of Plato's theoretical vision and illuminates the lasting challenge of his understanding of the human condition. (shrink)

Care of the soul is arguably the core concept in Patočka’s phenomenology. However, what is the soul? In this paper I seek to determine its ontological meaning, connecting the concept of caring for the soul with that of the movement of existence. Starting from Patočka’s affirmative presentation of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato, I interrogate the “orthodox” Platonic concept of caring for the soul and develop an alternative notion, putting emphasis on action in the world. I demonstrate the impossibility (...) of identifying the third movement with true existence, or with the care for the soul, whether conceived as the performance of philosophy or as political action. Finally, I outline a reinterpreted concept of care for the soul in which the self-moving of the soul is not ontologically prior to responding. The soul is inherent in action; and it is free only as responding to the world and responsible only in being free. (shrink)

This book considers whether there is a legitimate or even necessary place for the perspective of 'care' when addressing questions of universal justice. To this end, it examines two major frameworks of contemporary moral philosophy_Jürgen Habermas's model of discourse ethics and Jacques Derrida's deconstructive ethics of radical singularity_in which the contrasting standpoints of communicative reciprocation and care for the absolute otherness of the other are respectively prioritized.

Editors Rachel Brown and Deva Woodly bring together Mara Marin, Shatema Threadcraft, Christopher Paul Harris, Jasmine Syedullah, and Miriam Ticktin to examine the question: what would be required for care to be an ethic and political practice that orients people to a new way of living, relating, and governing? The answer they propose is that a 21st-century approach to the politics of care must aim at unmaking racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, the carceral state, and the colonial present. The (...) politics of care is an approach to political thought and action that moves beyond the liberal approach which situates care as a finite resource to be distributed among autonomous individuals, or as a necessarily feminine virtue. Instead, those elucidating the politics of care for the contemporary era draw on rich interdisciplinary traditions and social movements to theorize and practice care as an inherently interdependent survival strategy, a foundation for political organizing, and a prefigurative politics for building a world in which all people can live and thrive. (shrink)

Responding to Ike Kamphof’s “Webcams to save nature: Online space as affective and ethical space,” this essay considers the further contextualization of Kamphof’s analysis using the idea of agencement and the provocation to consider further the politics of affect.

Feminist literature on care has extensively addressed inequalities that cut across the social categories of gender, class and ethnicity in relation to care work. One category that has received less attention in theories of caregiving so far is age. Built on the feminist literature of care and taking young (female) carers as its subject matter, this article tackles age as a third social category of intersectional inequalities along with class and gender. Firstly, through dealing with Nancy Fraser’s (...) justice framework of participatory parity, it is argued that addressing the intersectional inequalities that young (female) carers face necessitates a justice framework that contemplates both the distributional and recognitional aspects of care. In this respect a dual conceptualisation of care is presented – both as a social good and a social process. Secondly, a critical analysis will be presented of the elements of the justice framework of Fraser, where the notion of subordinated status will be related to the identities of young carers. Lastly, the normative framework participatory parity will be discussed in relation to the politics of need, as care practices define the needs of young carers that are contextualised in the care processes, but also in a childhood space. (shrink)

In the struggle for breathable air amid pollution and climate change, both resistance and inspiration can be found in ‘atmospheric care practices’ (Vine 2019). In this article, I embed these practices in a more than human political approach (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). More than human atmospheric care practices work to undo toxic harm both on a material and social level while intimately involving human beings with more than human worlds. In so doing, they are demonstrative of different (...) kinds of agency and political activity that open up alternative ways of relating and responding to climate change. (shrink)

There is a growing demand to incorporate social, economic and ethical considerations into biotechnology governance. However, there is currently little guidance available for understanding what this means or how it should be done. A framework of care-based ethics and politics can capture many of the concerns maintaining a persistent socio-political conflict over biotechnologies and provide a novel way to incorporate such considerations into regulatory assessments. A care-based approach to ethics and politics has six key defining features. (...) These include: 1) a relational worldview, 2) an emphasis on the importance of context, 3) a recognition of the significance of dependence, 4) an analysis of power, including a particular concern for those most vulnerable, 5) a granting of weight to the significance of affect, and 6) an acknowledgment of an important role for narrative. This policy brief provides an overview of these defining features, illustrates how they can appear in a real world example and provides a list of guiding questions for assessing these features and advancing a politics of care in the governance of biotechnology. (shrink)

This article examines the Israeli women’s movement, Checkpoint Watch, as a case from which to argue that the strategic use of the politics of care can challenge existing social and political orders. The conscious decision of activists to direct the practice of care toward the ‘wrong’ subject – toward Palestinians rather than Israeli soldiers – challenges the dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society. While the politics of care may call the political order into question, the (...) service of a behaviour that is considered essentialist may paradoxically reinforce the existing social order. I argue that the politics of care has the potential to challenge both the political and the social order, though not simultaneously. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 224-225 [Access article in PDF] Ross Harrison. Hobbes, Locke, and Confusion's Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth-Century Political Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. v + 281. Cloth, $65.00. Paper, $23.00. The title of Ross Harrison's book is taken from Macduff's line in Macbeth, "[c]onfusion now have made his masterpiece," in reference to the discovery of a murdered king. Regicide (...) was a particularly unsettling crime in the day of Shakespeare, as Harrison reminds us, since kings were often associated with divinity (2). And perhaps it was their obvious and fragile mortality, as witnessed by the killing of King Charles I, that served to further unsettle what had previously been taken for granted in the modern world—the very foundations of the state. Today, Jürgen Habermas informs us from the perspective of critical theory that we live in a "postmetaphysical condition," where we can no longer count on the apparatus of Christian natural law or Platonic Ideas to justify the state and its laws. Practically, the difficulty in Iraq of bringing together the various religious perspectives of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians, and others suggests that different religions or even varying interpretations of the same religion provide formidable barriers to the foundation of political systems. How do we bring people of different worldviews and perspectives together into one state? The great virtue of Harrison's book is the reminder that this is not a new problem. Rather, it resides at the core of the greatest challenges for political philosophy in any age. This challenge inspires what Harrison calls "some of the greatest and most important political philosophy ever written" (1).Thomas Hobbes is the first to receive extensive attention. Harrison provides a careful step-by-step analysis of Hobbes's reasoning in Leviathan. His affection for Hobbes is thinly veiled, as he parenthetically refers to Leviathan as "the greatest work of the greatest political philosopher" (62). Much of his account is standard, as he skillfully walks the reader from Hobbes's fascination with science to the sweeping authority of the sovereign. What is particularly worthy of note is his attention to the matter of foundations in Hobbes. Here his characterization reminds us of the eternality of Hobbes's central problem: "... how in a sceptical age to make statements of human reason that can depend on something fixed, or generally agreed" (64). Having found God superfluous to the question, according to Harrison, Hobbes ultimately employs prudence in relation to self-interest to be this fixed object. Since prudence—particularly its response to threats of violence—is the one element shared by all peoples, regardless of their religious or moral commitments, it makes the most sturdy foundation of political reasoning.The second object of extended attention is John Locke. And as was the case with his treatment of Hobbes, Harrison again looks to the foundations. As most readers of Locke are aware, the law of nature plays a central role in his thought, and if one is to get to the foundations of his politics, then one must unravel its mysteries. Locke makes solving these mysteries difficult for readers by denying the existence of innate ideas in the Essay. Locke makes his own task of grounding his theory difficult by doing just the same—denying the existence of innate ideas. Grounding natural law is made even more troublesome by his apparent appeals to these very same innate ideas on two occasions in the Second Treatise (§11, §136). It is perhaps in his own confusion that, according to Harrison, he "falls back, [End Page 224] after all, on revelation" (180). This is particularly unsatisfactory for Harrison, since revelation is characterized by the indeterminacy that led to the political conflict between Protestants and Catholics in modern England and eventually to the works of Hobbes and Locke in the first place.Shorter chapters are devoted to Grotius, Pufendorf, and the less-celebrated sixteenth-century figure, John Ponet. Ponet is found to appeal... (shrink)

Caring for the stranger -- Why compassion in politics? -- Historical perspectives on social welfare and global development -- Historical perspectives on human rights -- Compassion in religious and secular thought -- Justice and moral responsibility -- Altruism, empathy, and the making of "Us" and "Them" -- The moral politics of Liberals and Conservatives -- Politics against compassion in the United States -- Compassion in public policy and law -- Creating a more compassionate and just society.

The construction of foreign domestics as ‘Others’ has been a critical process to the globalization of domestic service. While the globalization of domestic service has been associated with a transnational female labour force, the transnational labour system has always been reconstituted as a new labour regime consistent with local particularity. In this article, I examine how Taiwanese employers discursively construct the otherness of their Filipino domestics. I argue that Taiwanese employers construct and naturalize the otherness of foreign domestics utilizing national (...) identities, racial characteristics, and nationally based class difference. These differences, integral to the racialization of foreign domestics, are central not only to the persistence of their servitude at home but also to their social and political marginalization in the host society as a whole. The localization of a transnational labour force necessitates the examination of the contextual politics of difference. Rather than speaking of the universalized experience of foreign domestics, the contextual politics of difference provides a comparative framework for understanding not only the relational but also the contextual nature of identity construction. It demonstrates how difference is localized in the transnational system of care and how the localization of difference serves to reproduce social and global inequality. (shrink)

À partir d’une critique des éthiques libérales et des modes de légitimation des inégalités sociales, les recherches sur le care ont constitué depuis une dizaine d’années en France un champ de recherches dialoguant avec les travaux de féministes étatsuniennes et notamment ceux de Carol Gilligan et Joan Tronto. Centrée sur la conception d’un sujet ontologiquement vulnérable et relationnel, cette perspective du care a affirmé l’importance morale et politique du souci d’autrui dans la préservation d’un monde commun. Des travaux (...) transdisciplinaires se sont ainsi saisis de voix étouffées ou minorées par le genre, la classe ou la race ; voix des domestiques, des aides-soignantes, des « femmes de réconfort » ou des personnes en situation de handicap. Ces travaux ont exploré des questions dévalorisées par les sciences sociales, comme le soin non médical, la dépendance ou les multiples attachements des humains aux non-humains. (shrink)

Departing from the thought-provoking conversation between David Theo Goldberg and Achille Mbembe on the driving themes in Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, this commentary elaborates upon three topics that emerge in this conversation: the role of desire and how it is articulated in black abjection, the politics of care, and contemporary practices of repairing the injustices perpetrated in the context of European modernity. It is emphasized that black reason as a practice of repairing and transformation is especially enacted (...) within contemporary movements like the refugee movements organized around the Black Mediterranean and in the lived freedom archives and abolitionist imaginaries of movements where gender and race cross-cut. Characterized by their transnational dimension and a radical openness towards new beginnings, these expressions of black reason imagine and reinvent justice and democracy anew. (shrink)

The body of research on the social and political implications of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic theory has been growing steadily in recent years. This has long been overdue, considering the preo...

Laurence Lampert has written an engaging, bold, and insightful book that should stand above much recent Nietzsche scholarship for its attention to Nietzsche’s purposes and its care with Nietzsche’s text. Nietzsche’s Task offers the first book length exegesis of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, attending to its structure and offering commentary on each section, or aphorism, of the book. Lampert provides a valuable contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, an extraordinary guide to the major issues of political philosophy, and a fine (...) resource to anyone reading, studying, or teaching that book. Nietzsche’s Task provides more than textual exegesis; Lampert makes a sustained argument for Nietzsche as a political philosopher in the tradition of Platonic political philosophy. Nietzsche’s task, argues Lampert, is the task of philosophy, and the task of Beyond Good and Evil is to establish the rightful rule of philosophy, to persuade nonphilosophers—the scholars, skeptics, and “free spirits” Nietzsche addresses—of the nobility and superiority of philosophy. Placing Nietzsche within the tradition of Western political philosophy, Lampert demonstrates Nietzsche’s full-scale engagement with Plato and Platonism throughout Beyond Good and Evil. I do not think it would exaggerate Lampert’s position to say that Nietzsche’s task is an assault on Platonism in the name of Platonic political philosophy. Yet, this involves a radically new approach to the presentation of philosophy, one much more open about the nature of philosophy and willing to expose the esoteric secrets hidden behind the dogmatic masks of previous philosophers. (shrink)

The U.S.Supreme Court's 6-decision in Gonzales v. Oregon is the latest defeat for the Bush administration in its sustained attack on Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law. Both the majority opinion and the major dissent in Oregon provide an opportunity to assess the dangers inherent in allowing a political agenda that emphasizes the sanctity of life and minimizes professional ethical obligations to overshadow quality patient care at the end of life.

In the Gorgias, Socrates claims to practice the true art of politics, but the peculiar politics he practices involves cultivating in each individual he encounters an erotic desire to live a life animated by the ideals of justice, beauty and the good. Socratic and Platonic Political Philosophy demonstrates that what Socrates sought to do with those he encountered, Platonic writing attempts to do with readers. Christopher P. Long's attentive readings of the Protagoras, Gorgias, Phaedo, Apology, and (...) Phaedrus invite us to cultivate the habits of thinking and responding that mark the practices of both Socratic and Platonic politics. Platonic political writing is here experienced in a new way as the contours of a politics of reading emerges in which the community of readers is called to consider how a commitment to speaking the truth and acting toward justice can enrich our lives together. (shrink)

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer”. For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of Michel Foucault and Judith (...) Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care. (shrink)

In this first comprehensive treatment of Plato’s political thought in a long time, John Wallach offers a "critical historicist" interpretation of Plato. Wallach shows how Plato’s theory, while a radical critique of the conventional ethical and political practice of his own era, can be seen as having the potential for contributing to democratic discourse about ethics and politics today. The author argues that Plato articulates and "solves" his Socratic Problem in his various dialogues in different but potentially complementary ways. (...) The book effectively extracts Plato from the straightjacket of Platonism and from the interpretive perspectives of the past fifty years—principally those of Karl Popper, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, M. I. Finley, Jacques Derrida, and Gregory Vlastos. The author’s distinctive approach for understanding Plato—and, he argues, for the history of political theory in general—can inform contemporary theorizing about democracy, opening pathways for criticizing democracy on behalf of virtue, justice, and democracy itself. (shrink)

At Republic 462a-e, Plato provides an account of political unity summarized in the following claims: PU1 — Political unity is the sharing of pleasures and pains in common; PU2 — The unity of a polis resembles the unity of an individual; PU3 — Political unity is the greatest good for a polis. Aristotle criticizes the coherence of these claims arguing that if anything becomes completely unified it becomes an individual and ceases to be a state. Since the greatest good for (...) a city preserves it, a city cannot be unified as an individual is unified. Robert Mayhew has recently defended the philosophical significance of Aristotle’s objections. Mayhew is right. Aristotle’s objections are significant, but this is because they require a more thorough explication of the Platonic view. This paper reconstructs the Platonic view, shows that a more careful reading avoids the Aristotelian criticisms, and then shows that Aristotle endorses the reconstructed view. (shrink)

This paper compares two influential but conflicting contemporary models of politics as an activity: those of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou. It discovers the fundamental difference between their approaches to politics in their opposing evaluations of the contemporary political significance of the legacy of Plato, Platonism, and the Platonic Idea. Karl Popper’s and Arendt’s analyses of the inherently ideological nature of totalitarianism are contrasted with Badiou’s vindication of an ideological “politics of the Idea.” Arendt and Badiou (...) are shown to share an understanding of politics as a realm for the human deployment of novelty and world-transformation. Their key disagreement concerns the form of activity that accomplishes this deployment. For Arendt, political activity has the basic form of noninstrumental and nonteleological action (praxis), devalued by the Platonic tradition of political philosophy. Badiou, by contrast, follows Plato in regarding politics essentially as a process of production (poiēsis) oriented to an ideal end. (shrink)

The impacts of the activities of technological societies extends further into the future than their capacity to predict and control these impacts. Some have argued that the repercussions of this deficiency of knowledge cause fatal difficulties for both consequentialist and deontological accounts of future oriented obligations. Increasingly, international politics encompasses issues where this problem looms large: the connection between energy production and consumption and climate change provides an excellent example. As the reach of technologically-mediated social action increases, it is (...) necessary to ask whether a political imaginary that extends itself to match this reach requires new concepts, and how far they should displace traditional political concepts of obligation, based on reciprocity and harm avoidance. This paper draws on recent scholarship on the role of concepts of care in political philosophy, bringing together phenomenological and feminist concepts of care in contributing to a positive concept of non-reciprocal intergenerational obligation that defends a constitutive connection between care and justice. (shrink)

Preface: what is just theory? -- Introduction: framing the common good -- Cultural turn 1. Inventing western metaphysics -- Why is Plato so upset at the poets, and what is western metaphysics? -- Reframing the republic : from the homeric to the platonic paideia -- Finding love (and writing) in all the wrong places : Plato's pharmacy and the double-edged sword of literacy in the Phaedrus -- Aristotle's natural classification of things : when dialectic trumps rhetoric and poetry gets (...) rescued -- Cultural turn 2. Rewriting western metaphysics : aesthetics and politics in the age of capital -- Rewriting western metaphysics for a revolutionary age -- The prelude to the revolution : the limits of literary freedom in a market society -- Women's rights, class wars, and the master-slave dialectic : signs of the rising countermovements -- The struggle between communality and hierarchy : lessons of the paris commune for the twenty-first century -- From God's great chain to nature's slow-motion evolution : reframing our regulative fictions -- Cultural turn 3. Surviving the sixth extinction and resolving the crisis of care -- Epilogue. (shrink)

In the operating theater, the micro-politics of practice, such as interpersonal communications, are central to patient safety and are intimately tied with values as well as knowledge and skills. Team communication is a shared and distributed work activity. In an era of "professionalism," that must now encompass "interprofessionalism," a virtue ethics framework is often invoked to inform practice choices, with reference to phronesis or practical wisdom. However, such a framework is typically cast in individualistic terms as a character trait, (...) rather than in terms of a distributed quality that may be constituted through intentionally collaborative practice, or is an emerging property of a complex, adaptive system. A virtue ethics approach is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a collaborative bioethics within the operating theater. There is also an ecological imperative - the patient's entry into the household (oikos) of the operating theater invokes the need for "hospitality" as a form of ethical practice. (shrink)

Nuestro trabajo intenta presentar, en su primera parte, la práctica de la filosofía clínica a partir de su pertinencia dentro de la filosofía antigua (clásica) en tanto ejercicio espiritual de transformación de sí. Con ello se quiere referir con el concepto de espíritu en comprender un ejercicio no como producto sólo del pensamiento sino a una totalidad psíquica y emocional del individuo, en sentirse dentro de la perspectiva del todo. Era un arte de vivir, un modo de vida que intenta (...) comprender más profundamente la totalidad de la existencia. La filosofía no es una disciplina que perseguía plantarse ante la dimensión única del conocimiento teórico sino en el marco del yo y del ser: consiste en un itinerario, un proceso, un viaje para la ampliación de la conciencia, que busca aumentar la captación, la atención, la vivencia y expansión del ser. En su segunda parte nos adentramos a examinar la figura del tirano en y como conciencia política degradada. Para ello nos centramos en el proceso de la personalidad de la condición de lo tiránico y del tirano dentro de la vida política, pero también como éste se nos presenta como germen en nosotros mismos y de cómo se establece a partir de ello –junto a las condiciones sociales requeridas-, su existencia proyectada en un individuo particular. La filosofía clínica es una filosofía crítica en la medida que tiene por asunto el pensamiento en sí mismo; es una filosofía con conciencia de sí misma; coloca al pensamiento en una sala de observación y cuidados intensivos ¿Se trata de comprender la política como un ejercicio espiritual? Por supuesto, un ejercicio cotidiano a lo largo de nuestra existencia, donde pueda permitirnos desarrollar una atención,una inteligencia, un crecimiento y una transformación de nuestra individualidad social autónoma como ciudadano de una región y del mundo, pero comprometida con su comunidad de vida. De un modo de aprender el dominio de uno mismo, del cumplimiento de los deberes, de la libertad pública y privada, que nos lleva a renunciar de todo aquello que no dependa de nosotros y ocuparnos de lo que sí depende; mantener una rectitud de acción en conformidad con el grado de evolución de nuestra razón. On the tyranny in Plato Our work attempts to present, in its first part, the practice of clinical philosophy from its relevance as a spiritual exercise of self-transformation within ancient (classical) philosophy. The¡ concept of spirit is meant to bring about an understanding of this exercise not as a sole product¡ of thinking, but as the involvement of the individual’s psychic and emotional totality, which entails that the individual should feel as a part of the whole. It was an art of living, a way of life that attempts to understand more deeply the totality of existence. Philosophy is not a discipline that sought to face the sole dimension of theoretical knowledge. Rather, it is built around the framework of self and being. It consists of a route, a process, a journey to broaden consciousness. It seeks to increase uptake, attention, experience and expansion of being. In the second part we examine in depth the figure of the tyrant as degraded political consciousness. To this aim we focus on the process of the personality of the tyrannical and the tyrant within political life, but also on how the latter is a seed within ourselves, and on how, on this basis,his existence projected onto a particular individual becomes established –together with the required social conditions. Clinical philosophy is a critical philosophy inasmuch as its subject-matteris thought in itself; it is a philosophy with self-awareness; it places thought in an observation and intensive care room. Are we to understand politics as a spiritual exercise? Of course, an everyday exercise throughout our existence, which enables us to develop a degree of attention, intelligence, growth and transformation of our social autonomous individuality as citizens of a region and the world, while sill committed to our life community. It enables us to learn self-control, to carry out our duties, to exercise public and private freedom, in a way that makes us give up everything which doesnot depend upon us and pay attention to what actually does. It enables us to maintain rectitude of action, in agreement with our reason’s degree of evolution. (shrink)

Virginia Held assesses the ethics of care as a promising alternative to the familiar moral theories that serve so inadequately to guide our lives. The ethics of care is only a few decades old, yet it is by now a distinct moral theory or normative approach to the problems we face. It is relevant to global and political matters as well as to the personal relations that can most clearly exemplify care. This book clarifies just what the (...) ethics of care is: what its characteristics are, what it holds, and what it enables us to do. It discusses the feminist roots of this moral approach and why the ethics of care can be a morality with universal appeal. Held examines what we mean by "care," and what a caring person is like. Where other moral theories demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of our ties to our families and groups. It evaluates such ties, focusing on caring relations rather than simply on the virtues of individuals. The book proposes how such values as justice, equality, and individual rights can "fit together" with such values as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity. In the second part of the book, Held examines the potential of the ethics of care for dealing with social issues. She shows how the ethics of care is more promising than Kantian moral theory and utilitarianism for advice on how expansive, or not, markets should be, and on when other values than market ones should prevail. She connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and considers the limits appropriate for the language of rights. Finally, she shows the promise of the ethics of care for dealing with global problems and seeing anew the outlines of international civility. (shrink)

Homelessness is an obvious moral challenge, given the fact that it is a problem that millions of people in the developed world have to deal with on a daily basis. In the relatively scarce literature on this subject, there appear to be—roughly—three main approaches, namely, what I will refer to as the “difference approach,” the “liberal approach” and the “care approach.” In the paper I will critically review these three moral perspectives on the issue of homelessness. I will argue (...) that the difference approach and the liberal approach in the end are unconvincing. Homelessness can hardly be interpreted in terms of an internally valued group identity nor in terms of autonomy and its preconditions. I will defend a version of the care approach instead, an approach that focuses on the concrete and particular needs of the homeless. (shrink)

In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone discussions on vulnerability (...) and precarity, she discusses her approach to normative expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of someone else's agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of contemporary issues, such as the Men's Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late AntiquityMichael F. WagnerDominic J. O'Meara. Platonopolis: Platonic Political Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 249. Cloth, $55.00.Porphyry tells of Plotinus's failed petition to emperor Gallienus to (re)establish a "city of philosophers" conformed to Plato's laws, named Platonopolis (Vit. Plo.12). O'Meara here articulates primary themes and developments in philosophical political thought in the classical Neoplatonic period, (...) from Plotinus's day in the mid-third century into the sixth century. Concurrently, he addresses head on "the conventional view that the Platonist philosophers of Late Antiquity had no political philosophy" (3). This view exemplifies the more general perspective that the Neoplatonists were simply disinterested in this-worldly affairs in lieu of "an immaterial world... our true 'homeland,' where we can at last attain the good we desire" (3). Consequently, O'Meara provides both a unique study of an important [End Page 205] topic and a compelling case for a more complete, balanced understanding of Neoplatonic other-worldly-ness. O'Meara's study covers key figures from four main groups of (neo)Platonists: Plotinus and his students; the schools in Syria and Asia Minor inspired by Iamblichus; the Athenian school (Plutarch, Proclus, Damascius et al.); and the Alexandrian school (Hyapatia, Philoponus, Olympiodorus et al.). He organizes his investigation (chapters) into three Parts.The pivotal concept in O'Meara's two-pronged endeavor is divinization - "assimilation and unification, as far as possible, to god" (31, Proclus) - a concept whose meaning for classical Neoplatonists ranges from "becoming a god" to "imitating some form of divine life, in one way or another" (31). Part I focuses on the Neoplatonists' shared association of a human soul's divinization with virtue-osity [my jargon], beginning with Plotinus's distinction between political virtue(s) and purification—or purificatory virtue(s). O'Meara emphasizes the relevance of the resulting "scale of virtues" to a life of continued activity—for example explicating Plotinus's denial that a "purified" soul is somehow exempt from the rightness-of-acting expected of the politically virtuous soul: rather, "reaching higher principles and different measures he will act [directly, immediately] according to these" (43, En. I,2,7).Another organizing theme as O'Meara's investigations proceed beyond Plotinus is the significance of the increasing complexities of particular Neoplatonic metaphysical systems, and so also of their moral systems - e.g. their "scales of virtue." Part I also articulates related attempts (beginning with Porphyry and Iamblichus) to articulate programs of moral and philosophical study - i.e. a related "scale of sciences." Of special note here are proposals by some Neoplatonists to divide the "practical sciences" associated on this scale with political virtuousness into legislative science(s) and judicial science (56). Implicit in the Neoplatonic scale(s) of virtue(s) was the thesis that as one progresses towards divinization "lower" virtue-osity is not transcended in the sense of lost or dismissed but rather it is included or incorporated into a higher form. Arguably, "lower" sciences are likewise not merely aids or stepping-stones towards something "higher," but genuine topoi of study and knowledge in their own right.Part II is the true heart of O'Meara's outstanding scholarly and philosophical inquiry. Here is where he fulfills his intent to discern a substantive tradition of political philosophy and to articulate its key themes and concepts. Though he associates this part of his investigation with Plato's conceit of the philosopher's return to the cave, he immediately parses this "descent" as a "divinization of political life through philosophy" (71). He articulates various Neoplatonists' approaches to questions inspired by Plato's cave allegory—e.g. Is the philosopher socially obligated to "return"? Could s/he then still be happy? (His investigation here does seem to overlook Neoplatonic conceptions of choice, volition, or will as these might pertain to such questions.) O'Meara recognizes, however, that the more fundamental link between Neoplatonic metaphysics and Neoplatonic ethical-political thought derives from Plotinus's conception "of fecundity, of an [overflowing] abundance" (74) in his highest One, and so in a soul assimilated to It. In Proclus's formulation: "that which... (shrink)

Eusebius of Caesarea drew heavily on pagan philosophy in developing the first Christian political theology. His quotations from Plato’s most political work, the Laws, are so extensive that they are treated as a manuscript authority by modern editors. Yet Eusebius’s actual use of the Laws is oddly detached from Plato’s own political intentions in that work, adapting it to a model of philosophical kingship closer to the Republic and applied to the emperor Constantine. For Eusebius the Laws mainly shows the (...) agreement of Christian and pagan morality, while his political theory centers on the establishment and maintenance of a Christian empire under a Christian emperor who is a philosopher-king. His view represents one of the fundamental political options in ancient Christianity, one that influenced later Byzantine political theology, but was largely rejected in the west. (shrink)

Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker is enigmatic. It reveals many influences and addresses even more themes. For these reasons and others, political theorists have tended to ignore it in favour of his more overtly political works. Yet to dismiss his last work is to neglect what might be a useful tool in unlocking his political theory. This article argues that the Reveries confirm what many have recently suggested-- that Rousseau is a Platonist in many important respects. Further, it holds (...) that his particular brand of Platonism as espoused in the Reveries provides essential epistemic information necessary to carry out his democratic politics--indeed, one far more democratic than Plato's, yet consistent with a Platonic metaphysics. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential for an international political theory of care as an alternative to liberalism in the context of contemporary global politics. It argues that relationality and interdependence, and the responsibilities for and practices of care that arise therewith, are fundamental aspects of moral life and sites of political contestation that have been systematically denied and obfuscated under liberalism. A political theory of care brings into view the responsibilities and practices of care that (...) sustain not just ‘bare life’ but all social life, from nuclear and extended families to local, national and transnational communities. It disrupts and challenges the individualism of liberalism, and the associated valorization of ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘toleration’. Instead, it emphasizes an ontology of relationality and interdependence that accepts the existence of vulnerability without reifying particular individuals, groups or states as ‘victims’ or ‘guardians’. Furthermore, by demonstrating the gendered and raced nature of caring in the contemporary world—from the household to the transnational level—an international political theory of care challenges our received assumptions about ‘dependence’ in world politics, and opens up space to interrogate politically not only gender but race and other aspects of inequality in the global political economy. (shrink)

The paper further realises Foucault’s genealogy of ethics to grasp genealogy as the totality of three axes – power, truth, and ethics – driven by the ethical axis. The paper demonstrates that Foucault’s discussion of antiquity is genealogical. The main focus is Foucault’s late work and, in particular, his final lectures on The Courage of Truth. The paper highlights the genealogical function of the distinction between ‘Laches’ and ‘Alcibiades’. ‘Laches’ provides a heuristic source for self-care in the present in (...) the form of practices of living tied to the ‘Laches’ parrhesia. But, it is also a critique of the present applied to democratic theories that have used the neo-platonic line of the ‘Alcibiades’ parrhesia – of which Foucault disapproves – as their source in creating traceable technologies of the self tied to structures of domination. Such technologies freeze games of power and governmentalise the problematisation of how to govern the self. Hence, the genealogical discussion of antiquity in connection with an understanding of genealogy as problematisation should be perceived as a heuristic source of self-creation with critical implications for evaluating power regimes in the present. The paper introduces the link between the ancient past and the present with respect to Foucault vis-à-vis certain democratic theories. The central aim is to consider on what grounds placing the problematisation of the self at the centre of a new politics can be also linked to governmentality. In this context, the paper also clarifies the wider implication of its core premise for Foucauldian studies and the emerging discussion of parrhesia. (shrink)

If for no other reason, this book is worth reading for the attention Professor Wallach affords the methods of interpretation. While the bulk of this lengthy study aims at a wide-ranging understanding of Plato’s political art “by focusing on the literary and philosophical connections between words and deeds in his ethical and political dialogues”, the structure of the argument and the structure of the book itself takes shape around the attempt to establish a new interpretive method. Wallach calls this interpretive (...) perspective “critical historicism”. The method is intended to rescue Plato from textualists and deconstructionists on the one hand, who “tend to liquefy the concreteness of the historical situation to which Plato’s dialogues responded” and the contextualists, on the other hand, who tend to dismiss Plato’s political art as merely an expression of “class interest, elitist bias, or linguistic convention”. As such, Wallach’s critical historicism attempts to cut across the dichotomy of textualism and contextualism; it “subordinates questions of authorial identity to questions about the discursive and practical problems that an author addresses, without ignoring authorial intention”. In short, the method aims to historicize, then to dehistoricize, and finally to rehistoricize so that Plato’s political art “can be used to invigorate contemporary political theory and benefit democracy”. (shrink)

In Essay Six of his Commentary on Plato's Republic, the Platonist Proclus offers a defence of the poetry of Homer and attempts to harmonize the Homeric epics, as inspired texts, with the philosophy of Plato as he interprets it. The tendency of late antique Platonists to turn to allegorical reading is well known, but in this instance Proclus interprets Achilles by other means. In particular, he is careful to place Achilles’ actions relative to what he sees as the correct position (...) in the scale of virtues (at the level of the political virtues). In some further remarkable passages Proclus sees Achilles’ ritual activities as a kind of prefiguration of the theurgic practices embraced by the Platonic school of Proclus’ era. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the experiences of EU migrants working in UK restaurants in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. We do so through a care ethics lens, which we bring together with the integrative approach to organisational silence to consider the ethical consequences of the organisational policies of political silence adopted by the restaurant chains in our qualitative empirical study. We develop the concept of political organisational silence and probe its ethical dimensions, showing how at the organisational (...) level it falls short of constituting a practice of caring for migrant workers in politically divisive and hostile times. We argue that organisational policies of political silence emphasise the exploitative nature of the business of (im)migration, which prioritises concern for profits over care for the needs of others. Organisations refuse caring responsibility for migrant workers, leaving care to the migrants themselves and their co-workers and managers. Whilst peer-care practices partially fill this politically silent care-vacuum, this leaves individuals to negotiate difficult tensions without institutional support at a time of increased uncertainty, complexity, hostility, violence, and vulnerability. Drawing lessons from our study and its aftermath, we call for a care manifesto to inform the business of (im)migration, which would need to include caring political responsibility towards migrant workers exercised through caring political organisational voice as well as silence. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to a conception of political life that remains vigilant of the foreignness that confronts us in our efforts to inhabit a shared world. To this end, I interpret Arendt’s less appreciated discourse on caritas, or love of the neighbor in Love and Saint Augustine, as a critical appropriation of Heidegger’s notion of care. In turning to caritas, I maintain that Arendt captures, perhaps more fully than Heidegger, the foreignness that care is destined (...) to confront in its native desire to belong to something outside of itself. This, I argue, leads Arendt to insist that the responsibility to care is not foremost a matter of individual existence, but rather of politics, grasped precisely as an openness to the foreign in communal life. (shrink)