One of the central themes of contemporary feminist literature is the exclusion of the female subject from the Western tradition. Luce Irigaray has made significant contributions to this literature. In this article I examine one aspect of Irigaray’s work on the feminine subject, her discussion of divine women. She argues that in order to achieve full subjectivity women must worship a female god that will give them the divinity that they lack, the divinity that the patriarchal god provides for (...) men. I argue that this thesis is both counterproductive and incoherent. It perpetuates the male/female binarism that is at the root of patriarchy. It also fails to define the concept of a female god which is at the centre of Irigaray’s argument. I conclude that the approach of process theology is much more successful in removing the maleness of God and providing women with a deity compatible with feminist beliefs. (shrink)

Patriarchal theologies which obstruct women’s leadership in the Anglican Church and impede ‘collaborative’ ministry prompt this exploration of the reluctance to relinquish male metaphors for God, even when intimate relationship rather than gender is stressed as the crucial concept of Trinitarian theology. Despite the ambiguities of using female terms for the divine and of establishing the oft-neglected Holy Spirit as female imaginary in the Godhead, Father-idolatry and sub-ordinationism in the Trinity need to be challenged. ‘Midwife’ is suggested as a (...) feminine term for the 3rd Person, signifying non-gendered action but retaining personhood. This would creatively renew Trinitarian doctrine, the Church and its leadership as reflections of the perichoretic Godhead. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 633-637 [Access article in PDF] Susan E. Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jas; Elsner, eds. Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xii + 379 pp. Cloth, $65. As he moves from monument to monument and polis to polis, Pausanias gives the impression that the sun is always shining and the weather fresh and sweet. Beyond the (...) next turn in the road, there might be a grove or spring and maybe a precinct of Demeter, a statue of Artemis, or a little temple of Aphrodite. If they were "worth seeing," we can rely on Pausanias to let us know. Delivering a mixed narrative that weaves together history, myth, and his own style of ekphrasis, his even-toned voiceover makes him a comfortable traveling companion. Or does it? We know that the oaks on Mt. Parnon make the forest dark (they are still there today), but for Pausanias, the land is called Skotitas, "Dark," not for the shadows of the oaks, but for Zeus Skotitas who had his sanctuary nearby. As Ada Cohen points out in her essay, Pausanias does not describe the landscape itself but only the places where it intersects with divinity. As the collaborators here make clear, similar principles of selection operate on other levels. Pausanias may enable us to visualize a lost world, but the view is sanitized. Writing at the peak of Roman wealth, power, and privilege, he gives us old Greece with hardly a trace of Rome. He presents cities without houses, landscapes without agriculture, sanctuaries without worshippers, and the past without the present. Like the cardboard and cellophane 3-D glasses worn by cinema audiences in the 1950s, his text brings into temporary and unstable focus a very specialized scene, but the view is that of a virtual museum, a theme park created for our viewing enjoyment.How did he do it and what are the consequences? I admit that when it comes to Pausanias, I am one of those "seekers after lost religions" whom Elsner classifies with archaeologists surveying the text of Pausanias for possible excavation sites. We will all be a little more careful after reading this book. Yet, where else [End Page 633] could we find the information Pausanias gives? Habicht rehabilitated Pausanias in the 1980s by demonstrating how well his text stands up when compared with the surviving external record. Pausanias did not have a spreadsheet to keep straight the sixty-nine altars at Olympia, but he must at least have taken notes.The arrangement of the articles presented here replicates a familiar academic setting. Structured like a weekend conference, the book divides into three sessions ("The Traveler and the Text," "Studies and Comparisons," and "Nachleben"), with four papers and two comments in each session. Very generally, the topics are: landscape as language (J. Elsner); mental baggage and method (E. Bowie); informants and information (C. P. Jones); pilgrimage and the inspiration of vision (I. Rutherford); selection and cultural choice (M. Torelli); memory and memorization (D. Konstan); identity, monumentality and the recall of mo(nu)ments sublime (J. Porter); representation of space and movement (A. Cohen); archaic text and image on the chest of Kypselos (A. M. Snodgrass); filling the empty map of Messenia (S. E. Alcock); Greek narratives in Roman images (B. Bergmann); other Spartas (P. Cartledge); shaping the genre of travel writing (S. B. Sutton); Leake's Pausanias and Greek topography (J. M. Wagstaff); rearranging Pausanias or Farnell on Greek ritual (J. Henderson); Harrison and Verrall present Pausanias for the hoipolloi (M. Beard); Sparta and the French Enlightenment (S. Bann); and remembering and reforming the past (J. Cherry).There isn't space enough here to do justice to every argument, but I will take a sentence to praise the editors for inspiring the synergy of so many specialties. Archaeologists talk about texts; literary scholars talk about places and objects; and art historians discuss the relation between the two. The section entitled Nachleben surveys the nineteenth-century efflorescence of Pausanias and from four very different vantage points evaluates his influence on... (shrink)

Yahweh among the Gods: The Divine in Genesis, Exodus, and the Ancient Near East. By Michael Hundley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv + 406. $99.

Christian ethics are usually based on a theology of love. In the case of Christian relationships to nature, Christian environmental writers have either suggested eros as a primary source for Christian love, without dealing with traditional Christian arguments against eros, or have assumed agape (spiritual love or sacrificial love) is the appropriate mode, without defining how agape should function in human relationships with the nonhuman portion of the universe. I demonstrate that God’s love for nature has the same form and (...) characteristics as God’s love for human beings, and that because agape is self-giving, it is preferable to eros in relationships with the environment. Agape concerning nature (I) is spontaneous and unmotivated, (2) is indifferent to value, (3) creates value, (4) initiates relationships with the divine, (5) recognizes individuality, (6) provides freedom, and (7) produces action and suffering. Agape might best be defined, not as Platonic ascent above the world, but as completely self-giving engagement with the world. Human love for nature is often limited by a human inability to accept love, including divine love, from nature. Flowing from God, agape cannot require reciprocity; yet agape understands what “the other has to give and can offer it complete valuation. Agape is the ideal form of human interaction with nature, because agape does not require equal status or ability, or common goals or needs. Love between humans and members of the land (or sea) community can be sacrificial, and should be distinguished by a loss of self-regard and a willingness to suffer. Further philosophical and theological discussion of the role of reciprocity and sacrifice in love for nature is highly desirable. (shrink)

This article examines the strange and special character of the work of dying manifest in Christian faith. As a discipline of thinking, ethics arises in response to the transience of life as a way of securing the future, both lending its support to technological interventions and at the same time prompting a new kind of question concerning ‘for what’ something should be done. Christian faith arising from the death and resurrection of the Son of God lives from out of another (...) possibility—that in receiving God’s love, the human soul may be turned from out of death into a future life in the divine presence. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that a false assumption drives the attraction of philosophers to a divine command theory of morality. Specifically, I suggest the idea that anything not created by God is independent of God is a misconception. The idea misleads us into thinking that our only choice in offering a theistic ground for morality is between making God bow to a standard independent of his will or God creating morality in revealing his will. Yet what is (...) God is hardly independent of him, and in coupling a perfect being theology with the doctrine of divine simplicity we discover that God’s “reason” is God. Accordingly, obeying the truths of goodness that we humans speak of as contained in the divine wisdom hardly impugns the divine sovereignty. By modifying divine command ethics to give primacy to God’s love or justice, thinkers such as Robert M. Adams, Philip L. Quinn, and Edward J. Wierenga admit the repugnance of this picture in spite of their verbal allegiance to divine command ethics. Accordingly, they implicitly concede that basing morality on God’s sheer power should not be the preferred option for the Christian theist. (shrink)

Mae Smethurst’s work has largely aimed to articulate nō theater in Western terms from their early roots, primarily through Aristotle’s On Tragedy. Her detailed examination of the shared structure of the content of these independent and superficially dissimilar arts reveals their mutual intelligibility and effectiveness through shared underlying universals. In this spirit, I outline how Zeami answers Plato’s first challenge to artistic performance, as expressed in Ion where Plato argues that rhapsody is not an art [techné] because it requires no (...) mastery. (Rhapsodes are instead vehicles of the divine.) This challenge to poetic performing arts, that is, to their claim to be arts at all, determines criteria by which we may judge any putative art, including sarugaku and its elevation to nōgaku. Though Zeami was unaware of Plato’s challenge, he nevertheless answers it in a way that brings Plato’s own assumptions and conceptual framework into relief. In this article I outline the first step of Zeami’s reply to Plato, how nō satisfies the criteria for mastery of a subject, with some help from zen master Dōgen. The focus of this article is twofold: 1) an examination of the ways Plato’s conception of a masterable subject entails metaphysical and epistemic tenets that may be revised or rejected in Buddhist tradition, and 2) a study of the means through which the sense of mindlessness that allegedly precludes rhapsody (and kamigakari) from qualifying as art (techné/michi) contrasts with the mushin and isshin of nō (and zazen). (shrink)

It is not uncommon for early-modern philosophers to portray a perfectly philosophical way of life as a condition that approaches the divine. The philosopher becomes as like God as a human being can, and in doing so experiences unparalleled and unalloyed joy. Spinoza advocates a version of this view and defends it with impressive consistency. To suggest that the process of philosophical enlightenment involves any affective cost, he argues, is simply to display a lack of understanding, and thus to (...) fall short of the insight and joy that understanding ultimately yields. Nevertheless, something seems to be missing. I turn to a pair of novels by J.M. Coetzee - The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus - to elucidate a significant though suppressed form of emotional loss that is integral to Spinoza’s image of the philosophical life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws by André LaksSusan Sauvé MeyerLAKS, André. Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022. x + 278 pp. Cloth, $35.00When the unnamed Athenian of Plato’s Laws specifies the constitution and law code for the (fictional) city of Magnesia, he retreats from some of the more notorious principles that structure the ideal city in the (...) Republic, most notably the prohibition against private property and private families for the city’s rulers and the explicit mandate that the rulers be philosophers. Magnesia will be governed by its property-owning citizens in a constitutional regime where law is the supreme political authority. Both [End Page 355] retreats are marked by the Athenian as making Magnesia “second best” in relation to the ideal.One of Laks’s striking theses is that the ideal from which the Laws’s second-best city falls short is not simply that of the Republic. Within the Laws itself, he argues, the Athenian articulates a “legislative utopia” and a constitutional ideal that are only imperfectly realized in the city identified as “second.” The constitutional ideal is articulated in book 3 in the mandate that a constitution achieve a mean (meson) between democracy and monarchy, while the legislative ideal underwrites the mandate in book 4 that laws should have persuasive preludes.While the constitutional “mean” mandated in book 3 is often characterized as “the mixed constitution,” Laks argues that what is mandated is not a mixture of monarchical and democratic institutions, but rather a synthesis of democracy and monarchy, with each institution implementing both democratic and monarchical principles. Laks calls such a mean a “middle.” If the mandated constitutional “middle” were fully achieved, he claims, democratic equality would be synthesized with the inequality of monarchy and thereby transformed from arithmetical into proportional equality. Similarly, democratic freedom would be synthesized with submission to authority, and transformed from negative freedom from authority into the positive freedom of rationality. Laks proposes that the freedom to emerge from this “metamorphosis” is the “voluntary servitude to the laws” lauded in book 3. While he acknowledges that Plato nowhere identifies such servitude to law as freedom, Laks locates that conception on the horizon of the conceptual metamorphosis of freedom that he finds in the Laws.Neither synthesis—of equality or of freedom—is perfectly achieved in the city whose constitution and law code are specified in the Laws, according to Laks; this is the burden of his remark that the constitution of Magnesia is “a mixture (sit venia verbo) of a mix and a middle.” A residue of unmitigated arithmetical equality remains in the constitution specified in book 6 to the extent that it includes a paradigmatically democratic procedure, the lottery, among the otherwise meritocratic procedures for appointing citizens to public office. A residue of despotism remains in the law code of Magnesia to the extent that the persuasive preludes to its statutes employ the manipulative rhetoric of praise and blame rather than philosophical arguments that display the rational grounding of the law in divine reason.Both retreats from the ideal are necessitated, on Laks’s interpretation, by the imperfect rationality of human beings. Not every person can learn to appreciate the superiority of proportional to arithmetical equality, or the perfect rationality of the laws’ prescriptions. In a “legislative utopia” citizens will obey the law because they appreciate its rational grounding, but that ideal is not fully achievable in a community of human beings. However rational the laws’ prescriptions may be, citizens’ obedience must be secured by nonrational means as well—hence the Athenian’s characterization of the politeia of the Laws as a “tragedy” (817b). [End Page 356]Laks’s exposition of these (and other) themes over the course of the volume is cumulative rather than sequential, diffuse rather than regimented, and deliberately sensitive to the literary features of Plato’s text and the ways in which its message may be allusive, indirect, or equivocal. What emerges from Laks’s learned engagement with the text is an interpretation that is “suggested” (an oft used phrase in the volume) rather than mandated by... (shrink)

Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden : the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga : discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari : history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue : the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe : cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Conclusion : imagined Japan(s).

It is the aim of this paper to show that [the theological argument from Divine omniscience] is not more than a needlessly (and confusingly) elaborate version of the argument for fatalism discussed by Aristotle in de Interpretatione 9, which, since its sole premise is the Principle of Bivalence, may conveniently be called the logical argument for fatalism. If this is right, if the theological premisses of the theological argument can be shown to be strictly irrelevant to the fatalist conclusion, (...) then it follows that it is pointless to try to avoid fatalism by modification of those theological premisses. (shrink)

Psalm 73 is a challenging Psalm in which the Psalmist draws on rich imagery to juxtapose doctrine and experience and to juxtapose the goodness of God with divine retribution. Drawing on data provided by 15 theological educators within the Anglican Diocese of Cyprus and the Gulf, this study tests the thesis that the imagery of Psalm 73 will be perceived differently by sensing types and by intuitive types and that the issue ‘Is God really good to the upright?’ will (...) be judged differently by feeling types and by thinking types. The findings from this study are consistent with the broader hermeneutical theory that the psychological type profile of the reader, in terms of perceiving preference and judging preference, plays a formative part in shaping the interpretation of biblical material.Contribution: Situated within the reader-perspective approach to biblical hermeneutics, the SIFT method is concerned with identifying the influence of the psychological type of the reader in shaping the interpretation of text. The present study demonstrates that this theory holds true for the way in which theological educators read Psalm 73. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft is celebrated for her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, while her title suggests that rights must play an important part in improving women’s situation, it is less clear how she envisages them. What does she think rights are and how are they to transform women’s lives? I argue that Wollstonecraft blends two traditions, a republican conception of rights as powers to act, and a distinct conception of natural rights. She offers a radical development of republican rights (...) theory, but, in order to resolve one of the problems it poses, resorts to divinely-ordained rights of nature. Is she alone in combining these two stances? In the final part of the chapter I show that she is not. Her position belongs to a historical trend in which republicanism gives way to a liberal outlook grounded on individual natural rights. (shrink)

When Timaeus claims that all vice is involuntary, and that it is not individual human beings but their “nurturers” and begetters” who must be assigned causal responsibility for human vice, he is extending the grand cosmological discourse he has been offering to include the causes of human vice, and he is presenting a novel twist on the Socratic paradox familiar from earlier works, that no one does wrong voluntarily. He is not, however, contradicting his earlier claims that human beings, rather (...) than the gods, are responsible for human evils. This is because 86b-87b does assign responsibility to human causes and responsibility for individual actions is not under discussion there. (shrink)

Christian ethics are usually based on a theology of love. In the case of Christian relationships to nature, Christian environmental writers have either suggested eros as a primary source for Christian love, without dealing with traditional Christian arguments against eros, or have assumed agape (spiritual love or sacrificial love) is the appropriate mode, without defining how agape should function in human relationships with the nonhuman portion of the universe. I demonstrate that God’s love for nature has the same form and (...) characteristics as God’s love for human beings, and that because agape is self-giving, it is preferable to eros in relationships with the environment. Agape concerning nature (I) is spontaneous and unmotivated, (2) is indifferent to value, (3) creates value, (4) initiates relationships with the divine, (5) recognizes individuality, (6) provides freedom, and (7) produces action and suffering. Agape might best be defined, not as Platonic ascent above the world, but as completely self-giving engagement with the world. Human love for nature is often limited by a human inability to accept love, including divine love, from nature. Flowing from God, agape cannot require reciprocity; yet agape understands what “the other has to give and can offer it complete valuation. Agape is the ideal form of human interaction with nature, because agape does not require equal status or ability, or common goals or needs. Love between humans and members of the land (or sea) community can be sacrificial, and should be distinguished by a loss of self-regard and a willingness to suffer. Further philosophical and theological discussion of the role of reciprocity and sacrifice in love for nature is highly desirable. (shrink)

This paper explores the characteristics of debilitating versus beneficial intersubjective engagements, by discussing the role of sin in the relational constitution of the self in Paul’s letter to the romans. Paul narrates ”sin’ as both a destructive holding environment and an interpersonal agent in a lethal embrace with human beings. The system of self-in-relation-to-sin is transactional, competitive, unidirectional, and domineering, operating implicitly within an economy of lack. Conversely, Paul’s account in romans of the divine action that moves persons into (...) a new identity of self-in-relationship demonstrates genuinely second-personal qualities: it is loving, non-transactional, non- competitive, mutual, and constitutive of personal agency. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.1 (2005) 83-105 [Access article in PDF] Does Malebranche Need Efficacious Ideas? The Cognitive Faculties, the Ontological Status of Ideas, and Human Attention Susan Peppers-Bates But whatever effort of mind I make, I cannot find an idea of force, efficacy, of power, save in the will of the infinitely perfect Being. Malebranche, Elucidation 15 One of the signatures of 17th century rationalists (...) is their replacement of the Scholastics's dependence on the deliverances of the senses with a dependence on the deliverances of the intellect as the key to gaining knowledge.1 Correct use of the intellect leading to freedom from the passions and to certain knowledge figures prominently in the works of Spinoza and Leibniz. Descartes's Meditations uses skeptical doubt to withdraw the mind from the senses, and his reliance on the meditative genre not only reveals to his readers the intellect as a distinct source of knowledge, but also trains them to use properly their will or faculty of judgment. Commentators have argued persuasively that overthrowing the sense-based epistemology and metaphysics of the Aristotelians depended on "discovering" the primacy of one's intellect over the senses, and using the deliverances of the mind to establish solid foundations for a new metaphysics and epistemology.2 Indeed, [End Page 83] outlining the proper use of the mind's faculties arguably lay at the basis of the Cartesian program in particular. This importance can be seen in Arnauld and Nicole's influential Port-Royal Logic, which aimed at training its readers in the proper use of the intellect.3Few would question Nicolas Malebranche's inclusion in the rationalist tradition.4 For while Malebranche famously takes ideas out of the Cartesian mind and transports them to God's—thus privileging the divine over the natural light—he shares Descartes's belief that our intellect, not our senses, holds the key to metaphysical truths such as the essence of matter, the mind-body distinction, and the existence of God.5 Yet, recently, Nicholas Jolley has contended that Malebranche's later commitment to "efficacious ideas" undermines his earlier belief in the power of the cognitive faculties: he believes that Malebranche abandons his view that the mind makes "real use" of the intellect to know intelligible objects.6 Jolley's position builds upon Alquié and Robinet's claims that around 1694-95 Malebranche moved from a vision "in" God to a vision "by" God. Now God's ideas act on and modify the soul with both sensations and intellectual concepts, rather than the human intellect contemplating ideas in the Divine Reason.7Alquié and Robinet argue that Malebranche, pushed by the battles with Arnauld and Régis over the status of ideas, introduced the language of "efficacious" ideas to explain how the union of the human and the divine mind is supposed to work.8 Robinet in particular suggests that in cashing out the metaphor of God enlightening human minds, Malebranche moved from a static "ontologist" view of idea-objects in God to an active "illuminationist" view whereby divine ideas cause(intellectual [End Page 84] and sensory) perception by modifying the soul.9 Once one accepts this view of the place and function of efficacious ideas in Malebranche's metaphysics, it seems natural to accept Jolley's declaration that the only way for the mind to apprehend ideas in God is if those ideas "act directly on the mind; [if] they thereby cause cognitive states to arise in a substance which is devoid of all genuine cognitive capacities of its own."10 Indeed, Jolley suggests that Malebranche ultimately made the soul passive in all its states, including its volitional ones.11In this paper, I argue that a strong interpretation of efficacious ideas, whereby they appear to become true causal agents, must be rejected precisely because it pushes us into an incorrect reading of Malebranche's theory of the divine and human faculties. Making ideas true causal agents within God privileges divine reason at the... (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the experience of vocational call and, in particular, three of its aspects: the source of the call, the form of the call, and the content of the call. It begins with a short reflection on Biblical accounts of vocation and then briefly contrasts that picture with the contemporary understanding of vocation as it is reflected in the thinking of Dewey, Weber, and Heidegger. It then explores Pope John Paul II’s creative retrieval of the original (...) understanding of vocation for our contemporary context by restoring the meaning of vocational call as having a divine source and dialogical form. The paper concludes with a reflection on the content of vocational call in the lives of individuals as they work out their vocations within the context of their particular communities. (shrink)

Malebranche's metaphysics and the problem of human freedom -- God, order, and general volitions -- Arnauld and Malebranche on the power of the human intellect -- The cognitive faculties and the divine ideas -- Malebranche on free will and imminent causation.

This paper traces a rather peculiar debate between William Ockham, Walter Chatton, and Robert Holcot over whether it is possible for God to know more than he knows. Although the debate specifically addresses a theological question about divine knowledge, the central issue at stake in it is a purely philosophical question about the nature and ontological status of propositions. The theories of propositions that emerge from the discussion appear deeply puzzling, however. My aim in this paper is to show (...) that there is a way of making sense of these views (and, by implication, of much of what is puzzling about medieval theories of propositions). The key, I argue, lies in getting clear about the precise theoretical roles these thinkers assign to propositions in their accounts of propositional attitudes. (shrink)

This dissertation attempts to reconcile the apparent inconsistency between a strong view of divine sovereignty and human moral responsibility. God's absolute sovereignty over his creatures entails that human beings cannot do otherwise than they do. If so, then it would seem to follow that human beings cannot be held morally responsible for their actions. The notion that God has Middle Knowledge is often defended as a way out of this apparent inconsistency. It is argued, however, that counterfactuals of freedom (...) have no truth value. Thus, it is admitted that God's sovereignty is not compatible with human beings having indeterministic freedom. Nevertheless, two considerations motivate an attempt to find a plausible compatibilist theory of moral responsibility. First, a strong case can be made that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities. Second, it is unlikely that indeterminism can ground moral responsibility due to the arbitrariness of indeterministic actions. Building on the work of Susan Wolf, John Martin Fischer, and Eleonore Stump, a compatibilist theory of moral responsibility is offered based on a teleological view of human agency. If an agent has a will that is designed to pursue the good as the intellect represents it, and her will is not directly manipulated, then she is morally responsible for her actions as long as her intellect is functioning properly, she knows the difference between right and wrong, and she has values that developed naturally through cognitive interaction with the world. This "Teleological Compatibilism" is immune from the standard objections raised against other compatibilist theories of responsibility. Given the plausibility of this compatibilist account, divine sovereignty and human responsibility can be shown to be consistent. (shrink)

Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman's account of the intellectual trajectory of modernity, employs the trope “homeless” to articulate deep difficulties that affirmations of divine transcendence and of human capacities to acknowledge transcendence face in a contemporary context thoroughly marked by fragmentation, fragility, and contingency. The “hospitality” of the Incarnation, which makes a fractured world a place for divine welcoming of the human in all its contingency and brokenness, is proposed as locus for theological engagement with Neiman's (...) appropriation of a Kantian sense of hope as the readiness to resist evil in a world seemingly bereft of welcome. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The King and the Crowd: Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty in the French Revolution Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly Stanford University We French cannot really think about politics or philosophy or literature without remembering that all this— politics, philosophy, literature—began, in the modem world, under the sign of a crime. A crime was committed in France in 1793. They killed a good and entirely likable king who was the incarnation (...) of legitimacy. We cannot not remember that this crime was horrible... When we speak about writing, the accent is on what is necessarily criminal in writing. (Jean-François Lyotard, "Discussion Lyotard-Rorty" 583; quoted in Dunn 165) The condemnation ofthe king is at the crux ofour contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. (Albert Camus, The Rebel 120; quoted in Dunn 140) Susan Dunn makes a well-documented case that the death of Louis XVI was unconsciously understood, especially by the Jacobins, as a human sacrifice that was necessary for the founding of the republic. "Louis must die because the patrie must live," said Robespierre at the king's trial, and the representative Carra considered Louis "the source of corruption and servitude... the fatal talisman ofall our ills" whose death would cause the people to be "regenerated in morality and virtue" (Dunn 15-37). The king was a monster and the source ofall the ills, and his death 68Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly had the power to alleviate those ills and regenerate the nation. This image of the king as sacrificial victim persisted throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in French literature and politics, sometimes assimilating itself to the image of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world. Legitimist writers like Joseph de Maistre saw his death precisely in this light as a great Christian sacrifice that would do France and the world good (Dunn 28-37). The king as a sacred monster whose life causes all ill and whose death brings healing is the classic figure of the scapegoat or sacrificial victim identified by René Girard. Susan Dunn recognizes this but because she does not know Girard's mimetic theory she is not able to explain the significance of the scapegoat king. Her work is, indeed, as Conor Cruise O'Brien says in the foreword, a work ofdemonstration rather than argument, of evidence rather than interpretation. I offer a mimetic interpretation ofthe Jacobin claim that the death ofthe king was the human sacrifice that founded the republic, and an argument that a universally operative generative mechanism forged the historical events of the revolution.1 There is no essential difference between the sovereignty ofthe king and the sovereignty of the people. In both cases sovereignty arises from a metaphorical contract that threatens death to anyone who violates it. The royal metaphors are organic while the revolutionary metaphors are legal and rational, but they all express the sacrificial structure ofpolitical power. Revolutionary democracy imports the fiction ofrationality to obscure its sacrificial structure. The desire ofthe general will for contractual equality is a transformation of mimetic desire in search of a victim around which the bad violence ofmimetic rivalry can coalesce into the good violence of sacred order. Sovereignty, therefore, is structurally single and simple; it is violence transformed through the sacred into the powers oforder. Max Weber understood this in general ifnot in its particulars when he defined sovereignty as the monopoly of the means of violence within a single territory.2 1 Mimetic theory was discovered by René Girard. I have given an account of my understanding of it in 7Ae Gospel and the Sacred 129-52. The idea of a mechanism universally operative in human history isjustified in the emerging discipline ofevolutionary psychology. Such mechanisms are the result ofthe interaction ofgenetic and environmental factors in the process of evolution (see Robert Wright). 2 The precise quotation from Weber is as follows: "The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a The King and the Crowd69 The transition from royal to popular sovereignty is a transformation of the basic pattern of victim and group. The... (shrink)

The caesura of tragedy, more precisely tragedy as the scene of a caesura upon which an interruption occurs in the relation between divine grounds and human will, stands at the center of Susan Taubes's confrontation with tragedy. Moving beyond an explication of generic history, she analyzed the “Nature of Tragedy” (1953) as a phenomenon emerging from a cultural-historical threshold situation, illuminating tragedy's origins in the framework of her approach to ritual, religion, and philosophy. In respect to the history (...) of theory, these reflections are located at a transition point between religious and cultural history. Her argument that tragedy maintains a…. (shrink)

This book is an expanded catalogue of an exhibit of mid‐fifteenth‐ through seventeenth‐century drawings, woodcuts, engravings, and etchings emphasizing hands as objects of study, as teaching tools, and as reflections of the human being. In addition, it contains an extended introduction by the curator of the exhibit, Claire Richter Sherman, and four essays by other contributors on pertinent topics: the hand as an instrument of the intellect, manual reckoning, music, and chiromancy . These essays, which precede the catalogue itself, are (...) only loosely connected to the exhibit, but each deals with its subject clearly and crisply.In his composition on the hand as a means of expression, Martin Kemp traces the legacy of ancient thought as reflected in the various anatomical drawings from Leonardo through the detailed Bidloo prints. Kemp concludes that the hand remains “a prime mechanism for personal expression—for the manifestation of individual character and identity.” In the following essay Sachiko Kusukawa provides a succinct sketch of finger numeration, noting that a system alluded to by ancient authors was fully described by the Venerable Bede in the eighth century. Bede also wrote of a method of using the hand as a mnemonic aid in determining the proper date for Easter and other movable feasts. Finger counting remained popular throughout the Middle Ages but gradually fell into disuse in the West by the sixteenth century and was merely quaint by the eighteenth. Kusukawa does not, unfortunately, suggest a reason for the decline, but the spread of computation with Arabic numerals was surely a major factor.Next, Susan Forscher Weiss discusses the use of the hand in teaching music theory and scales. Although there are some indications of this practice in antiquity, variations on a system developed in the eleventh century by Guido of Arezzo were used to teach music through the sixteenth century. Finally, Brain P. Copenhaver discusses the history of the pseudoscience chiromancy . Already in existence in antiquity, palmistry, and other forms of divination, flourished despite the prohibitions of the church. Copenhaver concludes with a witty discussion of the hard times on which palmistry has fallen recently in California.As for the catalogue, it consists of eighty‐three monochrome illustrations, each with an extensive commentary about the artist, the subject, and the reason the item was included in the exhibit. These descriptions are frequently fascinating short essays in themselves, enticing the reader to investigate further. The organization is thematic rather than chronological, with six divisions : “Reading the Writing on Hands,” “Handiwork of the Creator,” “Messengers of the World,” “Knowledge on Hand,” “Whole World in the Hand,” and “Guiding Hands.” The faults are minor. Although the themes of the divisions themselves are clearly described in Sherman's introduction, several of the illustrations seem to have only a general association with the stated theme. A few are filled with details too small to be legible in the necessary reduction of plates to fit the book. Most of the illustrations, however, are excellent examples of the main subject of the exhibit and are fascinating studies in their own right.Generally, this volume is a valuable work for anyone interested in the history of the hand in science and the arts. The four prefatory essays are particularly instructive, and the prints are reproduced clearly, with elaborate descriptions of their historical context and their meaning. Accordingly, this book is much more than merely a catalogue; it is an important work in its own right. Throughout, the substantial references to other works indicate directions for further study. One only regrets that the exhibit itself was shown in only two venues. (shrink)

Genomic research results and incidental findings with health implications for a research participant are of potential interest not only to the participant, but also to the participant's family. Yet investigators lack guidance on return of results to relatives, including after the participant's death. In this paper, a national working group offers consensus analysis and recommendations, including an ethical framework to guide investigators in managing this challenging issue, before and after the participant's death.

The Covid‐19 pandemic has exposed four myths in bioethics. First, the flood of bioethics publications on how to allocate scarce resources in crisis conditions has assumed authorities would declare the onset of crisis standards of care, yet few have done so. This leaves guidelines in limbo and patients unprotected. Second, the pandemic's realities have exploded traditional boundaries between clinical, research, and public health ethics, requiring bioethics to face the interdigitation of learning, doing, and allocating. Third, without empirical research, the success (...) or failure of ethics guidelines remains unknown, demonstrating that crafting ethics guidance is only the start. And fourth, the pandemic's glaring health inequities require new commitment to learn from communities facing extraordinary challenges. Without that new learning, bioethics methods cannot succeed. The pandemic is a wake‐up call, and bioethics must rise to the challenge. (shrink)

In 2004, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to allow firms that create “effective compliance and ethics programs” to receive better treatment if prosecuted for fraud. Effective compliance and ethics, however, appear to be limited to activities focused on complying with the firms’ internal legal and ethical standards. We explored a potential connection between the firms’ external corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors and internal compliance: Is there an organizationally valid relationship between these two firm activities? That (...) is, when organizations demonstrate CSR with behaviors external to the firm, such as employee volunteerism, are their employees more likely to demonstrate uncompromised legal and ethical compliance behavior internally? We collected data from 164 working professionals enrolled in a top-tier MBA program in the southeastern United States regarding their employer-sponsored volunteer activities and their intentions to comply in various organizational compliance vignettes. We found that employer-sponsored volunteerism is associated with uncompromised compliance choices in one of the three vignettes. This finding indicates preliminary support for further inquiry into the relationship within the firm between external CSR behaviors and policies regarding organizational compliance. Post hoc analyses suggest that employer-sponsored volunteerism is strongly associated with a positive organizational identity, but organizational identity is not associated with the significant compliance vignette. This evidence suggests that the underlying mechanism that connects external CSR behaviors and internal compliance intentions is complex and requires future study. (shrink)

Training in ethics and professionalism is a fundamental component of residency education, yet there is little empirical information to guide curricula. The objective of this study is to describe empirically derived ethics objectives for ethics and professionalism training for multiple specialties. Study design is a thematic analysis of documents, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups conducted in a setting of an academic medical center, Veterans Administration, and community hospital training more than 1000 residents. Participants were 84 informants in 13 specialties including (...) residents, program directors, faculty, practicing physicians, and ethics committees. Thematic analysis identified commonalities across informants and specialties. Resident and nonresident informants identified consent, interprofessional relationships, family interactions, communication skills, and end-of-life care as essential components of training. Nonresidents also emphasized formal ethics instruction, resource allocation, and self-monitoring, whereas residents emphasized the learning environment and resident-attending interactions. Conclusions are that empirically derived learning needs for ethics and professionalism included many topics, such as informed consent and resource allocation, relevant for most specialties, providing opportunities for shared curricula and resources. (shrink)

These volumes provide a resource that makes this research accessible across disciplines and clarifies its importance for the social sciences and philosophy as ...

ABSTRACT People who are paid to provide basic care for others are frequently undervalued, exploited and expected to reach often unrealistic standards of care. I argue that appropriate social recognition, support and fair pay for people who provide care for those who are disabled, frail and aged, or suffering ill health that impedes their capacity to negotiate daily activities without support, depends on a reconsideration of the paradigm of the citizen or and moral agent. I argue that by drawing on (...) the ideas of human vulnerability and dependency as central to our personhood, a more realistic conception of selves, citizens and persons can be developed that better recognises the inevitability of human dependency and the social value of care work. I also indicate the significance of this vulnerability‐focussed view for ethical evaluation of the emotional aspects of care relationships. (shrink)

Feminist and queer theorists influenced by Michel Foucault have given analyses of sexual violence and of sexually violent pornography that are generally taken to be in striking opposition to those defended by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon. In this commentary on Linda Martín Alcoff’s Rape and resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation, I suggest that these seemingly divergent analyses of sexual violence are more similar than they have appeared to be and I ask: Might this book help to (...) bring an end to the so-called ‘sex wars’ between the Foucauldians and the MacKinnonites that have been raging since the mid-1980s? (shrink)

In this book, Abraham argues that a theological imagination can expand the contours of postcolonial theory through a reexamination of notions of subjectivity, gender, and violence in a dialogical model with Karl Rahner. She raises the question of whether postcolonial theory, with its disavowal of religious agency, can provide an invigorating occasion for Catholic theology.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 213 Seiten: 247-279.

After a brief sketch of the history of philosophical pragmatism generally, and of legal pragmatism specifically (section 1), this paper develops a new, neo-classical legal pragmatism: a theory of law drawing in part on Holmes, but also on ideas from the classical pragmatist tradition in philosophy. Main themes are the "pluralistic universe" of law (section 2); the evolution of legal systems (section 3); the place of logic in the law (section 4); and the relation of law and morality (section 5).

This article examines the actions and testimonies of 14 nurses who killed psychiatric patients at the state hospital of Meseritz-Obrawalde in the Nazi 'euthanasia' program. The nurses provided various reasons for their decisions to participate in the killings. An ethical analysis of the testimonies demonstrates that a belief in the relief of suffering, the notion that the patients would 'benefit' from death, their selection by physicians for the 'treatment' of 'euthanasia', and a perceived duty to obey unquestioningly the orders of (...) physicians were the primary ethical reasons that were stated for their behavior. However, 20 years had elapsed between the killings and the trial, thus giving ample opportunity for the defendants to develop comfortable rationales for their actions and for their attorneys to have observed successful defenses of others accused of euthanasia. (shrink)