The basic problem affecting humanitarian law today remains that of its implementation. As of now, requests made by individuals before national courts to assess the compatibility of certain acts with international humanitarian law failed. The present case study and commentaries focus on the decision of a German civil court sitting Bonn to deny the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian law.

The crisis in Darfur (Sudan), which sparked in February 2003, only caught the United Nations’ attention in Spring 2004. Questions emerged as to whether the conflict between the rebels and the government was simply insurgency warfare or, in fact, concealed a genocide carried out by the Arab, Muslim-led government against the Animist and Christian-African population. The issue became so divisive that the Security Council requested the creation of an investigation team, the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, which amongst other (...) tasks had to examine whether genocide had taken place. This article analyzes the facts as well as the legal reasoning that guided the International Commission of Inquiry in drawing the conclusion that a governmental policy to commit genocide had not been formed. (shrink)

I examine experiences of married couples to better understand whether economic shifts that push couples into gender-atypical work/family arrangements influence gender inequality. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted in 2008 with stay-at-home husbands and their wives in 21 married-couple families with children. I find that the decision to have a father stay home is heavily influenced by economic conditions, suggesting that men’s increased job instability and shifts in the relative employment conditions of husbands and wives push some men into at-home (...) fatherhood. However, this shift in family arrangements can promote change toward greater gender equality even in couples that initially hold entrenched, gendered beliefs. The data indicate that at-home fathers come to value their increased involvement in children’s care in ways that reduce gender differences in parenting and that have the potential to translate into institutional change, particularly when they reenter the labor force. Furthermore, at-home father arrangements generally appear to provide increased support for women’s employment and promote changes in women’s work behavior that may reduce inequities that stem from traditionally gendered divisions in work/family responsibilities. (shrink)

In De Anima III.3 Aristotle presents his official discussion of phantasia (“imagination” in most translations). At the very outset of the discussion Aristotle offers as an endoxon that “phantasia is that in virtue of which we say that a phantasma occurs to us” (428a1-2). Now a natural reading of this claim, taken up by many commentators, can pose a problem for Aristotle’s overall account of perception. Here I argue that, although it would be silly to deny that Aristotle considers phantasia (...) to be that in virtue of which a phantasma occurs to someone, it is not silly to deny that phantasmata are present in every case in which phantasia is operative. This suggestion bolsters the idea that, according to Aristotle’s account of veridical perception, we can understand the world as making itself perceptually manifest to the perceiver. (shrink)

On 10 December 2003, a German civil court sitting in Bonn denied the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian...

In 1813 Isaak von Sinclair published a poem entitled “The New Acquaintance.” It recounts a meeting between himself, his friend Friedrich Hölderlin, and one other unidentified guest whom Sinclair awaited with keen anticipation. Because of Hölderlin’s well established friendship with Hegel it has been assumed in the past that the unknown acquaintance was in fact Hegel. However, at the time to which the poem refers, Hegel was a relatively obscure and unknown figure with no reputation. If we are therefore to (...) accept that the poem does indeed allude to Hegel then we must assume that Sinclair, as early as 1813, had recognized Hegel’s genius and wanted retrospectively to associate his name with the newly rising star of German philosophy. In that case we must ask why he refrained from mentioning Hegel by name or at least making the character of the unknown unambiguously clear? In translating this poem for the first time into English I offer for consideration another candidate as the “acquaintance,” namely, Wilhelm Heinse. (shrink)

Leopoldo Zea was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Though in English-language scholarship Zea is known primarily as a historian of ideas, his philosophical producti...

Graham, Noelle Comparisons are drawn between media reporting of eating disorders and other.forms of self-harm. Proper understanding of these illnesses can protect sufferers from further harm caused by inaccurate and insensitive reporting.

In the eleventh of his Antiquarian Letters, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing discusses a phrase from Lucian's description of the painting by Zeuxis called A Family of Centaurs: ‘at the top of the painting a centaur is leaning down as if from an observation point, smiling’. ‘This as if from an observation point, Lessing notes, obviously implies that Lucian himself was uncertain whether this figure was positioned further back, or was at the same time on higher ground. We need to recognize the (...) logic of ancient bas-reliefs where figures further to the back look over those at the front, not because they are actually positioned above them but because they are meant to appear as if standing behind.'1 · 1. The passage is in George Lessing, Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, p. 81. Panofsky's discussion does not note that the original text of Lucian makes clear that what is described is a copy of the original painting. This means that some of the issues of misunderstanding situated by Lessing and Panofsky in Lucian's court may in principle be attributable to the copyist. This makes no difference to the conceptual thrust of Panofsky's case.—Trans. (shrink)

If performativity means that to say stupid things is to do stupid things, then today stupidity is a very large problem, both within and outside philosophy, stemming, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, from a prostitution of the Aufklärung. But understanding stupidity seems almost to require becoming stupid oneself, as evidenced by Derrida's misunderstanding of Deleuze on just this topic, the former failing to grasp that the latter's account is founded on Simondon's theory of individuation, and on the difference between specific (...) individuation and psychic individuation. This failure comes despite the fact that différance itself must be understood as individuation, and thus what both Deleuze and Derrida help us to think, without quite managing to think it themselves, is that stupidity must be understood in terms of that psychic being who is pharmacologically and technologically capable of being disindividuated. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning , to show how philosophy of language (...) can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

This is a translation of "Socialite et argent", a text by Emmanuel Levinas originally published in 1987. Levinas describes the emergence of money out of inter-human relations of exchange and the social relations - sociality - that result. While elsewhere he has presented sociality as "non-indifference to alterity" it appears here as "proximity of the stranger" and points to the tension between an economic system based on money and the basic human disposition to respond to the face of the other (...) person. Money both encodes and effaces sociality, both designates and disguises social relations. It arises from the way that needs and interests are manifested in exchange relations, in what he calls the "interestedness" of economic life. But interests are always already cut through by the fact that being is always "being with others". Being is always "inter-being". Interestedness is always confronted by disinterestedness, that is, by a sociality marked by the "goodness of giving", attachment to and concern for the poverty of the other person. Levinas concludes with a discussion of sociality and justice, posing questions about the tension between the demand to respond to an Other immediately before me and at the same time to respond to the demands of an other Other (the third person) who also invites a response. (shrink)

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991 (the full essay consists of 38 sections). The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third (unrealised) volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that was advanced in (...) the first volume of The Obsolescence in 1956. The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of (nuclear) science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the (undemocratic) decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by (weapons) scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as (...) feminist difference theory , I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry. (shrink)

In European culture the sacred and the secular have existed in a dialectical relationship. Prodi sees the fifteenth-century crisis of Christianity as opening up three paths that eroded this dualism and tended towards modernity: civic-republican religion, sacred monarchy, and the territorial churches. Important counter-forces, which sought to maintain dualism, included the Roman-Tridentine Compromise, and those forms of Radical Christianity which rejected confessionalisation outright. During the Eighteenth Century, all these phenomena tended to contribute to one of two tendencies: towards civic religion, (...) or towards political religion. The former preserved a distinction between conscience and law; the latter comprised a state religion which sought to perfect all of human nature. It was civic religion which become embodied in the early USA, alienating God from worldly power, but leaving him as the guarantor of agreements between humans. Back in Europe, Prodi tracks the relationship between the Catholic Church and the new national states. He then turns to the political religions of the Twentieth Century. Prodi concludes by emphasising that this dualism of sacred and secular power lay at the centre of Western modernity, and expresses his fears about the collapse of civic religion into political religion, especially in the USA. (shrink)

“‘Surveyor,’ he said, ‘you cannot stay here. Forgive the impoliteness.’ ‘I didn’t want to stay,' said K., ‘I simply wanted a little rest. Now that I have had it, I am leaving.’ ‘This lack of hospit...

ABSTRACT “Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism in Comparison with Zen Buddhism” originally appeared as the concluding section of Ueda Shizuteru’s first book, Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit: Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus. It was first published in 1965 as an expanded version of Ueda’s doctoral dissertation, which was written under the supervision of Ernst Benz at the University of Marburg. Ueda’s careful analysis not only illuminates important points of affinity (...) between Eckhart and Zen, but also explains why Eckhart’s mysticism cannot be simply interchanged with Zen Buddhism. To allow the reader to read for themselves, I kept all interpretative notes to a minimum. The text is translated from the most recent edition of the German text, published in 2018 by Verlag Karl Alber, and edited by Wolf Burbat. The German pagination is interpolated in bold throughout the text. (shrink)

Many philosophers working on virtue theory have resisted the idea that the virtues are practical skills, apparently following Aristotle’s resistance to that idea. Bucking the trend, Matt Stichter defends a strong version of this idea in The Skillfulness of Virtue by marshaling a wide range of conceptual and empirical arguments to argue that the moral virtues are robust skills involving the cognitive-conative unification of Aristotelian phronêsis (‘practical intelligence’). Here I argue that Aristotle overlooks a more delimited kind of practical intelligence, (...) strongly analogous to his own account of phronêsis, that unifies complex forms of expertise such as medicine or even high-level sports. Insofar as the skill model of virtue is compelling, it must draw on a robust conception of practical expertise (technê) like the one developed here rather than the ordinary, anemic conception of practical skills. (shrink)

This text gives an account of the experience of reading Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva in the form of a brief dialogue with the text. It foregrounds the writing voice’s address of a second person and the attention this address brings to the acts of writing and reading that hold the two pronouns in relation, producing at once an infinite and nonexistent distance from being to being. The dialogue observes Lispector’s insistent return to the formulation “atrás do pensamento,” which has been (...) translated into English as “beyond thought” and can also be translated as “behind-thought” or as the background of thought, in a more spatial sense. Nancy reads the translation into French, where this spatial nuance is preserved, in consultation with Lusophone interlocutors about the specificities of the Portuguese original. The dialogue interrogates the link across this dimension, the recurrence of the pronoun it in the original Portuguese version of Água Viva, and the acts of writing and reading a text that brings awareness to a living, pulsing, ongoing, and escaping instant beyond meaning that is nonetheless the cause of the address in the first place. The dialogue follows the thread of this movement as it slips out behind thought, where Água Viva meets other books attuned to the instant and in which the dialogue’s “I” feels their vitalizing effects. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to study the use of diagrams and their associated gestures in three diferent reals : mathematics and physics, painting and literature. An example will be ofered for each realm, borrowed from a specialist’s study. The reference book for mathematics and physics will be Gilles Châtelet’s book Les Enjeux du mobile. And the detailed diagrams will be Cauchy and Poisson's and Oresme's. The reference books for painting will be: Francis Bacon. Une logique de la sensation, (...) which is Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the diagram based on the painter Francis Bacon’s declarations to David Sylvester. As for Literature, after considering two statements by Paul Valéry on the conditions of literary creation, I shall defend my own thesis on the diagrammatic dimension of the literary text. The specifc gestures associated in each case to the use of diagrams will be analysed and compared. (shrink)

Currently, the number of individuals affected by Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly increasing, expected to reach 14 million in the United States within 30 years. In spite of this impending crisis, less than 50 percent of primary care physicians disclose the diagnosis of dementia to their patients. This failure negatively impacts not only patients but also caregivers, whom dementia patients require to help them meet their needs and who often serve as important decision makers, either as surrogates or as designated healthcare (...) agents for the patient. If caregivers are not informed about and prepared to deal with the challenges they face, their health, both emotional and physical, is put at risk. We will argue that both patient and caregiver have the right to be informed of the diagnosis, as their interests are intertwined, especially as the disease progresses and the caregiver becomes the primary advocate for the patient. The caregiver of an individual with dementia therefore becomes intimately connected to the patient’s autonomy in a way few caregivers of other diseases do. In this article, we will show that a timely and thorough disclosure of the diagnosis is morally obligated by the core principles of medical ethics. As the population ages, primary care physicians must see themselves in a triadic relationship with both the dementia patient and caregiver, recognizing that the interests of both are deeply interdependent. (shrink)

The book that the French reader holds in his hands is one of the century’s most fascinating and liberating. It does nothing less than instigate the psychoanalytic approach as a universal method of...

The most long-standing criticism of virtue ethics in its traditional, eudaimonistic variety centers on its apparently foundational appeal to nature in order to provide a source of normativity. This paper argues that a failure to appreciate both the giving and taking of reasons in sustaining an ethical outlook can distort a proper understanding of the available options for this traditional version of virtue ethics. To insist only on giving reasons, without also taking (maybe even considering) the reasons provided by others, (...) displays a sadly illiberal form of prejudice. The paper finds and criticizes such a distortion in Jesse Prinz’s recent discussion of the ‘Normativity Challenge’ to Aristotelian virtue ethics, thus highlighting a common tendency that we can helpfully move beyond. (shrink)

Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial,...

We propose a reflection on the construction of scientific knowledge and in so doing an image of this knowledge. This will allow us to develop a comparative analysis of some of the main principles u...

The author, President of the Corsican antiracist collective Avà Basta, presents the specific forms taken by immigration and by its integration in a Corsican society deeply marked by its insularity and its unique history. She describes an immigrant population mostly of Moroccan origins, and analyses the role played by the identitary-nationalist Corsican reference in the racist discourse as well as in the anti-immigrant violence of the last months. She stresses the necessity, for Avà Basta, beyond its struggle against injustice and (...) discrimination on a universal basis, to demand that the nationalist movement position itself in favor of a definition of the Corsican nation based on a « community of fate s, ruling out any ethnicist temptation. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, at least, and presumably under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, certain advocates of Aristotle’s ethics have insisted that a proper validation of the virtues of character must proceed only from within, or be internal to, the particular evaluative outlook provided by possession of the virtues themselves. The most influential advocate of this line of thinking is arguably John McDowell, although Rosalind Hursthouse and Daniel C. Russell have also more recently embraced it. Here I consider whether a (...) distinction between the ‘substantive virtues’ and the ‘virtues of will power’ ultimately threatens that way of thinking about Aristotle’s ethics. If so, it would encourage a different reading of Aristotle’s ethics, one that McDowell has described as a “historical monstrosity”. (shrink)

How much violence can a society expect its members to accept? A comparison between the language theories of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan is the starting point for answering this question. A look at the early stages of language acquisition exposes the sacrificial logic of patriarchal society. Are those forces that restrict the individual to be conceived in a martial imagery of castration or is it possible that an existing society critically questions those points of socialization that leave their members (...) in a state of homelessness? The following considerations should help to distinguish between unavoidable and avoidable forms of violence. (shrink)

Do poststructuralist accounts of the self undermine the prospects for effective democratic politics? In addressing this question, Nolle McAfee brings together the theories of Jrgen Habermas and Julia Kristeva, two major figures whose work is seldom juxtaposed. She examines their respective notions of subjectivity and politics and their implicit definitions of citizenship: the extent to which someone is able to deliberate and act in community with others.. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship begins by tracing the rise of modern and poststructural views (...) of subjectivity, and then critiques these views as they are represented in the writings of Habermas and Kristeva. McAfee argues that Habermas's theory of subjectivity is overly optimistic about the possibility for individuals to know their own interests and act autonomously. Kristeva's poststructuralism has its own problems: it seems to limit political agency, since it considers the subject to be split and at odds with itself. Nevertheless, this book shows how Kristevan conceptions of the self can contribute to Habermas's hope for a more democratic, deliberative politics. Combining an insight from poststructural theory--that identity is constituted by a web of relationships--with the theory of deliberative democracy, McAfee argues that we need not be the kinds of individuals supposed by the modern liberal tradition to be effective political agents. The more we recognize our indebtedness to and relationship with others in our midst, the more likely we are to be capable members of political communities. (shrink)

Some ancient philosophers compared the world to a big animal. This was vigorously opposed by modernity – the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century –, which compared it to a machine. Today, nobo...

This text reconstructs the Kohlberg/Gilligan controversy between a male ethics of justice and a female ethics of care. Using Karl-Otto Apel's transcendental pragmatics, the author argues for a mediation between both models in terms of a reciprocal co-responsibility. Against this backdrop, she defends the circular procedure of an exclusively argumentative-reflexive justification of a normative ethics. From this it follows for feminist ethics that it cannot do without either of the two types of ethics. The goal is to assure the evaluative (...) variety of different types of an ethics of the good without endangering the normative boundaries of a deontological discourse ethics. (shrink)