"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

The article studies Foucault’s treatment of religious culture and some theological responses to his approach. Foucault examined some modern practices as exhibiting a ‘Christianization-in-depth’, as, for example, in the extension of confession as a continuing practice in recent and current political culture. Confessions of faith characterize both fascism and communism and the confessional form of the latter showed extensive debt to the legacy of eastern Christian practices. The Soviet hermeneutics of the self contrasted with the western form because the (...) self-knowledge of the former is not a western confession of desires and movements of the soul but, rather, coming to a clarity in grasping how one is regarded in the eyes of others. The continuing vitality of religious forms in contemporary experience shows itself in American apocalyptic creeds. Foucault’s critical analysis aids a self-understanding in three areas of religious activism: self-denial; the envisioning of sexuality; the aspirations toward community and friendship. (shrink)

Despite the commonly held view that confessing to doping is morally right, few former elite athletes who have doped confess to doping. In this paper, I ask whether elite athletes who have d...

ABSTRACT Natural language semantics is heir to two formalisms. There is the extensional machinery of explicit variables traditionally used to model reference to individuals, and the intensional machinery of implicit index parameters traditionally used to model reference to worlds and times. I propose instead a simple and unified extensional formalism – explicit semantics – on which all sentences include explicit individual, world and time variables. No implicit index parameters are needed.

Dostoevskij’s underground parody of confession paradoxically recovers an Orthodox morality by constructing an unorthodox model of authority and authorship. The authenticity and authority of underground discourse are both contingent on self-conscious parody, which also mediates Orthodox community or sobornost’. This essay critically reconsiders ethical, aesthetic and cultural dimensions of the self-conscious interpolation of literary and religious discourses in Dostoevskij’s Notes from Underground. Arguing with and against Bakhtinian readings, it re-examines the underground narrator’s secularized, Romanticized sensibilities, cynical critique of humanism, sacrilegious (...) modes of laughter, usurpation of authority, internalization of dialogue, literary stylization and parody, aesthetic and moral self-critique, and, finally, insistence on “a new word.”. (shrink)

Fyodor Dostoevsky is renowned as one of the greatest psychologists in world literature, but what we know about the origins and the workings of the human mind has changed drasti­cally since the late nineteenth century. If Dostoevsky was such a sensitive reader of the human condition, do his insights hold up to modern research? To judge just by the issue of the psychology of confession, the answer appears to be: yes. The work of Michael Tomasel­lo indicates that the human conscience (...) evolved in order to make people obey group norms. From this I draw the proposition that confession should be best directed to the group as a whole, and not to an individual. Judging by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and an assortment of characters in The Brothers Karamazov, this appears to be exactly how confes­sion works in Dostoevsky’s novels: sin is against all, so forgiveness must be from all. (shrink)

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive (...) but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. The book vividly illustrates the mixture of moods and motives that underlie the writing of autobiography: defiance and vulnerability, self-exploration and denial, passion, puzzlement, and detachment. Above all, Confessions is Rousseau's search, through every resource of language, to convey what he despairs of putting into words: the personal quality of one's own existence. (shrink)

Exploring Augustine's Confessions as far more than autobiography, more than an elaboration and admission of guilt, more so than a chronicle and more precisely as the very act of coming into the truth in his heart, in front of God, in his confession, and in his public writings. His Confessions charts his becoming a witness to his self-witnessing, as his matter of testimony. Confession becomes an onto-existential practice. But, what is the mode or nature of the type of (...) confession at work when confession becomes ontological? Using Heidegger, the paper hinges on two poetic instances, one in Confessions, one in Being and Time, to develop an idea of ontology as testimony when being is a diligent witness to Being. It is confession as an admission of guilt insofar as being seeks absolution of its presumptions of being as a genus, as indefinable, and as the most self-evident concept, and being then acknowledges the question of Being. This acknowledgement of the obligation of the question is, then, a confession as a public declaration of faith, of the openness to question. The ontological project, for Heidegger, is then confession and testimony perhaps more fundamentally than Augustine’s Confessions, whose autobiographical detail and positing of the self as a relation to God must carefully elaborate itself so as not to be guilty of the offense of metaphysics. (shrink)

(1993). Confessions of a Modest Bayesian. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 23, Supplementary Volume 19: New Essays on Metaphilosophy, pp. 315-337.

994 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL i996 Gregory Schufreider. Confessions of a Rational Mystic: anselm's Early Writings. West Lafa- yette, IN: Purdue University Press, i993. Pp. 392. Cloth, $39.95- Paper, $15.95. In his Confessions ofa RationalMystic, Gregory Schufreider sets out to explain Anselm to a modern audience, while remaining loyal to the philosophical and theological outlook of his premodern author. Schufreider succeeds remarkably well in the first part of his task, as he explains Anselm's argument (...) to an audience unfamiliar with its historical context: medieval monastic life. To overcome the distance between Anselm and his modern audi- ence, Schufreider introduces four meaningful approaches to the interpretation of a text: the logical, the hermeneutical, the phenomenological and the deconstructive . Critical of the ahistorical rationality implicit in the logical approach to Anselm's "ontological" argument,.. (shrink)

Previous studies have addressed many different kinds of confessions in police investigations – real, false, coerced, fabricated – and highlighted both psychological and social mechanisms that underlie them. Here, we focus on inadvertent confessions and admissions, which occur when a suspect appears to be confessing without being fully aware of doing so, or when police officers believe they have a confession or admission of guilt when in fact this is not the case. The goal of the study is (...) to explain when, how and why these confessions and admissions occur as well as how they are dealt with in two different jurisdictions, the United States and the United Kingdom. We use a discourse analysis approach because inadvertent confessions and admissions of guilt are the product of miscommunication – they happen because the speaker’s meaning and the hearer’s meaning are misaligned. The data consist of 50 interviews from the United Kingdom and 50 interrogations from the United States with both English-speaking and non-English speaking suspects. Our results demonstrate that inadvertent confessions can occur in both locales due to reliance on inference, which is inevitable since inference is the backbone of any human communication, as well as due to additional factors such as linguistic, cultural and procedural issues. We found that these phenomena are more frequent and less well controlled for in the United States context due to no systematic checking of understanding, adversarial questioning techniques and an absence of legal representation, and lack of professional, high-quality interpreting. We discuss the implications of our findings for current efforts to improve access to justice, custodial procedures and language services, and we make recommendations for the implementation of our research in professional practice. (shrink)

In the criminal legal system, confessions have long been considered the ‘gold standard’ in evidence. An immediate problem arises for this gold standard, however, when the prevalence of false confessions is taken into account. In this paper, I take a close look at false confessions in connection with the phenomenon of testimonial injustice. I show that false confessions provide a unique and compelling challenge to the current conceptual tools used to understand this epistemic wrong. In particular, (...) I argue that we cannot make sense of the unjust ways in which false confessions function in our criminal legal system by focusing exclusively on speakers getting less credibility than they deserve. I conclude that the way we conceive of testimonial injustice requires a significant expansion to include what I call agential testimonial injustice – where an unwarranted credibility excess is afforded to speakers when their epistemic agency has been denied or subverted in the obtaining of their testimony. (shrink)

In "The History of Sexuality", Foucault maintains that "Western man has become a confessing animal" (1990, 59), thus implying that "man" was not always such a creature. On a related point, Wittgenstein suggests that "man is a ceremonial animal" (1996, 67); here the suggestion is that human beings are, by their very nature, ritualistically inclined. In this paper I examine this crucial difference in emphasis, first by reconstructing Foucault's "genealogy" of confession, and subsequently by exploring relevant facets of Wittgenstein's later (...) thinking. While there are significant correlations between Foucault and Wittgenstein, an important disparity emerges in relation to the question of the "natural." By critically analyzing this, I show how Wittgenstein's minimal naturalism provides an important corrective to Foucault's more extravagant claims. By implication, we see why any radical relativist, historicist, and/or constructivist position becomes untenable on Wittgensteinian grounds, even though Wittgenstein himself is often read as promoting such views. (shrink)

In one of the first attempts at autobiography, Rousseau1s Confessions not only retells the facts of the author1s life, but reveals his innermost feelings & details the strengths & weaknesses of his character.

These essays, along with several manuscripts published here for the first time, offer a more complete and highly defined picture than ever before of one of the ...

This article traces the evolution of auricular confession from its origins in the spiritual diakresis in the early desert tradition and argues that through the Celtic churches of Northern Europe the practice is introduced into the Western Church culminating in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. By developing the desert tradition of diakresis it will be argued that the Celtic system triumphed because of its stronger psychological verisimilitude compared to the Southern Mediterranean traditions of public one-off penance.

This discussion of Stanley Hauerwas’Hannah's Child examines the implications of the book for the disciplines of historical and doctrinal theology. Locating the success of theological biography and autobiography in its description of God in relation to lived human existence, the article considers certain points of contact between Hannah's Child and St Augustine's Confessions. Building from this description of the task of theological autobiography, the article makes three points for historical and doctrinal theology arising from Hannah's Child: first that historical (...) theology is primarily a theological discipline; second that it is significant and important, nevertheless, for historical theology to retain its historical accidence; third that doctrine involves teaching and learning the Christian faith and is thereby of ethical significance. (shrink)

"I confess — I took virtually every picture in this book with my compact camera!" Pros like Rick Sammon make their living with top-of-the-line dSLR cameras.

This paper reads through some contemporary literary critical problems and theorizing about textuality to Augustine's Confessions, to the enrichment, if not the ecstasy of both contemporary and medieval thinking. It shows that Augustine is both aware of much that passes as new in theorizing about language, and that his text is argumentatively and rhetorically structured to set difference at play. Like Augustine's writing, this article is a performance piece: besides arguing, it acknowledges; beside demonstration, it questions; besides telling, it (...) shows; it would not be called a study of textuality in Augustine, but a performance of textuality with (in) Augustine. (shrink)

The ability of the Society of Jesus to engage in a broad and enduring tradition of scientific activity is here addressed in terms of its programmatic commitment to the consolidation and extension of the Catholic confession and its mastery of the administrative apparatus necessary to operate long-distance networks. The Society's early move into two major apostolates, one in education and the other in the overseas missions, brought Jesuits into regular contact with the educated elites of Europe and at the same (...) time placed the Society's missionaries in remote parts of the natural world. The modes of organization of travel and communication required by the Society's long-distance networks not only facilitated scientific communication and collaboration within the order, it also provided Jesuits with the resources they needed to engage successfully in 'ministries among the learned'. Evidence of a sustained attempt by Jesuit authors to assume the role of Kulturträger is found in the several genres of scientific publications that dominate the Society's scientific corpus. Thus the Society's early recognition of the "apostolic value" of scientific publications in recruiting friends and allies among Europe's intellectual elites, I argue, allowed a robust interest in natural knowledge to emerge as a legitimate part of the Jesuit vocation. (shrink)

The government of Rwanda has pursued reconciliation with great determination in the belief that it is the only moral alternative to post-genocide social challenges. In Rwanda, communities must be mobilised and reshaped for social, political and economic reconstruction. This creates a rather delicate situation. Among other strategies, the state has turned to the concepts of confession and forgiveness which have deep religious roots, and systematised them both at the individual and community or state level in order to bring about reconciliation, (...) justice, social cohesion and ultimately economic development. In view of these strategies and challenges, some of the important questions are: Does forgiveness restore victims and empower them to heal their communities? What empirical evidence exists that religiously inspired justice and reconciliation processes after mass political violence make a difference? In what areas might the understanding of religious thought and activity towards transitional justice be deepened? These questions provide the backdrop against which I examine the case of post-genocide Rwanda in this article. A hermeneutic interpretative analysis is used to situate the phenomena of forgiveness, confession and social transformation within the specific context of post-conflict societies. (shrink)

This paper discusses the complex relationship of Reformed confessions and Reformed orthodox scholasticism. It is argued that Reformed confessions differ in genre and method from Reformed scholastic works, although such differences between confessional and scholastic language should not be mistaken for representing different doctrines that are no longer in harmony with each other. What is more, it is precisely the scholastic background and training of the authors of such confessions that enabled them to place their confessional writings (...) in the broader catholic tradition of the Christian church and to include patristic and medieval theological insights. Thus proper attention to their scholastic background helps to see that at least in some confessions the doctrine of predestination, for instance, is not as ‘rigid’ as one might think at first sight. In order to demonstrate that the doctrine of the Reformed confessions was much in line with the scholastic theology of Reformed orthodoxy, this paper discusses, after having explained the terms ‘Reformed orthodoxy’ and ‘scholasticism’, the early Reformed scholastic theologians Beza, Zanchi, and Ursinus, who also have written confessional texts. The paper also includes a more detailed discussion of the Belgic Confession and the scholastic background of the Canons of Dordt and the Westminster Confession, thereby focusing on the doctrines of God, providence, and predestination. (shrink)

This article addresses two questions related to the discrimination of homosexuals in the British Armed Forces as illuminated in the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the casesSmith and Grady v. the United KingdomandBeck, Copp and Bazeley v. the United Kingdom. First, how does the military organization obtain knowledge about its subjects? Two works by Michel Foucault concerning the thematic of confession—The Will to KnowledgeandAbout the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth—provide a (...) foundation for answering this question. Second, what happens when this knowledge obtained by the military organization comes into contact with the legal system? In relation to this question, Foucauldian theories of law are discussed, namely the so-called ‘expulsion thesis’ and ‘polyvalence theory’. It is argued that the production of knowledge in the context of these cases is intertwined with the technique of confession. However, the confession does not only operate at the level of the military organization but also as an internal practice of the individual. When this knowledge then encounters the legal system, it appears that the law puts up a certain resistance towards other forms of power, e.g. disciplinary power. It is argued that this resistance is due to the law’s ‘strategic openness’, i.e. the possibility to harness the law to different strategic purposes, due to which law can never be fully subordinated by external powers. (shrink)

Antinatalism assigns reproduction a negative value. There should be fewer or no births. Those who say that there should be fewer births have been called conditional antinatalists. A better name for their view would be selective pronatalism. Those who say that there should be no births face two challenges. They must define the scope of their no-birth policy. Does it apply only to human or sentient beings or can it also be extended to all organic life, perhaps even to machine (...) consciousness? And whatever the scope, they have to justify the eventual extinction of humankind or other life forms, an inevitable consequence of unconditional antinatalism. Different axiologies and moral theories produce different responses to these challenges. It is argued that a two-value conflict-sensitive negative utilitarianism would produce a kind and reasonable justification for ending at least human and factory-animal reproduction. The conclusion is purely moral and supports only voluntary extinction for humankind. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by HerselfGail K. Hart (bio)Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by Herself. Translated and introduced by Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene. New York: MLA, 2009. xliii + 196 pp. $12.95.Confessions of a Poisoner is an epistolary, autobiographical novel, first published anonymously in German as Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin in 1803. Lurid accounts of sex, incest, murder, and other crimes contributed to its (...) status as a sensational document in its day, especially in light of the illicit activities of the Countess Charlotte Ursinus, who was arrested and prosecuted for multiple poisonings allegedly committed between 1779 and 1803. Readers were eager for details of the countess's affairs and crimes, and the novel can indeed be read as an account, perhaps her account, of a very busy life of iniquity.The book is extremely engaging, and absorbing because our autobiographical narrator has unusually acute insight into human affairs and human character. From early youth, she finds pleasure in the art of seeming and she is proud of the skill with which she reads those who have something to offer her. Indeed the book could double as a seminar in social manipulation as the narrator negotiates her culture's obstacles to women's self-fulfillment. One is often reminded of George Lillo's murderous Millwood from The London Merchant, who in 1731 made the observation:It is a general maxim among the knowing part of mankind that a woman without virtue, like a man without honor or honesty, is capable of any action, though never [End Page 68] so vile. And yet what pains will they not take, what arts not use, to seduce us from our innocence and make us contemptible and wicked, even in their own opinions?(I:3)The narrator of Poisoner, though she might agree with Millwood, sees her part in the vile actions as both determined and chosen. The early steps of corruption were abetted by passion (incited with some calculation by early lovers) but also by the education she received, which she describes as being more masculine than feminine. Her father's failure to guide and restrain her thirst for knowledge has apparently left her with the ambitions of a conquerer and the social duties of an aristocratic woman—and, as Countess Orsina would have it, where men use daggers, women use poison. Yet she also accepts responsibility for all that she has done, quite convinced that most of it was wrong. The moral philosophy of the piece is somewhat peculiar, but she strives in the space of the one long letter that makes up the book to give an honest account of her duplicitous deeds.This intriguing life story also has significant scholarly value, and the editors/translators, Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene, have appended an excellent introduction that examines the poisoner's confessions as a document of its time. Our narrator is both wise and well-educated, and she discourses frequently on contemporary literature and philosophy, inserting herself into a variety of cultural debates. For example, her opinions on the value of Richardson's novels for the education and protection of young woman—that Richardson's ideals of virtue are delusional and therefore dangerous—run counter to prevailing wisdom on what young ladies should read. Her struggles with Kant and critical philosophy, which, she claims, diminished her pulchritude, are also instructive. Additionally, the editors make a very convincing case for the authorship of Friederike Helene Unger, whose husband was the publisher, and whose other works bear certain strong resemblances to the prose and the ideas of Poisoner.All of this excitement and knowledge comes to us in a supremely lucid and readable translation. I rarely read fiction in translation without being regularly reminded in some way of the translator. One sees an odd word, puzzles out a sentence and thinks about how one might have done that differently—and one gets distracted. That is not the case with this text, and this is especially surprising because the original German is that "of an era both culturally and historically distant" (xxvii). Whitinger and Spokiene have done a superb job of resurrecting a forgotten German text, embedding it in... (shrink)

I illustrate a challenge to a view that is a response to the Hole Argument. The view, sophisticated substantivalism, has been claimed to be the received view. While sophisticated substantivalism has many defenders, there is a fundamental tension in the view that has not received the attention it deserves. Anyone who defends or endorses sophisticated substantivalism, should acknowledge this challenge, and should either show why it is not serious or explain how to respond to it.

This chapter contains sections titled: Note.

In this infectiously exciting book, Bryan Magee tells the story of his own discovery of philosophy and not only makes it come alive but shows its relevance to daily life. Magee is the Carl Sagan of philosophy, the great popularizer of the subject, and author of a major new introductory history, The Story of Philosophy. Confessions follows the course of Magee's life, exploring philosophers and ideas as he himself encountered them, introducing all the great figures and their ideas, from (...) the pre-Socratics to Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, including Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, rationalism, utilitarianism, empiricism, and existentialism. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's analysis of the constitution of the modern subject poses provocative philosophical and theological questions about the relationship between structures of power, practices of domination, and the subjects that they discipline. His problematization of the self proposes to illuminate Christianity's transmission, if not invention, of forms of self-knowledge and reflexive acts of truth that leave Christian subjects (understood in both senses of the term) open to the panoptical disciplines of the state, market, and other structures that dominate through normalization. (...) Even if one disagrees with his thesis that the teachings and practices of early Christianity are integral to the…. (shrink)

In which a scientist searches for an empirical explanation for phenomenal experience, spurred by his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book--part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation--describes (...) Koch's search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest--his instinctual belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work--to uncover the roots of consciousness. (shrink)

Augustine's Confessions is one of the most influential and most innovative works of Latin literature. Written in the author's early forties in the last years of the fourth century AD, they reflect on his life and on the activity of remembering and interpreting a life. Books I–IV are concerned with infancy and learning to talk, school days, sexual desire and adolescent rebellion, intense friendships and intellectual exploration. Augustine evolves and analyses his past with all the resources of the reading (...) which shaped his mind: Virgil and Cicero, Neoplatonism and the Bible. This edition, which aims to be usable by students who are new to Augustine, alerts readers to the verbal echoes and allusions of Augustine's brilliant and varied Latin, and explains his theological and philosophical questioning of what God is and what it is to be human. (shrink)

Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This paper focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the (...) recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect. (shrink)

This important new book examines in some detail the law relating to confessions, unlawful evidence, and the 'right to silence' in the police station. The author also looks at the principles which lie behind this branch of the law. As well as his close examination of the English position, the author also looks at alternative approaches taken by Scottish, Irish, Australian, Canadian, and American legal systems. There is no other book written in English which gives such systematic treatment to (...) this subject. (shrink)

' Here is Tolstoy's religion; and non-violence is at its heart. Simon Parke, author of The Beautiful Life.

"Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher’s Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men’s Sexuality" is the translation of a Japanese 2005 bestseller, "Kanjinai Otoko." Soon after the publication, this book stirred controversy over the nature of male sexuality, male “frigidity,” and its connection to the “Lolita complex.” Today, this work is considered a classic in Japanese men’s studies. The most striking feature of this book is that it was written from the author’s first-person perspective. The author is a (...) professor who teaches philosophy and ethics at a university in Japan, and in this book he talks about his own sexual fetishism, his feeling of emptiness after ejaculation, and his huge obsession with young girls and their developing female bodies. He undertakes a philosophical investigation of how and why sexuality took such a form within a person who had grown up as a “normal,” heterosexual man. This may be the first case in which a philosopher delves deep into his own sexuality and poses an ambitious hypothesis about the formation of male “frigid” sexuality, which might actually be shared by many “normal” men in our society in a hidden way. Reading this book, female readers will come to know, for the first time, some hidden aspects of male sexuality which men have skillfully submerged in a deep layer of their psyches. (shrink)

Lucas, Brian Review(s) of: Religious confession privilege and the common law, by Keith Thompson (Leiden: Matinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2011), pp.395, E135.00.

A privileged element of contemporary law, confession as a means of proof in criminal proceedings is the object of analysis in this research. Based on a bibliographic review, the study will seek to decompose and reorganize the object on two fronts, constructing a theoretical hypothesis that proposes to observe confession as an inquisitorial practice of an institution, but which also has a traceable genealogical depth in the modulations of subjectivation techniques. The notion of the care of the self that Michel (...) Foucault referred to unfolds in Christian ethics and asceticism, reorganizing the sense of care of the self and slowly, as Christian philosophy developed and the influence of the Catholic Church in the state grew, make the act of confession loaded with an institutional-subjective double, elements that allow Zaffaroni to observe the apparent neutrality of contemporary justice as a facade for an authoritarian state and adept at inquisitorial practices, especially in matters of criminal justice. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to describe and reflect upon the concrete particulars of one academician's work as an expert ethics witness. The commentary on my practices and the narrative descriptions of three cases are offered as evidence for the thesis that it is possible to act honorably within a role that some have considered to be inherently illicit. Practical measures are described for avoiding some of the best known pitfalls. The discussion concludes with a listing of the distinctive (...) competencies and understandings that are useful in serving as an expert ethics witness. (shrink)

The Accra Confession was formulated and adopted by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in Accra, Ghana, in 2004. This article traces the historical development of the Accra Confession and its continued impact on the present. It aims to show the confession as a Reformed response to 'empire'. The article explores the content, debates and challenges the Accra Confession offers to the notion of empire.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Confessions of an American PsychoJames Hogg’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to ViolenceDaniel Cojocaru (bio)My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility.... I could perceive no bottom, and then—not till then, did I repeat the tremendous prayer!—I was instantly at liberty; and what I now am, the Almighty knows! Amen.—James Hogg, The Private (...) Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner1My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.... My pain is constant and sharp.... But even after admitting this... and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself.... This confession has meant nothing.—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho2A hundred and sixty-seven years lie between the publication of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) (henceforth referred to as Confessions) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Yet one cannot but be amazed at the striking similarities of the main [End Page 185] protagonists’s insights at the end of these two novels. Although connections between works of Gothic Romanticism and postmodern narratives have been duly noted, the possible reasons for the analogies remain largely unexplored.3It will be argued here that both novels are representations of worlds immersed in what René Girard, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (henceforth referred to as Deceit), has termed “deviated transcendency,” resulting in similar stages of narrative progression, which in turn can be analyzed in terms of Girard’s mimetic cycle of violence.At a first glance, the two pieces seem to be concerned with themes that to a secularized age must appear most disparate. But as Girard has noted: “The very idea of mediation encourages literary comparisons at a level which is no longer that of genre criticism or thematic criticism.... It may illuminate the works through each other.”4 Hogg’s narrative deals with the problem of antinomianism and the resulting spiritual pride. The anti-hero of the narrative, Robert Wringhim, relies on his belief that he is one of the elect and cannot fall from grace and consequently is convinced by his elusive friend Gil-Martin to become a murderer without having to fear punishment. American Psycho on the other hand is concerned with the consequences of the crass materialism of the U.S. yuppie generation, culminating at the end of the 1980s, as experienced by the serial-killing first-person narrator Patrick Bateman. However, one could argue that in its very first pages, American Psycho presents the reader with a secularized version of antinomianism. Michael Steig has fleetingly noted that the egocentric doctrines of antinomianism psychologically resemble the “I’m alright tenets” of yuppie pseudo-psychology.5 Timothy Price, one of Bateman’s colleagues on Wall Street, expresses this in the following words: “In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.”6 Translated into antinomian terms, one could say that he is one of the elect, one of the privileged enjoying a capitalist heaven on earth; and by saying that society cannot afford to lose him, he, like Robert Wringhim, is showing that he believes he cannot fall from grace—or at least he tries to believe it.“I was well aware that the devilish powers of his mother would finally prevail; and either the dread of this, or the inward consciousness of having wronged him, certainly unnerved my arm.”7 If, in this reference to a quarrel with a fellow pupil at school, Robert gives away the fact that he doubts his own words, through the rhetorical device of correctio, so does Timothy Price by his choice of words. In fact, it is exactly because he is an asset that society can afford to lose him. As he is literally transformed into a commodity, society can discard him and in the novel indeed does so. It is one of the many ironies of the narrative that Price disappears soon after the above... (shrink)

Delivered at the Collège de France between January and March 1980, the lectures entitled On the Government of the Living (Du gouvernement des vivants) seem to be the missing piece in the Foucauldian puzzle. Still unpublished, those eleven lectures were intended to set the theoretical foundation for the book announced as the fourth and last volume of the History of Sexuality, under the title Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair). This book, however, was never published, despite (...) the fact that his editor described it as the keystone for the entire History of Sexuality.1 The value of Michel…. (shrink)

Jean Richard | Résumé : Cet article se présente comme une réflexion sur un écrit de Paul Ricoeur concernant l’herméneutique du témoignage chrétien. À la simple confession de foi, « Jésus est le Christ », le témoignage ajoute un noyau narratif, comme on voit dans les évangiles. Il ajoute aussi la dimension existentielle de l’expérience personnelle. Car le témoignage de foi est plus qu’un simple reportage. Il exprime l’engagement du témoin dans la cause pour laquelle il témoigne. Le témoignage devient (...) ainsi profession de la foi personnelle, où le témoin s’identifie avec la cause de celui pour lequel il témoigne. Ricoeur peut parler alors du « témoignage absolu de l’absolu ». |: This article is a reflection on a paper by Paul Ricoeur on the Christian testimony. A testimony is more than a bare confession of faith. It includes a narrative, as we see in the gospels. But it is also more than a bare report. It comprises an existential layer of personal experience. It voices the whole commitment of the witness to the cause to which he bears witness. Thus, the testimony becomes a personal profession of faith, whereby the witness identifies himself with the cause and with the person he bears witness to. Hence Ricoeur’s word : “the absolute testimony about the absolute”. (shrink)

Chapter 1 Introduction How are participants associated with the eventualities they participate in? Are there events? Thematic roles? ...

Two of Josiah Royce's lectures in Lectures on Modern Idealism concern the work of F. W. J. Schelling, the "poetic seer of splendid metaphysical visions" whom Royce considered "the prince of the romanticists."1 These lectures are titled "The Dialectical Method in Schelling" and "Schelling's Transcendental Idealism." In the former, Royce remarks that "there are two simple ways to avoid all dialectical complications. One is an easy way, viz., not to think at all. The other is a prudent way, viz., not (...) to confess your thoughts."2 But, Royce insists, philosophers (and Schelling, notably) attempt to "confess their contradictions, to live through them, and so, if may be, to get beyond them."3 In his second treatment of .. (shrink)

Si l'on en croit Marcel Proust il faut admettre qu'on n'écrit qu'une seule œuvre. Mais alors on doit également accepter comme vraie l'inverse de cette proposition, notamment, si les préoccupations d'un auteur ne se suivent pas, si l'écrivain ou le philosophe voltige d'une fleur à l'autre, s'il se laisse tenter par mille aventures de l'esprit il peut à la rigueur mériter le titre peu flatteur de dilettante. La grandeur de toute œuvre de vie consiste dans sa profonde unité, unité qui (...) se forme derrière, ou si l'on veut au-delà des systèmes ou des théories. Heidegger nomme l'impenśe de l'auteur ce que Gide appelle la part du Dieu ou la part du diable. Mais l'impensé n'est le caché, le voilé que par rapport à ce qui est dévoilé, à ce qui est pensé. Il n'est donc autre que l'infra-structure. C'est à cette structuration alors que l'impensé doit son importance dans l'édifice de nos pensées. Autrement dit, les pensées claires ont leur racine dans le clair-obscur. Il y a toutefois un clair-obscur qui n'en est un que pour le lecteur. L'auteur y est plus à l'aise. C'est le domaine des confessions. Les confessions peuvent prendre des formes différentes, toutefois leur caractéristique générate permet de les distinguer des autres œuvres. Ainsi, quand un philosophe décide de publier son œuvre de jeunesse, dirions-nous, cela tombe dans la catégorie des confessions, tout comme les entretiens avec… et les testaments philosophiques. (shrink)