Immanuel Kant spent many of his younger years working on what are generally considered his masterpieces: the three _Critiques_. But his work did not stop there: in later life he began to reconsider subjects such as anthropology, and topics including colonialism, race and peace. In _Late Kant_, Peter Fenves becomes one of the first to thoroughly explore Kant's later writings and give them the detailed scholarly attention they deserve. In his opening chapters, Fenves examines in detail the (...) various essays in which Kant invents, formulates and complicates the thesis of 'radical evil' - a thesis which serves as the point of departure for all his later writings. _Late Kant_ then turns towards the counter-thesis of 'radical mean-ness', which states that human beings exist on earth for the sake of another species or race of human beings. The consequences of this startling thesis are that human beings cannot claim possession of the earth, but must rather prepare the earth for its rightful owners. _Late Kant _is the first book to develop the 'geo-ethics' of Kant's thought, and the idea that human beings must be prepared to concede their space for another kind of human. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the later works of Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

This volume includes Felix Noeggerath's dissertation from 1916, published here for the first time in a reliable critical edition. The dissertation represents a daring and far-reaching re-conceptualization of Kantian and neo-Kantian thought that consists in "critique of anti-rationalism," especially in the form of vitalism. Both Kant's and Hermann Cohen's philosophies can be experienced anew through the far-reaching optic that Noeggerath developed - an optic that he reiterates and develops into a comprehensive theory of art in a 1951 essay - republished (...) here, as well. The introduction by Hartwig Wiebebach provides an overview and incisive analysis of Noeggerath's philosophical program, while the afterword by Peter Fenves describes in detail the effect of Noeggerath's thought on Walter Benjamin's own attempts at a critique of anti-rationalism. Altogether, the volume provides a new point of access to the important legacy of neo-Kantian thought in the early twentieth century not only in terms of the systematic philosophy, but also in relation to the theory of art and the philosophy of modern science. (shrink)

Speech act theory has taught us 'how to do things with words'. Arresting Language turns its attention in the opposite direction - toward the surprising things that language can undo and leave undone. In the eight essays of this volume, arresting language is seen as language at rest, words no longer in service to the project of establishing conventions or instituting legal regimes. Concentrating on both widely-known and seldom-read texts from a variety of philosophers, writers, and critics - from Leibniz (...) and Mendelssohn, through Kleist and Hebel, to Benjamin and Irigaray - the book analyzes the genesis and structure of interruption, a topic of growing interest to contemporary literary studies, continental philosophy, legal studies, and theological reflection. Arresting Language identifies critical moments in philosophical and literary texts during which language itself - without any identifiable speaker - arrests otherwise continuous processes and procedures, including the process of representation and procedures for its legitimization. (shrink)

Beginning with an analysis of an early satire of Kant 's doctrine of marital law, this essay draws on Walter Benjamin's condensed exposition of this doctrine in order to ask whether Kant 's notoriously unsentimental representation of marriage is, in fact, from the perspective of his own idea of law, overly sentimental. Whereas Kant ridicules the idea of a "law of war" in his program for perpetual peace, he accepts the possibility of legally sanctioned intercourse, in which people use others (...) and themselves. Between marital law and martial law lies maritime law, which concerns a surface that can be used but not mastered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Out of the Order of Number”: Benjamin and Irigaray Toward a Politics of Pure MeansPeter Fenves* (bio)At the heart of the legal orders that arose in conjunction with the Enlightenment idea of law as rules of conduct universally applicable to all those who belong to a properly instituted political body lies a formula for the justification of the violence on which the law depends in order for it (...) to be an actual, effective, and therefore “living” law—and not merely an idea: violence is justified insofar as it is a means for the control of those violent acts that are not themselves means for the control of immediate threats of violence. As Walter Benjamin indicates in the opening paragraphs of his most explicit exposition of legal and political theory, “Toward the Critique of Violence” (1921), the justification of violence as a means is the point of contention around which arguments over the origin, nature, and purpose of the modern state endlessly circle. Justified violence is supposed to be of a different order than unjustified violence, and so in the context of legal reasoning it is no longer called “violence” but “coercion” or “punishment.” Yet as the formula for the justification of violence indicates, the violence of the legal order is not in general sanctioned for the purpose of subduing immediate threats to one’s own life—this is the justification for the extralegal violence of “private persons”—but for the purpose of preserving the law itself: the law is inviolable. As long as the legal order makes the law effective and thus gives it life, it, too, is inviolable, and all violence other than its own can henceforth be interpreted as an immediate threat not to life itself—however this may be understood—but to the legal order. The end of legally sanctioned violence, its purpose and function, is not to put an end to violence as such but, instead, to thwart all threats to the law in the name of which violence can be sanctioned. Everything that enters into the space over which the legal order imposes its sentence is therefore implicated in the disquieting—or, as Benjamin says, “rotten” [GS 2: 188; SW 242]—ambiguity of legal violence understood as a means whose justification lies in the application of the law: the legal order can justify its own violence only insofar as this violence is a means to an end, but the end it serves can never be separated from itself as means, for the law, by virtue of its universality, is at bottom unconcerned with the life of those upon whom the violence it justifies is exercised or with the life of those whom this violence is supposed to protect. The violence of the legal order is concerned solely with itself, with its own majesty—without, however, ceasing to present itself as a means and reverting to what all legal violence once was: immediate manifestation.Nothing that enters into the space of the legal order can escape the ambiguity of the violence through which the law comes to life. Or at least nothing can escape this ambiguity as long as the space on which the legal order founds itself runs counter to the sole space that accords with the strict universality of the law: a universally accessible, indivisible, and undivided space that is nevertheless capable of the greatest degree of discreteness, differentiation, and individuation. In place of this space the legal orders that arose in Europe over the course of the last five centuries set out something like its parody: [End Page 43] homogeneous and yet fully divided domains whose divisions from one another are momenta of the extralegal violence to which each legal order owes its origin. At least one species of being has always been seen to move outside the space of the legal order—a species whose specificity, speciesness, and spatiality have thus given rise to interminable analysis: the angels. The space that angels traverse—and, in particular, the ones who enter into Luce Irigaray’s writings—does not suffer division into homogeneous domains but does not therefore amount to an undifferentiated expanse, a yawning abyss, or a formless chaos; it is... (shrink)

Uses Buddhist philosophy to discuss diversity as a value, one that can contribute to equity in a globalizing world.

When machine learning, data and AI are reshaping the human experience, Peter Hershock gives us a new way to think about attention, presence and ethics in our changing lives by balancing Western technology with Asian philosophy. He explains how Confucian and Socratic ethics can make visible what a history of choices about remaking ourselves has rendered invisible, and applies Buddhist ideas to give us an understanding about the self and consciousness. Seamlessly blending ancient Chinese, Indian and Greek philosophy, Hershock (...) responds to the challenge of staying present during the age of technology. (shrink)

Agues that Confucianism and other East Asian philosophical traditions can be resources for understanding and addressing current global challenges such as climate change and hunger.

In this essay, I claim that certain passages in Book IV of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics suggest a novel version of what is known as metaethical constructivism. The constructivist interpretation emerges in the course of attempting to resolve a tension between Spinoza’s apparent ethical egoism and some remarks he makes about the efficacy of collaborating with the right partners when attempting to promote our individual self-interest . Though Spinoza maintains that individuals necessarily aim to promote their self-interest, I argue that (...) Spinoza has an atypical conception of self that allows the interests of other people to be partially constitutive of one's own self-interest. In this way, Spinoza can account for the rationality of concern for the interests of others . This interpretation attributes to Spinoza a form of constructivism that differs in important ways from contemporary Humean and Kantian constructivisms and which can in principle be detached from Spinoza’s particular metaphysical commitments in order to yield a third general category of constructivist view . Though my treatment is necessarily brief, it is my hope that it can serve both to motivate a constructivist reading of Spinoza and, perhaps even more crucially, to suggest a Spinozistic variety of constructivism as a live theoretical option in metaethics. (shrink)

We suggest that in the particular context of medical education, ethics can be considered in a similar way to other kinds of knowledge that are categorised and shaped by academics in the context of wider society. Moreover, the study of medical ethics education is translational in a manner loosely analogous to the study of medical education as adjunct to translational medicine. Some have suggested there is merit in the idea that much as translational research attempts to connect the laboratory scientist's (...) work to its implications for patient care, translational ethics focuses on bringing ethics scholarship into the sphere of personal and public action. We distinguish the term ‘translational ethics’ (the study of ethics being translated between academy, classroom and clinic) from other prominent definitions in the bioethics literature. To do this, we build off a notion of knowledge translation that focuses on the nonlinear movement of information that comes to professionals through multiple competing sources. We suggest that this knowledge, and particularly knowledge about ethics, becomes embodied by the individual. It is through a reflective practice that internally embedded ethics knowledge might be modified, and this work might be best carried out with a moral community that maintains a sense of practical wisdom. Applying this translational approach to the study of medical ethics education can be both academically relevant and practically useful. This view of translation can help bridge the evident, multidirectional relationships between research, education and performance. It might also create further opportunities to develop medical ethics education theory. (shrink)

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings of (...) the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

Can the Marxist tradition still provide new resources for thinking the specificity of historical time? This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the 'subterranean currents' of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyès to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and Postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism's contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox currents. (...) Privileging not the single time of historical development, but the plural temporalities that intertwine in and constitute any given historical conjuncture, and arguing against merely subjectivist theories of temporal multiplicity, this volume studies the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. Comprehending their dynamics is a necessary precondition for a renewed politics of emancipation.Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas and Massimiliano Tomba. (shrink)

There are many things that could be wrong with foundationalism. For example, some have claimed that a so‐called basic belief cannot be both 1) a reason for non‐basic beliefs and 2) such that it cannot be provided with at least prima facie justification.1 If something is a reason, they say, then that something has to be a proposition (or sufficiently proposition‐like) and if it is a proposition (or sufficiently proposition‐like), then it is the kind of thing that requires a reason (...) in order to be even prima facie justified.2 Another reason that some give for rejecting normative foundationalism is that it leads directly to skepticism.3 There is no way, they claim, to move from so‐called basic propositions (typically given as first person introspective reports) to “external world” propositions by employing normatively acceptable principles of reasoning.4 Still others have thought that the invention of a nonrea‐soned reason was as ad hoc as the invention of an unmoved mover.5. (shrink)

Public health is concerned with how to improve the population’s health. At times, though, actions to improve the community’s health may collide with individual civil rights. For example, a public health response to a bioterrorism attack, such as smallpox, may require relaxing an individual’s due process protections to prevent the smallpox from spreading. This tension lies at the heart of public health policy. It also must be considered in discussing the concept of human rights in health.Proponents of incorporating the concept (...) of human rights in health emphasize the importance of both individual rights and collective rights. They argue that observing human rights is not only consistent with broad public health goals, but necessary to their attainment. To many human rights advocates, the concept is not limited to protecting against governmental intrusion. Accordingly, they emphasize the government’s obligation to promote attainment of human rights by, for instance, providing adequate health care. (shrink)

Public health is concerned with how to improve the population’s health. At times, though, actions to improve the community’s health may collide with individual civil rights. For example, a public health response to a bioterrorism attack, such as smallpox, may require relaxing an individual’s due process protections to prevent the smallpox from spreading. This tension lies at the heart of public health policy. It also must be considered in discussing the concept of human rights in health.Proponents of incorporating the concept (...) of human rights in health emphasize the importance of both individual rights and collective rights. They argue that observing human rights is not only consistent with broad public health goals, but necessary to their attainment. To many human rights advocates, the concept is not limited to protecting against governmental intrusion. Accordingly, they emphasize the government’s obligation to promote attainment of human rights by, for instance, providing adequate health care. (shrink)

As the Pyrrhonians made clear, reasons that adequately justify beliefs can have only three possible structures: foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism. Infinitism—the view that adequate reasons for our beliefs are infinite and non-repeating—has never been developed carefully, much less advocated. In this paper, I will argue that only infinitism can satisfy two intuitively plausible constraints on good reasoning: the avoidance of circular reasoning and the avoidance of arbitrariness. Further, I will argue that infinitism requires serious, but salutary, revisions in our evaluation (...) of the power of reasoning. Thus, reasoning can not provide a basis for assenting to a proposition—where to assent to a proposition, p, means to believe that we know that p. A non-dogmatic form of provisional justification will be sketched. Finally, the best objections to infinitism, including those posed by the Pyrrhonians, will be shown (at least provisionally!) to be inadequate. (shrink)

An ongoing debate among legal scholars and public health advocates is the role of litigation in shaping public policy. For the most part, the debate has been waged at a conceptual level, with opponents and proponents arguing within fairly well-defined boundaries. The debate has been based either on speculation of what litigation could achieve or on ideological grounds as to why litigation should or should not be used this way. With the exception of Rosenberg's study of how litigation shaped policy (...) in civil rights, abortion, and environmental matters, there is almost no empirical support for either position.In recent years, the most ardent proponents of litigation as public policy have been public health advocates. Perhaps out of frustration with the inability to achieve desired public health goals through the legislative branch of government, public health advocates have pursued litigation as an alternative strategy. Beginning with tobacco class action litigation in the early 1990s and continuing with litigation against gun manufacturers at the end of that decade, public health advocates have waged a veritable litigation assault aimed at changing how public health policy is formed. (shrink)

An ongoing debate among legal scholars and public health advocates is the role of litigation in shaping public policy. For the most part, the debate has been waged at a conceptual level, with opponents and proponents arguing within fairly well-defined boundaries. The debate has been based either on speculation of what litigation could achieve or on ideological grounds as to why litigation should or should not be used this way. With the exception of Rosenberg's study of how litigation shaped policy (...) in civil rights, abortion, and environmental matters, there is almost no empirical support for either position.In recent years, the most ardent proponents of litigation as public policy have been public health advocates. Perhaps out of frustration with the inability to achieve desired public health goals through the legislative branch of government, public health advocates have pursued litigation as an alternative strategy. Beginning with tobacco class action litigation in the early 1990s and continuing with litigation against gun manufacturers at the end of that decade, public health advocates have waged a veritable litigation assault aimed at changing how public health policy is formed. (shrink)

Many observers have argued that the US health care system could be more efficient, and achieve better outcomes if providers focused more on improving the community's health, not just the welfare of individual patients. The passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 seemed to herald the promise of such reforms, and greater integration of the health care and public systems. In this article, we reassess the quest for integration, a quest we call the “integration project.” After examining the modest (...) steps taken so far toward integration, we consider some conceptual barriers to integration as well as some of the risks it might portend for the public health system. Our assessment contributes to wide-ranging debates among public health advocates, practitioners, and policymakers as to the health care system's role in protecting public health, and how the public health system can best be organized to meet expected population health challenges. (shrink)