The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction at the heart of our current and hyperbolic understandings of life. To be more precise, on the one hand there is the historical novelty of biology as a modern science and set of technologies. On the other hand, life is simultaneously understood according to biological protocols that seem void of history.

Entre justification et explication, entre dire et faire, la destruction. Est-ce une chose ou un événement? Un geste, une oeuvre ou une opération? Un thème ou un titre? Est-ce même bien un mot? Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Avec Heidegger, Derrida en appelle à la destruction. Oui, à la destruction. L'a-t-on entendu? Comme Heidegger (et c'est aussi ce "comme" qu'il s'agira d'examiner ici), Derrida nomme et renomme la destruction. Il lui donne le temps et le nom, une renommée. Il la surnomme "déconstruction", par (...) exemple, ou, plus tard, "mal d'archive". Comme Heidegger, Derrida travaille, traduit et retraduit la destruction, faisant parfois comme si tous ses mots, tous les mots et les phrases qu'il propose et déploie à propos de la destruction, entretenaient des rapports sans rapport, rapports déjà trop clairs, ou encore bien obscurs. Qu'appelle-t-on destruction? Après Heidegger, Derrida s'y est attardé, lui qui parlait, encore et encore, de destination et de destruction, lui qui nous a rappelés si souvent à la destruction qui arrive, partout où elle arrive. Posons que c'était l'un de ses combats, l'une de ses longues guerres (avec lui-même, d'abord, et avec la destruction). Sera-ce finalement la nôtre? Est-il aujourd'hui temps de penser - après Heidegger, avec Derrida -, temps de combattre aussi peut-être, au moins d'écouter, la destruction qui vient? Est-il encore temps de témoigner de la destruction qui croit? (shrink)

Blood, in Gil AnidjarÕs argument, maps the singular history of Christianity.

Acts of Religion, compiled in close association with Jacques Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on religion and questions of faith and their relation to philosophy and political culture. The essays discuss religious texts from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, as well as religious thinkers such as Kant, Levinas, and Gershom Scholem, and comprise pieces spanning Derrida's career. The collection includes two new essays by Derrida that appear here for the first time in any (...) language, as well as a substantial introduction by Gil Anidjar that explores Derrida's return to his own "religious" origins and his attempts to bring to light hidden religious dimensions of the social, cultural, historical, and political. (shrink)

Have we ever been religious? It may seem strange to open an essay on Derrida with a Latourean question. Yet, with regard to religion, what Derrida demonstrates is quite unavoidably this: we have long been, and are still being, Christianized. Whatever else we may have been, perhaps still are, constitutes but the space or espacement offered or relinquished, however reluctantly or even grudgingly (though more often than not quite willingly) to Christianization. This is a space that goes beyond whatever is (...) meant by the word or the concept of ‘religion’, under whatever definition. And though Derrida still refers to it, at times, in terms that have themselves become, for the most part, religious markers (Judaism, Islam, etc.), he leaves no doubt that such name calling is part of the Christianization he otherwise documents. This essay attempts to show that the question (let us call it Derrida's ‘Christian question’) is therefore: what is Christianity? (shrink)

I teach with water. It’s nothing very remarkable and I myself do not remember how I settled upon water as a most convenient introduction to what I have to teach, which is to say, to learn. Did not everything begin with water? My own beginnings, in any case, would border on the banal, if they did not signify so much about where I live (race and class) and how I teach (tradition, institution, location), the liberties I can responsibly take, or (...) the sheer length to which one might have to go to register and partake of a sense of wonder – and of outrage – on the impossible path toward a collective experience of learning. In this particular instalment, learning with water is very much about recalling what we know, knowing what we do with the knowledge that we have. I teach with water. I start my class by quietly, if ostensibly, depositing in front of the class, or at the center of the seminar table, a bottle of “spring water.” I then invite the students to attend to this classroom instance of the proverbial elephant, though not necessarily true to the desperate manner of the three blind men. (shrink)

Was Derrida a mama’s boy? Was he not hiding or indeed manifesting, ostensibly displaying even, mommy issues? Let us posit that Derrida had a substantial, perhaps an inordinate amount of things to say about mothers in general, about surrogate mothers too, and about his own mother in particular. Derrida did confess having taken the side of his mother. Yet, what I really want to ask is whether, from Plato to Nancy and, more obviously, from Rousseau to Freud and beyond, mothers (...) can, in fact, be confined to bounded registers of life, of Derrida’s life and, more formally, to the biographical and autobiographical (as ‘Circumfession’ and before it Spurs and The Ear of the Other might suggest). Or even to the psychoanalytical (as The Post Card and, in it, the famous fort/da scene would certainly indicate). A concern — shall I already call it a solicitude — for mothers, on Derrida’s part, might raise a distinct set of questions. (shrink)

From Oedipus to Moses and beyond, Freud's last book has been read with singular obstinacy as addressing a Jewish (or anti-Semitic) question, or as renewing a religious (or antireligious) agenda. Between Athens and Jerusalem, from Judaism to a more general “monotheistic religion,” and from Oedipus (the son) to Moses (the father), scholars have explored or refuted numerous traces the primal murder left and many among the founding fathers, the substitutes to which it gave rise. Yet it is easy to see (...) that the reception of Freud has been fairly consistent in skipping over not so much the general religious (monotheistic, or even civilizational and universal) import of Freud's work, but rather the exorbitant centrality in it of Jesus Christ, the acutely singular question of Christianity and its founder. (shrink)

Marx reminded us that the critique of political economy is also the critique of religion, that economy is religion. Thus, a critique of religion that would not attend to economy, or let it continue to expand its dominion – what passes for “secularism” today – would fail to reach its aims. “One might just as well abolish the Pope while leaving Catholicism in existence.”Money is religion, then, and economic theology is the history of religion as political economy. More precisely, and (...) because Christianity is evidently not just any religion but rather conceals itself under that general term, economic theology is primarily the history of what Jacques Derrida has called mondialatinisation. It is the history of a concealed trinity: the translation, transubstantiation, and transvaluation, whereby Christianity became, in fact, “religion,” blood became money, and money – faith and works, paceWeber – became what it is all about. (shrink)

The year 1492 is only the last in a series of “ends” that inform the representation of medieval Spain in modern Jewish historical and literary discourses. These ends simultaneously mirror the traumas of history and shed light on the discursive process by which hermetic boundaries are set between periods, communities, and texts. This book addresses the representation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the end of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). Here, the end works to locate and separate Muslim from Christian (...) Spain, Jews from Arabs, philosophy from Kabbalah, Kabbalah from literature, and texts from contexts. The book offers a reading of texts that emerge from its Andalusi, Jewish, and Arabic cultural sphere: Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed; the major text of Kabbalah, the Zohar; and the Arabic rhymed prose narrative of Ibn al-Astarkuwi. The author argues that these texts are written in a language that disrupts the possibility of locating it in a pre-existing cultural situation, a recognizable literary tradition, or a particular genre. At stake are issues – texts and contexts – that have gained particular urgency in the writings of such recent thinkers as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Avital Ronell. The book reads the place and taking place of language, interrogating the notion of disappearing contexts and the view that language is derivative of its true place, the context that, having ended, is mourned as silent and lost. (shrink)

What’s in a name after Derrida? What’s in a name after all? What is a name such that it always already remains, after all is said and done? And who or what is itthat one calls name, names, or by name? Is it possible (for anyone or anything) not to have a name of one’s own? Or to have another? The same as another? Is it possible to call and recall, in the name of memory and remembrance, indifference or convention, (...) one name for another, one name for the other? Can the name be, as it were, avoided? Could anyone respond responsibly yet decline or resist, not so much that (or because) names wound, nor to protect oneself from being called names, but instead neither to call nor respond to the name, as it were, to the very same name one is called? To protest against the name, to refuse the name to the point of abandoning this and that name? To invent oneself beyond the name, beyond all names, in the name of the name? “For in order to live oneself truly,” Derrida writes, “it is necessary to elude the law of the name, the familial law made for survival and constantly recalling me to death.” What is called naming? One could say that the name is, to life, at once insult and injury. Or that calling names—mourning. (shrink)

Genocide is a matter of law. It is also a matter of history. Engaging some of the most disturbing responses to the Armenian genocide, Marc Nichanian strikingly reveals the complex role played by law and history in making this and other genocides endure as contentious events. Nichanian's book argues that both law and history fail to contend with the very nature of events for which there is no archive. Both history and law fail to address the modern reality that events (...) can be—and are now being—perpetrated that _depend_ upon the destruction of the archive, turning monstrous deeds into nonevents. Genocide, this book makes us see, is in one sense the _destruction_ of the archive. It relies on the historiographic perversion. (shrink)

Responding to Gil Anidjar's “Jesus and Monotheism” and its posing of the “Christian Question,” in this paper I return to Freud's Moses and Monotheism and its narrative of Jewish self-division. In highlighting the retroactive formation of identity, I note both its temporal dimension and the force of exclusivity it generates. This reading suggests a contrast between such theo-political communities, with their legacies of affiliation, and Christian self-absolution (the refusal of constitutive self-division) with its image of a new man. I (...) take a brief detour through Marx and Schmitt to examine the founding structures of secular modernity and the entanglement of liberalism with Christianity. Pursuing a hint offered by Anidjar that Christianity is not quite a tradition, I conclude that for Freud, the “Christian question” emerges as a kind of enigma: the dream of a community divorced from human modes of transmission, unbound by legacies of filiation to the past, and replacing the collective memory of a people with the end of human collectivity. (shrink)

Semen est sanguis Christianorum!—‘the blood of Christians is seed’—writes Tertullian at the end of his Apologeticum. This summing-up has justly become a cornerstone of Christian the...

Available corpora for Argument Mining differ along several axes, and one of the key differences is the presence (or absence) of discourse markers to signal argumentative content. Exploring effective ways to use discourse markers has received wide attention in various discourse parsing tasks, from which it is well-known that discourse markers are strong indicators of discourse relations. To improve the robustness of Argument Mining systems across different genres, we propose to automatically augment a given text with discourse markers such that (...) all relations are explicitly signaled. Our analysis unveils that popular language models taken out-of-the-box fail on this task; however, when fine-tuned on a new heterogeneous dataset that we construct (including synthetic and real examples), they perform considerably better. We demonstrate the impact of our approach on an Argument Mining downstream task, evaluated on different corpora, showing that language models can be trained to automatically fill in discourse markers across different corpora, improving the performance of a downstream model in some, but not all, cases. Our proposed approach can further be employed as an assistant tool for better discourse understanding. (shrink)

An emotion-based lengthening effect on the perception of durations of emotional pictures has been assumed to result from an arousal-based mechanism, involving the activation of an internal clock system. The aim of this study was to systematically examine the arousal effect on time perception when different discrete emotions were considered. The participants were asked to verbally estimate the duration of emotional pictures from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The pictures varied either in arousal level, i.e., high/low-arousal, for the same (...) discrete emotion (disgust or sadness) or in the depicted emotion, e.g., disgust/fear for pictures matched for arousal (high-arousal). The results systematically revealed a lengthening effect on the perception of the duration of the emotional compared to the neutral pictures and indicated that the magnitude of this effect increased with arousal level. Nevertheless, variations in time perception were observed for one and the same arousal level, with the duration of disgust-inducing pictures (e.g., body mutilation) being judged longer than that of fear-inducing pictures (e.g., snake). These results suggest that arousal is a fundamental mechanism mediating the effect of emotion on time perception. However, the effect cannot be reduced to arousal, since the impact of the content of pictures also plays a critical role. (shrink)

Thomas Gil und Wolfgang Mack befassen sich aus der Perspektive zweier unterschiedlicher Disziplinen –Philosophie und Psychologie – mit der Frage nach den Funktionen der Seele. Aus der Sicht der Philosophie wird untersucht, was unter psychischen Funktionen zu verstehen ist. Aus der Sicht der Psychologie wird der Begriff der Seele historisch-kritisch diskutiert. Ist für die Psychologie die Seele als wissenschaftlicher Begriff möglicherweise (wieder) geeignet? In gemeinsamer Diskussion beantworten die Autoren die Frage danach, was das Psychische ist.

Downward causation exercised by emergent properties of wholes upon their lower-level constituents’ properties has been accused of conceptual and metaphysical incoherence. Only upward causation is usually peacefully accepted. The aim of this paper is to criticize and refuse the traditional hierarchical-vertical way of conceiving both types of causation, although preserving their deepest ontological significance, as well as the widespread acceptance of the traditional atomistic-combinatorial view of the entities and the relations that constitute the so-called ‘emergence base’. Assuming those two perspectives (...) with no reserves, we are condemned to confine our debate to the question of whether reified wholes can have the power to downwardly change or influence their lower-level parts, a question which seems profoundly misleading to me. I therefore propose an alternative relational ontological view, assuming a straightforward horizontal and intra-level way of representing those putative cases of cross-level causation. I finally confront two recent replies to Kim’s well-known objections to DC—Craver and Bechtel and Kistler :595–609, 2009)—, emphasizing their global positive approaches, as well as the reasons why their accounts still seem insufficient to me. I conclude arguing that both Kim’s principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and its allegation of an overdetermination in cases of DC can be surpassed by the new relational ontological perspective presented here. (shrink)

The following essays are about what it is to believe something, how we make up our minds and decide, what it means that conflicts anddisagreements are not eliminable, and the fact that new technological developments are substantially changing the way we live.

Philosophers of well-being have tended to adopt a foundationalist approach to the question of theory and measurement, according to which theories are conceptually before measures. By contrast, social scientists have tended to adopt operationalist commitments, according to which they develop and refine well-being measures independently of any philosophical foundation. Unfortunately, neither approach helps us overcome the problem of coordinating between how we characterize well-being and how we measure it. Instead, we should adopt a coherentist approach to well-being science.

To advance current knowledge on ethical decision-making in organizations, we integrate two perspectives that have thus far developed independently: the organizational identification perspective and the ethical climate perspective. We illustrate the interaction between these perspectives in two studies, in which we presented participants with moral business dilemmas. Specifically, we found that organizational identification increased moral decision-making only when the organization’s climate was perceived to be ethical. In addition, we disentangle this effect in Study 2 from participants’ moral identity. We argue (...) that the interactive influence of organizational identification and ethical climate, rather than the independent influence of either of these perspectives, is crucial for understanding moral decision-making in organizations. (shrink)

This easy-to-understand translation of one of the earliest surviving Buddhist texts offers a pathway to awakening that is simple, straightforward, and free of religious doctrine One of the earliest of all Buddhist texts, the Atthakavagga, or “Book of Eights,” is a remarkable document, not only because it comes from the earliest strain of the literature—before the Buddha, as the title suggests, came to be thought of as a “Buddhist”—but also because its approach to awakening is so simple and free of (...) adherence to any kind of ideology. Instead the Atthakavagga points to a direct and simple approach for attaining peace without requiring the adherence to doctrine. The value of the teachings it contains is not in the profundity of their philosophy or in their authority as scripture; rather, the value is found in the results they bring to those who live by them. Instead of doctrines to be believed, the “Book of Eights” describes means or practices for realizing peace. Gil Fronsdal’s rigorous translation with commentary reveals the text to be of interest not only to Buddhists, but also to the ever-growing demographic of spiritual-but-not-religious, who seek a spiritual life outside the structures of religion. (shrink)

In this article I address the issue of the ontological conditions of possibility for a naturalistic notion of emergence, trying to determine its fundamental differences from the atomist, vitalist, preformationist and potentialist alternatives. I will argue that a naturalistic notion of ontological emergence can only succeed if we explicitly refuse the atomistic fundamental ontological postulate that asserts that every entity is endowed with a set of absolutely intrinsic properties, being qualitatively immutable through its extrinsic relations. Furthermore, it will be shown (...) that, ironically enough, this metaphysical assumption is implicitly shared by all the above mentioned alternatives to Emergentism. The current article concludes that the notion of organization by itself is not enough, and that ontological emergence can only be justified by assuming a relational ontological perspective that, in opposition both to atomism and holism, defends that the existence-conditions, the identity and the causal behavior of any emergent systemic property can only be conceived, and explained, as constructed by and through specific networks of qualitatively transformative relational processes that occur between the system’s components and between the system and its environment. Additionally, I try to explain how one can make sense of the idea that an emergent phenomenon is both dependent on, and autonomous from, its emergence base. (shrink)

Generating an account that can sidestep the disagreement among substantive theories of well-being, while at the same time still providing useful guidance for well-being public policy, would be a significant achievement. Unfortunately, the various attempts to remain agnostic regarding what constitutes well-being fail to either be an account of well-being, provide useful guidance for well-being policy, or avoid relying on a substantive well-being theory. There are no theory-free lunches in well-being policy. Instead, I propose an intermediate account, according to which (...) well-being is constituted by endorsed veridical experiences. This account refers back to theories of well-being but does so as agnostically as possible. An intermediate account of well-being is meant as a policy guiding compromise between the different theories of well-being that make claims regarding what constitutes well-being. An intermediate account does as well as can be hoped for in providing a basis for well-being policy. (shrink)

In den drei hier veröffentlichten philosophischen Studien geht es um die Begriffsarbeit des menschlichen Geistes, durch welche er in der Lage ist, die Struktur physischer und geschichtlicher Prozesse zu erfassen.

It is an open question whether well-being ought to primarily be understood as a temporal concept or whether it only makes sense to talk about a person’s well-being over their whole lifetime. In this article, I argue that how this principled philosophical disagreement is settled does not have substantive practical implications for well-being science and well-being policy. Trying to measure lifetime well-being directly is extremely challenging as well as unhelpful for guiding well-being public policy, while temporal well-being is both an (...) adequate indirect measure of lifetime well-being, and an adequate focus for the purposes of improving well-being through public policy. Consequently, even if what we ought to care about is lifetime well-being, we should use temporal measures of well-being and focus on temporal well-being policies. (shrink)

Spoofing is the act of placing orders to buy or sell a financial contract without the intention to have those orders fulfilled in order to create the impression that there is a large demand for that contract at that price. In this article, I deny the view that spoofing in financial markets should be viewed as morally permissible analogously to the way bluffing is permissible in poker. I argue for the pro tanto moral impermissibility of spoofing and make the case (...) that spoofing is disanalogous from bluffing in at least one important regard—speculative trading serves an important economic role, whereas poker does not. (shrink)

Policy-makers sometimes aim to improve well-being as a policy goal, but to do this they need some way to measure well-being. Instead of relying on potentially problematic theories of well-being to justify their choice of well-being measure, Daniel Hausman proposes that policy-makers can sometimes rely on preference-based measures as evidence for well-being. I claim that Hausman’s evidential account does not justify the use of any one measure more than it justifies the use of any other measure. This leaves us at (...) a loss as to which policy should be chosen in the non-trivial cases for which there is substantial disagreement between the different measures in their assessment of policy. (shrink)

Filosofía constitucional.--Filosofía penal.--El hombre y la historia y otros ensayos.