Abstract:The coronavirus pandemic has challenged the ability of countries to both protect personal freedoms and effectively counteract viral infections. Attempts to reduce viral vulnerability and increase immunity based on liberal or authoritarian principles seem to be either failing or succeeding at the price of eliminating freedoms altogether. The concept of social freedom, as an alternative to that of liberal autonomy, may provide a third alternative, integrating freedom with elements of social responsibility. However, I argue that it too will fail, since (...) all attempts to ensure immunity without challenging the exploitation of natural environments from where the virus originated do not go to the source of the problem. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Marx's Attempt to Leave PhilosophyOmar DahbourDaniel Brudney. Marx's Attempt to Leave Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xviii + 425. Cloth, $45.00.In the introduction to this book, Daniel Brudney writes, "The humanist Marx has been in the shadows. I think it time he was brought into the light" (13). The way Brudney chooses to do this is by examining Marx's writings of 1844-46, along with some of (...) Feuerbach and Bauer's works, for their critique of philosophy. Brudney argues that Marx's early texts are the most intrinsically interesting, in that they contain Marx's explicit antiphilosophical claims (163). Brudney asks three questions about these claims: [1] how different was Marx's critique of philosophy from that of other Young Hegelians, particularly Feuerbach and Bauer? [2] Why was Marx so committed to "leaving philosophy"? and [3] Was he successful in justifying his critique of capitalism nonphilosophically?For this reader, the most compelling part of the book was Brudney's treatment of the first question, in which he gives Feuerbach's "antiphilosophy" a sympathetic yet critical treatment. While Brudney claims that Feuerbach ultimately can substantiate neither his critique of Christian faith nor that of speculative philosophy (73), Feuerbach's work is still of interest for his ambitious, if failed, attempt to do so. Furthermore, Marx's later antiphilosophy, Brudney ultimately concludes, is much more indebted to Feuerbach than Marx cares to admit.The treatment of Marx's early work is aimed at examining the reasons for the hostility to philosophy that infuses virtually all of Marx's texts. After carefully distinguishing between the conceptions of human nature in Marx's 1844-45 manuscripts and in the German Ideology, Brudney concludes that Marx was pessimistic about providing a philosophically compelling argument for the central importance of labor (218). Much more likely, in Marx's view, was a case made on the basis of facts, practice, or experience.But Brudney argues that this will not doóthat philosophy is required because [End Page 135] Marx's conception of labor is irreducibly normative. This is what he calls the "justification problem": how can claims about the alienation of labor, e.g., be derived from facts of the matter without some further (philosophical) interpretation of these facts? In the German Ideology, the problem is compounded: how can social critics attack the "ruling ideas" of capitalism, when they live within the society in which these ideas dominate?So far, so good: Brudney makes his case for the necessity of a normative critique of capitalist society. While Marx was genuinely antiphilosophical, this was to his detrimentóit robbed him of the ability to justify his critique. But Brudney claims that, consequently, what Marx needed was "moral philosophy." This is where the problems with his argument become manifest. Despite an exhaustively detailed treatment of Marx's early texts, Brudney paints with a very broad brush when he employs the terms "philosophy" and "moral philosophy." What exactly do they mean? Brudney refuses to specify or limit Marx's critique to what Marx very probably thought of as most essentially philosophicalónamely, Hegelianism.To limit Marx's criticisms of philosophy in this way might imply that Marx was simply wielding a different kind of philosophical apparatus, one that was, in the particular intellectual world of 1840s Germany, "antiphilosophical." Specifically, Brudney wants to avoid the conclusion that Marx was a materialist, only opposed to idealism, not to "philosophy" as such. Yet, this reader cannot escape the sense that what Brudney really is comparing Marx (and Feuerbach) to the philosophy, not of the 1840s, but of the 1990s.This is especially the case in his discussion of Marx's rejection of "morality." By "morality" Brudney seems to mean some sort of rule-governed theory of moral conduct (e.g., Kantianism). But Marx's rejection of this sort of moral theory certainly need not mean his rejection of ethics of any kind. Brudney fails to adequately confront interpretations of Marx that suggest he was influenced by earlier, particularly Aristotelian, philosophy in his criticisms of German idealism (see, e.g., Carol Gould's Marx's Social Ontology or the writers in George McCarthy [ed... (shrink)

A new interpretation of Marx’s early development and the political dimension of Young Hegelianism. Review p/c.

In this book Omar Dahbour examines all of the arguments that have been given for national self-determination, whether by international lawyers, moral philosophers, democratic theorists, or political communitarians.

How do groups—be they religious or ethnic—achieve sovereignty in a postnationalist world? In Self-Determination without Nationalism, noted philosopher Omar Dahbour insists that the existing ethics of international relations, dominated by the rival notions of liberal nationalism and political cosmopolitanism, no longer suffice. Dahbour notes that political communities are an ethically desirable and historically inevitable feature of collective life. The ethical principles that govern them, however—especially self-determination and sovereignty—require reformulation in light of globalization and the economic and environmental (...) challenges of the twenty-first century. Arguing that nation-states violate the principle of self-determination, Dahbour then develops a detailed new theory of self-determination that he calls "ecosovereignty.” Ecosovereignty defines political community in a way that can protect and further the rights of indigenous peoples as well as the needs of ecological regions for a sustainable form of development and security from environmental destruction. In the series Global Ethics and Politics, edited by Carol Gould. (shrink)

Debates about global justice tend to assume normative models of global community without justifying them explicitly. These models are divided between those that advocate a borderless world and those that emphasize the self-sufficiency of smaller political communities. In the first case, there are conceptions of a community of trade and a community of law. In the second case, there are ideas of a community of nation-states and of a community of autonomous communities. The nation-state model, however, is not easily justified (...) and is one that has been criticized extensively elsewhere. The model of a community of trade underlies both advocates of market-oriented development and exponents of global schemes of redistribution of resources and incomes. I analyze the work of Charles Beitz, Peter Singer, and Thomas Pogge to show that the assumption that global interdependence is beneficial is poorly justified. The model of a community of law, as seen in the work of Henry Shue and others, is the basis for arguments against state sovereignty and in favor of international human rights regimes. I argue that this model suffers either from a problem of practicability or of hegemony. Finally, the model of a community of autonomous communities uses notions of patriotism and sovereignty to maintain that disengagement and independence are the best routes to global peace and justice. (shrink)

Comparing Carol Gould’s Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights to other recent discussions of global justice, Dahbour argues that her work offers two important theoretical departures: It grounds global rights and democracy along foundationalist rather than constructivist lines; and it rejects the notion that just global institutions require the equal input of all those affected by their activities, defending instead that only those engaged in the “common activity” of institutions should participate in the decision-making. On the basis of this common (...) activity guideline, Dahbour argues against Gould that we should not move toward “globalizing democracy” (or political cosmopolitanism) because globalization has been mostly a project of U.S. Empire. Instead, furthering democracy andhuman rights requires the strengthening of local democracy and support of the global justice movement as an antiglobalization movement. [Abstract prepared by the Editors.]. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that justice is necessarily inapplicable to the global scale, since there is no such thing as a global society in the proper sense. I examine why this is so, and criticize two types of arguments for global justice—maximalist conceptions (such as those of Charles Beitz and Allen Buchanan) that argue for a robust notion of redistribution on the global scale, and minimalist conceptions (such as those of Thomas Pogge and Iris Young) that argue for a (...) notion of redress or solidarity across borders. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that justice is necessarily inapplicable to the global scale, since there is no such thing as a global society in the proper sense. I examine why this is so, and criticize two types of arguments for global justice—maximalist conceptions that argue for a robust notion of redistribution on the global scale, and minimalist conceptions that argue for a notion of redress or solidarity across borders.

In this work the author attempts two, rather different, tasks in rethinking the nature of Kant's contributions to political philosophy. First, she argues that Kant's political writings depart methodologically from his critical writings on epistemology and morality. This is the significance of her use of the term 'nonideal theory' to designate the distinctive methodology that is supposedly operative in later Kantian texts such as part 1 of the Metaphysics of Morals, and especially the essays on enlightenment, world history, and war (...) and peace. Second, she maintains that Kant's distinctive contributions to political philosophy derive not from entailments of his moral philosophy, but from specific theses he advocates... (shrink)

The publication of Gillian Brock's Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account in 2009 and of Richard Miller's Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power in 2010 have created an important occasion for reassessing the discourse about global justice that has arisen in the last decade. Above all, these books have moved the debate about what constitutes global justice in an exciting new direction by introducing important considerations previously lacking. But most essentially, these books give us an opportunity to assess whether (...) the concept of global justice is amenable, not only to exercises in liberal moral thinking, but also to radical social theorizing about deprivation and powerlessness on the international scale. Is there a new paradigm of radical global justice?While I will argue that, ultimately, neither author makes a definitive break with the liberal paradigm, this is not so much a result of faintheartedness or failure of imagination as a deficiency with the concept of global justice itself. I think it may turn out, once these exciting new works have been fully digested, that they are actually pointing the way beyond concern for global justice, in any sense of the term currently extant. What may lie "beyond" global justice will be the object of some brief speculations at the end of this essay. (shrink)

The principle of national self-determination has usually been justified by extending to national groups an entitlement that individuals are regarded as having, namely, to the conditions necessary for their self development. In order to extend the concept of self-determination to nations in this way, an argument that it is important for nations to exist within their own political communities must be given. In this essay, I describe and criticize one type of argument for such a principle of national self-determination – (...) what I will call the communitarian argument.Contemporary communitarians usually contend that determining who rightfully has membership in a political community must precede the allocation of rights and responsibilities between members. Community is understood to mean a national community; membership in communities therefore results from the ascription of national identities to individuals and to the consequent sorting out of loyalties that follows from this ascription. A right of self-determination for nations is required, on this view, in order to ensure that political communities are legitimately formed in accordance with national identities. (shrink)

Although the focus of "Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights" is practical, Gould does not shy away from hard theoretical questions, such as the relentless debate over cultural relativism, and the relationship between terrorism and democracy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social TheoryOmar DahbourWarren Breckman. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory. Modern European Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 335. Cloth, $54.95.In his new book on the Young Hegelians, Warren Breckman claims that the historical origins of Karl Marx's critique of "bourgeois individualism" remain obscure (4). Breckman's book is an attempt to (...) resituate Marx's philosophy within its original context in order to better understand why Marx was so hostile to liberalism—and especially to the concept of civil society that informs much of liberal thinking on the relation of government to the individual.As Breckman notes, concern with the idea of civil society brings one back to Hegel, who was the first philosopher to theorize this idea in depth (3). So Breckman asks: what was the intellectual path that led from the greatest theorist of civil society, Hegel, to the greatest critic of it, Marx?Breckman's account of this historical trajectory from Hegel to Marx is divided into three stages. The first consists of the last years of Hegel's life, during which he spent much of his time in debate with other leading thinkers, such as his former friend Schelling and the conservative jurist Stahl. The second stage is that of the development of the Young Hegelians' thought after Hegel's death, especially in juxtaposition to the "Old Hegelians" and to the Christian "new right" of the day. In the third stage, Marx differentiated his own position from that of other Young Hegelians.According to Breckman, two concerns dominated debates between the various philosophical camps in 1820s and '30s Germany. One concern was to accurately explain the nature of God. The other was to articulate the proper relation between the personal and transpersonal dimensions of experience. In the first case, all factions during Hegel's lifetime espoused some version of religious belief. The issue was whether belief in God [End Page 290] could be based on a direct, personal faith, as Schelling and the anti-Hegelians maintained, or whether belief was a rational affirmation of a divine being, as Hegel and his followers maintained (33). With the development of a critique of Christian faith by Strauss and Feuerbach, the Young Hegelians shifted their attention to how best to account for belief in God, rather than God as such.In the second case, the role of the self became a paramount concern in "Biedermeier" Germany, where I. H. Fichte (the son of J. G. Fichte), famously declared that "everything is personal" (22). This view was anathema to the Young Hegelians, who rejected the personalism of Schelling and the religious right in arguing that it embodied, not an immediate reality that escaped the purview of reason, but an abstract egoism (95). These two philosophical concerns became increasingly political ones as well when conservative jurists such as Stahl espoused a "personalist" theory of sovereignty in which the person of the sovereign was analogized to the person of God (64).Accordingly, the Young Hegelians linked their critique of religious personalism to a critique of political monarchism. It is at this point that the final steps to advocacy of democracy, and eventually, socialism, were made, especially by Arnold Ruge and Marx. But, according to Breckman, it is this rapid transition from the critique of religion to the critique of politics that led Marx, for instance, to a conflation of the liberal toleration of religion with the Prussian restoration's theological justification of the state (294). In the end, "radical social theory" is based on a "category mistake": liberal individualism is not the same as theological personalism (238).Breckman's study of the Young Hegelians has many virtues. It is particularly good on the political and personal relations of philosophers of sometimes punishing abstractness, such as Hegel and Schelling. There are also illuminating portraits of some virtually forgotten thinkers—for instance, Eduard Gans, the editor of Hegel and teacher of Marx.The problems result from the significance that Breckman claims for his study. If the title of the book is meant to describe this significance, it does not. Marx appears... (shrink)

Drawing from Andean cosmological, mythological and aesthetic lineages, this paper is about the possibility of a phenomenology of things at catastrophic ends. In this regard, I approach things under the sway of a (de)formative emptiness. In the first part, I develop a relational ontology on the basis of the Andean notion of pacha or cosmos, which provides a phenomenological frame for a determination of “place,” “world” and “topology.” I also contrast an elemental topology of the cosmos configured by ouranic sunlight (...) with an elemental catastrophism that overturns it. In the second part, I study a chronological series of artifacts in an Andean aesthetic lineage in order to attempt a phenomenology of “things” (utensils, buildings, mountains) that “spectrally” hover in overturns of the cosmos (pachakuti). (shrink)

Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis (...) of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeingaesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways. (shrink)

A distinctive focus of 19th- and 20th-century Latin American philosophy is the convergence of identity formation and political liberation in ethnically and racially diverse postcolonial contexts. From this perspective, Omar Rivera interprets how a "we" is articulated and deployed in central political texts of this robust philosophical tradition. In particular, by turning to the work of Peruvian political theorist José Carlos Mariátegui among others, Rivera critiques philosophies of liberation that are invested in the redemption of oppressed identities as conditions (...) for bringing about radical social and political change, foregrounding Latin America's complex histories and socialities to illustrate the power and shortcomings of these projects. Building on this critical approach, Rivera studies interrelated epistemological, transcultural, and aesthetic delimitations of Latin American philosophy in order to explore the possibility of social and political liberation "beyond redemption.". (shrink)

On one classical conception of God, God has no parts, not even metaphysical parts. God is not composed of form and matter, act and potency, and he is not composed of existence and essence. God is absolutely simple. This is the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity. It is claimed that ADS implies a modal collapse, i.e. that God’s creation is absolutely necessary. I argue that a proper way of understanding the modal collapse argument naturally leads the proponent of ADS to (...) reject a particular premise of the argument: namely, “the same identical cause brings about the same effect.” However, I argue that the rejection of that premise leads to a deeper problem for ADS. It leads to an explanatory gap: how can we explain the relevant type of indeterminism in an absolutely simple God? (shrink)

While previous literature provides evidence of the positive relationship between ethical climate and job satisfaction, the possible mechanisms of this relationship are still underexplored. This study aims to enhance scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the ethical climate–job satisfaction relationship by identifying and testing two of the possible mechanisms. More specifically, this study fills an existing research gap by examining social and interpersonal mechanisms, referred to in this study as workplace isolation of colleagues and salesperson’s teamwork, of the ethical climate–job satisfaction (...) relationship. This is vital for the selling profession because job satisfaction is known to drive higher levels of salespeople’s performance. The arguments for such mechanisms are built on the foundations of social/psychological contract theory and ethical climate literature. Empirical testing using a large sample of salespeople shows higher levels of ethical climate to decrease workplace isolation and increase teamwork. Findings support hypothesized model where ethical climate positively relates to job satisfaction as partially mediated by workplace isolation and teamwork. Ethical climate is negatively related to workplace isolation and positively to teamwork. Further, findings indicate negative effect of workplace isolation on teamwork and sales performance. Job satisfaction is found to be key factor in driving performance of salespeople. (shrink)

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of (...) the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

In this paper, I critically examine Stephen Turner's critique of practice theory in light of recent neurophysiological discoveries regarding the “mirror neuron system” in the pre-frontal mo-tor cortex of humans and other primates. I argue that two of Turner's strongest objections against the sociological version of the practice-theoretical account, the problem of transmission and the problem of sameness, are substantially undermined when examined from the perspective of re-cently systematized accounts of embodied learning and intersubjective action understanding in-spired by these developments. (...) In addition, I show that the practice-theoretical framework out-lined by Pierre Bourdieu in the Logic of Practice and other works is, in contrast to Turner's por-trayal of a confused hodgepodge of logical errors and empirical impossibilities, largely consistent with the latest neurophysiological evidence and as such fundamentally foreshadowed more recent understandings of the neurocognitive foundations of the perception, understanding and structure of the motor schemes productive of action in the world. Also in line with these newer neurosci-entific developments, the practice-theoretical focus on the body as the central matrix generative of tacit understandings and analogical operations responsible for “higher order” systems of classi-fication emerges as the key to solving some of the thorniest problems in the theory of action: eliminating to need to resort to unwarranted “collective object” explanations for the origins of shared presuppositional frameworks. (shrink)

Cuba faces a dilemma between continuing its current portfolio of biotechnology drugs and vaccines with lower profitability or renewing its product portfolio with the associated costs and risks.

The purpose of this research is to examine the notion of salesperson moral identity as a prosocial individual trait and its associated effects on customer and coworker relationships. In addition, this study examines the underlying processes in which these effects occur as well as the moderating role of internal competitive climate. Our empirical investigation of business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals reveals that moral identity has both direct and indirect effects on a salesperson’s customer- and team-directed outcomes. Specifically, our results demonstrate that (...) salesperson moral identity positively affects both salesperson-customer identification and organizational identification, which, in turn, impact customer service provision and teamwork. Our findings also indicate that internal competitive climate exacerbates the positive effects of salesperson moral identity on customer service provision and teamwork. (shrink)

The authors of the target article articulate the complicated, often conflicting demands of U.S. Food and Drug Administration roles as justification for the FDA’s delay in releasing guidelines...

I this paper, I draw on recent research on the radically embodied and perceptual bases of conceptualization in linguistics and cognitive science to develop a new way of reading and evaluating abstract concepts in social theory. I call this approach Sociological Idea Analysis. I argue that, in contrast to the traditional view of abstract concepts, which conceives them as amodal “presuppositions” removed from experience, abstract concepts are irreducibly grounded in experience and partake of non-negotiable perceptual-symbolic features from which a non-propositional (...) “logic” naturally follows. This implies that uncovering the imagistic bases of allegedly abstract notions should be a key part of theoretical evaluation of concepts in social theory. I provide a case study of the general category of “structure” in the social and human sciences to demonstrate the analytic utility of the approach. (shrink)