Kant’s philosophy treated endings as necessary but necessarily elusive for the moral and political imagination, and he employed irony, among other things, to draw attention to the risks of perverting the figure of the end. Kantian endings, this essay suggests, give rise to two possible orientations which exist in tension with each other: melancholic confrontations with impossibility alongside a more forward-looking, optimistic gaze. I examine the two features of Kantian endings and the affective orientations they inspire under the headings of (...) succession and secession. In addition to the mathematical-logical language of Kant’s writing, however, one also has to be able to appreciate the noirish qualities of Kant’s thought, which is to say, elements of culpability and aversion with respect to figures of transcendence that posit the space within which finite experience takes shape. (shrink)

This paper examines Charles Taylor's case against complete secularization in A Secular Age in the light of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critiques of the potential for nihilism inherent in different kinds of philosophical appeals to ?transcendence?. The Heideggerian critique of metaphysics as ontotheology suggests that the theoretical pluralism Taylor rightly embraces is more consistently thought of as following from a robust ontological pluralism, and that Taylor's own commitment to ontological monism seems to follow from his own desire to leave room in (...) his theoretical account for an ontotheological creator God who stands outside the world and ultimately unifies its meaning. The Nietzschean critique contends that any such appeal to something that transcends the limits of human finitude remains nihilistic, insofar as such valorizations of the otherworldly undermine our capacity to appreciate and experience the genuine meaningfulness of human existence in its this-worldly finitude. The paper explores Taylor's response to this Nietzschean critique, showing that Taylor ?deconstructs? the crucial distinction between immanence and transcendence that any ?exclusively humanist? worldview must presuppose. Taylor's response only partly resolves the problem, however, because the Nietzschean can still draw a defensible distinction between legitimate and meaningful appeals to transcendence and illegitimate and nihilistic ones. The paper concludes by suggesting that traditional appeals to a transcendent creator God, a heavenly afterlife, and so on, continue to run afoul of Nietzsche's critique of the nihilism of otherworldliness, and that we would do better to explicitly abjure such otherworldly appeals. (shrink)

In the educational strand of cosmopolitanism, much attention has been placed on theorizing and describing who is cosmopolitan. It has been argued that cosmopolitan sensibilities negotiate and/or embody such paradoxes as rootedness and rootlessness, local and global concerns, private and public identities. Concurrently, cosmopolitanism has also been formulated as a globally-minded project for and ethico-political responsibility to human rights and global justice. Such articulations underscore cosmopolitanism in anthropocentric terms. People can be cosmopolitan and cosmopolitan projects aim to cultivate cosmopolitan subjectivities. (...) What is striking about scholarship in educational cosmopolitanism is its lack of serious attention placed on the greatest global threat facing not only but largely created by human beings: environmental degradation. In this paper, I provide an overview of key texts written on the who in educational cosmopolitanism which helps lay the groundwork for an analysis of what is cosmopolitan. Regarding the what, I examine a range of boundary-defying emergencies described in cosmopolitan terms including climate change, radioactive poisoning of the planet, and bioinvasion. In the last analysis, I consider what it would take and what the possibilities are for our species to be truly committed to caring not only for the human world. (shrink)

Building on Rodin's analysis, Ryan raise further issues about self-defense as a justification of modern nation state war. Principal among these is what he calls the "conscription paradox.".

In this essay, I argue that Derrida cannot pursue the question of being/following unless he thinks through the question of sexual difference posed by figures of little girls in philosophical texts and in literature, specifically as posed by Lewis Carroll's Alice whom Derrida references in L'animal que donc je suis. At stake in thinking being after animals after Alice is the thought of an other than fraternal following, a way of being-with and inheriting from (other than human) others that calls (...) for an account of development that is not dictated by a normative autotelic and sacrificial logic. I argue that Derrida's dissociation of himself and his cat from Alice and her cat(s) in L'animal que donc je suis causes him to risk repeating the closed, teleological gestures philosophers like Kant and Hegel perpetuate in their accounts of human development. The more sweeping conclusion towards which this essay points is the claim that the domestication of girls and their subjection to familial fates in narratives and the reduction of development to teleology more generally, require the sacrifice and forgetting of ‘nature’, including animals, so that the fates of girls and ‘nature’ are intertwined in the context of projects of human world-building and home-making. (shrink)

Trust relations in the health services have changed from asymmetrical paternalism to symmetrical autonomy-based participation, according to a common account. The promises of personalized medicine emphasizing empowerment of the individual through active participation in managing her health, disease and well-being, is characteristic of symmetrical trust. In the influential Kantian account of autonomy, active participation in management of own health is not only an opportunity, but an obligation. Personalized medicine is made possible by the digitalization of medicine with an ensuing increased (...) tailoring of diagnostics, treatment and prevention to the individual. The ideal is to increase wellness by minimizing the layer of interpretation and translation between relevant health information and the patient or user. Arguably, this opens for a new level of autonomy through increased participation in treatment and prevention, and by that, increased empowerment of the individual. However, the empirical realities reveal a more complicated landscape disturbed by information ‘noise’ and involving a number of complementary areas of expertise and technologies, hiding the source and logic of data interpretation. This has lead to calls for a return to a mild form of paternalism, allowing expertise coaching of patients and even withholding information, with patients escaping responsibility through blind or lazy trust. This is morally unacceptable, according to Kant’s ideal of enlightenment, as we have a duty to take responsibility by trusting others reflexively, even as patients. Realizing the promises of personalized medicine requires a system of institutional controls of information and diagnostics, accessible for non-specialists, supported by medical expertise that can function as the accountable gate-keeper taking moral responsibility required for an active, reflexive trust. (shrink)

Public health advocates, government agencies, and commercial organizations increasingly use nutritional science to guide food choice and diet as a way of promoting health, preventing disease, or marketing products. We argue that in many instances such references to nutritional science can be characterized as nutritional scientism. We examine three manifestations of nutritional scientism: the simplification of complex science to increase the persuasiveness of dietary guidance, superficial and honorific references to science in order to justify cultural or ideological views about food (...) and health, and the presumption that nutrition is the primary value of food. This paper examines these forms of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics to address bioethical concerns related to the misuse of scientific evidence to make claims regarding the effect of diet on health. We argue that nutritional scientism has ethical implications for individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being. (shrink)

While Deleuze and Guattari's passion for certain literature is well known, the nature of a ‘Deleuzian’ literary criticism remains an open question. However, most critics appear to agree that Deleuze and Guattari's comments on meaning and interpretation offer an ontological alternative to the textual focus of deconstruction. Through an interrogation of the difficult style of their books in relation to Plato, Nietzsche and Derrida, this paper offers a different reading of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to literary criticism. Despite appearances, (...) transcendental empiricism and the project of ‘overturning Platonism’ provide a Deleuzian theory of reading that attends to textuality. (shrink)

In the age of globalization, and increased interdependence in the world that we face today, there is a question we may have to raise: Do we need and could we attain a world government, capable of insuring the peace and facilitating worldwide well-being in a just and efficient manner? In the twenty chapters of this book, some of the most prominent living philosophers give their consideration to this question in a provocative and engaging way. Their essays are not only of (...) wide theoretical interest but also provide a thought-provoking approach to this most timely and urgent issue. A wide range of perspectives are represented here. -/- The authors include Richard Falk, Michael Walzer, Thomas Pogge, Larry May, Alfred Rubin, Stanley Hoffman, Jan Narveson, Virginia Held, Pauline Kleingeld and Luis Cabrera. Jovan Babic is Professor of Ethics at the University of Belgrade and Visiting Professor at Portland State University. Petar Bojanic is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, Law and Applied Philosophy (CELAP) as well as the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory (Belgrade). (shrink)

Peace is the primary public good. --James K. Galbraith Somehow or other the wrong belief has taken possession of us that ahimsa is preeminently a weapon for individuals and its use should, therefore, be limited to that sphere. In fact this is not the case.

A free society requires a citizenry that is capable of taking personal responsibility for bettering their lot, and voluntarily promoting and protecting public goods such as education, health, public order, peace, and justice. Although the law backed by force can have some success at compelling people to make contributions to the public exchequer, refrain from criminal activity, honor legal contracts, and so on, an economically and politically free society cannot rely exclusively on the threat of coercion to induce in citizens (...) a sense of social responsibility. On the contrary, a free society depends on a well‐entrenched sense of responsibility that is internalized and actualized by citizens in their everyday lives. But any realistic attempt to frame an ideal of social responsibility must confront two serious challenges presented by the complexity and scale of modern societies, namely the challenge of knowing the content of our responsibilities and the challenge of finding the motivation to discharge them. With these challenges in view, this essay assesses the power of prevailing accounts of citizenship to generate an effective sense of social responsibility, and proposes some guiding principles to inform a broader theory of responsibility that might synthesize the strengths of political accounts while transcending some of their limitations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to determine whether Kant’s account of freedom fits with his theory of the human sciences. Several Kant scholars have recently acknowledged a tension between Kant’s metaphysics and his works on anthropology in particular. I believe that in order to clarify the issue at stake, the tension between Kant’s metaphysics and his anthropology should be broken down into three distinct problems. -/- First, Kant’s Anthropology studies the human being ‘as a freely acting being.’5 This approach (...) thus presupposes that such an inquiry can acknowledge freedom and appeal to it in its accounts of human behaviour. Yet the Critique of Pure Reason clearly asserts that ‘as regard [man’s] empirical character there is no freedom; and yet it is only in the light of this character that man can be studied.’ This, in contrast, seems to indicate that the human sciences should be carried out independently of freedom. -/- Second, the Anthropology seems to suggest that empirical factors encompassed by culture, civilisation and mores can have an impact on the human being’s moral status by generating some form of moral progress. Yet if freedom and moral agency are restricted to the domain of the intelligible, they cannot be influenced by anything empirical. -/- Third, the Anthropology provides numerous moral and prudential recommendations as to how one should behave in particular circumstances. Thus it seems to presuppose that anthropological knowledge, as well as the practical guidance based on this knowledge, can have an impact on the free choices we make. Yet how can the human sciences be legitimately, and efficaciously, prescriptive vis-à-vis our free choices? -/- Regarding the first problem, which I tackle in section I, I will hold that the human sciences can legitimately refer to ‘practical freedom’ understood as the power to determine one’s aims and to act independently of sensuous impulses, through intentions and the representation of purposes. I will address the second and third problems in two steps. Section II will tackle them negatively through a distinction between the conditions of moral agency and the conditions of moral improvement. It will allow me to argue that the possibility of any direct influence of the empirical on the intelligible is metaphysically invalid in principle, and hence, that empirical factors cannot effect any direct change in one’s moral character. In the third section, I will turn to the positive side of my account by focusing on the issue of the moral relevance of culture and civilisation as well as that of the human sciences (which study their influence), and suggest that they are morally relevant insofar as they make us more morally efficacious. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that for Kant, a combination of epigenesis and monogenesis is the condition of possibility of anthropology as he conceives of it and that moreover, this has crucial implications for the biological dimension of his account of human nature. More precisely, I begin by arguing that Kant’s conception of mankind as a natural species is based on two premises: firstly the biological unity of the human species (monogenesis of the human races); and secondly (...) the existence of ‘seeds’ which may or may not develop depending on the environment (epigenesis of human natural predispositions). I then turn to Kant’s account of man’s natural predispositions and show that far from being limited to the issue of races, it encompasses unexpected human features such as gender, temperaments and nations. These predispositions, I argue, are means to the realisation of Nature’s overall purpose for the human species. This allows me to conclude that man’s biological determinism leads to the species’ preservation, cultivation and civilisation. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an account of member obligation: the obligations that fall on the members of an obligated collective in virtue of that collective obligation. I use this account to argue that unorganized collections of individuals can constitute obligated agents. I argue first that, to know when a collective obligation entails obligations on that collective’s members, we have to know not just what it would take for each member to do their part in satisfying the collective obligation, but (...) also what they should do if they cannot do their part because others will not do theirs. I go on to argue (contra recent proposals) that it is not good enough for members in this situation to reasonably believe that others will not do their part. Rather, for a member of an obligated collective to permissibly escape doing her part in a collective obligation, she must both reasonably doubt that others will do their part and stand ready to act in case others do as well. -/- This necessary condition for collective obligation points the way to plausible sufficient conditions – conditions that, I argue, allow unstructured collectives to bear obligations. For (a) if a collective’s members are individually obligated to be ready to do their part, in a given collective action, and (b) if that individual readiness makes it sufficiently likely that the collective will in fact act, then it is hard to see what could block an attribution of collective obligation. In particular, in that case there ought to be no additional objection that there is no existing, organized “agent” on which the obligation might fall. For agents are, simply, things that can act. To be able to act is just to be able to succeed by trying. Unstructured collectives try to do something, I argue, when each member acts on their willingness to do their part in that thing if others do theirs; sometimes they succeed, producing a collective action. Some unstructured collectives, therefore, can succeed by trying; therefore, they can act; therefore they are agents. (shrink)

It is well-known in Western scholarship that Rousseau has been the forerunner of integral value-based pedagogies; in any case, his name stands as one of the main educationists of the West. However, the pedagogic reflections of two major philosophers of modern Europe, Kant and Hegel, have been largely overlooked, especially in the last decades. Dr. Ferrer shows in this paper that Kant and Hegel can also be regarded as forerunners of holistic value-based pedagogies. Their enlightening contributions to philosophy of education (...) and ethics, deeply complementary with Rousseau, can enrich the educational scenario of the Western world, dramatically impoverished by materialism, utilitarianism and technocracy. Before them, Plato already outlined a profound philosophy of education that can be regarded as integral and value-based; beyond contextual factors and the historical distance, Plato can still inspire Western education in a spiritual, ethical and humanistic horizon, just like Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. (shrink)

Kant limits cosmopolitan right to a universal right of hospitality, condemning European imperial practices towards indigenous peoples, while allowing a right to visit foreign countries for the purpose of offering to engage in commerce. I argue that attempts by contemporary theorists such as Jeremy Waldron to expand and update Kant’s juridical category of cosmopolitan right would blunt or erase Kant’s own anti-colonial doctrine. Waldron’s use of Kant’s category of cosmopolitan right to criticize contemporary identity politics relies on premises that upset (...) Kant’s balanced right to hospitality. An over-extensive right to visit can invoke “Kantian” principles that Kant himself could not have consistently held, without weakening his condemnation of European settlement. I construct an alternative spirit of cosmopolitan right more favorable to the contemporary claims of indigenous peoples. Kant’s analysis suggests there are circumstances when indigenous peoples may choose whether to engage in extensive cultural interaction, and reasonably refuse the risks of subjecting their claims to debate in democratic politics in a unitary public. Cosmopolitan right accorded respect to peoples; any “domestic” adaptation of cosmopolitan right should respect indigenous peoples as peoples, absent a serious public explanation by a democratic state for why it has now become appropriate to treat indigenous peoples merely as individual citizens. (shrink)