Over the past 25 years, no religious institution in America has done more to explore the link between the environment and spirituality than the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Now, for the first time, a selection of the finest of the Cathedral's ecological sermons appears in a single volume.

Both in scholarship on the Weimar Republic and in historical research in general, many conceptions of ‘crisis’ tend to remain vague and difficult to operationalize. These operational defects of the concept of crisis arise inevitably, we argue, from the concept’s constitutive link to human perception on the one hand and from its subsumption of complex interconnections of historical processes within different subsystems on the other. Frequently today, in both ordinary and historiographical usage, this basic openness of the concept (...) of crisis is foreclosed when it is deployed with a solely negative connotation of ‘downfall’ and ‘decline’, or of something being thrown into question or jeopardy. Such uses obscure a way in which a crisis can evoke not only the pessimistic sense of a threat to the old order but also the optimistic scenario of a chance for renewal. A one-sidedly negative understanding of crisis as prelude to calamity, we argue here, is problematic for historical research for two reasons. Firstly, it obscures comprehension of the consciousness of actors in the relevant period who at any particular moment can have had no prior knowledge of the crisis’s outcome. Secondly, it tends to reify the relevant crisis and to occlude its basic character as something narratively constructed in the accounts of both contemporaries and subsequent historiography. (shrink)

The human experience is punctuated by times of crisis. Some crises are experienced at a personal level (e.g., the diagnosis of a life-threatening disease), organizational level (e.g., a business facing bankruptcy), and still others are experienced on a societal or global level (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic). Although crises can be deeply troubling and anxiety provoking, they can also serve as an important catalyst for creative action and innovative outcomes. This is because during times of crisis our typical forms of (...) reasoning and action may no longer serve us. It is precisely during such times that new ways of thought, action and leadership are needed. A key question for researchers to consider is:Why and how times of crisis serve as an impetus for creative actions and outcomes?The purpose of this paper is to address this question. I open by briefly discussing the features of a crisis. I then introduce an empirically testable, process model that outlines various pathways, factors, and outcomes associated with different ways people and organizations respond during times of crisis. I close by briefly outlining future directions for creativity theory and research. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the practice of injecting patients who are dying with a relatively high dose of sedatives in response to a catastrophic event that will shortly precipitate death, something that we term ‘crisis sedation.’ We first present a confabulated case that illustrates the kind of events we have in mind, before offering a more detailed account of the practice. We then comment on some of the ethical issues that crisis sedation might raise. We identify the primary (...) value of crisis sedation as allowing healthcare professionals to provide some degree of reassurance to patients, their families and the professionals who are caring for them. Next we focus on the issue of informed consent. Finally, we ask whether continuous deep sedation might be preferable to crisis sedation in scenarios where potential catastrophic events can be anticipated. (shrink)

현대사회에서 철학이 처한 위기는 본질적이다. 철학은 자신의 시대를 위기로 파악하면서 새로운 사유를 지향한다. 그러기에 철학적 관점에서 매 시대는 위기와 극복의 사유를 전개하는 시대이지만, 그럼에도 현대는 철학이 그 자체로 폐기될 위험에 처해있다. 이 논문은 현대의 철학에 닥친 위기의 본질을 계보사적 맥락에서 밝히고, 이를 성찰함으로써 철학 본연의 자리를 새롭게 정초하려는 목적을 지닌다. 이를 위해 먼저 현대의 철학이 유래한 근원에 대해 해명하고(2장) 이 철학이 처한 위기 현상을 그 존재론적 터전의 왜곡(3장)으로 파악할 것이다.BR4장은 이러한 존재론적 위기를 극복하기 위해 필요한 사유로서의 탈형이상학적 동인을 해명한다. 그것은 (...) 서구 철학의 전승과 함께 실체론적으로 설정된 신적 사유의 해체로 밝히고 있다. 5장에서는 철학의 본질 가운데 하나인 이성개념을 새롭게 이해하기 위한 논의를 담고 있다. 이어 6장에서는 현대 철학이 나아가야 할 지향점과 과제를 논의할 것이다. 그 뒤에는 철학이란 존재를 새롭게 이해하는 사유의 길을 걸어가는 영원의 학문이라는 생각이 자리한다. (shrink)

Organised around the themes of economy and politics; critical theory; and culture in order to offer an impressive range of thematic perspectives and critical angles, the book delves into the most pressing of today’s quandaries by combining stringent critical analysis with creative foresight. A rigorous examination of the current crisis of late-capitalist society, States of Crisis and Post-Capitalist scenarios develops paradigms that promise to rekindle the desire to move beyond capitalism towards a different social order.

This study discusses the issue of emotional crisis and trauma in terms of opportunities to develop and grow. The article seeks to show the complex psychological conditions pertaining to emotional crises, a constructive way of dealing with them, and the possibility of growing and developing thanks to having experienced such a crisis. These issues are usually omitted when describing crises; however, as the author postulates, they constitute a foundation for differentiating — as we surely must do — between (...) emotional crisis and trauma, development and growth through crisis, and the positive adaptive changes observed in cases of post-traumatic disorder. Such changes cannot always be identified as instances of so called post-traumatic growth. The latter is described by the author, with reference to Maslow's theory, as development “resulting from the lack of something”, where this in turn reflects some trauma or other. Moreover, considerations pertaining both to current work in health psychology, and to the distinction between emotional crisis and trauma proposed here, could well prove relevant where practices of intervention are concerned. (shrink)

Timely and provocative essays on bioethical questions brought to the forefront by the bioterrorist threat.

In Of Other Spaces Foucault coined the term "heterotopias" to signify "all the other real sites that can be found within the culture" which "are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted." For Foucault, heterotopic spaces were first of all spaces of crisis, or transformative spaces, however these have given way to heterotopias of deviation and spaces of discipline, such as psychiatric hospitals or prisons. Foucault's essay provokes us to think through how spaces of crisis and critique function to open (...) up disruptive, subversive or minoritarian fields within philosophical, political, cultural or aesthetic discourses. This book takes this interdisciplinary and international approach to the spatial, challenging existing borders, boundaries, and horizons; from Claire Colebrook's chapter unpacking the heterotopic spaces of America and Mexico that lie beyond reductive ideological spaces of light and darkness, to a Foucauldian reading of the Zapatista resistance. With essays on politics, philosophy, literature, post-colonial studies, and aesthetics from established and emerging academics, this book answers Foucault's call to give us a better understanding of our present cultural epoch."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Thirty years ago, Fukuyama announced the end of history in the form of the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets. Crises were going to be something of the past. Today, crises abound. Does this mean that the eschatology of the 1980s and 90s should give way to a crisology? Given the many ways in which the vocabulary of crisis is used, and crises are instrumentalized, can the word crisis become a rigorous philosophical concept? In this essay, I (...) analyze the extent to which, and contexts in which, philosophy has claimed crisis as a central concept ; offer a tentative typology of crisis in relation to the problem of normativity ; conclude with a few remarks on critique as the philosophy of crisis. (shrink)

This paper analyzes perceptions of responsible leadership in eight Asia-based firms during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focal firms were a mixture of multinational corporations (MNCs), large-sized enterprises, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In all eight focal firms, we found that the responsible decision-making of leaders during the pandemic was perceived to be guided by five main moral principles. These comprised equity-based justice for employees, meeting employees’ basic needs, ethics of care for employees, concern for non-employee (...) stakeholders, and interactional justice for employees. We developed a conceptual map of how these principles related to aspects of four ethics-oriented leadership theories. Our analysis also identified four types of responsible leadership policies and practices. These comprised prioritizing the health and safety of stakeholders, flexible work arrangements, meeting employees’ and customers’ special needs, and financial and psychological support for employees. (shrink)

This is a contribution to thesociology and social epistemology of knowledgeproduction in Russian social sciences today. Inthe initial section, the epistemic status andsocial function of Soviet social scientificdiscourse are characterized in terms of textualforms and their modes of (re-)production. Theremaining sections detail the course of therestructuration of social scientific discoursesince the fall of the Soviet Union and draw onextant empirical sources, in particular studiesof bibliographical rubrics, thematicrepertoires, and current textual formsthroughout the public sphere and the academicestablishment in Russia. An underlying (...) concernis the shifting status of the intellectual inthe wider socio-cultural context as reflectedin language usage and its textualembodiments. (shrink)

This book analyzes emergency legislations formed in response to terrorism. In recognition that different countries, with different legal traditions, have different solutions, it adopts a comparative point of view. The countries profiled include America, France, Israel, Poland, Germany and United Kingdom. The goal is not to offer judgment on one response or the other. Rather, the contributors offer a comprehensive and thoughtful examination of the entire concept. In the process, they draw attention to the inadaptability of traditional legal and philosophical (...) categories in a new and changing political world. The contributors first criticize the idea of these legislations. They then go on to develop different models to respond to these crises. They build a general analytical framework by answering such questions as: What is an emergency legislation? What kinds of emergencies justify laws of this nature? Why is contemporary terrorism such a specific emergency justifying new laws? Using legal and philosophical reflections, this study looks at how we are changing society. Coverage also provides historical experiences of emergency legislations to further illustrate this point. In the end, readers will gain insight into the long-term consequences of these legislations and how they modify the very work of the rule of law. (shrink)

Not a day goes by that we don't hear of a crisis, declared or looming: the ecological crisis, the public health crisis, the housing crisis, the race crisis, the constitutional crisis, the economic crisis. In an age where everything seems to be a crisis, or in a permanent state of crisis, it can be difficult to distinguish between what is urgent and what isn't, what to act on now and what to (...) act on later. In A Philosophy of Crisis, Miguel de Beistegui offers a typology of crisis that will help us make sense of these issues. While some social scientists and philosophers have become skeptical of the notion of crisis, de Beistegui holds that crisis can be a useful concept so long as we make it a polysemic one that can evolve and operate alongside other concepts. He outlines four regimes of crisis: crises of deviation, exception, contradiction, and extinction. Each involves a certain relation to the norm and requires a certain response. Drawing on the tools of philosophy and disciplines including political economy, law, sociology, and the sciences, A Philosophy of Crisis equips us to understand our current state of crisis and deal with it. (shrink)

Building on its origins at a seminar in Oslo organized by two of the editors, this book combines classic texts of Nordic ecophilosophy and the original contributions of those influenced by this tradition to present the view that critical realism is indeed a worthy intellectual tradition to carry forward and further develop the work of the founders of Nordic ecophilosophy. It was clear at the seminar that there was a promising convergence of interests and themes in the two approaches; while (...) at the same time, within the Nordic ecophilosophical tradition, there was appreciation of the capacity of critical realism, with its provision of a robust philosophical ontology and generation of totalizing immanent critiques of Western philosophy, to provide an expansive and secure home for the development of ecophilosophical work generally. If there is a single overarching theme of critical realist philosophy, it surely must be that of the unity of theory and practice, which Bhaskar, following Hegel, has also called "seriousness". This makes the applicability, relevance and actionability of critical realism key considerations for critical realists. There can be no doubt that this concern was shared fully by the Nordic ecophilosophers; and this quality of "seriousness" is a striking feature of the Nordic contributions presented in this book. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on affective structures and the main adaptive functions of shared narratives to fill the gaps of the Conviction Narrative Theory. The transmission of narratives among individuals in highly uncertain situations is irrevocably tainted by affects and anchored in collective memory. Narratives have important evolutionary functions for human beings under threat and act as the social glue that creates and strengthens social bonds among individuals.

Departing from the (post-)Anthropocenic crisis state of today’s world, fuelled by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, various post-truth populist follies, and an apocalyptic WW3-scenario that has been hanging in the air since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this article argues for the possibility – and necessity – of an affirmative posthumanist-materialist mapping of hope. Embedded in the Deleuzoguattarian-Braidottian (see Deleuze and Guattari 2005 [1980]; Braidotti 2011 [1994]) methodology of critical cartography, and infused with critical posthumanist, new materialist, and queer theoretical (...) perspectives, this cartography of hope is sketched out against two permacrisis-infused positionalities: nostalgic humanism and tragic (post-)humanism. Forced to navigate between these two extremes, the critical cartography of hope presented here explores hope in numerous historico-philosophical (re-)configurations: from the premodern ‘hope-as-all-too-human’, to a more politicised early modern ‘hope-as-(politically-)human’ – representing hope’s first paradigm shift (politicisation), and from a four decades-long neoliberal redrawing of hope as ‘no-more-hope’ – hope’s second shift (depoliticisation) – to a critical (new) materialist plea to de-anthropocentrise and re-politicise hope – hope’s third and final post-Anthropocenic shift (re-politicisation). By mapping these (re-)configurations of hope, a philosophical plea is made for hope as a material(ist) praxis that can help us better understand – and counter – these extractive late capitalist, neoliberal more-than-human crisis times. (shrink)

Don Isaac Abravanel was one of the main leaders of medieval Spanish Jewry. This work presents a systematic exposition of Abravanel's defence of Judaism, analyzing and evaluating his views on the basic issues of medieval philosophy and theology.

The focus of this paper lies in the unconscious solidification of capitalist ideology through Lacanian understanding of subjectivity. The analysis intervenes in the ideological fantasy and its inherent antagonisms in order to analyse the way capitalist ideology strives to fill or repress these ruptures in the socio-symbolic edifice. It points to the mode of proliferation of certain objects, which the fantasy puts in the position where they can function as objects of desire, covering the cracks in the socio-symbolic order by (...) filling their own lack. Furthermore, I focus on the establishment and signification of meaning within the capitalist matrix as well as its dialectical overlap with the objects proliferated by the socio-economic system in question. Such simultaneous fusion of lack and excess creates ideological enjoyment and solidifies capitalist ideology in the subject’s fantasy construction. Here lies the strength of capitalist ideology and its appropriation of even some social phenomena into consumerist categories. It is therefore vital to understand how ideology manages to fix its core of enjoyment through a dialectical overlap of meaning and objects to produce a totalized experience of reality. In itself, this already points to the much neglected Lacanian discourse of the Capitalist, revealing how the daily reality of subjects is driven by unconscious fantasy in its dogmatic ideological circle. It also hints to the homology between Lacan's surplus- jouissance and Marx's surplus-value. (shrink)

At times of crisis, existing institutional arrangements of societies are thrown into question. Crises that occur in multiple societies simultaneously present rare opportunities for comparative empirical analysis. Social theory can reveal the framing conditions of the responses to crises and the sources of variations between them. This paper compares the immediate responses of the Australian, UK and US governments to the global COVID-19 pandemic, particularly with regard to financing lockdowns, and points out significant differences between the three approaches. Drawing (...) on Polanyi’s method of institutional analysis, we compare the responses of these same national groups to an earlier crisis, the Japanese prisoner of war camps during the Second World War, to show similar patterns of integration recurring eight decades apart. This analysis shows that aspects of moral economies that are not usually apparent can become pronounced during crises, and points to the importance of enduring social imaginaries. (shrink)

This article explores the discourse-conceptual linkages between ‘Brexit’ and ‘crisis’ in European news media reporting about the UK referendum on leaving the European Union of 23 June 2016. The study examines media discourse about the Brexit vote in Austria, Germany, Poland and Sweden at the transformative moment in between the pre/after vote period. The conceptually-oriented critical discourse analysis shows how Brexit was not only constructed as an imaginary or a future crisis but also how its mediated visions were (...) made real by recontextualising elements of various past social/political/economic crises. As is shown, such a strategy of discursively amalgamating the real and the imaginary, as well as the experienced/past and the expected/future, often allowed constructing Brexit as one of the most significant, critical occurrences of post-War Europe. Through the analysis, the article aims to show how wide and diverse the importance of ‘Brexit as crisis’ has been for European news media discourse. It also emphasises that while in the UK itself – including huge part of the UK traditional media – the critical nature of Brexit was often strategically downplayed, the wider European discourse would see it as a multifaceted ‘crisis’ of huge significance to both the present and the future of the EU, wider Europe and the world. (shrink)

Phil Powrie _French Cinema in the 1980s: Nostalgia and the Crisis of Masculinity_ Oxford University Press, 1997 ISBN 0-10-871119-0 (pbk) 203 pp.

Crisis jargon has become endemic in modernity. Whether in radical or in affirmative versions, the idea that ‘crisis’ offers ‘opportunity’, in accordance with the meaning of crisis as ‘decision’, is widespread. This paper questions the relationship between modernity and crisis, first by highlighting the ways in which modernity itself has been cast as ‘crisis’: first as crisis of tradition, then as crisis of modernity itself. The main part of this paper then consists of (...) a reading of modernity-as-crisis inspired by Walter Benjamin, most notably by his Passagen-Werk. It consists of an attempt to consider ‘crisis’ as what Benjamin calls a ‘wish image’, an image that contains hidden utopian ideals. In invoking ‘crisis’, I argue, a conception of modernity as shock, raised to the level of the collective, becomes apparent. Crisis jargon thereby remains wedded to what Benjamin calls a mythical conception of history. The paper ends with a discussion of the political consequences that follow from this that are grounded in the relation between messianism and profane politics in Benjamin. (shrink)

This is an interesting group to look at, according to Crocker, because French Enlightenment thinkers straddled two vastly different time periods.

This paper concerns the character of argumentation in inner dialogue, i.e. dialogue that an individual keeps to herself in her own mind. The problem of inner dialogue research is the methodological difficulty connected with its externalization. In the text, the activity of crisis diary-writing is suggested as a way of naturally externalizing inner decision-making. By adopting a pragma-dialectic approach to argumentation, the text attempts to characterize crisis diary-writing as an argumentative activity type. The argumentative characterization of crisis (...) diary-writing involves identifying the institutional point and implemented genre as well as distinguishing the empirical counterparts of the four stages of critical discussion. For illustration, the paper draws its examples from Anne Frank’s Diary. As a result of the characterization achieved in the paper, it is concluded that crisis diary-writing is a conventionalized deliberative activity type preconditioned by implicit norms governing the conduct of argumentation. (shrink)

What is to be learned from the chaotic downfall of the Weimar Republic and the erosion of European liberal statehood in the interwar period vis-a-vis the ongoing European crisis? This book analyses and explains the recurrent emergence of crises in European societies. It asks how previous crises can inform our understanding of the present crisis. The particular perspective advanced is that these crises not only are economic and social crises, but must also be understood as crises of public (...) power, order and authority. In other words, it argues that substantial challenges to the functional and normative setup of democracy and the rule of law were central to the emergence and the unfolding of these crises. The book draws on and adds to the rich ’crises literature’ developed within the critical theory tradition to outline a conceptual framework for understanding what societal crises are. The central idea is that societal crises represent a discrepancy between the unfolding of social processes and the institutional frameworks that have been established to normatively stabilize such processes. The crises at issue emerged in periods characterized by strong social, economic and technological transformations as well as situations of political upheaval. As such, the crises represented moments where the existing functional and normative grid of society, as embodied in notions of public order and authority, were severely challenged and in many instances undermined. Seen in this perspective, the book reconstructs how crises unfolded, how they were experienced, and what kind of responses the specific crises in question provoked. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: European Crises of Public Power: From Weimar until Today, Poul F. Kjaer & Niklas Olsen / Part I: Semantics, Notions and Narratives of Societal Crisis / 1. What Time Frame Makes Sense for Thinking About Crises?, David Runciman / 2. The Stakes of Crises, Janet Roitman / Part II: Weimar and the Interwar Period: Ideologies of Anti-Modernism and Liberalism / 3. The Crisis of Modernity – Modernity as Crisis: Towards a Typology of Crisis Discourses in Interwar East Central Europe and Beyond, Balázs Trencsényi / 4. European Legitimacy Crisis – Weimar and Today: Rational and Theocratic Authority in the Schmitt-Strauss Exchange, John P. McCormick / 5. Crisis and the Consumer: Reconstructions of Liberalism in Twentieth Century Political Thought , Niklas Olsen / Part III: The Causes of Crises: From Corporatism to Governance / 6. The Constitutionalization of Labour Law and the Crisis of National Democracy , Chris Thornhill / 7. The Crisis in Labour Law: From Weimar to Austerity Ruth Dukes / 8. From the Crisis of Corporatism to the Crisis of Governance, Poul F. Kjaer / Part IV: The Euro and the Crisis of Law and Democracy / 9. What is left of the European Economic Constitution II? From Pyrrhic Victory to Cannae Defeat Christian Joerges / 10. Reflections on Europe’s “Rule of Law Crisis”, Jan-Werner Müller. 11. Democracy under Siege: The Decay of Constitutionalisation and the Crisis of Public Law and Public Opinion, Hauke Brunkhorst/ Part V: The Consequences of Crises and the Future of Europe / 12. Crises and Extra-Legality: From Above and From Below, William E. Scheuermann / 13. “We could all go Down the Road of Lebanon” – Crisis Thinking on the Anti-Muslim Far Right, Mikkel Thorup / 14. Conclusions and Perspectives: The Re-Constitution of Europe, Poul F. Kjaer & Niklas Olsen Index . (shrink)

This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control (...) forms of legitimation to the rule of law. Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism. (shrink)

My paper considers the role of wonder and admiration in times of crisis. I argue that wonder should be understood in René Descartes’ (1649/1989) sense, as a response to something unfamiliar that is based on the object, rather than our judgements about it. In contrast, in admiration, we must judge the objects as admirable, that they have some valuable traits. In ordinary times, it may be immoral acts that stand out as unfamiliar and so provoke wonder. However, I will (...) focus on the importance of wonder in times of crisis, to recognise the unfamiliar, when many or most are treating the immoral as normal, as Hannah Arendt (2003) describes it. Then admiration is the response that can enable us to take the unfamiliar as valuable moral exemplars and to emulate them. Nevertheless, I will argue, contra Linda Zagzebski (2015) that we can admire a person, action, or character trait without necessarily being motivated to emulate them. Also, I contend that we can have ambivalent feelings mixed with our admiration and still be moved to emulate others. The complexity of the relation between these three emotions and attitudes—wonder, admiration, and emulation—means that while they can contribute to resistance to immorality in times of crisis, they are untrustworthy in myriad ways. (shrink)

This paper traces the history of accelerationism as a political philosophy, from its inception at Warwick University to its deployment by avowed white supremacists. Probing its philosophical commitment to a both a deterministic philosophy of history and a sacrificial logic of politics, I argue that even the initial elaborations of (non-race-based) accelerationism contained the seed of its development into violent white supremacy. The conclusion assesses a politics of deceleration as a strategy for countering accelerationism, ultimately arguing for the superiority of (...) a Benjaminian politics of the emergency brake. (shrink)