La originalidad de Blanchot en el ámbito de las críticas deconstructivas al tema de la propiedad/impropiedad de la muerte en la obra de Heidegger no ha recibido demasiada atención de los comentaristas. A tal fin, examino la noción de muerte en la obra de R. M. Rilke, para después recorrer el abordaje que de esta temática realizó Blanchot en El espacio literario . Luego, relevando las líneas de fuerza de la lectura blanchotiana, se pondrá de manifiesto hasta qué punto el (...) pensamiento de Rilke puede constituir una herramienta para deconstruir cierto resto de subjetividad moderna en la noción de muerte heideggeriana. (shrink)

Theological ethics, particularly Christian theological ethics, is very well-equipped both to treat the interests and needs of future generations as a genuine and pressing concern – and also to evade some of the questions they pose about temporality, by appealing to judgement beyond history. Phenomenological approaches to the question of future generations are important as a counterbalance to this tendency in theological ethics, insofar as they force us to remain with, and wrestle with, the relation to future persons as future. (...) In this article I show that drawing on phenomenological approaches, in order to attend to temporality, produces an account of justice and responsibility to future generations that is more adequate theologically, as well as ethically. Attending to how the other, the future and the imperative of justice interrelate yields an approach to theological ethics that does not need to assume for the ethicist the God’s-eye view – the view from outside time, narrative or interpersonal encounter – and that is thus able to grapple with the core questions raised by bringing future generations into ethics. (shrink)

The question of responsibility to future generations is a distinctively modern ethical problem, which exposes the limits of many modern ethical frameworks. I argue for the theological importance of this ‘limit’, and of the question of responsibility to future generations, drawing on the ultimate/penultimate conceptuality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. Responsibility to future generations calls for detailed attention to a given situation, in the light of its openness to a future not within our control; and action for the sake of future (...) generations requires a suspension of one’s own judgement on that action. Christian ethics can take responsibility to future generations seriously while (and indeed through) maintaining a critique of attempts to orient action towards an innerworldly future utopia. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the philosophical and theological issues that arise when a ‘religious’ process of decision-making, which is normally taken to require specific theological commitments both for its successful use and for its coherent explanation, is transferred into ‘secular’ contexts in which such theological commitments are not shared. Using the example of Quaker Business Method, we show how such a move provokes new theological questions, as well as questions for management studies.

Does feminist theology have a future? This article explores the practices and methods of feminist theology as inherently future-oriented, attentive to the other and hence destabilizing of fixed identities-including fixed feminist or theological identities. I propose that the concern of third-wave feminism with the ways in which images of women and femininity are produced, reproduced and distributed can be taken up in feminist theology through sustained attention to how theology is done. This can help to overcome the tension between the (...) perceived need for feminist theology to move on and the continued widespread resistance to, or ignorance of, its basic ideas. I describe this as an examination of the spiritualities of feminist theology-and hence as a contribution to theologies of the Holy Spirit. (shrink)

Food - what we eat, how much we eat, how it is produced and prepared, and its cultural and ecological significance- is an increasingly significant topic not only for scholars but for all of us. Theology on the Menu is the first systematic and historical assessment of Christian attitudes to food and its role in shaping Christian identity. David Grumett and Rachel Muers unfold a fascinating history of feasting and fasting, food regulations and resistance to regulation, the symbolism attached (...) to particular foods, the relationship between diet and doctrine, and how food has shaped inter-religious encounters. Everyone interested in Christian approaches to food and diet or seeking to understand how theology can engage fruitfully with everyday life will find this book a stimulus and an inspiration. (shrink)

"Williams's masterful translation satisfies (at last!) a long-standing need. There are lots of good translations of Augustine's great work, but until now we have been forced to choose between those that strive to replicate in English something of the majesty and beauty of Augustine's Latin style and those that opt instead to convey the careful precision of his philosophical terminology and argumentation. Finally, Williams has succeeded in capturing both sides of Augustine's mind in a richly evocative, impeccably reliable, elegantly readable (...) presentation of one of the most impressive achievements in Western thought--Augustine's Confessions." --Scott MacDonald, Professor of Philosophy and Norma K. Regan Professor in Christian Studies, Cornell University. (shrink)

This essay uses the motif of ‘the woman as answer’ in Barth and von Balthasar to explore aspects of their accounts of sexual difference in relation to ontological and trinitarian difference. In both cases the motif is shown to be problematic for reasons which become apparent in christology. Barth's characterisation of woman as the ‘sufficient answer’ to the prior ‘question’ posed by man indicates a tendency towards the elision of difference in his anthropology, which is reflected in the nonsexuality of (...) Christ ‐ the ‘true Man’ Ð and in aspects of his trinitarian theology. Von Balthasar's ‘double answer’ of woman to man moves beyond viewing sexual difference as the locus of man's self‐completion, but the overdetermination of ‘woman’ in his mariology undermines this. The pneumatology of von Balthasar's ‘Spiritus Creator’ suggests possibilities for the development of a christologically‐focused anthropology which maintains difference. (shrink)

The connections Stanley Hauerwas draws between his theological work and the craft of bricklaying, which he learned from his father, invites comparison with Seamus Heaney's depiction of poetry as digging. Both men understand their task of writing as hard and precise labour that pays close attention to given materials and that honours the complexities of the past. I consider how the characterisation of theology as bricklaying‐like work, integral to Hauerwas’ professional and personal self‐understanding, may shape his theological approaches and priorities, (...) and ask how this might contrast with other possible approaches formed from other historical contexts. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 4, Page 657-680, December 2021.

This essay argues for the importance and interest, within and beyond theological ethics, of the ethical questions faced by professionals who are called on to be producers of statistics (herein “stats”) for management purposes. Truth-telling, in the context of demands for stats, cannot be evaluated at the level of the individual statement or utterance, nor through an ethical framework primarily focused on the correspondence between thought and speech. Reflection on stats production forces us to treat truth-telling as contextual and political, (...) and to engage with the idea that the capacity to tell the truth is learned or acquired in communities, societies and institutions. I develop this engagement through a rereading of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on “telling the truth” and Michel Foucault on parrhēsia, identifying and exploring the relationship between the responsible use of stats and the “cynical” protest against them. (shrink)

The Moral Nexus develops and defends a new interpretation of morality—namely, as a set of requirements that connect agents normatively to other persons in a nexus of moral relations. According to this relational interpretation, moral demands are directed to other individuals, who have claims that the agent comply with these demands. Interpersonal morality, so conceived, is the domain of what we owe to each other, insofar as we are each persons with equal moral standing. The book offers an interpretative argument (...) for the relational approach. Specifically, it highlights neglected advantages of this way of understanding the moral domain; explores important theoretical and practical presuppositions of relational moral duties; and considers the normative implications of understanding morality in relational terms. The book features a novel defense of the relational approach to morality, which emphasizes the special significance that moral requirements have, both for agents who are deliberating about what to do and for those who stand to be affected by their actions. The book argues that relational moral requirements can be understood to link us to all individuals whose interests render them vulnerable to our agency, regardless of whether they stand in any prior relationship to us. It also offers fresh accounts of some of the moral phenomena that have seemed to resist treatment in relational terms, showing that the relational interpretation is a viable framework for understanding our specific moral obligations to other people. (shrink)

We present readings, by Jewish, Christian and Muslim women scholars, of `difficult' texts from three scriptural traditions, viz. Ephesians 5.21-33, Sura' 4.32-35 and Genesis 30.1-26. All three texts concern marriage and point in different ways to the erasure of women's significance or agency, and we ask what happens when women read such texts as scripture. Our readings were developed in conversation with one another, following the developing practice of `Scriptural Reasoning', and they suggest ways in which the texts and their (...) feminist readers can `correct' and challenge each other. We propose that feminist biblical hermeneutics and inter-traditional scriptural reasoning can be mutually informative, with both practices seeking to take embodied difference seriously and to allow unresolved critical questions to arise in reading. (shrink)

This book provides a collection of sources, many of them fragmentary and previously scattered and hard to access, for the development of Peripatetic philosophy in the later Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire. It also supplies the background against which the first commentator on Aristotle from whom extensive material survives, Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200), developed his interpretations which continue to be influential even today. Many of the passages are here translated into English for the first time, (...) including the whole of the summary of Peripatetic ethics attributed to 'Arius Didymus'. (shrink)

We should approach this topic with great fear and respect. It is not a merely “academic” issue. Human rights are trampled upon in the East as in the West, in the North as in the South of our planet. Granting the part of human greed and sheer evil in this universal transgression, could it not also be that Human Rights are not observed because in their present form they do not represent a universal symbol powerful enough to elicit understanding and (...) agreement? (shrink)

Chemical structures are among the trademarks of our profession, as surely chemical as flasks, beakers and distillation columns. When someone sees one of us busily scribbling formulas or structures, he or she has no trouble identifying a chemist. Yet these familiar objects, which accompany our work from start to end, from the initial doodlings (Fig. I) to the final polished artwork in a publication (Fig. II), are deceptively simple. They raise interesting and difficult questions about representation. It is the intent (...) of this article to reflect upon molecular graphics. (shrink)

Ethics and Decision Making in Counseling and Psychotherapy has a distinct and timely focus on counseling as a profession. Chapters address the mental health professions, values in counseling, decision making, ethical principles, ethical standards, technology, ethical climate, and office/administrative practices. The early chapters present a foundation for ethical practice of the profession and provides solid building blocks to the more advanced perspectives in later chapters. Chapters on specialty practice are lively and contemporary overviews of these practice areas in counseling that (...) reflect more recent trends to increased differentiation of these areas of practice. Each specialty has its own chapter to allow for an extended discussion of the unique aspects of the field that provide clarity to understanding the particular ethical issues and standards that apply in each specialty. The specialty areas recognized by CACREP are included: mental health counseling; school counseling; couple, marital, and family counseling; rehabilitation counseling; addictions counseling; career counseling; and group counseling. This book is broad in its coverage of the most practiced specialties in mental health practice, and provides an efficient and effective overview of the broad scope of particular areas addressed in counseling. (shrink)

How do we explain violence? What is so significant of modern forms of violence that it has produced such large-scale destruction in its wake? This volume builds on the political philosophy of Wittgenstein, his notions of peace and violence, to explore how violence in any form is contained within culturally or ideologically formed institutions. Drawing on Wittgenstein's work on language, it explores the link between language and violence, everydayness, culture. It examines everyday instances of micro-violence which we sometimes forget to (...) recall. This book puts forth the claim that any theory of violence will have to touch upon the many myriad - both micro and macro -- political, social and cultural interactions that make up the human condition. The author further comments on the unseen ways in which violence has been instrumentalized in modern history's many stages to create a spectacle of power so as to reinforce authority. The volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of peace and conflict studies, political philosophy, linguistics and modern history. (shrink)

I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche's perspectivism for notions of truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates an epistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivism's claim that every view is only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivist's ability to offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsche's arguments for perspectivism depend on “internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but also within the standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons (...) allow a perspectivist argument against dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzsche also offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matter of meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflict with common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsche's position is similar to Putnam's recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage. (shrink)

Aesthetics in philosophy of mathematics is too narrowly construed. Beauty is not the only feature in mathematics that is arguably aesthetic. While not the highest aesthetic value, being interesting is a sine qua non for publishability. Of the many ways to be interesting, being explanatory has recently been discussed. The motivational power of what is interesting is important for both directing research and stimulating education. The scientific satisfaction of curiosity and the artistic desire for beautiful results are complementary but both (...) aesthetic. (shrink)

Karl Raimund Poppers (1902-1994) Hauptwerk, die Logik der Forschung (1934), gilt als Grundlagenwerk des kritischen Rationalismus. Der kritische Rationalismus zeigt, warum unser Wissen fehlbar ist und versteht den Erkenntnisfortschritt als Resultat von Hypothesenbildung und -widerlegung. Der Sammelband orientiert sich an der Gliederung der Logik der Forschung. Seine Beiträge kommentieren die jeweiligen Themen nach aktueller Forschungslage.

It is tempting to think that all of normativity, such as our reasons for action, what we ought to do, and the attitudes that it is fitting for us to have, derives from what is valuable. But value-first approaches to normativity have fallen out of favour as the virtues of reasons- and fittingness-first approaches to normativity have become clear. On these views, value is not explanatorily prior to reasons and fit; rather the value of things is understood in terms of (...) the pro-attitudes it is fitting to have, or that we have reasons to have, towards these things. The value-first accounts of reasons and fit that have been proposed have been direct accounts of reasons and fit. On these views, the fittingness of an attitude is explained in terms of the value of having it or the value of the object of that attitude. This chapter details and surveys these problems, explaining which are yet to be overcome, and explaining which problems direct value-first accounts can overcome. This chapter then explores the prospects of an indirect value-first account of reasons and fit. It argues that it avoids the problems that direct value-first accounts face and may be as explanatorily powerful as fittingness- and reasons-first accounts of value and normativity more generally. (shrink)

Is the essay literature or philosophy? A form of art or a form of knowledge? The contemporary essay is torn between its belletrist ancestry and its claim to philosophical legitimacy. The Spanish philosopher Eduardo Nicol captured the genre's uncertain status when he dubbed it “almost literature and almost philosophy” (Nicol 1961:207). The problem is hardly a new one. It goes back to what Plato called the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, and more recently to the German Romantic theorist, Friedrich (...) Schlegel, who called for a mode of criticism which would be at once philosophical and poetic. But today, when the status of critical discourse is up for grabs, reflecting the crisis of knowledge in the universities, the question of the essay takes on a new urgency. Now the predominant form of writing in the human sciences, it cannot avoid the challenge to define itself according to the prevailing standards of scientific knowledge and method. (shrink)

The book is written for anyone seriously interested in Plato's thought and in the history of literary theory or of rhetoric. No knowledge of Greek is required. The focus of this account is on how the resources both of persuasive myth and of formal argument, for all that Plato sets them in strong contrast, nevertheless complement and reinforce each other in his philosophy.

Self-deception raises complex questions about the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. In this book, Alfred Mele addresses four of the most critical of these questions: What is it to deceive oneself? How do we deceive ourselves? Why do we deceive ourselves? Is self-deception really possible? -/- Drawing on cutting-edge empirical research on everyday reasoning and biases, Mele takes issue with commonplace attempts to equate the processes of self-deception with those of stereotypical interpersonal deception. Such attempts, (...) he demonstrates, are fundamentally misguided, particularly in the assumption that self-deception is intentional. In their place, Mele proposes a compelling, empirically informed account of the motivational causes of biased beliefs. At the heart of this theory is an appreciation of how emotion and motivation may, without our knowing it, bias our assessment of evidence for beliefs. Highlighting motivation and emotion, Mele develops a pair of approaches for explaining the two forms of self-deception: the "straight" form, in which we believe what we want to be true, and the "twisted" form, in which we believe what we wish to be false. -/- Underlying Mele's work is an abiding interest in understanding and explaining the behavior of real human beings. The result is a comprehensive, elegant, empirically grounded theory of everyday self-deception that should engage philosophers and social scientists alike. (shrink)