Intended both as an introduction to the thought of the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito and as a mapping of current biopolitical practice, this essay traces the contributions and the limits of recent Italian contributions to the discussion of biopolitics. The essay offers a summary of Esposito's insight into the relation of community and immunity and compares his thinking to other philosophers who take immunity as their object of study . Campbell goes on to read Esposito's privileging of bios in (...) the light of Giorgio Agamben's emphasis on zōē, while making reference as well to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's understanding of biopower. He concludes by arguing that the stakes of Esposito's analysis for an affirmative biopolitics concern fundamentally the nature of community and its opening to all life forms as bios. (shrink)

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossibile to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life.Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics---including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk---have been (...) substansively influenced by Heidegger's thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault, Freud, and Gilles Deleuze. Throughout Improper Life, Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmation techne not thought through thanatos but rather through bios. (shrink)

This anthology collects the texts that defined the concept of biopolitics, which has become so significant throughout the humanities and social sciences today. The far-reaching influence of the biopolitical—the relation of politics to life, or the state to the body—is not surprising given its centrality to matters such as healthcare, abortion, immigration, and the global distribution of essential medicines and medical technologies. Michel Foucault gave new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics" in his 1976 essay "Right of Death and (...) Power over Life." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this Reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought. _Contributors_. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek. (shrink)

In the following excerpt from Bios, Esposito sketches the template of immunity as a response to what he calls a "hermeneutic block" in Foucault's notion of biopolitics. After singling out those moments of greatest tension in Foucault's reading of biopolitics especially as it relates to Nazi thanatopolitics, Esposito sets out in detail the most important features of what he calls the immunization paradigm. Consisting of three dispositifs, namely sovereignty, property, and liberty, the immunitary paradigm has for Esposito a decisively modern (...) inflection. Indeed modern biopolitics cannot be thought apart from the mode by which communities immunize or protect themselves. (shrink)

"In techne of giving, Timothy Campbell elaborates a notion of generosity as way of responding to contemporary biopower. Reading films from Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, he both updates their political lexicon while adopting them as models able to push back against neoliberal forms of gift-giving"--.

This research empirically investigated the CSR practices of 84 Botswana and Malawi organizations. The findings revealed that the extent and type of CSR practices in these countries did not significantly differ from that proposed by a U. S. model of CSR, nor did they significantly differ between Botswana and Malawi. There were, however, differences between the sampled organizations that clustered into a stakeholder perspective and traditional capitalist model groups. In the latter group, the board of directors, owners, and shareholders were (...) important stakeholders that appeared to be restricting extended stakeholder CSR activities in the Malawi and Botswana organizations. The sampled managers recognized the economic benefits of CSR practices and were not at odds with social objectives. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory. Bíos -his first book to be translated into English-builds on two decades of highly regarded thought, including his thesis that the modern individual-with all of its civil and political rights as well as its moral powers-is an attempt to attain immunity from the contagion of the extraindividual, namely, the community. In Bíos, Esposito applies such a paradigm of immunization to the analysis of the radical (...) transformation of the political into biopolitics. Bíos discusses the origins and meanings of biopolitical discourse, demonstrates why none of the categories of modern political thought is useful for completely grasping the essence of biopolitics, and reconstructs the negative biopolitical core of Nazism. Esposito suggests that the best contemporary response to the current deadly version of biopolitics is to understand what could make up the elements of a positive biopolitics-a politics of life rather than a politics of mastery and negation of life. In his introduction, Timothy Campbell situates Esposito’s arguments within American and European thinking on biopolitics. A comprehensive, illuminating, and highly original treatment of a critically important topic, Bíos introduces an English-reading public to a philosophy that will critically impact such wide-ranging current debates as stem cell research, euthanasia, and the war on terrorism. Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples. His books include Categorie dell impolitico, Nove pensieri sulla politica, Communitas: orgine e destino della comunità, and Immunitas: protezione e negazione della vita. Timothy Campbell is associate professor of Italian studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University and the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. (shrink)

No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of community: from American communitarianism to Habermas's ethic of communication to the French deconstruction of community in the work of Derrida and Nancy. Nevertheless, in none of these cases has the concept been examined from the perspective of community's original etymological meaning: _cum munus_. In _Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community_, Roberto Esposito does just that through an original counter-history of political philosophy that takes up not only (...) readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, but also by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. The result of his extraordinary conceptual and lexical analysis is a radical overturning of contemporary interpretations of community. Community isn't a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves. (shrink)

Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, is widely believed to have been the best moral philosopher in well over a century. The twenty new essays in this book were written in his honour and have all been inspired by his work - in particular, his work in an area of moral philosophy known as 'population ethics', which is concerned with moral issues raised by causing people to exist. Until Parfit began writing about these issues in the 1970s, there was almost (...) no discussion of them in the entire history of philosophy. But his monumental book 'Reasons and Persons' (1984) revealed that population ethics abounds in deep and intractable problems and paradoxes that not only challenge all the major moral theories but also threaten to undermine many important common-sense moral beliefs. (shrink)

In this survey of Roberto Esposito's thought, Bonito Oliva reflects upon the stakes of reading biopolitics in an immunitary key. After sketching the features of a "fundamental crisis in the sense of coexistence," the author, moving from ancient to modern philosophy, emphasizes the centrality of fear in Esposito's understanding of the origins of community. The importance of fear explains in part the intrinsic relation community has to immunity for Esposito, in which immunity is figured primarily as a negative form of (...) community. In the essay's closing pages, the author shows how deeply immunity informs Esposito's understanding of contemporary biopolitics. She goes on to note Esposito's indebtedness to Hegel, especially with regard to the negative, and echoes Esposito's and Deleuze's own calls for the construction of "an immanent norm of life.". (shrink)

In the following excerpt from Bios, Esposito sketches the template of immunity as a response to what he calls a "hermeneutic block" in Foucault's notion of biopolitics. After singling out those moments of greatest tension in Foucault's reading of biopolitics especially as it relates to Nazi thanatopolitics, Esposito sets out in detail the most important features of what he calls the immunization paradigm. Consisting of three dispositifs, namely sovereignty, property, and liberty, the immunitary paradigm has for Esposito a decisively modern (...) inflection. Indeed modern biopolitics cannot be thought apart from the mode by which communities immunize or protect themselves. (shrink)

“Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about. (And what a fuss it has been: philosophers have debated this question for over two millenia, and just about every major philosopher has had something to say about it.) Most philosophers suppose that the concept of free will is very (...) closely connected to the concept of moral responsibility. Acting with free will, on such views, is just to satisfy the metaphysical requirement on being responsible for one's action. (Clearly, there will also be epistemic conditions on responsibility as well, such as being aware—or failing that, being culpably unaware—of relevant alternatives to one's action and of the alternatives' moral significance.) But the significance of free will is not exhausted by its connection to moral responsibility. Free will also appears to be a condition on desert for one's accomplishments (why sustained effort and creative work are praiseworthy); on the autonomy and dignity of persons; and on the value we accord to love and friendship. (See Kane 1996, 81ff. and Clarke 2003, Ch.1.). (shrink)

How does Frege's distinction between sense and reference apply to terms whose reference depends on context? The stakes are high; a good account of the sense of 'I' might constitute an analysis of self-consciousness. Frege's own remarks on this matter are notoriously unsatisfactory. In "Past, Space, and Self", John Campbell does better. The depth and freshness of his investigations are outstanding. He uncovers a wide variety of evidence, both logical and psychological, to which any account must do justice.

Learning about the causes and effects of human-induced climate change is an essential aspect of contemporary environmental education (EE). However, it is increasingly recognized that the familiar ‘information dump delivery mode’ (as Timothy Morton calls it), through which new facts about ecological destruction are being constantly communicated, often contributes to anxiety, cognitive exhaustion, and can ultimately lead to hopelessness and paralysis in the face of ecological issues. In this article, I explore several pathways to approach EE, beyond the presentation (...) and transmission of ecological facts. I position my conceptual discussion around my own teaching experiences speaking about climate change with undergraduate students across several Education classes through 2019 to 2021. I situate these reflections within the current discourse on education and teaching in/for the Anthropocene. Throughout this discussion, I locate various ways in which much EE fails to contribute to student’s agency and empowerment by consistently reducing complex ecological phenomena to a set of problems, mainly economic/technological, to be fixed by technocracy. I propose that a contemplative–existential perspective to EE is capable of responding to these reductions, most basically by providing opportunities and practices for students to process their grief and other emotions through recognizing the Anthropocene as an inescapable reality, but also a reality that cannot be determinately imagined or predicted. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, with an intro. and trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Vagueness provides the first comprehensive examination of a topic of increasing importance in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic and language. Timothy Williamson traces the history of this philosophical problem from discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece to modern formal approaches such as fuzzy logic. He illustrates the problems with views which have taken the position that standard logic and formal semantics do not apply to vague language, and defends the controversial realistic view that vagueness is a (...) kind of ignorance--that there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we cannot know which one it is. (shrink)

The criticism that voluntary codes of conduct are ineffective can be met by giving greater centrality to human rights in such codes. Provided the human rights obligations of multinational corporations are interpreted as moral obligations specifically tailored to the situation of multinational corporations, this could serve to bring powerful moral force to bear on MNCs and could provide a legitimating basis for NGO monitoring and persuasion. Approached in this way the human rights obligations of MNCs can be taken to include (...) support for political as well as economic rights. This will go some way towards filling the regulatory gap created by the difficulty of controlling the activities of corporations operating globally. However, such a proposal will require a measure of ‘meta-regulation’ whereby the operations of MNCs are legally required to be sufficiently transparent to create the conditions for effective external moral scrutiny. (shrink)

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...) certain counterfactuals. The truth of deterministic laws is `modally fragile' on the standard semantics for counterfactuals: if determinism is true and you were to do otherwise, the laws would be different. We provide two ways of avoiding this problem: 1) supplement the standard semantics for counterfactuals with impossible worlds, or 2) introduce rigid designators into the description of problematic decision situations. We argue that both of these approaches are well-motivated and can be readily incorporated into Lewisian Causal Decision Theory. (shrink)

The paper clarifies and defends the orthodox view that counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents are vacuously true against recent criticisms. It argues that apparent counterexamples to orthodoxy result from uncritical reliance on a fallible heuristic used in the processing of conditionals. A comparison is developed between such counterpossibles and vacuously true universal generalizations.

William James has long been recognized as a central figure in the American philosophic tradition, and his ideas continue to play a significant role in contemporary thinking. Yet there has never been a comprehensive exploration of the thought of this seminal philosopher and psychologist. In Experiencing William James, renowned scholar James Campbell provides the fuller and more complete analysis that James scholarship has long needed. Commentators typically address only pieces of James's thought or aspects of his vision, often in (...) an attempt to make the task of understanding James seem easier than it is or else to dismiss him as a philosophically unprepared if well-meaning amateur. The isolated nature of these examinations, too often divorced from the original contexts, badly hinders and even distorts their conclusions. Focusing on James's own ideas rather than his critiques of others, and drawing from a wealth of scholarship that includes the completed editions of his writings and correspondence, Experiencing William James provides an invaluable, comprehensive view of James as he participates in and advances the pragmatic spirit that is at the core of American philosophy. Taking the whole of the man's thinking into account, this book offers the richest perspective so far on this great but not fully comprehended intellectual. (shrink)

Humean arguments from evil are some of the most powerful arguments against Theism. They take as their data what we know about good and evil. And they argue that some rival to Theism better explains, or otherwise predicts, that data than Theism. However, this paper argues that there are many problems with various methods for defending Humean arguments. I consider Philo’s original strategy; modern strategies in terms of epistemic probability; phenomenological strategies; and strategies that appeal to scientific and metaphysical explanations. (...) None of these methods have been sufficiently developed to provide a clear and distinctive defense of Humean arguments. Defenders of Humean arguments need to spend more time on the underlying methodology of their arguments. (shrink)

The author argues that all forms of life are interconnected and that no being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, nor does "nature" exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what the author calls the ecological thought. He investigates the philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of this interconnectedness.

At any given time, a subject has a multiplicity of conscious experiences. A subject might simultaneously have visual experiences of a red book and a green tree, auditory experiences of birds singing, bodily sensations of a faint hunger and a sharp pain in the shoulder, the emotional experience of a certain melancholy, while having a stream of conscious thoughts about the nature of reality. These experiences are distinct from each other: a subject could experience the red book without the singing (...) birds, and could experience the singing birds without the red book. But at the same time, the experiences seem to be tied together in a deep way. They seem to be unified, by being aspects of a single encompassing state of consciousness. (shrink)

When I take off my glasses, the world looks blurred. When I put them back on, it looks sharpedged. I do not think that the world really was blurred; I know that what changed was my relation to the distant physical objects ahead, not those objects themselves. I am more inclined to believe that the world really is and was sharp-edged. Is that belief any more reasonable than the belief that the world really is and was blurred? I see more (...) accurately with my glasses on than off, so visual appearances when they are on have some cognitive priority over visual appearances when they are off. If I must choose which kind of visual appearance to take at face value, I will choose the sharp-edged look. But what should I think when I see a mist, which looks very blurred however well I am seeing? Indeed, why choose to take any of the looks at face value? Why not regard all the choices as illegitimate projections of ways of seeing the world onto the world itself? (shrink)

Two opposing tendencies in the philosophy of language go by the names of ‘referentialism’ and ‘inferentialism’ respectively. In the crudest version of the contrast, the referentialist account of meaning gives centre stage to the referential semantics for a language, which is then used to explain the inference rules for the language, perhaps as those which preserve truth on that semantics (since a referential semantics for a language determines the truth-conditions of its sentences). By contrast, the inferentialist account of meaning gives (...) centre stage to the inference rules for the language, which are then used to explain its referential semantics, perhaps as the semantics on which the rules preserve truth. On pain of circularity, we cannot combine both directions of explanation. (shrink)

This paper discusses the nature and the status of inference to the best explanation. We outline the foundational role given IBE by its defenders and the arguments of critics who deny it any place at all ; argue that, on the two main conceptions of explanation, IBE cannot be a foundational inference rule ; sketch an account of IBE that makes it contextual and dependent on substantive empirical assumptions, much as simplicity seems to be ; show how that account avoids (...) the critics ' complaints and leaves IBE an important role ; and sketch how our account can clarify debates over IBE in arguments for scientific realism. (shrink)

This paper challenges the soundness of the two-dimensional conceivability argument against the derivation of phenomenal truths from physical truths in light of a hyperintensional, ground-theoretic regimentation of the ontology of consciousness. The regimentation demonstrates how ontological dependencies between truths about consciousness and about physics cannot be witnessed by epistemic constraints, when the latter are recorded by the conceivability—i.e., the epistemic possibility—thereof. Generalizations and other aspects of the philosophical significance of the hyperintensional regimentation are further examined.

The fundamental freedoms of speech, conscience, privacy, and religion are now an essential part of the fabric of contemporary society, set down in our most basic laws and regularly invoked in our political and cultural debates. These freedoms play a vital role in securing the spaces and opportunities within which people are able to pursue their own lives in their own ways. Independence of Mind takes this accepted thought a step further, by exploring the ways in which the fundamental freedoms (...) help us to achieve something even more profound, by enabling us to arrive at beliefs, convictions and voices of our own, so that we truly come to think, believe and speak for ourselves in the rich and various ways that the freedoms then protect. Privacy grants us the distance and refuge from others necessary to develop views of our own; freedom of speech calls on us to imagine ways of expressing ourselves that are both true to the views we have developed and innovative in their own right; freedom of conscience enables each of us to create a distinctive rational personality in which to embed the convictions that we wish to treat as non-negotiable; freedom of religion allows groups of us to endorse certain beliefs as articles of faith, free from the full demands of rational scrutiny. Much has been written about the political and legal implications of the fundamental freedoms and their entrenchment in bills of rights. This is the first book to undertake a comprehensive philosophical examination of their moral bases. It offers a penetrating analysis of what makes these particular freedoms matter to us in the ways that they do, and of the true significance of their entrenchment in law. (shrink)

Yet recent thinkers have expressed deep reservations about the concept and the term has become marginalized in the humanities and social sciences.Eschewing this ...

Previous research has suggested that bodily signals from internal organs are associated with diverse cortical and subcortical processes involved in sensory-motor functions, beyond homeostatic reflexes. For instance, a recent study demonstrated that the preparation and execution of voluntary actions, as well as its underlying neural activity, are coupled with the breathing cycle. In the current study, we investigated whether such breathing-action coupling is limited to voluntary motor action or whether it is also present for mental actions not involving any overt (...) bodily movement. To answer this question, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and respiratory signals while participants were conducting a voluntary action paradigm including self-initiated motor execution (ME), motor imagery (MI), and visual imagery (VI) tasks. We observed that the voluntary initiation of ME, MI, and VI are similarly coupled with the respiration phase. In addition, EEG analysis revealed the existence of readiness potential (RP) waveforms in all three tasks (i.e., ME, MI, VI), as well as a coupling between the RP amplitude and the respiratory phase. Our findings show that the voluntary initiation of both imagined and overt action is coupled with respiration, and further suggest that the breathing system is involved in preparatory processes of voluntary action by contributing to the temporal decision of when to initiate the action plan, regardless of whether this culminates in overt movements. -/- . (shrink)

Early practitioners of the social studies of science turned their attention away from questions of institutionalisation, which had tended to emphasize macrolevel explanations, and attended instead to microstudies of laboratory practice. The author is interested in re-investigating certain aspects of institution formation, notably the formation of scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines. He emphasises the manner in which science as cultural practice is imbricated with other forms of social, political, and even aesthetic practices. The author considers the following topics: the organic (...) physics of 1847; the innovative research program of Carl Ludwig as a model for institutionalising science-based medicine, optics, painting, and ideology in Germany, 1845-95; the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; and the introduction of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation into the practice of organic chemistry. (shrink)

This article endeavors to identify the strongest versions of the two primary arguments against epistemic scientific realism: the historical argument—generally dubbed “the pessimistic meta-induction”—and the argument from underdetermination. It is shown that, contrary to the literature, both can be understood as historically informed but logically validmodus tollensarguments. After specifying the question relevant to underdetermination and showing why empirical equivalence is unnecessary, two types of competitors to contemporary scientific theories are identified, both of which are informed by science itself. With the (...) content and structure of the two nonrealist arguments clarified, novel relations between them are uncovered, revealing the severity of their collective threat against epistemic realism and its “no-miracles” argument. The final section proposes, however, that the realist’s axiological tenet “science seeks truth” is not blocked. An attempt is made to indicate the promise for a nonepistemic, purely axiological scientific realism—here dubbed “Socratic scientific realism.”. (shrink)