This two-part article examines whether Sartre's final interviews, recorded in L'Espoir maintenant [ Hope Now ], indicate a final turn to belief through an overview of his engagement with the idea of God throughout his career. In Part 1 we examine Sartre's early atheism, but note the pervasive nature of secularised Christian metaphors and concepts in his religion of letters and the centrality of man's desire to be God in Being and Nothingness . His theoretical writings seek to refute the (...) idea of God, but in doing so God is paradoxically both absent and present. In Part 2 we assess his anti-theism and consider his final encounter with theism in L'Espoir maintenant, arguing that it is part of Sartre's long-term engagement with the idea of God. (shrink)

This essay produces a paradigmatic analysis of anti-Blackness from within the history and philosophy of biology in order to explore Frantz Fanon’s concept of ontological resistance. Through developing Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the Darwinian Imaginary alongside an Afropessimist paradigmatic analysis, the paper argues that scientific humanism’s claim that the Black is “the ostensible missing link between rational humans and irrational animals” (Wynter 2003: 266) is a form of metaphysical violence that the Black cannot ontologically resist. This heretical reading of three (...) canonical figures in Western bioscience—Carl Linnaeus, George Cuvier, and Charles Darwin—is an attempt to synthesize Wynter’s demonic ground and Wilderson’s grammatology in order to develop a Black anti-philosophy of science that thinks antagonistically about what it means to be “the missing link” in the chain of Human being. (shrink)

These two articles examine whether Sartre's final interviews, recorded in L'Espoir maintenant ( Hope Now ) indicate a final turn to God and religious belief through an overview of his engagement with the idea of God throughout his career. Part 1, published in Sartre Studies International 19, no. 1, examined Sartre's early atheism, but noted the pervasive nature of secularised Christian metaphors and concepts in his religion of letters and also the centrality of mankind's desire to be God in L'Etre (...) et le néant ( Being and Nothingness ). Sartre's theoretical writings sought to refute the idea of God, but in doing so, made God paradoxically both absent and present. Part 2 considers Sartre's anti-theism and its implications for his involvement with the idea of God before examining in detail his final encounter with theism as outlined in L'Espoir maintenant , arguing that it is part of Sartre's long-term engagement with the divine, but refuting the idea that he became a theist at the end of his life. (shrink)

Economic development and mass urbanization have unleashed unprecedented levels of land disputes in East Asia. In China and Vietnam especially, courts and other legal institutions struggle to find lasting solutions. It is against this background of legal failure that this book brings together leading scholars to understand how state agencies, land users and land developers imaginatively engage with each other to resolve disputes. Drawing on empirically rich case studies, contributors explore the limits of law and legal institutions in resolving land (...) disputes and reveal insights into how key actors in East Asia understand land disputes. Their studies reveal promising dispute resolution practices and point to the likely ways that states will deal with land disputes in the future. (shrink)

As conventionally understood, corruption relies on a set of universally agreed rules that determine what constitutes the appropriate allocation of organizational resources. This article explores whether rule-based approaches to corruption are applicable where business organizations, such as public private partnerships, and the public fundamentally disagree about what constitutes an appropriate allocation of resources. Drawing on empirical research about PPPs in Vietnam, this article compares how government, business organizations, and the public conceptualize the transfer of public assets into private ownership. It (...) argues that a public interest approach to corruption is needed where PPPs privatize public assets within the law, but against the express wishes of the public. (shrink)

On first reading Les Mots, it was as much of a surprise to note that references to religion and belief were both so frequent and so central to Sartre's unconventional autobiography as it was to learn that the famous Christian missionary Albert Schweitzer was his cousin. Further readings and analyses have reinforced my view that the language of belief plays a critical part in the text. These questions of belief and the references to religion that appear frequently in Les Mots (...) have received less attention. It could be said that these references are merely illustrative of Sartre's attempt to explain himself to himself and to us, and function as any metaphor would. But such a suggestion would fail to account for the many references to religion and belief and to explain why they are so tightly interlinked. We will argue that closer attention to these subjects provides significant insight into the work. Sartre, it would appear, uses a religious template, rather than an existentialist or a Marxist one, to understand his life's project, his past and his present. We will therefore investigate the nature of this use of the language of belief as a religious template and evaluate its significance. (shrink)

On first reading Les Mots, it was as much of a surprise to note that references to religion and belief were both so frequent and so central to Sartre's unconventional autobiography as it was to learn that the famous Christian missionary Albert Schweitzer was his cousin. Further readings and analyses have reinforced my view that the language of belief plays a critical part in the text. These questions of belief and the references to religion that appear frequently in Les Mots (...) have received less attention. It could be said that these references are merely illustrative of Sartre's attempt to explain himself to himself and to us, and function as any metaphor would. But such a suggestion would fail to account for the many references to religion and belief and to explain why they are so tightly interlinked. We will argue that closer attention to these subjects provides significant insight into the work. Sartre, it would appear, uses a religious template, rather than an existentialist or a Marxist one, to understand his life's project, his past and his present. We will therefore investigate the nature of this use of the language of belief as a religious template and evaluate its significance. (shrink)

This overview of Sartre's theater within the context of the symposium focuses on the inherent ambiguities of his theory and practice. His plays, as committed literature, are not always successful in their pedagogical intention of changing the minds of his audiences. On the one hand, he seeks to provide universal situations with which everyone can collectively identify, and on the other he wishes to convince them of the value of freedom and confront them with problems and conflicts they must resolve (...) for themselves. These spectators then exercise that freedom by taking ideological viewpoints that are in conflict with those of the plays. Moreover, the plays are often complex and ambiguous, and set far from a contemporary French context, thus demanding a certain sophistication of interpretation. Sartre's skill as a dramatist is to write plays that engage the public in debates about the key questions of the day, even though, because of his open approach, he does not always succeed in changing their minds. (shrink)

Before the establishment in the early 1800s of France's Sûreté Nationale and England's Scotland Yard, the detection of crimes was generally regarded as supernatural work, but the rise of modern science allowed mere mortals to systematize and categorize events—and thus to solve crimes. Reducing the amount of crime, however, did not reduce the fear of crime, which actually grew in the late-nineteenth century as the result of globalization and media sensationalism. Literary detectives offered an imaginary cure for an imaginary disease. (...) Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved. His ability to calm the fears of the globalizing Victorian era was an early version of what later became a proliferation of imaginary characters serving similar public functions. (shrink)

Before the establishment in the early 1800s of France's Sûreté Nationale and England's Scotland Yard, the detection of crimes was generally regarded as supernatural work, but the rise of modern science allowed mere mortals to systematize and categorize events—and thus to solve crimes. Reducing the amount of crime, however, did not reduce the fear of crime, which actually grew in the late-nineteenth century as the result of globalization and media sensationalism. Literary detectives offered an imaginary cure for an imaginary disease. (...) Sherlock Holmes, the most famous literary detective, retained many of the characteristics that earlier ages had attributed to superhuman “detectives”; a wondrous and a social being, he nonetheless was able to reassure an anxious public that even the most heinous crimes could be solved. His ability to calm the fears of the globalizing Victorian era was an early version of what later became a proliferation of imaginary characters serving similar public functions. (shrink)

The study of the early manuscripts of the great authors most often becomes a process of monumentalising or (re)legitimising their work. The recent publication of two of Sartre's early manuscripts – first Empédocle (Empedocles) in 2016 and second, in 2018, his dissertation for his graduate diploma (diplôme d’études supérieures or DES), L'Image dans la vie psychologique (The Image in Psychological Life), both texts written in 1926–1927 – encourages us to propose another type of genetic reading that insists on the collective (...) conditions of the production of knowledge, including philosophical knowledge. Such a collective genetics, applied to Sartre's intellectual formation during the interwar years, allows us to highlight some of the little-known forms of Parisian intellectual societies (the activities of the International Information Group of the École Normale Supérieure, the critical logic of the psychology journals, the regular meetings of the cenacles, and the literary and philosophical research groups). It also reveals, at the same time, the original relationship between Sartre's thought and the German literature and philosophy mediated to him by Bernard Groethuysen, Stefan Zweig and Alexandre Koyré. (shrink)

The question of the ground of history, according to Gillespie, is the question of what history is. German Idealism’s attempt to construe history as a source of value was the “fullest and perhaps the most profound” attempt to answer this question, and culminated in Hegel’s vindication of history as a rational process. The twentieth century, with its wars and holocausts, has made it impossible to affirm history as a rational process or a source of value, and Heidegger’s account of (...) history as an increasing oblivion of the “truth of Being” recognizes this; in Gillespie’s view it prepares the way for a transcendence of history altogether. If we are either to affirm or transcend history, however, we must get clear on what it is — on its ground. Gillespie treats Hegel and Heidegger as offering contrasting approaches to such clarification. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and thoughtful study, Michael Allen Gillespie explores the philosophical foundation, or ground, of the concept of history. Analyzing the historical conflict between human nature and freedom, he centers his discussion on Hegel and Heidegger but also draws on the pertinent thought of other philosophers whose contributions to the debate is crucial—particularly Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche.

In this essay, I argue that the notion of monetary debt does not displace but merely conceals our deeper, ontological debt to the sources of our being and way of life. I suggest that first Christianity and then modern science attempted to find a means of redemption that could free us from debt, but that both were unable to reconcile the ideas of freedom and indebtedness. I then examine the way in which Friedrich Nietzsche tried to resolve the apparent contradiction (...) of our debt to the past and our freedom to shape the future by developing a new form of redemption rooted in his doctrine of the eternal recurrence. (shrink)

"Did you know that common sense helps you make good choices? Common sense tells you how to act. Discover these and toher interesting facts in Common Sense." --.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

What psychological and philosophical significance should we attach to recent efforts at computer simulations of human cognitive capacities? In answering this question, I find it useful to distinguish what I will call "strong" AI from "weak" or "cautious" AI. According to weak AI, the principal value of the computer in the study of the mind is that it gives us a very powerful tool. For example, it enables us to formulate and test hypotheses in a more rigorous and precise fashion. (...) But according to strong AI, the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind; rather, the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind, in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to. (shrink)

Normative requirements are often overlooked, but they are central features of the normative world. Rationality is often thought to consist in acting for reasons, but following normative requirements is also a major part of rationality. In particular, correct reasoning – both theoretical and practical – is governed by normative requirements rather than by reasons. This article explains the nature of normative requirements, and gives examples of their importance. It also describes mistakes that philosophers have made as a result of confusing (...) normative requirements with reasons. (shrink)

This book is the one to put into the hands of those who have been over-impressed by Austin 's critics....[Warnock's] brilliant editing puts everybody who is concerned with philosophical problems in his debt.

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

Discussion of the worldwide corporate development of biotechnologies is sometimes diverted through the introduction of images of heroic medical intervention, exemplified by the statement, I would do anything to save my daughter. Such heroic images seem to justify virtually any deployment of resources and nearly any health or environmental risk. But it is instructive for future public discussions to examine the use of such images, and to note that those advocating a prominent role for biotechnologies in an expanding global economy (...) welcome such diversionary patterns. Our responsibility to do our own thinking is beset by conditions that may lead us astray. In a time burdened by profound worry—crushing inequalities among the world's peoples, an ecological crisis, and threat of nuclear war—it is tempting to avert our eyes when we are faced with grave new dangers. Moreover, in our increasingly visual culture, images have come to function as a facsimile of and substitute for real thinking. If we are to have significant discussions about the potential of biotechnology, we must not only be wary of promises of economic growth but must also be mindful of sources of diversion and the appeals of image-thinking. We should strive to become more critical of our own ways of thinking, thus opening the discussion to a fuller consideration of what needs to be saved. (shrink)