This volume of essays brings together leading commentators from both sides of the Atlantic to provide an introduction to Badiou's work through critical studies ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 34.2 (2006) 14-36 [Access article in PDF] "The Possibility of the Poetic Said" in Otherwise than Being (Allusion, or Blanchot in Lévinas) Gabriel Riera Language would exceed the limits of what is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making understandable [en laissant sous-entendre, sans jamais faire entendre] an implication of meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or (...) the logical definition of concepts. This possibility [vertu] is laid bare in the poetic said. [...] It is shown in the prophetic said. —Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being [my emphasis] Writing, without placing itself above art, supposes that one not prefer art, but efface art as writing effaces itself. —Maurice Blanchot, Writing of the DisasterIn an effort to elucidate a more originary difference than Heidegger's ontological difference between Being and entities, as well as an ethicity of thinking able to respond to the trace of transcendence of the other's face, Lévinas's philosophy redefines language radically and does so in uneasy proximity to poetic language. In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974), Lévinas deploys a constellation of terms—discourse, expression, communication, face, sincerity, witnessing, prophecy—in order to elucidate the ethical dimension of language, the ethicity of philosophical discourse. This constellation revolves around the crucial notion of signification and the two operative concepts of the said (le dit) and saying (le dire). By the former Lévinas understands the semantic content of an utterance or the giving of signs by a sender to an addressee, but also the different modalities by which a subject masters the world by assimilating it to the measure of consciousness (discourse, narration, history, manifestation, representation). Saying (le dire) refers to the way of signifying primarily that I am for the other, the expression of being-for-the-other that subjectivity "is" before positioned as the source of signs or comprehension: subjectivity as exposition. While the said expresses a content, the saying is expression without content.Language for Lévinas is the "structure" of both the retraction and the inscription of infinity (l'infini), and this "structure" is what Lévinas calls ethics. It is thus possible to affirm that in Lévinas there is no ethical turn without a certain linguistic turn, one in which the a priori of language is interrupted by an anteriority whose a priori character is enigmatic. But Lévinas's linguistic turn is turned inside out: for him language contains the other's call and thus harbors a form of exteriority within itself. This is because language is elevated to a metaphysical category (in the sense of Totality and Infinity [1961], where it means the breaching or interruption of totality) that exceeds the simple [End Page 14] "giving out of signs" [délivrance de signes] [AE 81/OB 48] or communication. Lévinas claims that "saying is communication, to be sure, but as a condition for all communication, as exposure [exposition]" [AE 82/OB 48]. Signification precedes and defines language as proximity and contact with the other and not as the "vicissitude [peripetia] of the thematizing intentionality" [AE 216/OB 137] of a subject whose main attribute is its ability to synchronize questions and answers, being and its manifestations, and by so doing leaves no margin for being exposed to the other. Further, signification also names an enigmatic pre-diction that challenges the primacy that language, understood as a system of signs, enjoys in other philosophies (structuralism and analytic philosophy, for example).Most critics agree that Lévinas's philosophy is inhospitable to aesthetic phenomena and ambivalent toward poetic language. His severe condemnation of the work of art in "Reality and Its Shadow" (1948) is still present in Totality and Infinity, Lévinas's first major work, where he establishes a relation with the other as face-to-face in discourse. And although in Otherwise than Being Lévinas finally acknowledges "poetic" language's ability to suggest significations that exceed the order of discourse and even endows it with a (quasi)-ethical force... (shrink)

Intrigues: From Being to the Other examines the possibility of writing the other, explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible, and discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected criticism. Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, whose works constitute the most thorough contemporary exploration of the question of the other and of its relation to writing, are the main focus of this study. The book's horizon is ethics in the Levinasian sense: the question of (...) the other, which, on the hither side of language understood as a system of signs and of representation, must be welcomed by language and preserved in its alterity. Martin Heidegger is an unavoidable reference, however. While it is true that for the German philosopher Being is an immanent production, his elucidation of a more essential understanding of Being entails a deconstruction of onto-theology, of the sign and the grammatical and logical determinations of language, all decisive starting points for both Levinas and Blanchot. At stake for both Levinas and Blanchot, then, is how to mark a nondiscursive excess within discourse without erasing or reducing it. How should one read and write the other in the same without reducing the other to the same? Critics in recent years have discussed an ethical moment or turn characterized by the other's irruption into the order of discourse. The other becomes a true crossroads of disciplines, since it affects several aspects of discourse: the constitution of the subject, the status of knowledge, the nature of representation, and what that representation represses (gender, power). Yet there has been a tendency to graft the other onto paradigms whose main purpose is to reassess questions of identity, fundamentally in terms of representation; the other thus loses some of its most crucial features. Through close readings of texts by Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot the book examines how the question of the other engages the very limits of philosophy, rationality, and power. (shrink)

The essay addresses the main shifts in Badiou’s conception of the event and the subject as they unfold in his late Logiques des mondes. In this text he develops an objective phenomenology of appearing in view of specifying the logical character of real change. The main focus of the essay is how Logiques des mondes stipulates a set of directives for an “ethics of living with an Idea,” that is, a subjective incorporation to truth as exception. How does Badiou’s text (...) write what is excluded from the inertia of a restricted economy of Being? I show that in order to account for this exception, Logiques des mondes must resituate the notionof site, prevalent in Being and Event, and that it does so in terms of the notion of world and of the localisation of appearing. This logic posits the articulation of a new transcendental regime whose major coordinates unfold as a true war machine against cultural relativism, or what Badiou calls “democratic materialism” and to which he contraposes a “materialist dialectics”. (shrink)

The essay addresses the main shifts in Badiou’s conception of the event and the subject as they unfold in his late Logiques des mondes. In this text he develops an objective phenomenology of appearing in view of specifying the logical character of real change. The main focus of the essay is how Logiques des mondes stipulates a set of directives for an “ethics of living with an Idea,” that is, a subjective incorporation to truth as exception. How does Badiou’s text (...) write what is excluded from the inertia of a restricted economy of Being? I show that in order to account for this exception, Logiques des mondes must resituate the notionof site, prevalent in Being and Event, and that it does so in terms of the notion of world and of the localisation of appearing (both of which entail the formulation of an objective phenomenology of appearing or logic of appearing). This logic posits the articulation of a new transcendental regime whose major coordinates unfold as a true war machine against cultural relativism, or what Badiou calls “democratic materialism” and to which he contraposes a “materialist dialectics”(dialectique matérialiste). (shrink)

Language would exceed the limits of what is thought, by suggesting, letting be understood without ever making understandable [en laissant sous‐entendre, sans jamais faire entendre] an implication o...

This book collects the work of leading scholars on Alain Badiou and G.W.F. Hegel, creating a dialogue between, and a critical appraisal of, these two central figures in European philosophy.

En el siguiente artículo analizaremos las nociones de angustia y desesperación desarrolladas por Sören Kierkegaard en El concepto de angustia y en el Tratado de la desesperación con el fin de resaltar la importancia de las mismas para el autor danés y, a su vez, vislumbraremos su papel determinante en las relaciones concretas con el prójimo descritas por Jean-Paul Sartre en El ser y la nada. Nuestra hipótesis de trabajo establece que Sartre sigue el cuadro de la desesperación kierkergaardiana y (...) que por ello condena al fracaso las relaciones con el prójimo. Nosotros consideramos que las nociones de angustia y desesperación de Kierkegaard analizadas en este artículo constituyen el meollo del problema en el autor francés, pues, sólo a partir del estudio de ellas, se podrá discutir e intervenir el concepto de mala fe en Sartre que determina el fracaso de las relaciones concretas con el prójimo en El ser y la nada. (shrink)

Bd. 1. A-B -- Bd. 2. C-F -- Bd. 3. G-Inn -- Bd. 4. Ins-Loc.

La ruptura del paradigma tradicional en la educación ecuatoriana emerge ante la imperiosa necesidad de la omnipresencia de la sociedad del conocimiento, las prescripciones de solución son variadas, mitigadas en su efectividad por el contexto; sin ser la panacea la presente propuesta ha legitimado la eficiencia y eficacia del proceso formativo académico de profesionales versátiles, competentes y competitivos que aportan al desarrollo sostenible, sustentable del país en concordancia con sus pares regionales enfocados a la competitividad internacional (escalada profesional). Se identifica (...) las habilidades de los estudiantes, se potencia sus destrezas, satisface sus necesidades personales, contribuye con la satisfacción de las necesidades del colectivo permeando relaciones humanas cálidas, comportamiento cooperativo asertivo maximizando logros a través de evidencia fáctica real. Los métodos, técnicas y estrategias varían en función del nivel que cursan los preprofesionales; un modelo estándar educativo con base en las competencias reales, la comunicación y la satisfacción de las necesidades humanas en concordancia con el ecosistema, legitima los procesos de formación en escenarios reales a través de la cooperación. (shrink)

The Simple Counterfactual Analysis (SCA) was once considered the most promising analysis of disposition ascriptions. According to SCA, disposition ascriptions are to be analyzed in terms of counterfactual conditionals. In the last few decades, however, SCA has become the target of a battery of counterexamples. In all counterexamples, something seems to be interfering with a certain object’s having or not having a certain disposition thus making the truth-values of the disposition ascription and of its associated counterfactual come apart. Intuitively, however, (...) it would seem that, if all interferences were absent, the disposition ascription and its associated conditional would have the same truth-value. Although this idea may seem obvious, it is far from obvious how to implement it. In fact, it has become widely assumed that the content of qualifying ceteris paribus clauses (such as ‘if all interferences were absent’) cannot be specified in a clear and non-circular manner. In this paper, I will argue that this assumption is wrong. I will develop an analysis of disposition ascriptions, the Interference-Free Counterfactual Analysis, which relies on a clear and non-circular definition of the notion of interference and avoids the standard counterexamples to SCA while vindicating the intuition that disposition ascriptions and counterfactual conditionals are intimately related. (Please note that an erratum has been issued for the published version of this paper. It is recommended to read the self-archived version of the paper.). (shrink)

The volume deals with the history of logic, the question of the nature of logic, the relation of logic and mathematics, modal or alternative logics (many-valued, relevant, paraconsistent logics) and their relations, including translatability, to classical logic in the Fregean and Russellian sense, and, more generally, the aim or aims of philosophy of logic and mathematics. Also explored are several problems concerning the concept of definition, non-designating terms, the interdependence of quantifiers, and the idea of an assertion sign. The contributions (...) concerned with Wittgenstein's investigations into the philosophy of logic and mathematics pursue issues relating to logical necessity, the undeniability of the law of the excluded middle, and the source of self-evidence, often characterized in the literature as the "rule-following considerations". Additionally, they examine Wittgenstein's attitudes towards the very idea of set-theory as a possible foundation for arithmetic. The volume also includes a number of contributions on specific issues concerning Wittgenstein's views on moral and religious judgements. (shrink)

This important collection of lectures and essays was regarded by Gabriel Marcel as the best introduction to his thought.

v. 1. Reflection & mystery -- v. 2. Faith & reality.

This discussion of pride, shame, and guilt centers on the beliefs involved in the experience of any of these emotions. Through a detailed study, the author demonstrates how these beliefs are alike--in that they are all directed towards the self--and how they differ. The experience of these three emotions are illustrated by examples taken from English literature. These concrete cases supply a context for study and indicate the complexity of the situations in which these emotions usually occur.

Famously, in the essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Prize Essay), Kant attempts to distance himself from the Wolffian model of philosophical inquiry. In this respect, Kant scholars have pointed out Kant’s claim that philosophy should not imitate the method of mathematics and his appeal to Newton’s “analytic method.” In this article, I argue that there is an aspect of Kant’s critique of the Wolffian model that has been neglected. Kant presents a powerful (...) attack of the idea that philosophy should proceed through the analysis of concepts and argues that we should give up the aim of arriving at “complete” concepts as one of its fundamental desiderata. Importantly, this attack of philosophy conceived as conceptual analysis is distinctive and original if one compares it with Kant’s critique of analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason, which rests on the idea that analysis is insufficient to ground substantial metaphysical truths. I also make an additional point: Scholars have debated whether the appeal to Newton’s analytic method involves a form of empiricism. I submit that this debate is ill-conceived because Kant uses a notion of “given concepts” that is indeterminate with respect to their a priori or a posteriori status. (shrink)

In this conceptual article, we argue that defining corporate social responsibility and corporate social irresponsibility as opposite constructs produces a lack of clarity between responsible and irresponsible acts. Furthermore, we contend that the treatment of the CSR and CSI concepts as opposites de-emphasizes the value of CSI as a stand-alone construct. Thus, we reorient the CSI discussion to include multiple aspects that current conceptualizations have not adequately accommodated. We provide an in-depth exploration of how researchers define CSI and both identify (...) and analyze three important gray zones between CSR and CSI: the role of harm and benefit, the role of the actor and intentionality, and the role of rectification. We offer these gray zones as factors contributing to the present lack of conceptual clarity of the term CSI, as a concept in its own right, leading to difficulties that researchers and managers experience in categorizing CSI acts as distinct from CSR. (shrink)

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. Book jacket.

El trabajo que se presenta gira en torno a la metodología del aprendizaje cooperativo para favorecer la inclusión del alumnado. Se toma como referente el trabajo realizado en diferentes investigaciones vinculadas a la implementación de un programa didáctico para implementar el aprendizaje cooperativo en las aula: el “programa CA/AC : Cooperar para aprender/aprender a cooperar “; así como los procesos de formación y asesoramiento que hemos llevado a cabo en este campo hasta la fecha.

The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...) transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, Radical History & the Politics of Art argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action? (shrink)

The idea that healthcare should become more person-centred is extremely influential. By using recent English policy developments as a case study, this article aims to critically analyse an important element of person-centred care, namely, the belief that to treat patients as persons is to think that care should be ‘co-produced’ by formal healthcare providers and patients together with unpaid carers and voluntary organizations. I draw on insights from political philosophy to highlight overlooked tensions between co-production and values like equality and (...) liberty. Regarding equality, I argue that co-production compounds both problems of gender inequality in the distribution of care labour and the challenges associated with securing equal access to care. Turning to liberty, I identify important commonalities between co-production and republicanism in political philosophy, given their shared insistence on common citizens’ civic virtue. Then, I use against co-production some liberal arguments against republicanism, to highlight a problem of over-demandingness. In bringing my argument to a close, however, I wish to caution against hastily rejecting co-production as a policy programme. (shrink)

The intellectual resistance to totalitarian regimes can take many forms. This remarkable volume portrays one such story of resistance in Romania during the reign of Ceausescu: that of Constantin Noica, one of the country's foremost intellectuals. The Paltinis Diary is a wonderful homage to an intellectual master and to the power of intellect and freedom. The book will be of interest to philosophers, non-philosophers alike, and to anyone who seeks to grasp the true meaning of survival under totalitarian conditions.

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South (...) African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships. Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's _Still Alive_ and Marguerite Duras's _La Douleur_; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's _W_, Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, and Philippe Grimbert's _Secret_; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's _Austerlitz_, Sabine Reichel's _What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?_, and Ursula Duba's _Tales from a Child of the Enemy_. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide. (shrink)

Public reason liberalism is defined by the idea that laws and policies should be justifiable to each person who is subject to them. But what does it mean for reasons to be public or, in other words, suitable for this process of justification? In response to this question, Kevin Vallier has recently developed the traditional distinction between consensus and convergence public reason into a classification distinguishing three main approaches: shareability, accessibility and intelligibility. The goal of this paper is to defend (...) the accessibility approach by demonstrating its ability to strike an appealing middle course in terms of inclusivity between shareability and intelligibility. We first argue against Vallier that accessibility can exclude religious reasons from public justification. Second, we use scientific reasons as a case study to show that accessibility excludes considerably fewer reasons than shareability. Throughout the paper, we connect our discussion of accessibility to John Rawls’s model of public reason, so as to give substance to the accessibility approach and to further our understanding of Rawls’s influential model. (shrink)

Recent epidemiological research on the social determinants of health has been used to attack an important framework, associated with Norman Daniels, that depicts healthcare as special. My aim is to rescue the idea that healthcare has special importance in society, although specialness will turn out to be mainly limited to clinical care. I build upon the link between Daniels's theory and the work of John Rawls to develop a conception of public justification liberalism that is suitable to the field of (...) justice and health. I argue that, from the perspective of public justification liberalism, (clinical) healthcare deserves special status. (shrink)

The involvement of the public in the governance of genomics has become a topic of growing interest among scholars, practitioners and policy-makers. The implementation of public involvement programmes may be quite expensive, and the design and evaluation of public participation is a matter of controversy. Thus, this paper examines the justifications for public participation in the governance of genomic research to help understand whether public involvement is worthwhile and to provide a guide to the design of public participation. I identify (...) four primary justifications in support of public involvement. I argue that three of them have serious flaws: neither an increase in the stability of institutions, nor the positive effects on the virtues of individuals, nor the epistemic merits of participatory activities provide a solid ground for the engagement of the public in the governance of genomics. However, the ideal of legitimacy in the exercise of coercive power appears to lend strong support to public involvement programmes. Given that the reasons why public involvement is sought shape the design of the participatory activities, restricting the range of valid justifications promises to simplify the task of designing and evaluating public involvement. (shrink)

Intimacy: From Transformation to Transmutation The paper reflects the historical and current dynamism of the concept of intimacy. Besides differences between scientific disciplines in understanding what the substance of intimacy is, the recent discourse on change in intimacy has been dominated by the transformation theme introduced by Anthony Giddens (1992). Led by reflections of Richard Sennett (1986) the author draws attention to the opposite aspect of change in intimacy—the change in content, or the "transmutation" of intimacy. Transmutation of intimacy—the substitution (...) of the satisfaction of intimate needs with identity creation—not only contests the very essence of intimacy, but also constitutes a significant challenge for the project of intimate citizenship (Plummer 2003). (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish three general approaches to public trust in science, which I call the individual approach, the semi-social approach, and the social approach, and critically examine their proposed solutions to what I call the problem of harmful distrust. I argue that, despite their differences, the individual and the semi-social approaches see the solution to the problem of harmful distrust as consisting primarily in trying to persuade individual citizens to trust science and that both approaches face two general (...) problems, which I call the problem of overidealizing science and the problem of overburdening citizens. I then argue that in order to avoid these problems we need to embrace a (thoroughly) social approach to public trust in science, which emphasizes the social dimensions of the reception, transmission, and uptake of scientific knowledge in society and the ways in which social forces influence both positively and negatively the trustworthiness of science. (shrink)

1. Směry, osobnosti, problémy -- 2. Biograficko-bibliografický slovník.

In this paper, I develop Mauricio Suárez’s distinction between denotation, epistemic representation, and faithful epistemic representation. I then outline an interpretational account of epistemic representation, according to which a vehicle represents a target for a certain user if and only if the user adopts an interpretation of the vehicle in terms of the target, which would allow them to perform valid (but not necessarily sound) surrogative inferences from the model to the system. The main difference between the interpretational conception I (...) defend here and Suárez’s inferential conception is that the interpretational account is a substantial account—interpretation is not just a “symptom” of representation; it is what makes something an epistemic representation of a something else. (shrink)

Carnap’s seminal ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ makes important use of the notion of a framework and the related distinction between internal and external questions. But what exactly is a framework? And what role does the internal/external distinction play in Carnap’s metaontology? In an influential series of papers, Matti Eklund has recently defended a bracingly straightforward interpretation: A Carnapian framework, Eklund says, is just a natural language. To ask an internal question, then, is just to ask a question in, say, English. (...) To try to ask an external question is to try, absurdly, to ask a question in no language at all. Finding that so trivial an I/e distinction can’t help to explain Carnap’s deflationary metaontology, Eklund is led to attribute to Carnap a view he calls ontological pluralism. In this paper, I show that Eklund misreads Carnap, and I argue that this misreading obscures fundamental features of Carnap’s philosophy. I then defend an account of frameworks as what Carnap called semantical systems, and I place this account in the context of Carnap’s philosophical program of explication. Finally, I discuss the role that frameworks and the I/e distinction play in ESO, showing that ESO provides no reason to attribute the doctrine of ontological pluralism to Carnap. (shrink)

Interpretations of Kant’s account of the forms of “taking-to-be-true” (Fürwahrhalten) have generally focused on three such forms: opinion (Meinung), belief (Glaube), and knowledge (Wissen). A second distinction that has received comparatively less attention is that between conviction (Überzeugung) and persuasion (Überredung). Kant appears to use the distinction between the subjective and the objective sufficiency of a taking-to-be-true to characterize all of these forms. However, it is impossible to account for the differences between them by relying on this latter distinction alone. (...) In turn, this makes it difficult to fit all of these forms into a single classification of taking-to-be-true. In this chapter, I propose a new approach to conviction and persuasion that dissolves these problems. Conviction and persuasion are not single forms of taking-to-be-true with distinctive characteristics, yet it is not useful to treat them as “classes” of taking-to-be-true either. Rather, they are “operators” that determine whether a taking-to-be-true is apt or inapt, depending on whether it rests on a correct evaluation of the grounds we have. (shrink)