Jan Patočka became politically active for the first time as a spokesperson of the dissident movement Charter 77. In this capacity he wrote several essays, the first of which, entitled "On the Matters of The Plastic People of the Universe and DG 307", I interpret as the explanation and justification of his turn toward political engagement. The following article is a reading of Patočka's essay that pays particular attention to a peculiar formal feature of the essay – namely (...) that it's presented as a reversal of Dostoevsky's short story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man". In reversing this story, Patočka shows us the two basic ways of human life and explains his political engagement as an action taken on behalf of the properly human way of life, which he calls "life in truth" or "the responsible life". The purpose of his political engagement thus wasn't defending human rights, but defending life in truth, to which human rights provide suitable conditions. "On the Matters…" also presents Patočka's assessment of the Communist regime with clarity and severity not seen elsewhere in his writings, and shows a shift in his views of youth and youthful rebellion. (shrink)

This article attempts to bring together the life, situation, and philosophical work of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka in order to present his conception of philosophy and sacrifice and to understand his action of dissent and his own sacrifice as spokesman for Charter 77 in light of these concepts. Patočka philosophized despite being barred from teaching under the German occupation and under the communist regime, even after he was forced to retire and banned from publication. He also refused (...) the official philosophical categories of communism and, what is more, criticized the very manner in which its ideology allowed it to function. Against the destruction of moral and political life by communist and liberal regimes alike, he outlined the necessity of a “life in the idea” that would be responsive to the notion of sacrifice. Such a position of distance from the things of the world which remains anchored among them is meant to respond to dissatisfaction with the world as it is found and is the very movement of human freedom. Taken together, these three aspects of his philosophical practice made him a dissident, a role he took on more completely when, as part of the Charter 77 movement, he publicly opposed the state, in a course of action that led to his death. (shrink)

This is a critical study of the philosophies of Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, as leading to, and flowing from, Charter 77. In part one, Patocka's philosophy is presented as between Platonic-humanistic and Heideggerian poles. In his Heideggerian moments, Patocka looked for a way to transcend productionist metaphysics and return to unspecified authenticity. In his Platonic-humanistic moments, Patocka found authenticity in "care for the soul" and "life in truth," the practice of the Socratic method. For these basic human (...) rights, the necessary preconditions for life in truth, Patocka chose to write Charter 77 and eventually to sacrifice himself. ;In part two, I examine the influence of Patocka on the philosophy of his fellow Charterist, the dissident Vaclav Havel, who attempted to apply Patocka's thought to the situation in post-totalitarian societies. ;In part three, I examine to what extent did president Havel adapt or change his positions through the practice of his new responsibilities, and confrontation between his conscience directed consciousness with Czechoslovak being. (shrink)

Political insider trading has brought substantial attention to ethical considerations in the academic literature. While the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act prohibits members of Congress and their staff from leveraging non-public information to make investment decisions, political insider trading still prevails. We discuss political ethics and social contract theory to re-engage the debate on whether political insider trading is _unethical_ and raises the issues of conflict of interest and social distrust. Empirically, using a novel (...) measure of information risk, we find that senator trades are associated with substantially high levels of information asymmetry. Moreover, based on inside political information, senators earn significant market-adjusted returns (4.9% over 3 months). Thus, our results do not support the prediction made by social contract theory and thereby provide a potential resolution to the ongoing debate on banning stock trading for members of Congress. (shrink)

An essay of Jan Patočka on Dostoevsky's short story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man".

Body, Community, Language, World, here made available in English for the first time is Patocka's presentation of phenomenology as a living tradition - as a philosophical heritage that requires to be rethought and redirected in light of possibilities that it has itself uncovered. Jan Patocka lived for most of his adult life in Communist Czechoslovakia where he was at times banned from publishing or teaching. Mentor of Vaclav Havel, Patocka defied the regime as one of the spokespersons for Charta (...) 77, and died in 1977, following two months of police interrogation. (shrink)

A simple but valuable experience that all humans have in common is that their life and their actions, the things they do and the things they omit to do, their reflection and their praxis are always marked by the tension which exists between what is factual and what is appropriate. Ethics can be described in simple terms as the systematic reflection on this tension, an endeavour to explicate how notions such as ‘appropriateness’ can be translated into categories such as (...) ‘goodness’ and ‘rightness’ in such a way that we do not remain bogged down in this experience but can develop some kind of assessment. One can also say, therefore, that ethics has a critical approach: the aforementioned tension is not merely noted and left at that, it is scrutinised, studied and assessed on the basis of a particular measure or criterion, thus making it possible, for example, to distinguish between the acknowledgement of changes and the appreciation of improvements .Every theory of ethics which consistently aspires to such a critical reflection, therefore, will have to deal with the question how the aforementioned criterion can be put into words. I already pointed to our common experience of the tension between the actual and the appropriate. In an effort to pin down the criterion in question, a useful point of departure might be to reflect for a moment on what is meant by appropriate. The term itself hints at some kind of relation or belonging to. If, then, the appropriate can be formulated in terms of belonging to ‘the human’ then an understanding of what it is to be human will always constitute the point of departure of any critical ethical reflection. For those who might be tempted to view this as too deductive, the whole approach can be turned on its head: the specific sort of reflection in which people engage with respect to the tension between the actual and the appropriate and in which the appropriate can be formulated in terms of the human, is ethics.[...]In the present article I intend to focus on the image of the human person which is compatible with such a notion of ethical obedience as responsibility to-be-taken-up. The fact that people speak today of a ‘changing of the guard’ when it comes to fundamental ethics is certainly no exaggeration. An ethics founded on natural law has been evolving towards the use of the notion personalism as a designation for an inclusive anthropology which is the expression of the appropriate. Experience teaches that a substantive explanation of personalism — which I provide in the third part of this article — is best preceded by a methodical sketch concerning the ‘status’ of personalism as a fundamental ethical category. In the fourth part of the article I will endeavour to outline the contours of a personalist theory of action. (shrink)

This article investigates how human life is conceptualized in the design and use of digital assistants and how this conceptualization feeds back into the life really lived. It suggests that a specific way of conceptualizing human life — namely as a set of tasks to be optimized — is responsible for the much-criticized information hunger of these digital assistants. The data collection of digital assistants raises not just several issues of privacy, but also the potential for improving (...) people’s degree of self-determination, because the optimization model of daily activity is genuinely suited to a certain mode of self-determination, namely the explicit and reflective setting, pursuing, and monitoring of goals. Furthermore, optimization systems’ need for generation and analysis of data overcomes one of the core weaknesses in human capacities for self-determination, namely problems with objective and quantitative self-assessment. It will be argued that critiques according to which digital assistants threaten to reduce their users’ autonomy tend to ignore that the risks to autonomy are derivative to potential gains in autonomy. These critiques are based on an overemphasis of a success conception of autonomy. Counter to this conception, being autonomous does not require a choice environment that exclusively supports a person’s “true” preferences, but the opportunity to engage with external influences, supportive as well as adverse. In conclusion, it will be argued that ethical evaluations of digital assistants should consider potential gains as well as potential risks for autonomy caused by the use of digital assistants. (shrink)

A simple but valuable experience that all humans have in common is that their life and their actions, the things they do and the things they omit to do, their reflection and their praxis are always marked by the tension which exists between what is factual and what is appropriate. Ethics can be described in simple terms as the systematic reflection on this tension, an endeavour to explicate how notions such as ‘appropriateness’ can be translated into categories such as (...) ‘goodness’ and ‘rightness’ in such a way that we do not remain bogged down in this experience but can develop some kind of assessment. One can also say, therefore, that ethics has a critical approach: the aforementioned tension is not merely noted and left at that, it is scrutinised, studied and assessed on the basis of a particular measure or criterion, thus making it possible, for example, to distinguish between the acknowledgement of changes and the appreciation of improvements .Every theory of ethics which consistently aspires to such a critical reflection, therefore, will have to deal with the question how the aforementioned criterion can be put into words. I already pointed to our common experience of the tension between the actual and the appropriate. In an effort to pin down the criterion in question, a useful point of departure might be to reflect for a moment on what is meant by appropriate. The term itself hints at some kind of relation or belonging to. If, then, the appropriate can be formulated in terms of belonging to ‘the human’ then an understanding of what it is to be human will always constitute the point of departure of any critical ethical reflection. For those who might be tempted to view this as too deductive, the whole approach can be turned on its head: the specific sort of reflection in which people engage with respect to the tension between the actual and the appropriate and in which the appropriate can be formulated in terms of the human, is ethics.[...]In the present article I intend to focus on the image of the human person which is compatible with such a notion of ethical obedience as responsibility to-be-taken-up. The fact that people speak today of a ‘changing of the guard’ when it comes to fundamental ethics is certainly no exaggeration. An ethics founded on natural law has been evolving towards the use of the notion personalism as a designation for an inclusive anthropology which is the expression of the appropriate. Experience teaches that a substantive explanation of personalism — which I provide in the third part of this article — is best preceded by a methodical sketch concerning the ‘status’ of personalism as a fundamental ethical category. In the fourth part of the article I will endeavour to outline the contours of a personalist theory of action. (shrink)

Calling Citizens to a Moral Way of Life: A Dutch Example of Moralized Politics This article offers a sociological analysis of the moral revisions that accompany welfare state reforms in the Netherlands. It is argued that Dutch welfare state reforms after the Cold War rely on moral discourses in particular and moral language in general to legitimize and effectuate policy measures. The Dutch reformers have been pursuing a set of strategies of moralization designed to adjust the Dutch welfare state (...) to the new, post-Cold War situation, in which social policies are redesigned to support the operation of global markets. This article seeks to show how this "moral revision" has been taking place by consulting data sources provided by Dutch media, policy documents, council reports, advices, speeches, and newspaper interviews. This implies that special attention is paid to the rhetoric, language, tones, symbolism, metaphors and moral images used and propagated by moral revisionists, elites and media, their definitions of the prevailing moral situation and of the desired one, their formulation of desired values and norms and the ways in which moral panics are aroused. Three recent Dutch policy innovations, namely the national debate on norms and values, the Charter Responsible Citizenship and the family policy memorandum, are interpreted as political strategies to re-engineer the new morality that can sustain a reformed state. (shrink)

After many policy attempts to tackle the persistent rise in the costs of health care, physicians are increasingly seen as potentially effective resource stewards. Frameworks including the quadruple aim, value-based health care and choosing wisely underline the importance of positive engagement of the health care workforce in reinventing the system–paving the way to real affordability by defining the right care. Current programmes focus on educating future doctors to provide ‘high-value, cost-conscious care’ (HVCCC), which proponents believe is the future of sustainable (...) medical practice. Such programmes, which aim to extend population-level allocation concerns to interactions between an individual doctor and patient, have generated lively debates about the ethics of expanding doctors’ professional accountability. To empirically ground this discussion, we conducted a qualitative interview study to examine what happens when resource stewardship responsibilities are extended to the consulting room. Attempts to deliver HVCCC were found to involve inevitable trade-offs between benefits to the individual patient and (social) costs, medical uncertainty and efficiency, and between resource stewardship and trust. Physicians reconcile this by justifying good-value care in terms of what is in the best interest of individual patients–redefining the currency of value from monetary costs to a patient’s quality of life, and cost-conscious care as reflective medical practice. Micro-level resource stewardship thus becomes a matter of working reflexively and reducing wasteful forms of care, rather than of making difficult choices about resource allocation. (shrink)

As COVID-19 drags on and new vaccines promise widespread immunity, the world's attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. How do societies know when an epidemic is over and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate such an end? Who has the insight, authority, and credibility to decipher these signs? Detailed research on past epidemics has demonstrated that they do not end suddenly; indeed, only rarely do the diseases in question actually end. This (...) article examines the ways in which scholars have identified and described the end stages of previous epidemics, pointing out that significantly less attention has been paid to these periods than to origins and climaxes. Analysis of the ends of epidemics illustrates that epidemics are as much social, political, and economic events as they are biological; the “end,” therefore, is as much a process of social and political negotiation as it is biomedical. Equally important, epidemics end at different times for different groups, both within one society and across regions. Multidisciplinary research into how epidemics end reveals how the end of an epidemic shifts according to perspective, whether temporal, geographic, or methodological. A multidisciplinary analysis of how epidemics end suggests that epidemics should therefore be framed not as linear narratives—from outbreak to intervention to termination—but within cycles of disease and with a multiplicity of endings. (shrink)

What does it mean for an epidemic to end, and who gets to declare that it is over? This multidisciplinary spotlight issue provides 18 case studies, each examining specific epidemics and their ends as well as the methodologies used to measure, gauge, and define an epidemic's end. They demonstrate that an epidemic's end is often contentious, raising issues of competing authority. Various forms of expertise jostle over who declares an end, as well as what data and information should be used (...) to measure and define the end of an epidemic. As a result, it is more accurate to describe multiple endings to an epidemic: the medical end, the political end, and the social end. At the same time, multidisciplinary research into the ends of epidemics highlights the crucial role of information and measurement in an epidemic's end, as well as the ways in which ending forces observers to rethink and reconceptualize time. Whereas the declaration of an epidemic suggests a neatly defined period of emergency, the end is a messy process incorporating competing accounts of what went wrong and fears of the next epidemic, in which cycles of multiple diseases and overlapping social crises disrupt a simple return to normal life, articulating the nature of epidemics not just as medical phenomena, but also as fundamentally political and social ones. The end period therefore looks both forward and backward, often applying “lessons learned” from the history of the ended epidemic to the future, in anticipation of the next outbreak. Re-envisioning the future is a way to analyse and understand the past epidemic, and thereby to restore human agency into society's relationship with disease. (shrink)

The Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (1907-1977), who studied with Husserl and Heidegger, is widely recognized as the most influential thinker to come from postwar Eastern Europe. Refusing to join the Communist party after World War II, he was banned from academia and publication for the rest of his life, except for a brief time following the liberalizations of the Prague spring of 1968. Joining Vaclav Havel and Jiri Hajek as a spokesman for the Chart 77 human-rights declaration of 1977, (...) Patocka was harassed by authorities, arrested, and finally died of a heart attack during prolonged interrogation. Plato and Europe, arguably Patocka’s most important book, consists of a series of lectures delivered in the homes of friends after his last banishment from the academy just three years before his death. Here, he presents his most mature ideas about the history of Western philosophy, arguing that the idea of the care of the soul is fundamental to the philosophical tradition beginning with the Greeks. Explaining how the care of the soul is elaborated as the problem of how human beings may make their world one of truth and justice, Patocka develops this thesis through a treatment of Plato, Democritus, and Aristotle, showing how considerations about the soul are of central importance in their writings. He demonstrates in vivid fashion how this idea forms the spiritual heritage of Europe. (shrink)

Medical, scientific and societal progress has been such that, in a universalist humanist perspective such as the WHO’s, it has become an ethical imperative for the primary endpoints in evidence based health care research to be expressed in e.g. Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). The classical endpoints of discrete health‐related functions and duration of survival are increasingly perceived as unacceptably reductionistic. The major problem in ‘felicitometrics’ is the measurement of the ‘quality’ term in QALYs. That the mental, physical and (...) social domains, each containing many dimensions and items, all contribute to QOL is uncontroversial. What is controversial, is the weight of the different dimensions in overall QOL. It has been shown to be very different between different patient populations. In human individuals, assuredly complex systems, the many dimensions and items of QOL observably interact, probably sometimes also in chaotic ways. In these conditions, the weights of isolated items in individuals become for all practical purposes meaningless. Therefore, the much used multi‐item questionnaires at best describe, but do not evaluate QOL, neither in individuals, nor in populations. For example, allergic patients treated with cetirizine scored better than those a placebo on all dimensions of the SF‐36, a standard QOL questionnaire. Here there is no serious doubt that the treatment improved QOL, because it is highly unlikely that any important dimension on which the patient groups would have scored otherwise is missing in the SF‐36. However, whether piracetam treatment of acute stroke, which improved the surrogate endpoints neurological and functional scores, also improved QOL is plausible, but will be proven only when comprehensive QOL measurement will have been done. And suppose in randomised populations of end‐stage metastatic solid cancer patients, one would compare palliative last‐line chemotherapy with only palliative care, and one would, as can be expected, find no significant differences in average survival, and chemotherapy superior for the mental domain, but inferior for the physical comfort domain: we would not know which treatment, on aggregate, would be the better. The problem is that QOL is an individual and emergent construct, the resultant of a great many intractions, and of a different order than its contributing components. Overall QOL can therefore best be captured only as the Gestalt of a global self‐assessment. Just as people in everyday life, while acting under uncertainty, make global assessments all the time, so they can seriously answer the serious question: ‘How have you been?’ A solemn, practical, non peer‐relativistic, non‐cultural, experiential, and well tolerated way to obtain such responses is Anamnestic Comparative Self Assessment (ACSA), in which the subjects' memories of the best and the worst times in their life experience define their individual scale of QOL. ACSA is thus both exquisitely idiosyncratic, and yet can in a universalist humanistic perspective be considered generic. Using both a multi‐item questionnaire and a global assessment allows by one logistic regression, to estimate the weights of the dimensions and items in populations, and thus identify those whose improvement would most contribute to the QOL of the greatest number. A combined approach to measurement of QOL is necessary to maximise the utility of QOL interventions. (shrink)

The development of nuclear energy technologies in the second half of the 20th century came with great hopes of rebuilding nations recovering from the devasta-tion of the Second World War or recently released from colonial rule. In coun-tries like France, India, the USA, Canada, Russia, and the United Kingdom, nuclear energy became the symbol of development towards a modern and technologically advanced future. However, after more than six decades of experi-ence with nuclear energy production, and in the aftermath of the (...) Fukushima nuclear disaster, it is safe to say that nuclear energy production is not without its problems.Some of these problems have their origins in the very materiality of the technolo-gies involved. For example, not only does the use of highly radioactive materials give rise to risks for the current generation (e.g., in the potential for disaster when reactors melt down) but high-level radioactive waste from nuclear energy production presents a serious intergenerational problem for which an acceptable final solution or its implementation remains elusive. Moreover, nuclear energy technologies have specific social and political consequences. For example, they have been said to be authoritarian technologies (Winner, 1980), requiring cen-tralized authority, secrecy, and technocratic decision-making. While some of these problems could have been foreseen before nuclear energy technologies were introduced, others only arose after these technologies were already integrated into the social and infrastructural fabric of our lives. Addition-ally, new technologies (e.g., Generation III, III+ and IV reactors) are still being developed, bringing with them new and uncertain hazards and risks. Ignorance and uncertainty about the possible deleterious effects of introducing a new technology are inevitable, especially if the technology is complex, large time-scales are involved, or risks depend on social or political factors unforeseen in the design stage. However, this should not deter us from developing and intro-ducing new technologies. Rather, it should motivate us to organize these ‘exper-iments’ with new technologies in society in such a way that we can learn about their possible hazards and risks as effectively and responsibly as possible (van de Poel, 2011, 2015). In this way, it is possible to minimize risks and avoid unwant-ed moral, social or political developments. However, organizing such experi-ments responsibly also means that one could come to the conclusion that continuing an experiment is no longer responsible or desirable. Should we be prepared for such a scenario, and if so, how could we do that? One possible strategy to tackle this issue is that the technology and its introduction should be reversible. The aim of this thesis is to further explore this strategy by answering the following main research question (RQ) and accompanying subquestions (SQ):RQ: What are the implications of reversibility for the responsible develop-ment and implementation of nuclear energy technologies?SQ1: Under what conditions can nuclear energy technologies be considered reversible?SQ2: Why should nuclear energy technologies be reversible?SQ3: If so, how could the reversibility of nuclear energy technologies be achieved?After the introductory chapter 1, the chapters that form the main body of this dissertation each provide a distinct contribution to answering the three subques-tions and, by extension, the main research question. Guided by three historical case studies of nuclear energy technology development (i.e., India, France and the USA), chapter 2 answers the first subquestion by formulating the two condi-tions under which it can be considered reversible, i.e., 1) the ability to stop the further development and deployment of a that technology in society, and 2) the ability to undo the undesirable outcomes (material, institutional or symbolic) of the development and deployment of the technology. Chapter 3 subsequently tackles the second subquestion by establishing the general desirability of technological reversibility by virtue of its relation to responsibility in Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical phenomenology. It argues that technology development is a legitimate response to responsibility but inevitably falls short of the responsibility that inspires it, incessantly calling for technological and political change in the process. Having thus argued that nuclear energy technologies should ideally be reversible, chap-ters 4 and 5 work towards specific strategies to achieve technological reversibil-ity. Chapter 4 first investigates the processes that make it difficult to stop the further development and implementation of a nuclear energy technology in society, thus provid-ing input on how to fulfill the first condition for the reversibility of nuclear energy technologies. To do so, it presents a phenomenological perspective on technology and its adoption based on the work of Alfred Schutz. It also explores different ways in which technology adoption drives the processes of path depend-ence towards technological lock-in. Chapter 5 examines the history of geological disposal of high-level radioactive waste in the USA. It identifies a number of concrete policy pitfalls that could lead to lock-in and that should consequently be avoided. It also presents a number of general design strategies that could facilitate the undoing of undesirable consequences of a technology, thus providing input on how to fulfill the second condition for the reversibility of nuclear energy technol-ogies.Chapter 6 summarizes the central findings of the thesis and explains how these help to answer the research questions. On top of this, it reflects on a number of complications connected to reversibility considerations. Based on this, it is concluded that the question of irreversibility and reversibility is context- and technology-specific and a matter of degree. The chapter concludes with a reflec-tion on generalizations and limitations of the results. Finally, chapter 7 discusses the implications of this dissertation’s results for responsibly experimenting with nuclear energy technologies in society. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to further our understanding of the “GM is unnatural” view, and of the critical response to it. While many people have been reported to hold the view that GM is unnatural, many policy-makers and their advisors have suggested that the view must be ignored or rejected, and that there are scientific reasons for doing so. Three “typical” examples of ways in which the “GM is unnatural” view has been treated by UK policy-makers and their (...) advisors are explored. These are the Government’s position (DEFRA Report), the account of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and the position of Nigel Halford, a scientist with an advisory role to the Government. I show that their accounts fail to mount a convincing critique. Then, I draw on an empirical research project held during 2003–2004 at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north east of England. Scientists met with non-scientists in a range of facilitated one-to-one conversations (“exchanges”) on various environmental issues, one of which was on GM. Our findings show that some scientists who rejected the “GM is unnatural” view struggled to do so consistently. Their struggle is interpreted in terms of a conflict between a so-called “scientific” worldview, and a different worldview that underlies the concerns of those who held the “GM is unnatural” view. This worldview is explored further by an examination of their concerns. What distinguishes this worldview from the “scientific” worldview is that the instrumentalization of the nonhuman world is questioned to a larger extent. I conclude that, because the underlying concerns of those who held the “GM is unnatural” view were not with GM as such, yet with a worldview that was considered to be problematic, and of which many GM applications were held to be expressions, policy-makers and their advisors should reflect on the critical worldview of those who claim that GM is unnatural if they want to engage seriously with their concerns. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders the meaning of political action by way of a dialogue between Dewey, Thoreau, and Cavell. These philosophers demonstrate possibilities of political engagement and participation. Especially in response to the psychological and emotional dimensions of political crisis today, I shall claim that American philosophy can demonstrate something beyond problem-solving as conventionally understood in politics and that it has the potential to re-place philosophy in such a manner that politics itself is changed. First, I shall draw (...) a contrast between the ways of political action demonstrated respectively by Dewey and Thoreau. Some points of divergence are revealed within American philosophy. I shall then explore the partially different sense of political action implied by Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy, identifying this as the politics of acknowledgment. Finally, I shall propose the idea of challenging inclusion as an alternative political education for human transformation, taking this as a key to changing politics. (shrink)

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian’s intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy’s concepts of “emotive,” “emotional regime,” (...) and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein’s “emotional community” and on Stearns’s “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian’s ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women’s history” in the 1970s. (shrink)

The general purpose of this book differs from those of most of the works found traditionally in the field of political philosophy. Firstly, the present approach is in no way prescriptive or normative, as the interest centres on explication rather than an evaluative assess ment of this, that or another type of arrangement, or act. 1 It will be clear that I am in complete disagreement with Gewirth when he claims that "The central concern of political philosophy is (...) the moral evaluation of political power. " It seems obvious that the under standing of political and social forms of life, and a fortiori of political power, must come before its evaluation. This cannot be provided by moral assessment alone. Thus an analytical or explicative approach which promotes such understanding must come first, and must be the "central concern" of the appropriate philosophical discipline. This is not to say that moral assessment is illegitimate, nor even that it cannot be one of the concerns of political philosophy, but it is to deny that it can be central, even though it might be somebody's central interest. To the extent to which this book is successful it will provide an argu mentin my favour - if the job can be done, obviously it is of primary importance. But we should not assume that it cannot be done unless we can show that there is no separate sphere of political and/or social phenomena. (shrink)

The essay takes the widespread complaint that societies today are deeply divided and polarized as a starting point. Affirming that there is no democracy without division, it asks what it means for conflict and disagreement to be dealt with in a respectful and civil manner. As an illustration of the main argument, the way that liberals have engaged with populist leaders is criticized on both a strategic and normative level. An alternative to existing strategies of dealing with the conflict between (...) liberals and populist is then proposed. Finally, the article also asks under what conditions civil disobedience might be an appropriate response to authoritarian populism. (shrink)

Whereas at the roots of the Western way of thinking, in particular, at the roots of philosophy and epistemology lies a notion of the one/over/many, in Asiatic cultures, it is an idea of one/and/many, represented by Japanese (Chinese) Ma. In the paper it is argued that Japanese Ma is not only broader than epistemological reality (the world) but also more basic. To overcome Wittgenstein’s skepticism we have to return to a noncognitive idea of the ontic presence. Our thinking and cognition (...) is deeply rooted in the imperceptible and indiscernible ontic flexibility and generality which is not conceptual or linguistic. This essay presents another interesting aspect of my metaphysical project showing that we cannot infer cognition either from the object level or from a meta-level. (shrink)

It was not only in his infamous speeches as NSDAP-approved Führer- Rektor of Freiburg University that Heidegger advocated what can be seen as an ‘activist’ understanding of human existence. To exist, according to this approach, means to be called upon to take charge of one’s life - actively, responsibly, authentically - whether mandated by Volk and Führer or not. Heideggerian resoluteness amounts to being active in a deep sense, a view articulated during the Rektoratszeit in the form of an (...) outright equation of dasein and work. I will revisit Heidegger’s phenomenology of boredom in Basic Concepts of Metaphysics, and contrast it with passages from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet. Pessoa presents a radical counterpoint to Heidegger, utterly at odds with his intellectual and political persona. Insofar as the early Heidegger still represents the sinister forces ruling on the death star of western metaphysics, Pessoa carries the light that can set us on a path toward very different horizons for thinking being. (shrink)

Why awaken the soul to justice if the only result can be to increase awareness of the futility of aspiring to justice in the world? Zwicky documents challenges to the belief that teaching philosophy will result in a fairer polity and suggests that perception of being’s integrity sustains pursuit of philosophy as a way of life.

in a nervous system of a given species. This chapter provides a critical perspective on the role of connectomes in neuroscientific practice and asks how the connectomic approach fits into a larger context in which network thinking permeates technology, infrastructure, social life, and the economy. In the first part of this chapter, we argue that, seen from the perspective of ongoing research, the notion of connectomes as “complete descriptions” is misguided. Our argument combines Rachel Ankeny’s analysis of neuroanatomical wiring (...) diagrams as “descriptive models” with Hans-Joerg Rheinberger’s notion of “epistemic objects,” i.e., targets of research that are still partially unknown. Combining these aspects we conclude that connectomes are constitutively epistemic objects: there just is no way to turn them into permanent and complete technical standards because the possibilities to map connection properties under different modeling assumptions are potentially inexhaustible. In the second part of the chapter, we use this understanding of connectomes as constitutively epistemic objects in order to critically assess the historical and political dimensions of current neuroscientific research. We argue that connectomics shows how the notion of the “brain as a network” has become the dominant metaphor of contemporary brain research. We further point out that this metaphor shares (potentially problematic) affinities to the form of contemporary “network societies.” We close by pointing out how the relation between connectomes and networks in society could be used in a more fruitful manner. (shrink)

Hans Jonas’ anti-visionary conservation-oriented environmental philosophy—prominently articulated in his seminal book The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age —had a tremendous impact on public and philosophical debates throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Jonas argues that the “environmental crisis” reveals an underlying fundamental “crisis” in the human-nature relation. The crisis challenges the metaphysical foundations of our Western culture—including the dominant way humans view and deal with nature. Environmental ethics, therefore, requires critical reflection on and (...) revision of the underlying philosophy of nature: ethics and philosophy of nature, Jonas argues, are twin sisters. This approach provokes severe criticism: the diagnosis objection, the origin analysis objection, the justification objection, and the problem-solution objection. Most objections are not as sound as they claim to be—although Jonas’ argumentative justification is in fact a bit weak. However, a systematic critique of the objections of the critics from an analytic perspective shows that he developed a political and practical “philosophy of nature” in which anthropology, ethics, and politics are conceptualized as a converging domain as one of the core constituents of environmentals ethics for this century. (shrink)

This volume weaves together a variety of perspectives aimed at confronting a spectrum of ethico-political global challenges arising in the Anthropocene which affect the future of life on planet earth. In this book, the authors offer a multi-faceted approach to address the consequences of its imaginary and projective directions. The chapters span the disciplines of political economy, cybernetics, environmentalism, bio-science, psychoanalysis, bioacoustics, documentary film, installation art, geoperformativity, and glitch aesthetics. The first section attempts to flesh out new (...) aspects of current debates. Questions over the Capitaloscene are explored via conflations of class and climate, revisiting the eco-Marxist analysis of capitalism, and the financial system that thrives on debt. The second section explores the imaginary narratives that raise questions regarding non-human involvement. The third section addresses ’geoartisty,’ the counter artistic responses to the speculariztion of climate disasters, questioning eco-documentaries, and what a post-anthropocentric art might look like. The last section addresses the pedagogical response to the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Building on an action theoretical perspective, it is assumed that most television viewing is a routine response to frequently occurring situations, which together make up everyday life. This interplay between television viewing and everyday life was studied using data from a national survey among Dutch adults and their families. From this survey, data of 225 couples were analyzed using event history analysis. Results indicate that one cannot see television viewing as merely an alternative for other activities. For instance, (...) participatory activities have two distinct effects: They tend to inhibit television viewing by the actor but stimulate television viewing by the actor’s partner. The effect of contacts with other variables appears to be important as well: Being at home, engagement in child care, household work, and eating and drinking often enhances television viewing. But presence of non-family may inhibit television viewing. Education was shown to have a consistently negative impact on television viewing, and there appeared to be some gender specific inducements for termination of television viewing. (shrink)

In order to discuss our problem I propose to adopt a definition of art as an ensemble of man-made objects of specific character, of materials, tools and institutions, of people—those who produce and those who commission or look at works of art—and of techniques and skills mastered by the artists. Art—so broadly understood—has no sharp limits, it is an area connected by hundreds of links with the whole of social, economic, intellectual and spiritual life. It is exposed to various (...) disturbances since any one occurring in those other areas with which art is connected must of necessity affect art and its development to a greater or smaller degree. Lack of demand for some kind of artistic products must lead to the extinction of the corresponding kind of production. For instance, images of saints disappeared in those parts of Germany which adopted the Reformation. One can say in general, that, since various factors of social and economic character influence the life of art, it must reflect the results of those crises which affect social, political or economic life, although the way art reacts on various disturbances may be varied. It may seem natural that in a period of unemployment and of high prices society cannot afford to devote as much money to invest in the goods of culture as it does in times of prosperity, and often it is so indeed. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that acting and judging ought to rest on a community-wide, binding definition of what is right and respectable, that is, a substantial consensus. Such consensus is thought possible only when we engage shared values and criteria, when we use knowledge and abilities appropriated through education. On this view, education deals with the reproduction of consensus and, hence, with the passing on of traditions and norms. On my view, we need to question the framework in which the (...) debate over social erosion takes place. I take a cue from remarks of Hannah Arendt and question the presupposition that acting and judging in a right way requires both common values and the appropriation of what we call ‘knowledge’ of criteria and principles. I do not suggest that ‘knowledge’ has nothing to do with acting and judging. Rather, I wish to draw attention to thinking as a condition for acting and judging. Here, thinking has nothing to do with knowledge or with appropriation. Rather, it has to do with living-together with somebody. Educa-tion for thinking is, then, a ‘public thinking’ which leads out of the serf and into communal responsibility. On this treatment, the educator is to be a ‘faithful guardian’ of this calling out into responsibility. (shrink)

The use of quality of life (QOL) outcomes in clinical trials is increasing as a number of practical, ethical, methodological, and regulatory reasons for their use have become apparent. It is important, then, that QOL measurements and differences between QOL scores be readily interpretable. We study interpretation in two contexts: when determining QOL and when basing decisions on QOL differences. We consider both clinical situations involving individual patients and research contexts, e.g., randomized clinical trials, involving groups of patients. We (...) note the ethical importance of such understanding: proper interpretation and communication facilitate health care decision making. Communication that facilitates interpretation is of moral significance since better communication can attenuate ethical problems and inform choices. Much of what is communication worthy about QOL assessments is determined by the particular QOL instrument used in the assessment and how it is administered. In practice, these choices will be driven by the purpose of the assessment, but, it is argued, to maximize understanding, we should combine the information garnered from traditional standardized QOL instruments, from individualized QOL assessments, and from a recently proposed dialogic paradigm, where QOL is determined by shared conversation regarding the interpretation of texts. And, while some studies can surely succeed using abbreviated methods of administration (e.g., postal surveys may suffice for certain purposes), we will focus on methods of administration involving interviewer–respondent interaction. We suggest that during the QOL elicitation process, interviewer and respondent should engage in a two-way conversation in order to achieve a shared understanding of the “answers” to QOL “questions” and, finally, to reach a shared interpretation of the individual’s QOL. (shrink)

The paper consists of two parts, outlined in the title.I. In the historical science time appears as an element of the historian’s workshop. The historian collects source information, evaluates them and assigns respective dates. Only on the ground of thus “processed” sources may he reproduce the past: events and longer development processes, setting them in time. This dated time is understood colloquially as something objective, which runs one way and may be measured.II. A historian who studies the past reality depends (...) on the extent to which those sources are preserved. As a result of their interpretation, with the use of increasingly excellent research methods, he reproduces that reality. He must carry out an ongoing selection of historical facts found. This exposes him to temptations of such selection of those facts so as to adjust the historical knowledge to serve well the national interests, his own political opinions, etc. In this way the historian exerts influence on social awareness, which may consists of various myths and stereotypes, which sometimes lead to negative social behaviors: aggression, chauvinism, etc. Therefore, for researcher honesty’s sake and in the sense of moral responsibility, he must be careful to be as impartial as possible in his work. (shrink)

The paper consists of two parts, outlined in the title.I. In the historical science time appears as an element of the historian’s workshop. The historian collects source information, evaluates them and assigns respective dates. Only on the ground of thus “processed” sources may he reproduce the past: events and longer development processes, setting them in time. This dated time is understood colloquially as something objective, which runs one way and may be measured.II. A historian who studies the past reality depends (...) on the extent to which those sources are preserved. As a result of their interpretation, with the use of increasingly excellent research methods, he reproduces that reality. He must carry out an ongoing selection of historical facts found. This exposes him to temptations of such selection of those facts so as to adjust the historical knowledge to serve well the national interests, his own political opinions, etc. In this way the historian exerts influence on social awareness, which may consists of various myths and stereotypes, which sometimes lead to negative social behaviors: aggression, chauvinism, etc. Therefore, for researcher honesty’s sake and in the sense of moral responsibility, he must be careful to be as impartial as possible in his work. (shrink)

Completing the translation of Derrida's monumental work _Right to Philosophy_, _Eyes of the University_ brings together many of the philosopher's most important texts on the university and, more broadly, on the languages and institutions of philosophy. In addition to considerations of the implications for literature and philosophy of French becoming a state language, of Descartes' writing of the _Discourse on Method_ in French, and of Kant's and Schelling's philosophies of the university, the volume reflects on the current state of research (...) and teaching in philosophy and on the question of what Derrida calls a "university responsibility." Examining the political and institutional conditions of philosophy, the essays collected here question the growing tendency to orient research and teaching towards a programmable and profitable end. The volume is therefore invaluable for the light it throws upon an underappreciated aspect of Derrida's own engagement, both philosophical and political, in struggles against the stifling of philosophical research and teaching. As a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy and as one of the conveners of the Estates General of Philosophy, Derrida was at the forefront of the struggle to preserve and extend the teaching of philosophy as a distinct discipline, in secondary education and beyond, in the face of conservative government education reforms in France. As one of the founders of the Collège International de Philosophie, he worked to provide a space for research in and around philosophy that was not accepted or legitimated in other institutions. Documenting and reflecting upon these engagements, _Eyes of the University_ brings together some of the most important and incisive of Derrida's works. (shrink)

I investigate the complex relationship between politics and philosophy by focusing on the notion of testimony. I argue that there is a necessary and fruitful tension between sapiential and political life. Testimony is characterized here as a free value-response in an intersubjective relation that requires empathy on both sides of the communication. This act of affirming a truth or value goes beyond the limits of prudent self-realization and self-preservation: authentic testimony requires some kind of self-sacrifice. I contrast this (...) general image of testimony to Jan Patočka’s interpretation of «care for the soul». Patočka, by following the early Husserl’s renewal of philosophy, managed to establish and to preserve the harmony between theory and praxis even during persecution of the communist regime. His courageous acts come close to and illuminate the testimony of Edith Stein, who set the measure for philosophical authenticity and self-donation. The comparison of these two testimonies helps to elaborate the notion of exemplary sapiential life — a highly relevant notion for politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Militant democracy calls for pre-emptive measures against political actors who use democratic institutions to undermine or outright abolish a democratic political system. Born in the context of interwar fascism, militant democracy has recently been revived by political and legal theorists concerned about the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists. A long-standing charge against militant democracy—also articulated with renewed force in our era—is that, as a top-down way to deal with the intolerant, militant democracy is inherently elitist and (...) bears uncomfortable similarities with technocracy. But while it is true that militant democracy relies on state institutions to preserve democracy, it by no means excludes citizen engagement: “courts or the people” is a false choice. On the other hand, citizens engaged in militant democracy must take on the difficult task of distinguishing very clearly between democratic essentials under threat and political questions about which citizens might reasonably disagree. While citizen assemblies are not the answer to all of contemporary democracies’ travails, they might be very helpful in clarifying such distinctions for wide audiences. (shrink)

Tibetan Buddhist writings frequently state that many of the things we perceive in the world are in fact illusory, as illusory as echoes or mirages. In Twelve Examples of Illusion , Jan Westerhoff offers an engaging look at a dozen illusions--including magic tricks, dreams, rainbows, and reflections in a mirror--showing how these phenomena can give us insight into reality. For instance, he offers a fascinating discussion of optical illusions, such as the wheel of fire (the "wheel" seen when a torch (...) is swung rapidly in a circle), discussing Tibetan explanations of this phenomenon as well as the findings of modern psychology, and significantly clarifying the idea that most phenomena--from chairs to trees--are similar illusions. The book uses a variety of crystal-clear examples drawn from a wide variety of fields, including contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, as well as the history of science, optics, artificial intelligence, geometry, economics, and literary theory. Throughout, Westerhoff makes both Buddhist philosophical ideas and the latest theories of mind and brain come alive for the general reader. -/- "This delightful book offers a rich and satisfying philosophical feast to anyone interested in the phenomenon of illusion itself or in the Buddhist analysis of the human condition. Westerhoff draws together classical Buddhist scholarship, contemporary cognitive science and his own judicious philosophical reflection in a serious but refreshingly accessible engagement with the Buddhist tradition in the exploration of the role of illusion in our cognitive and emotional lives." Jay L. Garfield, author of Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika -/- "Jan Westerhoff creatively juxtaposes an important Buddhist study of illusion with fascinating modern researches on illusory experiences, using the latter to illuminate the former. The result is a revealing account of the pervasiveness of illusion in our cognitive experience and the very structure of our cognitive apparatus. It brings to life the Buddhist discussion of illusion, making it relevant to our everyday experience instead of being high-minded intellectual exercises only." -/- Tao Jiang, author of Contexts and Dialogue: Yogacara Buddhism and Modern Psychology on the Subliminal Mind -/- "The twelve similes for the illusory nature of this world are very profound, and Westerhoff does them wonderful justice in this excellent book." -/- Robert Thurman, Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Buddhist Studies, Columbia University. (shrink)

This paper explores the dynamics of intergenerational change and its impact on social ethics in Slovakia during the 20th century, with a particular focus on authors of Lutheran background. The methodology selected to achieve the aims of this study is grounded in the 'theory of generations.' The purpose of this analysis is to examine how shifts in political, social, and economic realities influenced the ethical frameworks guiding societal engagements in Slovakia. Through a historical analysis of theological movements and their (...) socio-political contexts, the study reveals a significant shift from Christian Socialism, which was prevalent in the pre-war era among Lutheran thinkers, to Christian Realism, which emerged among the post-war generation. Christian Socialism sought to synthesize Christian values with socialist principles, while Christian Realism adopted a more pragmatic approach that acknowledged the role of various social systems without asserting the exclusivity of Christianity. The findings of this study highlight the flexibility and responsiveness of social ethics to changing social realities, and the role of intergenerational dynamics in shaping these ethical frameworks. (shrink)

I suppose I’m writing this because of my 1965 paper on Pacifism. In that essay I argued that pacifism is self-contradictory. That’s a strong charge, and also not entirely clear. Let’s start by trying to clarify the charge and related ones.Pacifism has traditionally been understood as total opposition to violence, even the use of it in defense of oneself when under attack. I earlier maintained (in my well-known “Pacifism: A Philosophical Analysis” (Narveson, Ethics, 75:4, 259–271, 1965)) that this position is (...) contradictory, if it is intended to mean that one has no right to use violence. While that is perhaps going too far, pacifism as so characterized is surely, as I have later argued, self-defeating in an obvious sense of that expression. But in any case, contemporary theorists who describe their views as pacifist profess to hold no such doctrine—they regard that familiar characterization of pacifism as a caricature. They do express strong opposition to war, but even that is not unlimited. If the chips are genuinely down, they will approve going to war-level self-defense—but they deny that it ever is really necessary, or at least that it is necessary nearly as often as actual war-making behavior among nations would suggest.In this it is not clear that we have a purely philosophical disagreement. How much opposition to war qualifies a view as “pacifist”? That is now very hard to say. After all, all decently liberal thinkers are against violence as a standardly available way of pursuing one’s ends. We all agree that if violence is to be justified, it takes something special. It should be a “last resort,” Just War theorists have classically said, and while ‘last’ is very difficult to pin down, at least, violence should be very far from the first thing a responsible nation thinks of. What’s more, the “something special” is not just that one’s ends are so important. It has to be that the violence would be employed in defense, of self or of other innocent parties under threat. So if there is genuine disagreement, it must be along this line: that we are morally required to make very substantial sacrifices in the pursuits of our otherwise legitimate interests, including our interests in security, in order to avoid using the violence of war.Is this reasonable? I think not. We should, of course, be reasonable, and that includes refraining from violence—except when the violence is necessary to counter the aggressive violence of others. For we reason, on practical matters, in terms of benefits and costs. Agents, especially political agents, can, alas, benefit from violence where that violence is unilateral. Thus it is rational to see to it that it won’t be unilateral. And when it is not unilateral, then the balance is in favor—strongly in favor—of peace. It remains that we must, alas, be able to make war in the possible case that we can’t have peace. When everybody shares the preference for peace, then we can scale down and hopefully even eliminate war-making capability. (Contemporary nations have already scaled down considerably—there have been few wars in the classic sense of military exchanges between states as such in recent times.) But until the scaling down is universal and includes a genuine renunciation of the use of warlike methods to achieve ends other than genuine self-defense, what most of us think of as “pacifism” is a non-option in the near run. (shrink)

History begins inseparably with the birth of the polis and of philosophy. Both represent a unity in strife. History is life that no longer takes itself for granted. To speak, then, of the meaning of history is not to tell a story with a projected happy or unhappy ending, as Western civilization has hoped, at least since the French Revolution. History's meaning is the meaning of the struggle in which being both reveals and conceals itself. Technological society represents both (...) the triumph of historicity and its implosion, since here humans turn from reaching for the sacrum imperium - life lived in the perspective of truth and justice - to the mundane satisfaction of mundane needs, to life lived for the sake of catering to life. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore whether there are any legal limits to the use of force, in particular when force is used for political reasons. How plausible is it to expect people to limit their options when they feel that what they’re doing paves the way towards paradise? In this light, much of the law of armed conflict would seem to be inadequate, based as much of it is on the premise that force is non-political. To the extent (...) then that limits are conceivable, these may stem from the individual morality of those engaged in battle rather than from any grand legal designs. (shrink)

The invention of computers, and especially their communication capabilities is revolutionary in several ways. They show the paramount importance of communication in human life, as well as facilitating revolutionary improvements in virtually all areas of social life: business, the arts, agriculture, and others. They put in perspective the erroneous outlook of "materialism" -the idea that human well-being is a matter of accumulating material objects, with a corollary that we must be using up the material resources that make such (...) life possible. In fact, we use fewer and fewer material resources to make life better. Given human ingenuity, natural resources simply do not pose any basic restriction on human potential. Humanity can be in for a great future, provided our politics can be kept from wrecking it all. Will we have the wisdom to leave people to their devices and continue to forward all this progress? (shrink)

My main complaint about Dworkin's papers on equality was that he had not said much by way of arguing for it. His intriguing response to this request provides a good start, and I shall confine this brief, further comment to what he says on that basic subject. Space considerations, alas, require me to ignore the other parts of his discussion. Dworkin distinguishes what he calls the “abstract egalitarian thesis” from his particular version of equalitarianism, equality of resources. His strategy is (...) to argue, first, that the latter is the best realization or version of the former, and then to argue for the general thesis itself. In my comments, I shall reverse this order, however, for reasons that will be clear as we proceed. 1. TheEgalitarian Thesis Dworkin states this as follows: “From the standpoint of politics, the interests of the members of the community matter, and matter equally.” The statement is intended to be abstract in the sense that it would “embrace various competing conceptions of equality,” so that in principle we can divide the discussion the way Dworkin has done into the two questions, “Should we accept equality as a principle at all?” and “What is the best version of equality, at what we might call the constitutional level?” But can we really do this? I am not entirely clear that we can. In order to appreciate the difficulty here, at any rate, consider Dworkin's suggestion that ”in order to sharpen the question” – the question whether to accept equality as a principle at all, that is –“I ask you to suppose that the abstract egalitarian principle does provide a good argument for subsidized medicine…” Now, some might think that such a program is paradigm case of what ought to be rejected at the public level, and yet his reasons for such rejection might very well be based on a principle that its proponent would regard as abstractly egalitarian. (shrink)

Czech history defies dominant Western progressive historical narratives and moral evolutionism. Czech free-market democracy was defeated and betrayed three times in 1938, 1948, and 1968. The Czech Protestants were defeated in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently, Czechs have a different perspective on the traditional questions of speculative philosophy of history: Where are we coming from? Where are we going? What does it mean? They ask further: where and why did history go wrong?Jan Patocka , the leading Czech philosopher and (...) the author of Charter 77 of human rights, traced the repeated historical tragedies of the Czechs to the origins of their national movement in the imperial liberation of the serfs in the eighteenth century, debating the dominant nationalistic belief in national historical continuity, leading to linguistic nationalism. Patocka accused his nation of being "petty," of low social origins and interests, unlike their elitist neighbors. Despite his obsession with aristocracies bent on any transcendence, Patocka thought that the Czechs should have fought the Nazis in 1938 for the transcendental ideal of democracy. Linguistic nationalism led the Czechs and their leaders to choose life in slavery in their Hegelian conflict with the German masters.The Czech reception of Patocka's philosophy of Czech history has been mixed. I criticize the philosophical, political, and historical shortcomings of Patocka's discussion. Contemporary Czech attitudes to their history are forgetfulness; new Czech historicism tracing a continuity from Jan Hus to Václav Havel; and a search for historical truth and philosphical understanding of history that has political implications. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment: A New Translation of the Traité des trois Imposteurs by Abraham AndersonJan W. WojcikAbraham Anderson. The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment: A New Translation of the Traité des trois Imposteurs. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. Pp. xiv + 165. Cloth, $52.50. Paper, $21.95.This work results from a seminar, organized by (...) Richard H. Popkin, sponsored by the Foundation for Intellectual History, and held in Leiden in 1990, in which various [End Page 368] aspects of the history and significance of the Traité de trois Imposteurs were studied. As the title of the work indicates, it contains an English translation of the Traité. It also contains three short essays of commentary (the second of which is a modified version of Anderson’s contribution to the volume of essays which resulted from the Leiden seminar, Heterodoxy, Spinozism and Free Thought in Early Eighteenth Century Europe: Studies on the Traité des trois Imposteurs, edited by S. Berti, F. Charles-Daubert, and R. H. Popkin). There is a select bibliography, but no index.The Treatise consists of a critique of revelation (which is exposed as a fiction of the imagination), along with a discussion of the ways in which claims to revelation made by crafty politicians have enslaved humankind. It also includes scurrilous stories about three of the main alleged impostors: Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, as well as a more philosophical discussion of God, the soul, and demons.The translation is of Pierre Rétat’s 1973 edition of the 1777 edition of the Traité. This edition was chosen out of a number of virtually identical editions because it is accompanied by three very brief documents related to the Treatise (“Sentiments Concerning the Treatise of the Three Impostors: Extract of a Letter or Dissertation of Mr. de La Monnoye on this Subject,” a “Response to the Dissertation of Mr. de La Monnoye,” and a “Copy of Article IX of the Second Part of the First Volume of the Mémoires de Littérature”). Anderson’s reasons for selecting this edition are sound. The accompanying documents are of interest in their own right; in addition, they are the focus of Anderson’s essays of commentary and are (as he claims) necessary for a proper understanding of the significance of the Treatise. Although earlier English translations exist (1844, reprinted 1846, reprinted 1904) they are either not readily available or are not reliable in that the manuscript original is not readily identifiable. Hence Anderson’s translation is a welcome addition to the literature for those (both specialists and nonspecialists) whose circumstances do not permit a study of the 1777 French edition.The first two essays of commentary concern political issues, as indicated by their inclusion in “Part I: The Politics of the Traité des trois Imposteurs.” In the first, entitled “On a Section of Prosper Marchand’s Private Catalogue,” Anderson refutes the claim made by Margaret C. Jacob in The Radical Enlightenment that a section of Prosper Marchand’s library catalogue shows that Marchand considered the Traité to be in the tradition of Protestant radicalism and republicanism. After a careful analysis of the works listed in this section of the catalogue, Anderson concludes that (with one exception) the books in this section constitute a bibliography of works that “either exemplify the uses of literary study for the defense of orthodoxy or belong to a literary tradition of the cynical study of those uses, or consist in a parody and public exposure of that cynical study” (81). In the second essay, “Sallengre, La Monnoye, and the Traité des trois Imposteurs,” Anderson argues that rather than being a work of radical propaganda, the Traité was part of a satirical campaign against the “conformist libertine intelligentia” (x) of Louis XIV—those who believed that the fact of imposture ought not become public knowledge because they believed that religion ought to serve to enforce the rights of monarchy.“Part 2: Philosophy in the Traité des trois Imposteurs” consists of a single essay, “Descartes the Impostor, Bayle, and the Hidden Origins of Enlightenment.” Here, Anderson explores puzzling aspects of the... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the turn to polytheism in postmodern theory. In postmodernism, there is a strong interest in polytheism as an alternative to the much-criticized dominance of onto-theology in the philosophical tradition. The article argues that the new polytheism cannot be unequivocally understood as an alternative for an onto-theological way of thinking, or as a ‘liberation’ from monotheism. Already in Romanticism, the engagement with polytheism and paganism was ambiguous. There was the familiar superiority of Christian monotheism over polytheism. But there (...) was also an appropriation of polytheism that served a new self-perception of the West. This article focuses on this second line of interpretation and argues that postmodern theory inherits the theo-political concerns central to eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Romanticism. The article sets out to sketch the role of polytheism in a post-secular paradigm. Subsequently, it sketches the engagement with polytheism in British and German Romanticism. It will be argued that in Romanticism, polytheism was always embedded in more substantial cultural and political narratives. The remainder of the article will scrutinize the function of polytheism in the writings of Richard Rorty and John Milbank and how their respective forms of polytheism give way to different political theologies. (shrink)

Present study sheds more light on the conceptualization of citizenship and civic engagement among majority and minority youth. In order to understand the meanings of citizenship, fourteen focus groups were conducted with young people aged 16–26, with both civically engaged and disengaged young ethnic Czechs, Roma, and Ukrainians. Results suggest that young people understand the citizenship as having multiple dimensions (legal and personal, and in terms of rights and responsibilities) and civic engagement as being focused on various aspects. The way (...) people described their position within society was influenced by the social background and mirrored in the views on full citizenship. (shrink)

In his two works from the 1970s, Patočka proposes a very personal way that the spiritual crisis, which manifests itself as a techno-scientific reality of Gestell, can be overcome. Patočka argues that the only way to escape spiritual decline is through sacrifice. This study examines how the ethical is represented in Patočka’s philosophy. It focuses on his two main concepts of sacrifice and care for the soul and explores the relationship between them. Through a close reading of Plato and Europe, (...) ‘Four Seminars’, and his essay ‘The dangers of technicization’, this study reveals how Patočka proposes that the ethical can be implemented within the realm of the political. Drawing a parallel between Socrates’ and Patočka’s lives and fates, this study points to the significance of ethics in political life – both in the ancient Greek polis of Socrates’ time and in communist Czechoslovakia in Patočka’s time. This approach highlights the influence that the philosophy of Socrates had on Patočka’s thinking. (shrink)

‘It comes together at the end’: the impact of a one‐year subject in Nursing Inquiry on philosophies of nursingThis paper reframes an interpretive study as critical inquiry as the researchers interrogate their roles and authority in the ‘reading’ of what is valued as reflective. Working from data collected in written philosophies and interviews within the context of a one‐year subject aimed at developing reflective practice and an appreciation of ways of knowing, this paper examines the change in philosophies of nursing (...) perceived by three university‐based educators and their students. The study reveals a growing appreciation of the complexity of nursing but a limited consideration of the dialectic of critical theorising and everyday engagement necessary to critical reflection and reconstruction of action. More importantly, the process of research collaboration raises questions of the soul‐searching necessary for university educators to act against the institutionalised political context that determines what is seen to be of value in student learning. (shrink)