INTRODUCTION In ita original form the present paper was presented to the American Mathematical Society, April 2k,, as a companion piece to the writer's ...
Post's Nachlass has recently been made available to the public in an archive in the U.S.A. After a short summary of his life and career, this article indicates the character and content of the manuscripts, and their significance is assessed. Two short passages are transcribed; and. as a separate item, a paper of the 1930s on the paradoxes is reproduced.
This article discusses Rousseau’s theory of the genesis and development of a “post-liberal self” and its political implications. In his Emile, or Education, Rousseau explores the distinctive features of the post-liberal self through Emile’s growing capacity to think in terms of his social interdependence with others and yet to maintain his critical autonomy. For Rousseau it is only such individuals with a highly developed moral and civic consciousness who are capable of articulating the general will and of properly (...) participating in a modern republic. I argue that the general will for Rousseau is therefore not a property of the community but of the post-liberal self, for whom the common good is a larger dimension of the individual good. I then discuss the political implications of this theory by relating it to The Social Contract where Rousseau urges us to examine the legitimacy of existing social norms, laws and practices. Rousseau, I conclude, is one of the great radical thinkers of self-transformation as the prerequisite for overcoming the pathologies and limitations of liberal society. (shrink)
" -- Franklin H. Littell In To Mend the World Emil L. Fackenheim points the way to Judaism's renewal in a world and an age in which all of our notions -- about ...
More akin to the Roman Empire’s concept of civitas mobilis augescens, the distinction between the twentieth-century metropolis and the Roman model of a city must be sought in the eminently biopolitical character of the modern-day post-metropolis, conceived by Hardt and Negri as the new hegemonic paradigm of production. As a result, the primacy of time over space has been established as the only possible way of measuring the proximity of productive relationships: everything that can be converted into information is (...) instantaneous and the value of goods depends not on the requirements of its production process but on the cost of its transportation. As a kind of Phenomenology of the Urban Spirit, this paper develops the main milestones in the historical unfolding of this Logic of the Absolute Urban Spirit. (shrink)
Despite the radically different interests that motivate Emil Fackenheim’s and Henry Harris’s respective interpretations of Hegel, the two have significant points of commonality. They in fact come the closest precisely at points where they seem to differ most. The need and the possibility of ‘reconciliation’ is the theme that animates both interpretations, and both also agree in their assessment of Hegel’s treatment of ‘evil.’ There are nevertheless crucial differences separating the two, which the essay details. The essay concludes wondering, (...) on the one hand, how seriously Harris recognizes that, in a post-Holocaust world, ‘reconciliation’ calls for existential conditions such as Hegel could never have imagined; and on the other hand, how much Fackenheim would be willing to admit that his immersion into history will necessarily bring violent consequences in train for which there will have to be an accounting. (shrink)