When Emanuel Ringelblum was born on November 21, 1900, in Buczacz, the small, multilingual and multi-ethnic Galician town was to be found on the far northeastern part of the Austrian Empire. As a mail stamp on a Correspondenz-Karte or Karta korrespondencyja of 1890 shows, the place was officially spelled in accordance with its Polish orthography. However, it was called Butschtasch in German, Bichuch in Yiddish, and still differently in Ukranian. After World War I, it was for a short while part (...) of Ukrania, and subsequently became Polish, then Soviet, and Ukranian again in the aftermath of the end of the Soviet Union. Ringelblum's cousin, Shmuel Josef Agnon, was also born in Buczacz. But their lives were to diverge in most respects. Agnon is remembered as one of the leading authors of modern Hebrew belles-lettres who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1966. And one remembers Ringelblum as the one who, with utmost and relentless courage, organized the underground archive Oyneg Shabes in the Warsaw ghetto. Samuel D. Kassow, the expert on the history of Oyneg Shabes and the author of a brilliant monograph on this subject, asserts that “more than anyone else it was Emanuel Ringelblum who encouraged individuals to write, who organized and conceptualized the archive, and who transformed it into a powerful center of civil resistance”. (shrink)

Some disability activists argue that disability is merely a difference. It is often objected that this view has unacceptable implications, implying, for example, that it is permissible to cause disability. In reply, Elizabeth Barnes argues that viewing disability as a difference needn’t entail such implications and that seeing such implications as unacceptable is question-begging. We argue that Barnes misconstrues this objection to the mere difference view of disability: it’s not question-begging to regard its implications as unacceptable, and the grounds that (...) Barnes offers for potentially blocking some of these implications fail to explain our conviction that it’s impermissible to cause disability. (shrink)

Chacun des livres de Paul Ricœur est structuré comme un récit ; il naît d’un problème résiduel, et résistant, qui a échappé aux précédents, et qui constitue comme leur zone d’ombre ; de telle sorte qu’ils se présentent tous comme limités parce que la question à laquelle ils sont confrontés est délimitée. Mais, en se déplaçant sur le terrain de l’involontaire,...

This paper examines perfectionist attempts to explain the prudential badness of pain (its badness for those who experience it). It starts by considering simple perfectionist explanations, finding them wanting, before considering the most sophisticated perfectionist attempt to explain prudential badness: Gwen Bradford’s tripartite perfectionism. The paper argues that Bradford’s view, though an improvement on earlier perfectionist proposals, still does not satisfactorily explain the full set of prudentially bad pains. It ends by showing how this provides grounds for a general kind (...) of pessimism about perfectionism and the badness of pain and how this case undermines a general purported advantage of perfectionism over the objective list theory. (shrink)

What role does language play in our thoughts? A longstanding proposal that has gained traction among supporters of embodied or grounded cognition suggests that it serves as a cognitive scaffold. This idea turns on the fact that language—with its ability to capture statistical regularities, leverage culturally acquired information, and engage grounded metaphors—is an effective and readily available support for our thinking. In this essay, I argue that language should be viewed as more than this; it should be viewed as a (...) neuroenhancement. The neurologically realized language system is an important subcomponent of a flexible, multimodal, and multilevel conceptual system. It is not merely a source for information about the world but also a computational add-on that extends our conceptual reach. This approach provides a compelling explanation of the course of development, our facility with abstract concepts, and even the scope of language-specific influences on cognition. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In “The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today,” Blumenthal-Barby and colleagues argue that philosophy is indispensable to the field of bioethics (Blumenthal-Barby et al. 2022). Nonetheless, they i...

Self-harm within immigration detention centres has been a widely documented phenomenon, occurring at far higher rates than the wider community. Evidence suggests that factors such as the conditions of detention and uncertainty about refugee status are among the most prominent precipitators of self-harm. While important in explaining self-harm, this is not the entire story. In this paper, we argue for a more overtly political interpretation of detainee self-harm as resistance and assess the ethical implications of this view, drawing on interviews (...) with detainees from Australia’s offshore system. Self-harm by detainees is not only a medical ‘condition’ arising in response to oppression but a form of political action to lessen or contest it. We first establish how self-harm could be conceptualised as resistance. We then discuss its political purpose, noting it serves at least three functions: intrinsic, instrumental and disruptive or coercive. Viewing detainee self-harm as political resistance is a supplement to (rather than a substitute for) a medical approach. However, conceptualising self-harm this way has several advantages, namely, moving away from the idea that such behaviour is ‘maladaptive’, recognising detainees as political agents, combatting government claims of ‘manipulation’ and ‘blackmail’ and clarifying the duties of healthcare workers who work in detention. (shrink)

This paper adds a new perspective to recent debates about the political nature of rights through attention to their distinctive role within social movement practices of moral critique and social struggle. The paper proceeds through a critical examination of the Political Constitutionalist theories of rights politics proposed by Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy. While political constitutionalists are correct to argue that rights are ‘contestable’ and require democratic justification, they construe political activity almost exclusively with reference to voting, parties and parliamentary (...) law-making, neglecting the vital role rights play in political struggle outside and against the official institutions of democratic citizenship. In contrast to the political constitutionalist stress on the patient and reciprocal negotiation of rights within formal electoral processes, this paper locates the political nature of rights in their conflictual logic as ‘claims’ in multiple spheres that function to mobilise oppos... (shrink)

Cet ouvrage propose d'unifier les sciences de l'homme entre elles et avec la philosophie en les articulant grâce à trois concepts fondamentaux: forme, sens et historicité.

Résumé La responsabilité est le maître mot de l’éthique contemporaine. L’éthique théologique participe également de ce développement conceptuel récent. Cet article porte sur les transformations du discours théologique sur l’éthique au xxe siècle, lesquelles sont tout autant de l’ordre des contenus — la responsabilité comme thème de réflexion — que de celui de la forme — la responsabilité comme posture méthodologique.The notion of responsibility is paramount in contemporary ethical thought. This applies to theological ethics as well. This article traces the (...) development of the theological discourse on responsibility throughout the 20th century. Responsibility is considered here both as a crucial concept of theological ethics and as a methodological stance. (shrink)

Outre que les règles d’éthique de la recherche proposées, édictées par les grands organismes subventionnaires canadiens éludent des enjeux d’importance majeure, règles et procédures de ces mêmes organismes touchant la présentation des demandes et leur étude, puis l’allocation des subventions, incitent à la fraude ou du moins à l’entorse, et parfois à l’iniquité. L’auteur présente diverses illustrations de cette thèse, avant de faire appel à son tour, mais sur un autre registre, à la responsabilité des chercheurs.

Face à la défense aristotélicienne de l'esclavage, il faut, dit-on "sauver l'honneur des philosophes". Objectif: dévoiler le coût de cette entreprise dans un contexte où l'on préconise de plus en plus le recours à Aristote pour surmonter les impasses imputées à la pensée éthico-politique contemporaine. Au delà de sa portée historique, cet ouvrage interroge l'image actuelle du philosophe grec véhiculée par ses commentateurs francophones (1932-1999) et la pertinence attribuée à son message.

Ce volume recueille les contributions d'un colloque qui s'est tenu à l'université de Nantes en juin 2005 et dont le thème était " Expérience et herméneutique ". L'intention était alors d'interroger la signification de l'expérience pour l'herméneutique et de se demander pourquoi toute expérience, pour l'herméneutique contemporaine, relève de la compréhension et de l'interprétation. L'expérience de la compréhension transforme toujours d'une certaine façon celui qui en est le sujet, en même temps qu'elle transforme le rapport que celui-ci entretient au monde. (...) C'est pourquoi l'expérience de la compréhension est en même temps compréhension de l'expérience. Il faut dire alors que les notions d'" expérience " et d'" herméneutique"s'impliquent réciproquement, et que la compréhension en vient à signifier le rapport en tant que tel, et cependant diversifié, au monde. (shrink)