Crises and social revolts in the historiography of contemporary France Refusing to apprehend the category as a simple empirical fact, the article examine the notion of crisis against the perspective offered by the series of French Revolutions : . This enables the authors to question these « moments of crisis » in relation to the historiographical contribution of successive generations of historians. In opposition to a liberal vision where social revolts are devoid of any political project, such an approach on (...) the part of the historian places the focus on a people, a proletariat, a group which, above all, reveals itself to be a political subject. To be effective, and to avoid stifling the comprehension of a revolutionary phenomenon, the concept of conjunctural crisis is thus combined with the invocation of a longer temporality and with a comprehension of the organic movements of society. The focus placed on the moment of crisis enables the authors to propose a different way of apprehending revolution, to grasp its rootedness in time that is both profound and immediate, organic and circumstantial. (shrink)

Although many scientists view cloning as a useful procedure for scientific research into early embryo development—one that cannot currently be used to produce multiple copies of humans—the popular literature has led some individuals to view it as sinister. To address the concerns of the public, various conceptions of cloning are distinguished and their basis in fact analyzed. The possible uses, benefits, and detriments of both embryo splitting and nuclear transplantation are explained. Once the nature and purposes of cloning are understood, (...) and the distinctive ethical dilemmas created by embryo splitting and nuclear transplantation are sorted out, these procedures should be clinically implemented to assist in vitro fertilization treatment for those who are infertile and to further other therapeutic and investigational efforts in medicine. (shrink)

Psycho-physical origins.-- Spatial nothingness.-- The origin of space.-- Moral facts and origins.-- Psycho-physical relationship.-- Morality and moral ideals.-- The economic solution.-- Principles of psychotherapy.

The volume addresses these questions, contrasting Derrida's thought with philosophical predecessors such as Rosenzweig, Levinas, Celan, and Scholem, and tracing ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Future Directions for Human Cloning by Embryo Splitting:After the HullabalooCynthia B. Cohen (bio)In October 1993, a paper entitled, "Experimental Cloning of Human Polyploid Embryos Using an Artificial Zona Pellucida," was presented at a joint meeting of the American Fertility Society and the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. Although it was awarded a prize, its authors, who are affiliated with George Washington University, decided against calling a press conference (...) to announce their findings. Word of their experiment soon leaked out, however, and the New York Times blazoned on its front page that human embryo cloning had been achieved. The story was accompanied by a diagram of cloning by nuclear transplantation.Newspapers and television networks around the world picked up the story and embellished it. The idea of unlimited, xeroxed copies of human beings gripped the public imagination. Wild scenarios of hundreds of Hitlers plotting to take over the world and of clones giving birth to their own twins enlivened media reports. Only gradually did it become clear that the term "polyploid" in the title of the paper referred to abnormal embryos that could never develop into living human beings and that "cloning" referred to embryo splitting or twinning, not to nuclear transplantation or the transfer of a donor nucleus into an enucleated egg. Once this sank into public consciousness, the "hullabaloo," as Dr. Howard W Jones, Jr., called it, died down.It left in its wake unanswered questions about the ethics of splitting embryos. During the height of the publicity given to the George Washington experiment, newspaper and TV stories had not delved in any depth into the ethical issues it raised. Ethicists, given limited time to discuss the ethical questions at stake, had been quoted in quick, simplistic responses. Some had offered little analysis of the rights and wrongs of embryo splitting, but, revealing tremendous creative talent, had spun out [End Page 187] imaginary and frightening applications of the procedure. This was a story essentially about ethics in which ethics was never really discussed.The National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction* (NABER), an independent, multidisciplinary group that addresses ethical issues in modern reproductive science, technology, and care, became concerned about the sparsity of reflective ethical debate about embryo splitting. NABER's chair, Albert Jonsen, observed that "reporters phoning ethicists for comment and ethicists appearing on talk shows do not a debate make. Debate requires face to face (or at least essay to essay) argument among persons sharing the same information. This has yet to take place." Consequently, NABER decided to convene a workshop on human cloning by embryo splitting at the National Academy of Sciences in February 1994. The board invited participants who would provide a broad range of opinion about the ethical and public policy issues entailed by human embryo splitting. Embryologists, ethicists, reproductive biologists, public policy experts, staff from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), legal scholars, journalists, and infertility specialists were among those who participated. The feature articles in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal derive from that workshop. Their authors were given free rein to take whatever stance they deemed ethically supportable.The first article is designed to provide some understanding of the science of human cloning as a basis for exploring the ethical issues raised by this set of techniques. Jacques Cohen, a leading reproductive embryologist, and Giles Tomkin, a science writer, both of Cornell University Medical School, explain, in a way that is clear to laypersons and biologists alike, the meaning, nature, and function of cloning. They discuss recent: advances in this area and offer an assessment of feasible uses of human cloning procedures, hoping to dispel what they view as mistaken fears about its future applications. Dr. Howard W Jones, Jr., a pioneer infertility specialist, briefly comments on Cohen and Tomkin's paper, pointing out that embryo splitting may not improve pregnancy results if genetic heterogeneity is required for successful embryo transfer and implantation.In the next article, three major ethical arguments against human cloning by embryo splitting are analyzed and rejected by Ruth Macklin, an expert in reproductive ethics from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She finds the first argument, that the worth of individuals... (shrink)

The work of Jacques Derrida has transformed our understanding of a range of disciplines in the humanities through its questioning of some of the basic tenets of western metaphysics. This volume is a trans-disciplinary collection dedicated to his work; the assembled contributions - on law, literature, ethics, history, gender, politics and psychoanalysis, among others - constitute an investigation of the role of Derrida's work within the field of humanities, present and future. The volume is distinguished by work on some (...) of his most recent writings, and contains Derrida's own address on 'the future of the humanities'. In addition to its pedagogic interest, this collection of essays attempts to respond to the question: what might be the relation of Derrida, or 'deconstruction' to the future of the humanities? The volume presents the most sustained examples yet of what deconstruction is in its current phase - as well as what its possible future may be. (shrink)

Autour de la grande conference de Jacques Derrida, intitulee Justices, prononcee en 2003 et demeuree inedite en francais a ce jour, cet ouvrage collectif convoque certains des meilleurs specialistes de son oeuvre. Il s'agit moins ici de commemorer ou de dresser un etat des lieux que de penser, a partir de Derrida et avec lui, ce qui vient et de repondre a l'appel, aux appels pluriels qui resonnent dans son travail philosophique. Sont ainsi examines les principaux legs de sa (...) pensee dans les differents domaines (philosophie, politique, science des religions, esthetique, litterature) qu'elle a profondement transformes. Autant de reponses et de responsabilites, autant de provocations a lire et a relire l'oeuvre de Jacques Derrida a sa hauteur, comme elle nous y engage toujours. Avec les textes de: Gil Anidjar, Philip Armstrong, Fernanda Bernardo, Mireille Calle-Gruber, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Gianfranco Dalmasso, Francoise Dastur, Jacques Derrida, Silvano Facioni, Edoardo Ferrario, Jerome Lebre, Georges Leroux, Michel Lisse, Rene Major, Marie-Louise Mallet, Serge Margel, Joana Maso, Ginette Michaud, J. Hillis Miller, Raoul Moati, Jean-Luc Nancy, Evando Nascimento, Francois Nault, Laura Odello, Jean-Michel Rabate, Marta Segarra, Peter Szendy, Chantal Talagrand, Francesco Vitale et Hent de Vries. (shrink)

Un hommage à l'œuvre d'Emmanuel Levinas avait été organisé à la Sorbonne, peu après la mort du philosophe, certaines communications ont été publiées dans un numéro de la revue Rue Descartes. Celles-ci déclinent, selon un modèle propre à chaque auteur, un moment de ce que Levinas appelle " l'altérité d'autrui ". Deux directions caractéristiques de la pensée de Levinas sont privilégiées, l'une encline à l'exégèse et à l'étude du Talmud, dérangeant la souveraineté de la raison, l'autre, la philosophie, permettant d'accéder (...) à une réflexion partagée sur la vérité. Présentés par Danielle Cohen-Levinas, les textes sont signés par Miguel Abensour, Pierre Bouretz, Catherine Chalier, Simon Critchley, Marc de Launay, MarieLouise Mallet, Jean-Luc Marion, Stéphane Mosès, Silvana Rabinovich, Jacques Rolland, Shmuel Trigano. Le lecteur trouvera également dans la collection Quadrige, Le tempe et l autre, ouvrage regroupant quatre conférences d'Emmanuel Levinas faites au Collège de philosophie. (shrink)

En même temps qu'il est réputé pour son scepticisme linguistique, Kant reconnaît aux pronoms personnels une signification universelle. C'est ce statut d'exception qui éclaire le caractère décisif de l'usage de ces pronoms dans la critique kantienne du cogito. On peut faire apparaître un paradoxe immanent à cet usage au coeur de l'opération de désubstantialisation de la pensée, engagée par Kant dans la Déduction transcendantale et dans les Paralogismes: d'une part, la substitution des pronoms il et ça au pronom je dans (...) le fameux «je pense» permet la réduction de la pensée à sa stricte fonction logique mais, d'autre part, le jeu de substitution des pronoms n'entame pas la fonction d'instanciation d'un sujet "fût-il strictement grammatical" de la pensée dans la formulation du cogito. Cette tension paradoxale entre un sujet désubstantialisé et une «subjectivité», certes neutralisée mais restée néanmoins instanciée dans l'acte de penser, s'accuse dans la deuxième édition de la Critique de la raison pure, qui invente à partir du cogito une nouvelle catégorie d'existence. Kant semble ainsi poser une pierre d'attente pour une nouvelle conception de la subjectivité de la pensée, que nous nommons «le fait-sujet de la pensée responsable» et qui implique une pensée inédite de la constitution du je dans et par la puissance d¿interpellation de la raison. Cette analyse permet une relectura du premier paragraphe de l'Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, elle conduit à reconsidérer de manière critique l'interprétation que donne Jacques Derrida du sujet kantien de la pensée dans L'animal que donc je suis et elle inaugure peut-être une nouvelle conception du sujet responsable. Though known for his linguistic scepticism, Kant grants a universal meaning to personal pronouns. It is this exception which accounts for the decisive role that the use of personal pronouns plays in the kantian criticism of the cogito. It can be shown that a paradox inherent to this use emerges at the core of the thought-desubstancializing operation developed by Kant in the Trascendental deduction and the Paralogisms: on one hand, the substitution of the pronoun "I" for the pronouns "he" and "it" in the famous "I think" allows the reduction of thought to its strict logical function, but, on the other hand, the play of pronoun substitution does not prevent the subject of thought "even tough strictly grammatical" from being instanciated in the formula of the cogito. This paradoxical strain between a desubstancialized subject and a "subjectivity" neutralized but nonetheless still instantiated in the act of thinking is to be noted in the second edition of the Critique of pure reason, which derives from the cogito a new category of existence. It seems, therefore, that Kant lays the first ground for a new conception of the subjectivity of thought, which we call "the fact-subject of responsible thought" and which implies a novel notion of the constitution of the "I" in and through the addressing force of reason. This analysis allows for a new understanding of the first paragraph of the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, leads us to critically re-consider Jacques Derrida's interpretation of the kantian subject of thought in L'animal que donc je suis , and initiates perhaps a new conception of responsible subject. (shrink)

My purpose is to consider if, in political society, there can be any legitimate and sure principle of government, taking men as they are and laws as they might be. —Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Following Rousseau's opening thought in The Social Contract…, I shall assume that his phrase “men as they are” refers to persons' moral and psychological natures and how that nature works within the framework of political and social institutions. —John Rawls, The Law of peoples.

Textes issus d'un colloque consacré aux relations entre J. Derrida, son oeuvre, sa pensée et les judéités dans leur pluralité interprétative, linguistique, nationale, politique, philosophique, littéraire et religieuse.

What does it mean to"do theory" in America? In what ways has "French Theory" changed American intellectual and artistic life? How different is it from what French intellectuals themselves conceived, and what does all this tell us about American intellectual life? Is "French Theory" still a significant force in America, raising conceptual questions not easily answered? In this volume of new work--including the French writers Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilled Delezue, as well as essays by Sylvere (...) Lotringer and Sande Cohen, Mario Biagoli, Elie During, Chris Kraus, Alison Gingeras, and Kriss Ravetto, among others--French theorists assess the impact and reception of their work in America, and American-based critics account for their effects in different areas of cultural criticism and art over the last thirty years. (shrink)

L’éthique est sans discussion. Les rencontres de Jacques Derrida et de Jean-François Lyotard à Cerisy, en 1980 et en 1982, l’attestent. Elles imposent une écoute et une lecture qui relèvent de ce que Kant nommait « l’interprétation authentique ».

This is an exploration of women’s tradition of hospitality, the epistemic and moral contribution of their practices of welcoming the other and their historical experience as providers of care. The essay claims that female hospitality has largely consisted of care for others, which challenges a social model based on individualism and self-sufficiency. The argument is rooted in ethnography and Jewish thought and reclaims the home as an ethical space. This text analyses two disturbing and painful stories from the Tanakh that (...) are both examples of the consequences of extreme or absolute hospitality and violence against women. The famous works of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Lévinas on hospitality as ethics and hospitality as the feminine are discussed vis-à-vis anthropological and feminist approaches to the connection between the female welcoming of the other and the ethics of care. Finally, the reflections of the members of Beit Midrash Arevot shed light on a traditionist feminism that develops an ethics and practice of hospitality as welcoming otherness. (shrink)

"Dans ses conférences annuelles à l'Université du Québec à Montréal, le philosophe flamand Jacques De Visscher dessine des figures de l'hospitalité à partir de lectures phénoménologiques d'oeuvres littéraires (Samuel Beckett, Albert Cohen, Franz Kafka, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Paul van Ostaijen, Georges Perec, Marcel Proust) dans lesquelles il porte une attention particulière à la mise en scène architecturale, à la corporéité et à l'enracinement des choses dans notre monde ambiant. Il tente ainsi de nous prémunir d'une aliénation et (...) d'un déracinement qui appauvrissent nos relations avec autrui et notre être-au-monde."--From publisher's website. (shrink)

This rich collection will introduce students of philosophy and politics to the contemporary critical literature on the classical social contract political thinkers Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . A dozen essays and book excerpts have been selected to guide students through the texts and to introduce them to current scholarly controversies surrounding the contractarian political theories of these three thinkers.

Joshua Cohen: Rousseau. A Free Community of Equals. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010, 193 S. ISBN: 978-0199581504Frederick Neuhouser: Pathologien der Selbstliebe. Freiheit und Anerkennung bei Rousseau. Aus dem Amerikanischen von Christian Heilbronn. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2012, 366 S. ISBN: 978-3518296264.

Ce livre offre un parcours en compagnie d'ecrivains, philosophes et poetes, parmi les plus marquants de la deuxieme moitie du XXe siecle. Son point de depart est une question qui porte sur l'essence meme de la litterature: que signifie aimer avec passion une oeuvre et l'homme qui est derriere?... Comment vit-on avec? Et qu'y trouve-t-on pour vivre avec soi meme, apprendre a vivre ainsi? Il s'agit donc d'un livre ecrit a la premiere personne par un auteur qui aura eu la (...) chance de croiser le chemin de quelques grandes figures de la pensee francaise contemporaine: Edmond Jabes, Jacques Derrida et Andre du Bouchet, Maurice Blanchot de facon plus lointaine. On y trouvera pourtant une volonte clairement pedagogique. Didier Cahen reprend et etudie les enonces multiples de ces createurs de la postmodernite sur l'articulation de la pensee et de la litterature ou sur l'espace commun de la philosophie et de la poesie. Dans la foulee, il aborde des questions plus ouvertes, qui touchent a l'intuition de l'autre, au non-savoir qu'explore la face cachee de la litterature. Comme le demontrent les oeuvres singulieres de Roger Laporte et de Marcel Cohen, ecrire c'est mettre sa vie en jeu, se fier a ce qui vient, suivre l'ordre de l'Autre... en se jouant de l'etre. Indiscipline au coeur des disciplines, cet exercice de la litterature traverse ainsi les genres, engage son ecriture au-dela des lignes du livre, delivre le message qui se lit a livre ouvert. (shrink)

This work is an exceptionally rich account both of the connections and divergences between Levinas and Derrida as ethical thinkers. Against the backdrop of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy and phenomenology, Srajek draws on Hermann Cohen's ethics of correlation so as to demonstrate how far it is possible to read Levinas and Derrida as constructing similar approaches to ethics.

A sequel to Levinas's Totality and Infinity, this work is generally considered Levinas's most important contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure of metaphysical discourse, much commented upon by Jacques Derrida. This work contains a fundamentally original theory of the ethical relationship and describes the face-to-face relationship, sensibility, responsibility and speech. Renowned Levinas scholar Richard A. Cohen has contributed a new foreword to this edition of Otherwise than Being, which is also the first time the work is (...) available in an affordable paperback edition. This foreword, along with Alphonso Lingis's extensive introduction to the work, is a valuable tool for researchers and students of Levinas's philosophy. (shrink)

In this book, Livingston develops the political implications of formal results obtained over the course of the twentieth century in set theory, metalogic, and computational theory. He argues that the results achieved by thinkers such as Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and Cohen, even when they suggest inherent paradoxes and limitations to the structuring capacities of language or symbolic thought, have far-reaching implications for understanding the nature of political communities and their development and transformation. Alain Badiou's analysis of logical-mathematical structures (...) forms the backbone of his comprehensive and provocative theory of ontology, politics, and the possibilities of radical change. Through interpretive readings of Badiou's work as well as the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Livingston develops a formally based taxonomy of critical positions on the nature and structure of political communities. These readings, along with readings of Parmenides and Plato, show how the formal results can transfigure two interrelated and ancient problems of the One and the Many: the problem of the relationship of a Form or Idea to the many of its participants, and the problem of the relationship of a social whole to its many constituents. (shrink)

It has been a decade since the phrase virtue argumentation was introduced, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that it burst onto the scene, it would be just as much of an understatement to say that it has gone unnoticed. Trying to strike the virtuous mean between the extremes of hyperbole and litotes, then, we can fairly characterize it as a way of thinking about arguments and argumentation that has steadily attracted more and more attention from argumentation (...) theorists. We hope it is neither too late for an introduction to the field nor too soon for some retrospective assessment of where things stand. (shrink)

Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy contests the ancient opposition between Athens and Jerusalem by retrieving the concept of meontology - the doctrine of nonbeing - from the Jewish philosophical and theological tradition. For Emmanuel Levinas, as well as for Franz Rosenzweig, Hermann Cohen and Moses Maimonides, the Greek concept of nonbeing clarifies the meaning of Jewish life. These thinkers of 'Jerusalem' use 'Athens' for Jewish ends, justifying Jewish anticipation of a future messianic era as well as portraying (...) the subjects intellectual and ethical acts as central in accomplishing redemption. This book envisions Jewish thought as an expression of the intimate relationship between Athens and Jerusalem. It also offers new readings of important figures in contemporary Continental philosophy, critiquing previous arguments about the role of lived religion in the thought of Jacques Derrida, the role of Plato in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas and the centrality of ethics in the thought of Franz Rosenzweig. (shrink)

The claim that argumentation has no proper role in either philosophy or education, and especially not in philosophical education, flies in the face of both conventional wisdom and traditional pedagogy. There is, however, something to be said for it because it is really only provocative against a certain philosophical backdrop. Our understanding of the concept "argument" is both reflected by and molded by the specific metaphor that argument-is-war, something with winners and losers, offensive and defensive moments, and an essentially adversarial (...) structure. Such arguments may be suitable for teaching a philosophy, but not for teaching philosophy. Surely, education and philosophy do not need to be conceived as having an adversarial essence-if indeed they are thought to have any essence at all. Accordingly, philosophy and education need more pragmatic goals than even Pierce's idealized notion of truth as the end of inquiry, e.g., the simple furtherance of inquiry. For this, new metaphors for framing and understanding the concept of argumentation are needed, and some suggestions in that direction will be considered. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This volume is dedicated to Mario Bunge in honor of his sixtieth birthday. Mario Bunge is a philosopher of great repute, whose enormous output includes dozens of books in several languages, which will culminate with his Treatise on Basic Philosophy projected in seven volumes, four of which have already appeared [Reidel, I 974ff. ]. He is known for his works on research methods, the foundations of physics, biology, the social sciences, the diverse applications of mathematical methods and of systems analysis, (...) and more. Bunge stands for exact philosophy, classical liberal social philosophy, rationalism and enlightenment. He is brave, even relentless, in his attacks on subjectivism, mentalism, and spiritualism, as well as on positivism, mechanism, and dialectics. He believes in logic and clarity, in science and open-mindedness - not as the philosopher's equivalent to the poli tician's rhetoric of motherhood and apple pie, but as a matter of everyday practice, as qualities to cultivate daily in our pursuit of the life worth living. Bunge's philosophy often has the quality of Columbus's egg, and he is prone to come to swift and decisive conclusions on the basis of argu ments which seem to him valid; he will not be perturbed by the fact that most of the advanced thinkers in the field hold different views. (shrink)

Distinguer pour unir, ou Les degres du savoir was first published in 1932 by Jacques Maritain. In this new translation of The Degrees of Knowledge, Ralph McInerny attempts a more careful expression of Maritain's original masterpiece than previous translations. Maritain proposes a hierarchy of the forms of knowledge by discussing the degrees of rational and suprarational understanding. Nine appendices, some longer than the chapters of the book, advance Maritain's thought, often by taking on criticism of earlier editions of the (...) work. Rightly called Maritain's cardinal work, The Degrees of Knowledge is a magnificent and sagacious achievement. Jacques Maritain's masterpiece proposes a hierarchy of forms of knowledge that culminate in mystical experience and wisdom, which is a gift of the Holy Ghost. Maritain argues that the intellectual life is meant to be complemented by the spiritual life and should culminate in sanctity. (shrink)

We examine whether a taxpayer’s decision to choose a taxpayer-favorable (vs. a taxpayer-unfavorable) characterization of income is associated with contextual and individual dimensions of that decision. Using a 2 × 2 factorial experimental design, we manipulate the prevailing social norm on whether there is a general belief that a specific form of income should be characterized as a capital gain (taxed at a lower tax rate and hence taxpayer favorable) or as ordinary income (taxed at a higher tax rate and (...) hence taxpayer unfavorable), and the group affiliation on whether the individual is making a tax characterization decision as a sole proprietor or as a member of a group practice. Moreover, we measure participants’ fairness perception of characterizing the income as capital gains versus ordinary. We study the decisions of 180 graduate business and accounting students from two US business schools to explore these dimensions using a tax-ambiguous income situation. Results indicate that both contextual and individual dimensions impact taxpayer decisions. Specifically, the social norm and fairness perception of characterizing income as capital gains affects the likelihood of choosing such a characterization. Being a sole proprietor or a member of a group practice does not have any significant main effect. However, relative to all other conditions, taxpayers are most likely to characterize income as capital gains when both the social norms are for capital gains characterization and when the taxpayer is a member of a group practice. Results remain largely robust to a variety of alternative explanations. We conclude the paper with a discussion of our findings and their implications for tax policy, enforcement, and research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HOMO FABER RECONSIDERED: TWO THOMISTIC REFLECTIONS ON WORK KEITH A. BRECLAw Georgetown University Washington, D.C. ATHOUGH WE APPEAR to be poised at the beginning of yet another chapter in the accelerating drama of the industrial revolution-or as some would have it, a postindustrial climax to that revolution-it is far from evident that homo faber and his distinctive activity have found for themselves either a philosophy or a philosopher. The (...) work activity may have become respectable as a philosophical subject only in the nineteenth century, but it has hardly been the object of extended or systematic inquiry, then or now. That is well illustrated by Marx and the Marxian legacy. Marx is arguably to be considered· the preeminent philosopher of work, having elevated work and the worker to the center of his activist program. Yet that same orientation to instigating action leads Marx intentionally to neglect elaborating the philosophical foundations of his thought. To be counted among the consequences of that neglect is a treatment of the work activity which appears to be inconsistent, or at best, incomplete.1 One measure of the inadequacy of Marx's treatment of the subject is to be found in a significant tendency among some twentieth-century Marxists or Marxist-inspired thinkers to abandon the centrality 1 On the unresolved tensions in Marx's concept of work, see, for example: G. A. Cohen, "Marx's Dialectic of Labor," Philosophy and Public Affairs 3 (Spring 1974): 260-261; Peter Fuss, "Theory and Practice in Hegel and Marx: An Unfinished Dialogue," in Terence Ball, ed., Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), pp. 113-114; and R. N. Berki, "On the Nature and Origins of Marx's Concept of Labor," Political Theory 7 (February 1979) : 35-37. 579 580 KEITH A. BRECLAW of work and the worker altogether. Andre Gorz bids a dramatic and final " farewell to the working class." Work has become so de-skilled and fragmented that the Marxian working class has been decisively replaced by a " non-class of non-workers." Work, now thoroughly absorbed and shaped by technocratic industry, is beyond hope of humanization. The radical program he recommends for the " non-class" is to maximize leisure which is already a realizable possibility within the technocratic economy. With that pronouncement, whatever dignity homo faber may have possessed is lost as he vanishes into the depths of a selfreproducing technocratic order.2 In this paper I wish to examine an alternative to Marxism for approaching work as a subject worthy of philosophical attention. \Vhile classical and scholastic thought may not appear at first to be promising grounds on which to consider the topic, the work of two contemporary Thomists-Jacques Maritain and Joseph Pieper-offers a significant and unique contribution in this area. However, I hesitate to say that either of these thinkers has accomplished the construction of a full-scale philosophy of work.3 In all fairness, that is not the intent of either one of them. At the same time, what they have accomplished in their reflections on work in some respects is more extensive and systematic than the results of speculation by Marxist thinkers.4 2 Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (Boston: South End Press, 1982). Gorz's program for labor is built largely on conclusions about the evolution of capitalism since Marx associated with the thinkers of the Frankfurt School and their contemporary disciples. The notable claim is that the contribution of technology has come to dwarf labor as a factor of production to such an extent that Marx's labor theory of value is no longer operative. This dominant role for technology is also at the root of the deradicalization of the workers' movement. See Jurgen Habermas, "Technology and Science as 'Ideology'," in his Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). 3 M. D. Chenu, in his Theology of W orlo (Chicago: Regenery, 1963), judges that presently we lack not only a theology, but a philosophy, psychology or sociology of work as well (p. 5). There is little reason to conclude that the situation has been altered since Chem1 rendered that judgment. 4 Having said... (shrink)

In addition to the familiar cardinal and proportional readings of many and few, there is yet another interpretation, the relative proportional reading. This reading, unlike the ordinary absolute proportional reading, is not conservative. Under the relative reading, 'Many ψs are φs' is true just in case the proportion of φs among ψs is greater than the proportion of φs among members of contextually given alternatives to ψ. I provide a definition of proportional readings that reduces the differences between absolute and (...) relative interpretations to the value of a single parameter.I argue that relative readings are not restricted to many and few, but are also exhibited by the adverbs often and seldom, and by generics. Interpretations of determiners that have been treated as "focus-affected readings," interpretations of adverbs of quantification that have been treated as "pure frequency readings," and interpretations of generics which have been claimed to be cases of "reverse interpretation" or "direct kind predication" are, in fact, instances of relative readings.A: Army reserve service is especially hard on people who own a small business.Q: Do many small-business owners serve in your regiment?A: I don't know what it's like in other regiments –Q: I am not asking you about other regiments.A: I know, but relatively speaking . . .(Interview on Israel Army Radio, June 8th, 2001). (shrink)

he article focuses on the contemporary social movements and new identities as well as the new theoretical paradigms to explain these developments. It is reported that the social movements like feminist, ecological, and local-autonomy movements started in the Europe in the 1970's. The participants in these movements, it is said, did not view themselves in terms of a socioeconomic class. Class background does not determine the collective identities of the actors of these socio-political movements. Different social philosophers and thinkers like (...) Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim and their ideas are also discussed. (shrink)