Jeff McMahan, one of the leading contemporary writers on ‘just war thinking’, argues in the book under review, Killing in War, that one of the central tenets of the ‘ius in bello’, namely the moral equality of combatants, is both conceptually and morally untenable. This results from a reflection upon and a departure from two basic assumptions in Walzer’s work, namely the idea that war itself isn’t a relation between persons, but between political entities and their human instruments and the (...) idea that the ‘ius ad bellum’ and ‘ius in bello’ are and should be kept distinct. This book merits serious reflection. However, the disadvantages of McMahan’s position are obvious. If the rights of combatants during war depend on the justice of their cause, the immunity of the civilians on the side of the supposed ‘unjust’ enemy is seriously endangered. (shrink)

Aanleiding voor dit nummer over 'democratie en representatie' is het overlijden, op 3 oktober van vorig jaar, van een van de belangrijkste naoorlogse politieke denkers in Frankrijk, Claude Lefort . Omdat we niet zozeer de man, maar des te meer zijn ideeën willen memoreren hebben we ervoor geopteerd om de kern van zijn politiek-filosofische nalatenschap onder de aandacht te brengen. Zonder twijfel is dat het inzicht in de onlosmakelijke verwevenheid van democratie en representatie.

Aanleiding voor dit nummer over 'democratie en representatie' is het overlijden, op 3 oktober van vorig jaar, van een van de belangrijkste naoorlogse politieke denkers in Frankrijk, Claude Lefort . Omdat we niet zozeer de man, maar des te meer zijn ideeën willen memoreren hebben we ervoor geopteerd om de kern van zijn politiek-filosofische nalatenschap onder de aandacht te brengen. Zonder twijfel is dat het inzicht in de onlosmakelijke verwevenheid van democratie en representatie.

"I'll furnish the war": the making of a media myth -- Fright beyond measure? the myth of the war of the worlds -- Murrow vs. McCarthy: timing makes the myth -- The Bay of Pigs/New York Times suppression myth -- Debunking the "Cronkite moment" -- The nuanced myth: bra burning at Atlantic City -- It's all about the media: Watergate's heroic-journalist myth -- The "fantasy panic": the news media and the crack-baby myth -- "She was fighting to the death": mythmaking (...) in Iraq -- Hurricane Katrina and the myth of superlative reporting -- Conclusion. (shrink)

Forty years af ter the cold-bloo ded as sas - si na tion –or de red by the CIA– of Ernes to (Che) Gue va ra, (im pri sio ned and still ali ve in Bo li - via), a symbo lic let ter to him is writ ten by a do - mi ni que priest –Frei Bet to– a Bra zi lian, which re sult sin a sort of `act-of-so rr..

The search for living (relevant and significant) values in societies has become increasingly widespread and institutionalized through the last decades. The paper argues that there are serious theoretical limitations (biases) inherent in the most widespread survey techniques, which jeopardize their very reason for existence: to foresee directions of social and political change. In fact the predictions made on the basis of these techniques manage to reach partial confirmation, but none are uncontested on theoretical and/or empirical grounds. Starting from the statement (...) that empirical value inquiry continues to be very fragmented, the paper proceeds from critiques formulated on the basis of a hermeneutic analysis of survey methods to a comparison of these critiques with other attempts in the social sciences to treat the phenomenon of value. The third section of the paper relates the moral outlook of these surveys to another moral outlook seemingly operative nowadays: a global ethical vision. The section concludes that the value surveys fail to grasp both the ways values are organized and their dynamic because of their bias toward a Developmentalist ideology of world progress. (shrink)

A central question along which phenomenological approaches to sociality or intersubjectivity have diverged concerns whether concrete interpersonal encounters or sharing a common world is more fundamental in working out an adequate phenomenology of human sociality. On one side we have philosophers such as the early Sartre, Martin Buber, Michael Theunissen, and Emmanuel Levinas, all of whom emphasize, each in his own way, the priority of some mode of interpersonal encounters (broadly construed) in determining the basic character of human coexistence. On (...) the other side, we have philosophers such as the early Heidegger and the early Merleau-Ponty (and here I would also include Gadamer and the later Wittgenstein), who argue that an adequate account of human sociality must begin, in the proper order of understanding and hence explanation, with how we always already exist in a shared or common world. Which side is right in this debate? I argue that once we correctly understand the precise sense (or way) in which the common world is more fundamental than concrete interpersonal encounters, this enables us to understand how there is no real opposition between the phenomenological conception of the common world and the experience of the other, even in its radical otherness. (shrink)

Joseph Rouse is one of the most distinctive and innovative proponents of practice theory today. This article focuses in section I on two extended elaborations with systematic intent from Rouse’s corpus over the last two decades regarding the nature of practices, highlighting in particular the concept of normativity. Toward this end, this article explains why Rouse argues that we need to bring about something like a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the intrinsic normativity of practices as an essentially interactive, (...) temporal, contestable, and open-ended process. In section II, this article then examines some commonalities and apparent divergences of Rouse’s practice theory from the existential phenomenology of the early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The article draws to a close by considering two apparent divergences between Rouse’s conception of practices and existential phenomenology: (1) the degree of compatibility between the claim of existential phenomenology to reveal necessary enabling background conditions of our lived experience and Rouse’s normative conception of practices; and (2) the compatibility of “quasi-transcendental” constitution, as this is at work according to existential phenomenology, and Rouse’s argument that it is wrong to understand practices as exclusively centered on the activities of human beings. (shrink)

Que la musique soit faite pour etre ecoutee semble une evidence, et pourtant... C'est pour guider les melomanes et les aider a passer d'une audition passive a une ecoute active que Jean-Yves Bras partage ici son experience d'ecouteur. Apres avoir defini ce qu'est la musique, il s'interroge ensuite sur la nature de l'ecoute: que faut-il entendre par ecouter? Sur quoi porter notre attention? Comment ecouter? Les conditions materielles dans lesquelles nous consommons la musique, notre comportement au concert ou a (...) l'ecoute d'un disque, ont egalement une incidence importante sur la qualite de notre ecoute. Puis il analyse ces liens si mysterieux et si essentiels tisses entre compositeurs, interpretes et nous-memes, auditeurs. Enfin, il trace a grands traits l'histoire de nos oreilles de l'Antiquite a nos jours, pour conclure sur les differentes categories d'auditeurs actuels. Parallelement, l'auteur a cree un site Internet, www.artdecouter.fr, qui apporte un complement d'information agremente d'exemples sonores. Ce chemin d'initiation se parcourt sous forme de dialogue: une jeune personne souhaitant s'instruire, Mademoiselle Croche, nous permet par ses questions d'entendre s'ouvrir pour nous le langage de la musique. Jean-Yves Bras a ete directeur de la Documentation musicale de Radio France et a participe a de nombreuses emissions. Responsable artistique du Festival Chopin a Paris, il est l'auteur des Courants musicaux du XXe siecle et d'un ouvrage sur le chef d'orchestre Carlo Maria Giulini. (shrink)

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is rightly regarded as a thinker who extended the development of the so-called expressivist conception of language and world that Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) and especially Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) initially articulated. Being immersed as Humboldt was in the intellectual climate of German Romanticism, he aimed not only to provide a systematic foundation for how he believed linguistic research as a science should be conducted, but also to attempt to rectify what he saw as the deficiencies (...) of Kant’s philosophical system. My aim in this paper is to show how an expressivist thinker like Humboldt has the conceptual resources from within his own framework and, perhaps surprisingly, with some help from the 20th century philosopher of language and mind, Donald Davidson, to reject a criticism commonly made against expressivist conceptions of language and world. This is the charge that this sort of expressivism threatens the objectivity of the world by emphasizing the role of language in the constitution and disclosure of the world. Cristina Lafont makes just this charge against Humboldt (and other philosophers in the German expressivist-hermeneutic tradition). Specifically, she argues that expressivist philosophers of language are all ultimately committed to some pernicious form of linguistic idealism and relativism. In this paper, I first present Humboldt’s reflections on language and give some textual evidence for why he is often read – mistakenly in my view – as a linguistic idealist and relativist. Second, I briefly sketch Lafont’s charge of linguistic idealism and relativism against Humboldt. Third and finally, I show how she misunderstands Humboldt’s expressivist conception of language and world by connecting my rebuttal to her criticism with Davidson’s argument that successful communication does not require the sharing of explicit rules or conventions that govern in advance the use and understanding of words. (shrink)

Si les expositions de peinture font l'objet d'une large fréquentation, Hegel est bien souvent décrié, surtout dans les milieux artistiques. Cette présentation de son Esthétique voudrait montrer, en privilégiant les analyses concrètes comme celle de la peinture hollandaise du XVIIe, toute la fécondité de cette approche philosophique. Loin du dogmatisme, Hegel conçoit l'art historiquement, jugeant les œuvres, mais récusant par avance toute norme académique. L'historicité de l'art est-elle solidaire de sa fin, de son dépassement? Dans quelle mesure art et religion (...) sont-ils dissociables? Questions auxquelles nous confronte cette lecture de Hegel. (shrink)

This book discusses political change in the view of Confucian thought. This study focuses on the Book of Change, which is one of the nine basic books of Confucius School, and has dominated oriental thought in this field for more than three thousand years.

Two experiments investigated whether infants represent goal‐directed actions of others in a way that allows them to draw inferences to unobserved states of affairs (such as unseen goal states or occluded obstacles). We measured looking times to assess violation of infants' expectations upon perceiving either a change in the actions of computer‐animated figures or in the context of such actions. The first experiment tested whether infants would attribute a goal to an action that they had not seen completed. The second (...) experiment tested whether infants would infer from an observed action the presence of an occluded object that functions as an obstacle. The looking time patterns of 12‐month‐olds indicated that they were able to make both types of inferences, while 9‐month‐olds failed in both tasks. These results demonstrate that, by the end of the first year of life, infants use the principle of rational action not only for the interpretation and prediction of goal‐directed actions, but also for making productive inferences about unseen aspects of their context. We discuss the underlying mechanisms that may be involved in the developmental change from 9 to 12 months of age in the ability to infer hypothetical (unseen) states of affairs in teleological action representations. (shrink)

Este artigo apresenta uma exegese do In Physica II, 1, l. 11-14 de Filipono, texto no qual o autor expõe uma compreensão da noção de força como formadora e diretiva da totalidade dos corpos na medida em que os mantém no ser, conferindo, portanto, unidade e ordenação ao cosmo. Nesse contexto, é possível sustentar que a força vinculada com a locomoção natural dos corpos simples tomados em conjunto, o cosmo, é uma anima mundi. Para tanto, a noção de vida, também (...) presente no In Physica II, 1, l. 11-14, é tomada como chave de leitura, uma vez que por ela tem sentido afirmar que o cosmos possui uma forma, esta que, no limite, é a própria alma do cosmo. (shrink)

After the devastating tsunami hit the northern Sumatran coastline in December 2004, the Indonesian province of Aceh found itself at a crossroad. This crossroad intersected the three-decade-long civil war, the move towards peace and the need for post-disaster recovery. This article analyses the gendered politics embedded in Aceh's navigation through this crossroad. First, it argues that both the conflict and the subsequent peace process were marginalised by the international programmes of post-tsunami recovery. Second, it demonstrates that within this marginalisation, women's (...) investments in both war and peace were further neglected throughout the formal peace process. Third, it highlights how the peace process reflected a narrow, masculinist and public sphere agenda that silenced both women and the gendered issues affecting them. In short, this article seeks to unveil the gendered politics of war and peace in post-tsunami Aceh. It does so with the feminist ambition of demonstrating that sustainable and comprehensive peace in Aceh cannot be secured without recognising and accounting for the impact that the conflict has upon gendered identities. (shrink)

This study seeks effective ways for managing employees with a high Machiavellian personality in organizations by identifying how to enhance their pro-organizational attitudes and behaviors [organizational citizenship behavior ] through transformational leadership. Drawing upon the dual-focused model of TFL, we suggest that exerting TFL upon employees high in Machiavellianism involves ethical dilemmas in that individual-focused and group-focused TFL have contrasting effects on leading pro-organizational attitudes/behaviors among these pro-individual employees. Analysis of data from 184 employees working in South Korea shows that (...) Machiavellianism negatively relates to affective commitment, OCB toward the organization, and OCB toward individuals, but positively to continuance commitment. More importantly, the results reveal that group-focused TFL can effectively manage employees high in Machiavellianism by mitigating the negative relations between Machiavellianism and affective commitment and between Machiavellianism and OCB-O. However, individual-focused TFL strengthens these negative relations as well as the negative relation between Machiavellianism and OCB-I. This study thus shows that to lead employees high in Machiavellianism in a pro-organizational direction, group-focused TFL rather than individual-focused TFL needs to be employed. (shrink)

Infolge der Moderne schwinden absolute Erklärungsprinzipien: Man sucht Orientierung, um seine Lebenswelt und den erfahrungswissenschaftlich aufgeschlossenen Kosmos zu überschauen. Seine sich in diesem Kontext ausbildende, nie ganz bewusst gestaltete Weltanschauung artikuliert der Mensch auch in der Literatur. Antonia Bräutigam analysiert anhand von Jenseitsreisen in Werken von Autoren wie Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett und C.S. Lewis die durch die Moderne geprägte Weltanschauung und reflektiert diese philosophisch-theologisch. Literatur erweist sich dabei als locus theologicus, als Erkenntnisort für die Theologie, das Motiv der Jenseitsreise (...) als Daseinsmetapher von hoher theologischer Relevanz."-- Back cover. (shrink)

I present Modern Symbolic Logic, an introductory philosophy course in first-order logic, as a blended course. A blended course integrates online video learning with in-class activities, out of class supports, and deliverables into a cohesive and mutually supporting package. Blended courses are an enhancement on hybrid courses, which focus on online video learning but not on the additional supports needed for an effective learning experience. This paper has two central aims. The first is to present a blended course in action (...) in order to address a need in the literature for detailed reports of blended classes. The second is to advance an iterative approach to blended course design that significantly lowers the bar of entry for instructions hoping to create a blended course. (shrink)

À partir de l’observatoire d’une « consultation antialcoolique » ouverte en 1954 dans le 13e arrondissement de Paris, cet article étudie la manière dont le travail social a investi le nouveau champ d’action du suivi psychiatrique de l’alcoolisme, dans un contexte de mutations de la prise en charge médicale de cette maladie. Le contenu autant que la structure des dossiers de patients de la consultation, que nous mettons en regard avec des publications issues de revues médicales et de travail social, (...) permettent d’approcher le travail quotidien des assistantes sociales, au plus près des alcooliques et de leurs familles. Nous montrons que l’action de l’assistante sociale, devenue centrale bien que subordonnée à celle du médecin psychiatre, s’enrichit d’une dimension psychothérapique et se caractérise par la recherche de la confiance du malade et de son adhésion au traitement, marquant ainsi une inflexion nette dans le rapport aux populations assistées. Cependant, ces évolutions ne suffisent pas à débarrasser le travail social de ses ambiguïtés constitutives et notamment de ses fonctions de contrôle et de surveillance, sources de difficultés, de malentendus et de conflits avec les malades et leurs proches. (shrink)

A belief in God which disregards the human suffering, is not worthy of our attention. It will only be possible to justify God and the belief in God within the experience of suffering. This article describes, by way of an analysis of the human suffering, under which circumstances and on what conditions the belief in God can indeed be connected with the human suffering. It will be argued that precisely our compassion with the provisonal impossibility to sustain our faith can (...) become a place where God is justified. (shrink)

This book chapter shows how the early Heidegger’s philosophy around the period of Being and Time can address some central questions of contemporary social ontology. After sketching “non-summative constructionism”, which is arguably the generic framework that underlies all forms of contemporary analytic social ontology, I lay out early Heidegger’s conception of human social reality in terms of an extended argument. The Heidegger that shows up in light of this treatment is an acute phenomenologist of human social existence who emphasizes our (...) engagement in norm-governed practices as the basis of social reality. I then defuse a common and understandable set of objections against invoking the early Heidegger as someone who can make any positive contribution to our understanding of social reality. Lastly, I explore the extent to which the early Heidegger’s philosophy provides insights regarding phenomena of collective intentionality by showing how the intelligibility of such phenomena traces back to individual agents’ common understanding of possible ways of understanding things and acting with one another. With the early Heidegger, I argue that this common understanding is the fundamental source and basis of collective intentionality, not the non-summativist constructionism on which contemporary analytic social ontology has sought to focus with much effort. The lesson about social ontology that we should learn from the early Heidegger is that there is a tight connection between the social constitution of the human individual and his or her capacity to perform actions or activities that instantiate collective intentionality. (shrink)

Tainted political symbols ought to be confronted, removed, or at least recontextualized. Despite the best efforts to achieve this, however, official actions on tainted symbols often fail to take place. In such cases, I argue that political vandalism—the unauthorized defacement, destruction, or removal of political symbols—may be morally permissible or even obligatory. This is when, and insofar as, political vandalism serves as fitting counter-speech that undermines the authority of tainted symbols in ways that match their publicity, refuses to let them (...) speak in our name, and challenges the derogatory messages expressed through a mechanism I call derogatory pedestalling: the glorification or honoring of certain individuals or ideologies that can only make sense when members of a targeted group are taken to be inferior. (shrink)

This chapter provides an interpretation of the early Heidegger’s underdeveloped conception of the undistinguishedness of everyday human existence in Being and Time. After explaining why certain translation choices of some key terms in this text are interpretively and philosophically important, I first provide a concise argument for why the social constitution interpretation of the relation between ownedness and unownedness makes better overall sense of Heidegger’s ambivalent attitude toward the social constitution of the human being than the standard existentialist interpretation of (...) this relation. I then proceed to the heart of this chapter, which develops his inchoate conception of the undistinguishedness of everydayness by arguing that it specifies the third distinctive mode of concrete human existence in addition to ownedness and unownedness. Accordingly, I show how unownedness is actually a generic phenomenon with two distinct species, namely, undistinguishedness and disownedness, which are at once closely related to, but also differ in significant respects from, each other. Consequently, instead of taking for granted a one-dimensional and mutually exclusive opposition between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, I argue that we should adopt a two-dimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relations among undistinguishedness, disownedness, and ownedness that intersects with Heidegger’s underappreciated distinction between genuineness and ungenuineness. After raising and replying to some objections to this interpretation of undistinguishedness, I conclude this chapter by briefly sketching three of its philosophical consequences and pointing out its potential as an important resource for contemporary social theories. (shrink)

L’injustice est, chez Spinoza, transgression de la loi positive et la rébellion populaire toujours contraire à la loi : jamais la multitude ne peut être légitimée à se révolter. Pourtant elle est caractérisée comme specie juris, apparence ou fausse apparence de droit, contraire à l’interprétation vraie des lois. Gouvernants comme gouvernés sont donc capables d’injustice. Il faut donc expliquer ce à quoi sont tenus les uns comme les autres pour comprendre comment les normes juridiques sont produites.

Infolge der Moderne schwinden absolute Erklärungsprinzipien: Man sucht Orientierung, um seine Lebenswelt und den erfahrungswissenschaftlich aufgeschlossenen Kosmos zu überschauen. Seine sich in diesem Kontext ausbildende, nie ganz bewusst gestaltete Weltanschauung artikuliert der Mensch auch in der Literatur. Antonia Bräutigam analysiert anhand von Jenseitsreisen in Werken von Autoren wie Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett und C.S. Lewis die durch die Moderne geprägte Weltanschauung und reflektiert diese philosophisch-theologisch. Literatur erweist sich dabei als locus theologicus, als Erkenntnisort für die Theologie, das Motiv der Jenseitsreise (...) als Daseinsmetapher von hoher theologischer Relevanz. (shrink)

Le Moïse de Spinoza présente la particularité entre les convocations habituelles en philosophie politique, d’être à la fois prophète et législateur, vecteur d’un mode théologique de production des lois : il est le seul prophète à constituer un peuple, une république. Cela procède d’un premier pacte avec Dieu, au fondement d’une théocratie imaginaire, réellement une démocratie. Mais ils sont terrifiés (perterriti) en allant consulter Dieu. Comment comprendre l’usage de ce mot rare en latin? Il faut le replacer dans le réseau (...) sémantique de l’admiration, solidaire de l’imaginaire théologique qui cristallise leur expérience comme nation. Il nomme l’expérience du sacré et de l’augural et aboutit à un second pacte qui fonde la monarchie de Moïse. Nous examinerons les institutions qui font sa force en associant le peuple aux décisions du monarque et les causes internes de sa destruction. (shrink)

One of the greatest merits of Costica Bradatan's book is that it explores a cluster of topics that represent the untold, the unuttered, almost the unutterable in contemporary philosophy: death, dying, sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Ours is a culture of 'happy endings' and, in this respect, most philosophers of today are the spokespersons of their time. Bradatan is a dissenter. His book approaches death head-on. Indeed, what makes this project fascinating is the fact that, while the book purports to be about (...) 'dying for an idea,' it in fact sings praise to life. Death, in Bradatan's view, is something that brings new meaning to life, a renewed intensity to the act of living. Simon Critchley, New School for Social Research, New York, USA. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.