Philosophical suspicions about the place of shame in the psychology of the mature moral agent are in tension with the commonplace assumption that to call a person shameless purports to mark a fault, arguably a moral fault. I shift philosophical suspicions away from shame and toward its absence in the shameless by focusing attention on phenomena of shamelessness. In redirecting our attention, I clarify the nature of the failing to which ascriptions of shamelessness might refer and defend the (...) thought that, as an evasion of moral self-censure, shamelessness can be morally pernicious. Far from foregoing shame, I conclude, we should be mindful of its moral importance and unapologetic in its defense. (shrink)

A recurring concern about luck egalitarianism is that its implementation would make some individuals, in particular those who lack marketable talents, experience shame. This, the objection goes, undermines individuals’ self-respect, which, in turn, may also lead to unequal respect between individuals. Loss of (self-)respect is a concern for any egalitarian, including distributive egalitarians, inasmuch as it is non-compensable. This paper responds to this concern by clarifying the relationship between shame and (self-)respect. We argue, first, a luck egalitarian society and ethos (...) would be radically different from the current one and incompatible with shame over lack of talent, and, second, that while shame may still occur in a less than ideal luck egalitarian society, this kind of shame does not undermine egalitarian commitments. (shrink)

Does shame have a limited moral role because it is associated with a loss of self-respect or is it an important emotional support for socially beneficial behaviours? Aristotle supports the latter position. In his ethical theory, he famously claims that shame is a semi-virtue essential in the habituation of moral norms. He clarifies this role in the Rhetoric’s lesser-known distinction between true and conventional shame, which implies human beings make subjective evaluations of those appropriated cultural norms. Importantly, he locates this (...) potential for ethical assessment in friendship and not in public discourse, as he thinks it would be shameless to publicly evaluate moral rules. The article ends by exploring potential critiques to his position and argues that Aristotle’s approach makes shame indispensable for moral progress, even though we might want to consider some limited role for shameless public protest. (shrink)

What is the relation between shame and shamelessness? It may seem obvious: shamelessness is simply the absence of shame. But on reflection, it becomes clear that the story is considerably more complicated. Michelle Mason's intriguing "On Shamelessness" prompts such reflection. Mason argues that we should be mindful of the "moral importance of shame" and "unapologetic in its defense", and she does so via an examination of shamelessness and an argument to the effect that shamelessness is a moral fault. The tacit (...) assumption is that insofar as shamelessness is a moral fault, the value of shame is vindicated. I challenge that assumption. (shrink)

Camp might be said to be a queer object to the extent that it resists any attempt to define it in language. This essay reads Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair as a demonstration of the more performative and affective understanding of camp that is needed to overcome the conceptual impossibility of camp’s existence in language alone. This essay reconceptualizes camp as a performative and affective social phenomenon by reading the protagonist of White’s text as an exemplary figure who resists disciplinary (...) identity and legibility through a series of camp performances. Camp emerges at the conclusion of this essay as a mediation of a particular subject–object relation, and its emblem is the bandaid. For if shame appears to tyrannize the life of Twyborn’s protagonist, that subjugation is not total: shame’s performativity gives birth to a defiantly camp persona that re-routes shame as shamelessness. Camp advertises itself as a means of living in and living through performances of gender and sexuality. Shame is thus an important resource for both understanding the protagonist of White’s text and understanding the camp politics of queer critique that he embodies. Camp is a queer object that facilitates the healing of the shameful wound afflicting performative identities. (shrink)

This is a theological response to two programmatic essays, “Science and the Future of Theology: Critical Issues,” by Arthur Peacocke and “What Game is Being Played? The Need for Clarity about theRelationship between Scientific and Theological Understanding,” by David A. Pailin. It argues that the two authors, well informed by the recent developments in science, are reduplicating some methodological and epistemological trends common to nineteenth‐century theology. The feasibility of their project should, therefore, be examined on whether they succeed in answering (...) the questions posed to the liberal project that dominated theological and philosophical scholarship in the last century. They are found to be wanting in their inadequate response to three considerations: (1) the persistence of particular manifestations of religion and theology's enduring refusal to accept thoroughly scientific “enlightened” criteria, (2) the epistemological implications of the eschatological character of the Christianmessage, and (3) the trinitarian paradigm for Christian theology and the life of faith. (shrink)

An important question that is often raised, whether directly or indirectly, in philosophical discussions of shame‐inducing behavior concerns whether the experience of shame has unique moral value. Despite the fact that shame is strongly associated with negative affective responses, many people have argued that the experience of being ashamed plays an important motivating role, rather than being an obstacle, in living a moral life. These discussions, however, tend to take for granted two interrelated assumptions that I will be problematizing: 1) (...) that the subject's shame is warranted; 2) that the shame is directly attributable to the subject's own actions. I challenge these assumptions by turning to a phenomenon I call secondhand shame, namely, shame that is induced by another person's shameless behavior. This essay examines the gender and racial dynamics that so frequently intensify secondhand shame, and suggests that this troubling phenomenon, when shared as a group experience, can be morally transformative, particularly when it leads to unified public resistance to shameless conduct. (shrink)

Dans Shameless, Cristiana Franco étudie les représentations du chien dans la Grèce ancienne et son rapport avec le féminin. Au cœur de cette enquête, deux questions principales : pourquoi les textes tracent-ils un portrait ambivalent du chien, entre fidélité et trahison? Pourquoi des traits canins sont-ils souvent associés à des figures féminines négatives? Le livre en anglais est une réédition de l’essai en italien Senza ritegno (Bologna, 2003), dans la traduction de Matthew Fox, complétée...

(2013). SLUMBERING KISSES, SHAMELESS ENTANGLEMENTS: “la découverte de freud”. Angelaki: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 3-15.

This essay critically analyzes two dominant narratives that explain and lament the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. First, I extend Jill Locke’s (2016) concept of “The Lament that Shame is Dead" to show the limitations of criticizing Trump in terms of the “death of shame.” I then turn my attention to the problems inerent in recent characterizations of Trump as a petulant child. Drawing from Locke (2016) on shame and Freud (1914) and Lee Edelman (2004) on the (...) politics of “the child,” I argue that characterizing Trump as shameless, childish, or as a shameless child only affirms, rather than deposes, Trump’s right-wing populist strategy and keeps the focus on him as a personality rather than on the broader social and political context in which he emerged. I argue this has implications for the rise of right-wing populism in the West, more broadly. (shrink)

This essay critically analyzes two dominant narratives that explain and lament the rise of Donald Trump in the United States. First, I extend Jill Locke’s concept of “The Lament that Shame is Dead" to show the limitations of criticizing Trump in terms of the “death of shame.” I then turn my attention to the problems inerent in recent characterizations of Trump as a petulant child. Drawing from Locke on shame and Freud and Lee Edelman on the politics of “the child,” (...) I argue that characterizing Trump as shameless, childish, or as a shameless child only affirms, rather than deposes, Trump’s right-wing populist strategy and keeps the focus on him as a personality rather than on the broader social and political context in which he emerged. I argue this has implications for the rise of right-wing populism in the West, more broadly. (shrink)

Aristotle’s conception of vice is notoriously problematic. On the one hand, it appears as the antithesis of virtue; as such, it may seem, like virtue, to rest on principles, except that in the case of vice the principles are bad ones. On the other hand, vice may be something more like the privation or absence of virtue: not the negative pole or opposite of virtue but the condition of not being at all guided by rational principles or logos. As a (...) way of approaching Aristotle’s notion of vice, I propose to examine two disapproved qualities that Aristotle mentions briefly in his Rhetoric, and which are adduced as the opposites of emotions. The two qualities are ingratitude, which is represented as the opposite of feeling grateful, and shamelessness, the opposite of the emotion shame. Both ingratitude and shamelessness have the appearance of vices, even though they are contrasted here not with virtues but with passions or pathê. Examining the logic of these pairings will, I hope, shed light not only on ingratitude and shamelessness but also on the complex and unstable nature of vice itself. (shrink)

Interpersonal relationships represent an essential aspect of mental wellbeing and social functioning. If all the symptoms contain a relational meaning, shame represents the relational affect par excellence both in terms of its origin and its purpose. This paper aims to highlight the role of shame as an affect inherent in the rhythmic nature of the encounter with the other, as well as the pathological elements of this aspect in both its conscious and unconscious dimensions. There is a heterogeneous quantitative and (...) qualitative declination of shame, or of the defenses against this affect, among the various pathologies. We consider the fundamental needs of belonging and acceptance and the parallel abandonment anguish from various psychoanalytic and philosophical theoretical perspectives and then analyze the link between their dissatisfaction and the origin of shame. We also touch on the different interpretaions of shame based on eastern and western cultural norms. These hypotheses are closely intertwined with the beliefs of classical psychopathology. The role of the body in the encounter with the other and in the experience of shame is also examined. In particular, we study the role of this affect in schizophrenia, depression, eating disorders, and personality disorders. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Aufsatz untersucht das Verhältnis von Scham und Armut im Werk Ulrich Bräkers: Die Lebensgeschichte und Natürliche Ebentheuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg ist an der Vorbildlichkeit schamhafter Armut orientiert, ringt jedoch mit der paradoxen Notwendigkeit der schamlosen Inszenierung schamhafter Armut. Die Rede über den Gassenbettel zeichnet sich demgegenüber durch experimentelle Strategien der Beschämung des Publikums mithilfe einer Rhetorik der Evidenz und der Zeugenschaft aus. Die in Bräkers Tagebüchern enthaltene Jauss-Novelle schließlich, die hier erstmals einer genaueren Betrachtung unterzogen wird, kreist (...) um eine Figur schamloser Armut und sexueller Ausschweifung. Dass die in ihrer obszönen Explizitheit erstaunliche Jauss-Novelle nie vollständig und im Zusammenhang als literarisches Werk publiziert wurde, führt vor Augen, dass Scham eine Schlüsselfunktion für die Selektionsmechanismen des literarischen Betriebs besitzt.The article examines the relation between shame and poverty in the writings of Ulrich Bräker. The famous Lebensgeschichte und Natürliche Ebentheuer des Armen Mannes im Tockenburg is oriented towards a model of humble and shameful poverty, but at the same time struggles with the paradox it has to enact: the shameless staging of a bashful form of poverty. In contrast to this, the Rede über den Gassenbettel is characterized by experimental strategies of shaming the audience by its rhetoric of testimony and evidence. Finally, the Jauss-novella revolves around a figure of shameless poverty and sexual obscenity. The text which is part of Bräker’s diaries is examined here more closely for the first time. The fact that the novella was never published fully as a genuine literary work shows that shame plays a crucial role in the making of the literary canon. (shrink)

This book offers an analysis of shame and develops an interdisciplinary and comparative interpretation of Confucian shame as a moral disposition, the ability of critical moral-development and self-cultivation.

Professor Wodak is well known in academic circles focused on the far-right and critical discourse analysis. In this book, she uses her experience in both fields to reflect on the normalization of f...

Shamelessly Promethean -- The end of humanity -- The end of history -- The end of reality -- Atlas never shrugs -- (R)evolutionary spectre.

Cognitive science is shamelessly materialistic. It maintains that human beings are nothing more than complex physical systems, ultimately and completely explicable in mechanistic terms. But this conception of humanity does not ?t well with common sense. To think of the creatures we spend much of our day loving, hating, admiring, resenting, comparing ourselves to, trying to understand, blaming, and thanking -- to think of them as mere mechanisms seems at best counterintuitive and unhelpful. More often it may strike us as (...) ludicrous, or even abhorrent. We are. (shrink)

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the (...) women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say. The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T– in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism. [Publisher's abstract]. (shrink)

Psychopaths appear to be ‘creatures apart’ – grandiose, shameless, callous and versatile in their violence. I discuss biological underpinnings to their pale affect, their selective inability to discern fear and sadness in others and a predatory orienting towards images that make most startle and look away. However, just because something is biologically underpinned does not mean that it is innate. I show that while there may be some genetic determination of fearlessness and callous-unemotionality, these and other features of the (...) personality may arise from developmental failures in the interpersonal reception of their emotions, needs and their sense of self. One is unlikely to be able to own inner experiences if shamed for having them, or if, having them, one does not know how to regulate and soothe. So psychopaths may learn to attend away and suppress them. Rather than a fully inherited difficulty, they may have become unable to reflect on inner states, so meta-emotions and self-reflective emotions like guilt and shame do not fully arise. They retain enough sensitivity to know their difference, and hide. I suggest that psychopaths are characterised by a nested sense of self, arising from the surprising effect of shame on these seemingly shameless characters. They do not have an integrated sense of self across context or across time or in relation to a generalised social other. With a nested sense of self, diminished intensity and scope of affective experience (in both directly experienced and vicarious forms) they lack textured access to a personal, owned and integrated past. Thus they lack the kind of access to the past required for a motivationally compelling planning of the future. They lack the emotional investment in the future that enables us to overcome the motivation to act opportunistically and myopically. These individuals live strangely in time. They have a fugitive sense of self and live nimbly among many pasts. They present an elegant and coherent mask to the person they are addressing in the moment and generate possible futures without conviction. (shrink)

Of other ancient writers, call into question the traditional view that katharsis in the Poetics is a homeopathic process - one in which pity and fear affect emotions like themselves. She maintains, instead, that Aristotle considered katharsis to be an allopathic process in which pity and fear purge the soul of shameless, antisocial, and aggressive emotions. While exploring katharsis, Tragic Pleasures analyzes the closely related question of how the Poetics treats the.

Besides pure declarative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are declaratives (“you sinned shamelessly; so you sinned”), and pure imperative arguments, whose premises and conclusions are imperatives (“repent quickly; so repent”), there are mixed-premise arguments, whose premises include both imperatives and declaratives (“if you sinned, repent; you sinned; so repent”), and cross-species arguments, whose premises are declaratives and whose conclusions are imperatives (“you must repent; so repent”) or vice versa (“repent; so you can repent”). I propose a general definition of argument (...) validity: an argument is valid exactly if, necessarily, every fact that sustains its premises also sustains its conclusion, where a fact sustains an imperative exactly if it favors the satisfaction over the violation of the imperative, and a fact sustains a declarative exactly if, necessarily, the declarative is true if the fact exists. I argue that this definition yields as special cases the standard definition of validity for pure declarative arguments and my previously defended definition of validity for pure imperative arguments, and that it yields intuitively acceptable results for mixed-premise and cross-species arguments. (shrink)

[INTRODUCTION] Like the terms 'dialectic', 'Aufhebung' (or 'sublation'), and 'Geist', the term 'concrete universal' has a distinctively Hegelian ring to it. But unlike these others, it is particularly associated with the British strand in Hegel's reception history, as having been brought to prominence by some of the central British Idealists. It is therefore perhaps inevitable that, as their star has waned, so too has any use of the term, while an appreciation of the problematic that lay behind it has seemingly (...) vanished: if the British Idealists get any sort of mention in a contemporary metaphysics book (which is rarely), it will be Bradley's view of relations or truth that is discussed, not their theory of universals, so that the term has a rather antique air, buried in the dusty volumes of Mind from the turn of the nineteenth century. This is not surprising: the episode known as British Idealism can appear to be a period that is lost to us, in its language, points of historical reference (Lotze, Sigwart, Jevons), and central preoccupations (the Absolute). Even while interest in Hegel continues to grow, interest in his Logic has grown more slowly than in the rest of his work, with Book III of the Logic remaining as the daunting peak of that challenging text - while it is here that the British Idealists focussed their attention and claimed to have uncovered that 'exotic' but 'vanished specimen', the concrete universal. Finally, as the trend of reading Hegel pushes ever further in a non-metaphysical direction, it might be thought that the future of the concrete universal is hardly likely to be brighter than its recent past - for it may seem hard to imagine how a conception championed by the British Idealists, who were apparently shameless in their metaphysical commitments, can find favour in these more austere and responsible times. In this paper, however, I want to make a case for holding that there is something enlightening to be found in how some of the British Idealists approached the 'concrete universal', both interpretatively and philosophically. At the interpretative level, I will argue that while not everything these Idealists are taken to mean by the term is properly to be found in Hegel, their work nonetheless relates to a crucial and genuine strand in Hegel's position, so that their discussion of this issue is an important moment in the reception history of his thought. At a philosophical level, I think that the question that concerned Hegel and these British Idealists retains much of its interest, as does their shared approach to it: namely, how far does our thought involve a mere abstraction from reality, and what are the metaphysical and epistemological implications if it turns out it does not? As such, I will suggest, taking seriously what these British Idealists have to say about the concrete universal can help us both in our understanding of Hegel, and in our appreciation of the contribution Hegel's position can make to our thinking on the issues that surround this topic. (shrink)

In certain contemporary theories of the politics of shame, shame is considered a pernicious emotion that we need to avoid in, or a salutary emotion that serves as an infallible guide to, democratic deliberation. The author argues that both positions arise out of an inadequate notion of the structure of shame and an oversimplistic opposition between shame and shamelessness. Plato's dialogue, the Gorgias, actually helps to address these problems because it supplies a deeper understanding of the place of shame in (...) democratic politics in ways that address our contemporary dilemmas. It does this first, by avoiding the simple opposition between shame and shamelessness and secondly, by articulating three different kinds of "politics of shame" that can characterize democratic deliberations. Finally, Plato's treatment of shame extends upon contemporary ethical and psychoanalytic notions of shame in ways that are directly relevant to the our contemporary political situation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Innova dies nostros, sicut a principio:Novelty and Nostalgia in Thomas of Celano's First and Second Lives of St. FrancisBarbara Newman (bio)IntroductionIn his sixth-century compendium of hagiography, Gregory of Tours argued that one should always speak of the vita patrum or vita sanctorum in the singular. According to Pliny, he noted, grammarians did not believe the noun vita had a plural. More to the point, although "there is a diversity (...) of merits and virtues among [the saints], … the one life of the body sustains them all in this world."1 Just as the Church, the body of Christ, is one, so too the saints. Their project of imitatio Christi re-presents the one and only life of Christ for each new generation. As a literary genre, hagiography fleshes out this insight, for no other genre is so steeped in self-citation. Every vita is such a tissue of biblical verses that, to edit a saint's Life before Google, one had to know Scripture by heart or spend endless hours with a concordance. After the Bible, quotations from a few classic vitae were constantly recycled: Athanasius' Life of St. Antony, Sulpicius Severus' Life of St. Martin, Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. With the passage of time, newer classics joined older ones to produce one vast, self-referential monument, incarnate in the Acta Sanctorum: Gregory's vita sanctorum multiplied ad infinitum. So deep did this tendency run that, when an obscure saint needed a vita to justify a cult, shameless hagiographers would plagiarize whole paragraphs, plundering stories and miracles from earlier vitae to serve their turn.2 [End Page 169]It is small wonder, then, that the hagiographic genre is so often characterized as "traditional" or "conservative." It is nostalgic, too, in the sense that each saint's words and deeds bring a glorious Golden Age back to life—most often the apostolic age or the time of the Desert Fathers, but sometimes the graced beginnings of a religious order. Such memorials enabled later generations to idealize their glorious founders. This tendency to exalt the new as a renovation of the old has deep roots in Christianity; even the evangelist Matthew systematically represents Jesus as a new Moses. In the same vein, it is not unusual to find a saint identified as a new Jacob or a second David. On the other hand, many saints' Lives make an insistent claim to newness, renovatio. For the saints were, and are, extraordinary—not merely good men and women, but radical figures whose words and deeds shocked those around them, beginning with their parents. Like Jesus, they had not only admirers, but detractors in plenty. If their publicists held them up as exemplars of virtue, theirs was no ordinary kind, for the heroic virtue that gave saints their charisma could look much like madness. Despite the precedents of earlier vitae, their ascetic feats and challenging behavior often struck observers as new and unheard-of. In hagiography, therefore, claims of novelty play a key role that balances the familiar topoi. Sometimes the newness of a saint's charism is cause for joyful celebration. Jesus, after all, had declared ecce nova facio omnia (Rev 21:5). But "novelties" also had to be handled with care, for they could easily be condemned as heresies or extreme practices deviating from the tradition of the elders.This tension between novelty and nostalgia emerges most clearly in the vitae of saints who founded genuinely new forms of religious life. In this paper I will explore the way it plays out in two early Lives of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most popular saint of all time. After his death in 1226, Francis set a speed record for canonization—one that would be surpassed in the Middle Ages only by his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua, and by the Dominican martyr Peter of Verona.3 Aside from his charisma and the exponential growth of the Franciscan Order, the fast-track canonization is due to Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Hugolino had been personally close to Francis and supported his movement. For the ceremony in July 1228, less than two years after the... (shrink)

In this article I attempt to present an explanation that integrates the five features needed for the cognitive (knowledge‐yielding) linking of philosophy and literature. These features are, first, explaining how a literary work can support a general claim. Second, explaining what is uniquely gained through concentrating on such support patterns as they appear in aesthetic contexts in particular. Third, explaining how features of aesthetic response are connected with knowledge. Four, maintaining a distinction between manipulation and adequate persuasion. Five, achieving all (...) this without invoking what David Novitz has called “a shamelessly functional and didactic view of literature.”. (shrink)

In 1766 philosopher, novelist, composer, and political provocateur Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a fugitive, decried by his enemies as a dangerous madman. Meanwhile David Hume—now recognized as the foremost philosopher in the English language—was being universally lauded as a paragon of decency. And so Rousseau came to England with his beloved dog, Sultan, and willingly took refuge with his more respected counterpart. But within months, the exile was loudly accusing his benefactor of plotting to dishonor him—which prompted a most uncharacteristically violent (...) response from Hume. And so began a remarkable war of words and actions that ensnared many of the leading figures in British and French society, and became the talk of intellectual Europe. Rousseau's Dog is the fascinating true story of the bitter and very public quarrel that turned the Age of Enlightenment's two most influential thinkers into deadliest of foes—a most human tale of compassion, treachery, anger, and revenge; of celebrity and its price; of shameless spin; of destroyed reputations and shattered friendships. (shrink)

Helen's self-disparagement is an anomaly in epic diction, and this is especially true of those instances where she refers to herself as "dog" and "dog-face." This essay attempts to show that Helen's dog-language, in that it remains in conflict with other features of her characterization, has some generic significance for epic, helping to establish the superiority of epic performance over competing performance types which treated her differently. The metaphoric use of χύων and its derivatives has not been well understood: the (...) scholiast's gloss "shameless" is no more than a functional equivalent, and interpretations linking it primarily with reckless courage or with sexual misconduct are not well founded. An analysis of contexts suggests that "dog" as an insult has a fundamental association with physical greed and even cannibalism. The implied notion of avarice, however, may also be extended into other behavioral spheres, including those of fighting and sexuality. A character may also be called "dog" for reviling or slandering another unjustly. These strongly negative implications are out of keeping with the character given to Helen in epic. For where tragedy and lyric generally represent Helen as blameworthy, Homeric epic tends to absolve her of blame and to make her personally as well as physically attractive. The unexpected application of dog-terms to her may therefore be read as an allusion to other versions of the Troy legend which were more hostile to Helen. Negative portrayals of Helen are likely to have figured in the ancient kitharodic narrative which was a precursor of both tragedy and lyric; these are perhaps the unfriendly "songs" mentioned by Helen at Il. 6.357. By referring to such defamatory narratives through the dog-insult and through other instances of Helen's self-blame, the epic performer marks his own more favorable treatment as a generic preference. (shrink)

What interests us and claims our attention in Nazism is, essentially, its ideology, in the definition Hannah Arendt has given of this term in her book on The Origins of Totalitarianism. In this work, ideology is defined as the totally self-fulfilling logic of an idea, an idea “by which the movement of history is explained as one consistent process.” “The movement of history and the logical process of this notion,” Arendt continues, “are supposed to correspond to each other, so that (...) whatever happens, happens according to the logic of one ‘idea.’”2Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention insofar as, on the one hand, it always proposes itself as a political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of history on the basis of a single concept—the concept of race, for example, or the concept of class—and insofar as, on the other hand, this ideological explanation or conception of the world seeks to be a total explanation or conception. This totality signifies that the explanation is indisputable, leaving neither gaps nor remainders—unlike philosophical thought, from which ideology shamelessly draws the greater part of its resources but which is characterized by a risky, problematic style, what Arendt calls the “insecurity” of philosophical questioning . 2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , p. 469; hereafter abbreviated OT. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy teach at the University of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, France, and are also visiting professors at the University of California, Berkeley. They are coauthors of The Literary Absolute and, related to the topic of politics, “The Jewish People Don’t Dream” . Lacoue-Labarthe is also the author of Typography and La Fiction du politique . Nancy has written “Sharing Voices” in Transforming Hermeneutics and La Communauté désoeuvrée . Brian Holmes is a doctoral candidate in romance languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of the journal Qui Parle. He is currently at work on the parody of authorial identity in Cervantes and Flaubert. (shrink)

1. Where is the trouble? Let us take it for granted that a person can be interested in researches that go on in different fields, for example, in physics and in psychology. Undoubtedly, this will raise problems not shared by a person whose research is confined to one field only. There may be difficulty in deciding which of the two is that person's primary field of interest; members of his secondary field of interest may be flattered or feel slighted or (...) even threatened by his intrusion into their field. Let us fully ignore all these problems and pretend that they do not exist. Nevertheless, there may be different kinds of problems, and such that are hard to overlook. For example, a researcher may study the behavior of another researcher as a secondary field of research or even, worse, as a primary one. A professor of medical education who has studied the lecturing techniques of professors in his own medical school and found them very poor, meets with an understandable hostility in his own medical school. A (structuralist) sociologist may discover that his colleagues persistently speak of their teaching chores as serious undertakings and as sheer nuisance; he will be considered an enemy of education. A social psychologist may find a certain group of mathematicians or physicists in his own school or country over-ambitious and so rather unfriendly to competitors; they will then not like that social psychologist. A professor of education who thinks that biology professors shamelessly and immorally exploit their graduate students by forcing them to play cogs in their own research machinery, will find it difficult to get a job in a university with a strong biology department. And so it goes on. Let us agree that we can live with this difficulty too and even defend the researcher who meets this kind of hostility. Now the worst case is still different: i.e. when the outsider is also inte rested in the same research as the insider, and criticizes it and offers better ways of doing it.. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek writes: "Today philosophy is approaching a double end. Physics and brain sciences offer answers to the big metaphysical questions (is the universe infinite? Do we have a free will?), while what remained of philosophy is mostly getting lost in historicist relativism, reducing truth to a discursive “truth-effect.” But more and more people are tired of this game: the need for a new beginning, for authentic metaphysics, is felt everywhere. And Allinson does something that we all secretly knew it (...) has to be done, but nobody dared to actually do it so directly: he convincingly argues for the return to a philosophy that shamelessly addresses big questions. A great sigh of relief will be felt by the readers of Awakening Philosophy: The Loss of Truth: we are back home. If there is justice in our intellectual life, the book will become daily bread for thinking beings." -/- Brian Klug, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, the University of Oxford writes: "Awakening Philosophy is as original as it is ambitious. Allinson holds up a mirror to academic philosophy and shows how it has become fragmented into an eclectic set of specialisms. He seeks to get philosophy to question itself, thus reviving the spirit of Socratic enquiry: self-examination. In the process, he sets out to recover “the Great Questions” that have exercised philosophers from Plato to such figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant and Husserl. A timely and ground-breaking book." -/- Michael Slote, UST Professor of Ethics, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Member, Royal Irish Academy, former Tanner Lecturer, Stanford University, writes: "An elegant and timely appeal for philosophers and the educated public to make use of philosophy's historic roots for purposes of present-day enlightenment." In this original book, Robert Elliott Allinson asserts that philosophers have been lulled into a dogmatic sleep by Immanuel Kant, the slayer of metaphysics, who has convinced them (and the rest of humanity) that we can never know Reality. Allinson awakens global philosophers from their sceptical slumbers by diagnosing the reason why they have abdicated their traditional calling as leaders of inquiry into truth and wisdom. (shrink)

At the center of Plato’s Gorgias, the shameless and irascible Callicles offers an attack against philosophy. During this attack, he describes philosophy as a pastime fit only for the young which, if practiced beyond the bloom of youth, threatens to render those who practice it politically inept and powerless. Moreover, when taken too far, philosophy provokes the city into stripping the philosopher of all of his rights and property, leaving him with no οὐσία at all. Thus, according to Callicles, (...) far from making one powerful within the city, philosophy ultimately renders one impotent and utterly without substance. In what follows I argue that the Socrates of the Gorgias agrees with this characterization of the philosopher as the one who lacks power and οὐσία. However, whereas Callicles sees such a condition as the most worthless and pitiable sort, Socrates sees it as the unique and singular posture from out of which true philosophical thinking, and true political power, are possible. As I will show, through the course of the Gorgias as a whole, Socrates offers a counter-discourse that presents the philosopher as a powerless person lacking οὐσία who is precisely thereby able to undertake a pursuit of the truth and the good. Phrased otherwise: Socrates takes ignorance understood as lack or powerlessness to be the very condition for the possibility of philosophy and true political power, while showing rhetoric understood as the pretense of wisdom to be an obstruction to these. (shrink)

Nietzsches Philosophie ist ein hermeneutische. H.-G. Gadamer kennzeichnet die hermeneutik als ein parktische Philosophie. In diesem Aufsatz wird versucht Nietzsches Bedeutung für ein Hermeneutik als parktische Philosophie zu skizzieren an Hand einer Behandlung des Themas 'Scham' in seinen Schriften. Im ersten Teil wird die Entwicklung von Nietzsches Gebrauch des Begriffs 'Scham' verfolgt. im zweiten Teil werden die Ergbnisse gesammelt in einer Beschreibung von Nietzsches 'Hermenuetik der Scham'. Scham ist ein Form des praktischen Vorveständnis der Welt. Der Philosoph muss, Nietzsche zufolge, (...) einerseits 'schamlos unerschocken' sein, wird andererseits aber gekennzeichnet durch, 'Ehfurcht, Scham und Teif'. Zum Schluss wird den Underschied zwischen dieser und die gadamersche Hermeneutik angedeuter.Nietzsche's philosophy is hermeneutical. Hermeneutics is according to H.-G. Gadamer: practical philosophy. The article tries to explain Nietzsche's contribution to a hermeneutics as practical philosophy, by way of a discussion of the meaning of "shame" in his writings. In the first part the development of the concept of shame in Nietzsche's writings is outlined in four stages. In the second part the results of this overview are collected in a description of Nietzsche's hermenuetics of shame: shame is part of our practical preunderstanding of the world. The philosopher has, according to Nietzsche, to be 'fearlessly shameless' on the one hand, but is characterised by 'modesty [Scham] and delicate reverence' on the other. Hermeneutical consciousness can be characterised in terms of shame. (shrink)

So you're an economist? You study everything that can be gauged by the measure rod of money? You view human interaction in terms of supply and demand in the market? You depict human action as seeking self-interest in a calculative manner? Is this indeed your view of the world? If you are an economist and somebody has attempted, or might attempt, to embarrass you with such questions, you should read this book. If you are a non-economist inclined to raise such (...) questions, you too should study the essays collected in this volume. If you are a philosopher interest in the peculiar characteristics of the 'dismal science', this is a book to read. The book examines aspects of the economic world view from a variety of perspectives by raising shamelessly deep questions. This is a book in the ontology of economics. (shrink)

In a neglected passage, Aristotle affirms that certain action-types and emotions – for example, murder, and shamelessness – 'have names that imply badness’ and are categorically prohibited ( EN II.6 1107a8–15). Two questions are of interest. First, on Aristotle’s view, why are these act-types and emotions always vicious? Whether giving little money or feeling anger are vicious is context sensitive. Why aren’t murder and its ilk like that? Second, why are the prohibitions absolute? Why shouldn’t, say, the prospect of avoiding (...) disaster justify them, even if vicious? In this paper, I address these questions. I finish by responding to an objection by Peter Geach. (shrink)

The purpose of the research is to explicate the Buddhist principles of ethical analysis of premeditated murder as an immoral act. The author solves this problem through the method of case study of exegetical treatises of outstanding Buddhist thinkers Vasubandhu (4th-5th centuries) and Yašomitra (8th century). It is shown that the ethical analysis of premeditated murder is based on a religious anthropological concept (the Buddhist doctrine of human action producing karmic retribution). Sinful intent is interpreted as an immoral mental urge (...) that generated a verbal intention to take the life of a certain person or a certain animal. According to the canonical point of view, there are three mental roots of immoral acts - greed, hatred, ignorance. The ethnical analysis of sinful intent is aimed at determining the connection of intent with any of these three mental phenomena. In accordance with this principle, Buddhist thinkers have identified three types of premeditated murder. All of them produce a “black” (unfavorable) karmic fruit, i.e. an unfortunate form of rebirth, exacerbating physical suffering. Great attention is paid by the author to the problem of the karmic responsibility of individuals ordering murders and the executors of such orders. In the considered sources, the verbal order to kill and its physical execution are interpreted as equally immoral actions that produce collective karmic responsibility. The author of the research examines in detail a special class of premeditated murder, fraught with inevitable infernal retribution. This class includes murders of benefactors (mother, father, arhat) and Buddhist ascetics practicing asceticism. These malicious sins were interpreted as an insurmountable obstacle to achieving a soteriological goal, even in the distant transcendental future. It is shown that Buddhist exegetes have developed principles for diagnosing these sins and characterized the immoral personal characteristics of sinners (disrespect towards parents, Buddhist preachers and religious ascetics, heretical denial of spiritual values, shamelessness, arrogance, ignorant self-will, misanthropy). (shrink)

The premise of The Diversity of Darkness and Shameful Behaviors is to emphasize the need for enlightened, rational thinking as a paradigm of thought as the culture of shamelessness continues to grow and cast its repulsive dark shadow over those who embrace enlightened reason and basic human rights for all. This unique book utilizes evidence-based approaches in the examination of human behaviors in society that have become increasingly shameful and tolerated among a growing number of enablers. Key features include a (...) combination of academic analysis that draws on numerous and specific examples of the diversity of darkness that encompasses the world along with a balanced practical, everyday-life approach to the study of the socio-political world we live in through the use of contemporary culture references and featured popular culture boxes. Social scientists, social thinkers and the general audience alike will be intrigued and perhaps dismayed by the diversity of shamefully hateful and shamefully deadly topics covered. We should realize that humanity has the intellect to accomplish great feats but heed the growing culture of shamelessness, irrationality and the diversity of darkness. (shrink)

The image of Africa in the world at the moment does not fit into that of a dignifying and adequately humanised and humanising unit of mankind. The situation beats and challenges the philosophical and anthropological aphorisms that seem to commune all men in general. This philosophical reflection investigates the deep roots of the extant situation. It focuses more on inherent factors to the exclusion of all exterior sources and causes of the problems, which it considers as secondary even if important. (...) It has employed philosophical anthropological categories maximally and has also engaged metaphysical concepts to an extent to explore the general human modus operandi. Against this backdrop, it has beamed its searchlight on the Africans, specifically as a species of the human to identify to what extent it fits into the generally accepted pattern. This has led to an identification of the mind as the seat of the albatross. The philosophical anthropological analysis of the specific African mind and how it has been functioning has been carried out amidst a larger spectrum of the experiential operations of the mental state of mind. This has led to an examination of key concepts like fascination, imitation, success and failure, the heart and hope. A specific sample of an African concept has been adopted from the Igbo cultural background of Nigeria. How these concepts in practice have affected the organisation of African society and development has been examined and has led to an identification of various types of intelligence operative among the majority of African leaders, thinkers and the masses and the vicious cycle that is provoked by this. The external factors that feed and nourish this status quo have not been examined herein. But the shamelessness of the generality of mankind in tolerating this de facto state, for whatever can be labelled a third world within the one world, is implicitly indicated. The essay is a tribute to Professor Richard Onwuanibe who spent decades teaching philosophical anthropology to several generations of Nigerian seminarians who have become great philosophers as well today. It is also a wake-up call to philosophers, Africans and all people of good will. By concentrating on the internal conditions that in turn, obfuscate the mind and keep Africa and by implication the world behind its fullest possibilities of growth, peace and a better home for all, it looks forward to the exposition and possible neutralization of the latent external factors which belie the entire matrix of the African mindset at the moment. (shrink)

A central purpose of government is to lower taxes, and so it is a triumph for America that conservatives have successfully brought taxes to historic lows. Lest this be seen as a reactionary bulwark against liberal tax increases, or as shamelessly helping the rich—the conservative movement must offer a principled vision for America’s future. The principled conservative, I wish to maintain, must hold fast to an uncompromising zero tax position: we must continue to cut taxes, until every last American enjoys (...) perfect tax­free liberty. (shrink)

Perhaps even more radically than under the criticism of the ‘Maîtres du soupçon’, a whole world goes down in Greek comedy. Not only traditional religion, but also ethical life and finally even reason itself seem to be affected by the all-destroying power of laughter.The title of Aristophanes’ famous play ‘The Clouds’ has a symbolic meaning: in the comedy, Greek ethical life dissolves into a vanishing mist. Behind the player’s mask hides the principle of this total decomposition: the autonomous, selfconfident individual. (...) This event does not only have a theatrical meaning. It does not only exist in the artist’s imagination. It concerns a whole nation, a whole culture. The comedy is an expression of the way society understands itself. It represents in an aesthetic way the fact that the individual human being sees himself as ‘principium essendi et cognoscendi’ of everything. The comedy voices a new truth, namely that all truth begins and ends with man. The gods — symbols of truth and actuality- have dissolved in the shamelessness of a laughter, which does not halt for anything anymore. Formulated in modern terms: the comedy voices the philosophical principle that from now on the subject will be the reference point of all reality. Long before Descartes’s Cogito, a metaphysics of subjectivity here finds one of its remarkable expressions.At least, that is how Hegel interprets the comedy in his Phenomenology of Spirit. According to him, the destruction of the Greek world announces itself in the comedy. It signals the experience that a certain culture has grown old, that something new is coming. This new actuality will get its first, symbolic expression in the Christian religion. However, this transition is only possible if consciousness undergoes new experiences, by which the self-sufficient and frivolous cheerfulness of the comedy gets lost. In these new experiences the implications of the principle of the autonomous subjectivity, which is decisive for the comedy, come to light. Hegel defines this principle as following: “das Selbst ist das absolute Wesen; das Wesen, das Substanz und an dem das Selbst die Akzidentalität war, ist zum Prädikate herunter gesunken ...”.These new experiences are indicated by a term which is already familiar to the readers of the Phenomenology, namely ‘the unhappy consciousness’. Hegel writes: “We see that this Unhappy Consciousness constitutes the counterpart and the completion of the comic consciousness that is perfectly happy within itself”. The text is clear: the unhappy consciousness is not only that into which the comic consciousness turns. It is at the same time a change in which this consciousness accomplishes itself.The “Self which is for itself the absolute being” could not durably maintain itself in its position. Its “Leichtsinn” makes it “light”, too light to be the substance of everything. Very quickly, it loses its uncomplicated enjoyment of itself and becomes unhappy, even more: it has to become unhappy. I will return to the reason for this “having to” later on. But first, how does Hegel typify this historical experience, which is connected with the origin of Christianity? What does the bitter fruit of Greek comedy consist of? (shrink)

Why do human beings feel shame? What is the cultural dimension of shame and sexuality? Can theory understand the power of affect? How is psychoanalysis integral to cultural theory? The experience of shame is a profound, painful and universal emotion with lasting effects on many aspects of public life and human culture. Rooted in childhood experience, linked to sexuality and the cultural norms which regulate the body and its pleasures, shame is uniquely human. _Shame and Sexuality _explores elements of shame (...) in human psychology and the cultures of art, film, photography and textiles. This volume is divided into two distinct sections allowing the reader to compare and contrast the psychoanalytic and the cultural writings. Part I, _Psychoanalysis_, provides a psychoanalytic approach to shame, using clinical examples to explore the function of unconscious fantasies, the shame shield in child sexual abuse, and the puzzling manner in which shame attaches itself to sexuality. Part II, _Visual Culture_, is illustrated throughout with textual analysis; contributors explore shame and sexuality in art history, politics and contemporary visual culture, including the gendering of shame, shame and abjection, and the relationship between shame and shamelessness as a strategy of resistance. Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward bring together debates within and between the discourses of psychoanalysis and visual culture, generating new avenues of enquiry for scholars of culture, theory and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Few emotions have divided opinion as deeply as shame. Some scholars have argued that shame is essentially a maladaptive emotion used to oppress minorities and reinforce stigmas and traumas, an emotion that leaves the self at the mercy of powerful others. Other scholars, however, have argued that the absence of a sense of shame in a subject--their shamelessness--is tantamount to a vicious moral insensitivity. As the twelve original chapters in this collection attest, however, shame scholars are entering a new phase, (...) one in which scholarship no longer attempts to defend one side of shame against the other, but rather accepts both faces as faithful to the phenomenon to be explained. At the core of our understanding of shame there are profound disagreements about the importance of the Other in shaping our moral identity. As this collection shows by its study of shame, the difficulty of the connection between Self, Other, and morality spans over millennia and cultures and currently animates important debates at the core of feminism and disability studies. Contributors: Mark Alfano, Alessandra Fussi, Lorenzo Greco, JeeLoo Liu, Katrine Krause-Jensen, Heidi L. Maibom, Tjeert Olthof, Imke von Maur, Alba Montes Sánchez, Raffaele Rodogno, Alessandro Salice, Krista K. Thomason, Íngrid Vendrell Ferran. (shrink)

It is trivially true that comedians make jokes and thus are not serious; they are “just playing.” But watching Louis CK, especially his performances in Chewed Up, Shameless, and Hilarious, it is evident that he has more in mind than simply getting his audience to frivolously guffaw. I will make the case that this is so given the content of some of his humor which centers on areas of socio-political-ethical tensions that can be uncomfortable when addressed in a direct, (...) “bona-fide” communicative mode. I will concentrate upon his playful, yet serious, account of issues surrounding race and privilege which, though not obvious center-pieces, can be found in almost all of his performances. These are complex areas that are not obvious fodder for humor, and it is clear that his comedic repertoire is broad enough that he is not including these issues for lack of funnier bits. I will argue that through his humor, he at once brings to consciousness hidden biases, challenges them in a subversive manner on behalf of those harmed by cultural stereotypes, e.g., and opens up an otherwise adversarial audience to the possibility that they harbor such unwanted stereotypes—a necessary element in consciousness-raising. My account will require a brief distinction between seriousness and playfulness, a defense of the claim that we are drawn to humor even when it is used to question our cherished presuppositions, and an interpretation of thought experiments that parallels Louis CK’s comedic mechanisms in his stand-up performances and episodes from Louie. In some cases he is explicit that he is just “making shit up” (Oh My God), or, as he cautions in the setup to a story in Shameless, “it doesn’t matter cus’ I’m gonna lie to you.” But that does not take away from my point that he is serious with his humor about social reality in the same way that philosophers have traditionally “made shit up” with thought experiments for serious purposes. Louis CK employs a similar device with his humor, and in many ways is more effective than philosophers in making the implicit explicit for his (much larger) audiences who then spread his word. (shrink)