This article conceptualizes the lofty term of cosmopolitanism from people's historical experience. It attempts to find a bridge between theory and life. Many writers now maintain that cosmopolitanism is no longer a dream, but rather the substance of social reality - and that it is increasingly the nation-state and our particular identities that are figments of our imagination, clung to by our memories. The aim of this article is to concretize this argument and demonstrate how some of the Jewish intellectuals (...) who emerged from World War II and the Holocaust argued passionately about the status of their Jewishness and how this related to abstract and universal ideals of modernity and human rights. The article focuses on Hannah Arendt's responses to her critics instead of her vast theoretical work to illustrate this point. In responding to her critics, Arendt came closest to providing a formula for a concept of cosmopolitanism, which attempts to square the circle between the universal and the particular. (shrink)

This article analyzes the distinctive forms that collective memories take in the age of globalization. It studies the transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. Cosmopolitanism refers to a process of `internal globalization' through which global concerns become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people. Global media representations, among others, create new cosmopolitan memories, providing new epistemological vantage points and emerging moral-political interdependencies. The article traces the historical roots of this transformation and outlines the theoretical foundations for (...) the emergence of cosmopolitan memories through an examination of how the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel and the USA in the course of the last fifty years. It is precisely the abstract nature of `good and evil' that symbolizes the Holocaust, which contributes to the extra-territorial quality of cosmopolitan memory. As such, memories of the Holocaust contribute to the creation of a common European cultural memory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe basis of my argument is that the cultural trauma now identified as the Holocaust occupied a latency period of around thirty years, or one generation, before surfacing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Alongside theorists such as Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander I argue that cultural trauma, the trauma experienced by a social group, functions in a similar way to individual trauma. In this article I examine a number of texts that exhibit expressions of the trauma of the (...) Holocaust before that trauma was identified and narrativised. These texts include the television series Hogan’s Heroes, the film The Producers, and the musical Fiddler on the Roof. My approach to the texts has been through the idea of haunting as developed by Jacques Derrida. I argue that during the period of latency texts are haunted in various ways by the traumatic events that were later integrated as the Holocaust. (shrink)

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human (...) dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’. (shrink)

This paper examines the particular relevance of feminist critiques of epistemic authority in contexts of institutionalized violence. Reading feminist criticism of “experts” together with theorists of institutionalized violence, Stone-Mediatore argues that typical expert modes of thinking are incapable of rigorous knowledge of institutionalized violence because such knowledge requires a distinctive kind of thinking-within-discomfort for which conventionally trained experts are ill-suited. The author demonstrates the limitations of “expert” modes of thinking with reference to writings on the Iraq war by Michael Ignatieff (...) and Fouad Ajami. Finally, the author turns to a newly active group of epistemic agents—anti-war relatives of soldiers--to examine the role that undervalued epistemic traits can play in knowledge of war and other forms of structural violence. (shrink)

An important area of business ethics research focuses on how otherwise normal and law-abiding individuals can engage in acts of corruption. Key in this literature is the concept of rationalization. This is where individuals attempt to justify past and future corrupt deeds to themselves and others. In this article, we argue that rationalization often entails a process of overcompensation whereby the justification forwarded is excessive in relation to the actual act. Such over-rationalization provides an impetus for further and more serious (...) acts of illegality. Using a number of high profile cases, it is argued that this dynamic gap between the act and excessive rationalization can explain why corruption often escalates in severity and scope in the organization. (shrink)

Human nature, regardless of how we perceive it, whether from an ethical or psychological standpoint, is arguably such that it prevents the overwhelming majority of people from killing other humans....

While organizational learning literature has generated significant insight into the effective and efficient achievement of organizational goals as well as to the modus of learning, it is currently unable to describe moral learning processes in organizations consistently. Corporations need to learn morally if they want to deal effectively with stakeholders criticizing their conduct. Nongovernmental organizations do not ask corporations to be more effective or efficient in what they do, but to become more responsible or to learn morally. Current research on (...) the moral aspect of organizational learning has been primarily of a theoretical nature and is in need of empirical verification. Results of a longitudinal case study as Citigroup’s conflict with the Rainforest Action Network show that current organizational moral learning theories do not fit the moral learning path observed at Citigroup. More empirical research is needed to describe organizational moral learning. (shrink)

This paper gives a new and richer account of open-mindedness as a moral virtue. I argue that the main problem with existing accounts is that they derive the moral value of open-mindedness entirely from the epistemic role it plays in moral thought. This view is overly intellectualist. I argue that open-mindedness as a moral virtue promotes our flourishing alongside others in ways that are quite independent of its role in correcting our beliefs. I close my discussion by distinguishing open-mindedness from (...) what some might consider its equivalent: empathy and tolerance. (shrink)

Arendt's concept of common sense has generally been misunderstood. It is almost exclusively interpreted in light of Kant's common sense, either as an espousal of the latter or as a distortion of it. This narrow reading of Arendtian common sense has led to a problem, as her uses of the concept do not always fit its Kantian understanding. This has led to accusing her of being inconsistent, or as holding on to several, incompatible concepts of common sense.This article argues that (...) Arendt has one complex concept of common sense, used more or less consistently throughout her writings. Rather than understanding Arendt's common sense in light of Kant's, as most readers do, I demonstrate its links to Aristotle and to the eighteenth‐century Scottish school of common sense. By doing so I turn attention to a difficulty that has thus far not been adequately treated, namely the fact that Arendt presents two, allegedly contradictory pictures of the relation between common sense on the one hand and science and philosophy on the other: a picture in which science and philosophy depend upon common sense, versus one in which they find themselves in a conflict that eventually leads to the loss or demise of common sense. The last part of the article suggests a way to settle the tension between these two pictures, by understanding the political significance Arendt ascribes to them as two distinct yet complementary ways of approaching the modern phenomenon of totalitarianism. (shrink)

If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of 'difference' can both help explain the operation of this (im)moral landscape and offer the possibility of alternative (...) post-modern social spaces that might produce and respect Otherness. In this sense Lefebvre's work is an incipient 'difference ethics'. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that cosmopolitans should elucidate the qualities and dispositions, or ‘virtues’, associated with the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship. Bryan Turner's suggestion that cosmopolitan virtue should be identified as a type of ‘Socratic irony’, which enables individuals to achieve distance from their homeland or way of life, is explored. While acknowledging the attractions of his account, certain limitations which indicate the need to generate a richer theory of cosmopolitan virtue are identified. To that end, an alternative (...) picture of cosmopolitan virtue is presented by drawing on Hannah Arendt's ideas of ‘world’ and ‘worldliness’. It is argued that cosmopolitan virtue involves the adoption of a self-reflexive mode of being in the world, the cultivation of a heightened care or feeling for the world, and the ability to adopt certain skills in the manner of our disclosures to the world. (shrink)

My goal, in interpreting Arendt’s analyses of the polis – both modern and ancient – is to conceptualize the role that ‘healthy’ public spaces can play in modern cities. What distinguishes my interpretation of her work is how I integrate her seminal conception of a philosophy of natality in the constellation of elemental concepts: labor, work, and action, as a way to understand the rise and fall of Detroit and to set the possible horizon for its reincarnation as a ‘sustainable’ (...) and flourishing city beautiful. For me, it is precisely this conceptualization, as a philosophy of natality, that enables us to better identify the metaphysical and political foundations of her ideas about the polis and its possible pragmatic application for recreating public spaces in other modern, cosmopolitan cities. I end up considering what it means to become “native to a place” in the sense that was adopted in the rebirth of the River Rouge Complex and just what that has to do with the emergence of the barrio of Mexicantown in Detroit as a quintessential sign of successful city living and a sign of hope for a brighter, more beautiful future. (shrink)

The article aims at reconstructing how pain is used in contemporary societies in the process of engraving power. Firstly, a social phenomenological analysis of pain is conducted: Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are used for clarifying the experience of pain itself; Elaine Scarry’s analyses are overviewed in order to reconstruct how pain contributes to the establishing of power. Secondly, this complex approach is applied in early modern context: the parallel processes of the decline of a transcendental and the emergence of a (...) medical interpretation of pain is introduced, along with the marginalization of violence. Thirdly, the era characterized by the triumph of medical pain management is analysed: it is argued that the constitutive role of pain in establishing power does not cease to exist with the emergence of technologies of discursive governance ; it is an open question, what sort of power is engraved through pain understood in strictly medical frames. (shrink)

This article aims at grounding critical theories with the help of psy discourses. Even if the relationship between the two disciplines has always been a controversial one, the article argues that therapeutic knowledge that accesses empirical forms of social suffering may offer important insights for critical theory. This general argument is demonstrated by complementing the theories of Bourdieu and Habermas with a clinical description of depression. First, the limitations of the capabilities of these influential theories in terms of how they (...) can be used to conceptualize the variety of social suffering are introduced. Second, the psy discourses on depression are reviewed to identify and highlight latent references to the social. Third, by combining models of depressive suffering and various distortions of integration, an extended normative basis is elaborated. Instead of solely criticizing inequalities or distortions of communication, those social constellations are criticized that trap actors by producing a homogenous pattern of suffering. (shrink)

This paper offers an analytical description of the ethics of game design and its influence in the ethical challenges computer games present. The paper proposes a set of game design suggestions based on the Information Ethics concept of Levels of Abstraction which can be applied to formalise ethical challenges into gameplay mechanics; thus allowing game designers to incorporate ethics as part of the experience of their games. The goal of this paper is twofold: to address some of the reasons why (...) computer games present ethical challenges, and to exploit the informational nature of games to suggest how to develop games with ethics at the core of their gameplay. (shrink)

Culture is a demanding word, particularly when it is used in the context of the contemporary academic discipline of international relations . It is often employed in order to distinguish one identity from another, allegedly illuminating idiosyncrasies embedded in a particular society or group of people. The essentialized understanding of culture is also detectable in the case of the current debate on the non-Western international relations theories . Non-Western politicians and scholars often employ the term culture in order to distinguish (...) their values from alleged Western values. However, culture has another important function mainly advanced by a left-wing Kyoto School philosopher Tosaka Jun, that is, culture as a mirror for critical reflection for morality . This article is based on Tosaka's argument that culture has an important function for moral reflection beyond that of a mere means to identify one's distinctiveness from the West, and it criticizes Japan's soft power diplomacy or the total absence of it from that point of view. It also argues that this absence is the result of the soft power discourse's over-simplified interpretation of culture that results in confrontation between the West and the rest, particularly when it is employed in non-Western IRT discourses. Towards the end, I examine Miyazaki Hayao's films, Princes Mononoke in particular, as examples of cultural works facilitating a moment of critical reflection, and I extract embedded messages of relevance to critical reflection on contemporary IR literature, particularly non-Western literature. (shrink)

Law clings to rules to stabilize a preferred normative reality. But rules never suffice. Character is the dark matter of law. Ethos anthropos daimon. “Character is fate.” This paradoxically reversible saying by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus asserts that we are defined by the daimon – the god or messenger angel – with which we identify most. As Plato queried in the Phaedrus: which god do you follow, whose love claims you? In contemporary terms we might say, what character type, (...) what emotional ideal, what deep story do you hold most sacred? Out of the maelstrom that is the state of exception, choices must be made. What emotional field shall we occupy when we do politics and law? Bound by what sovereign values or ideals, embodied within what sort of character, emplotted in what sort of political or legal narrative? In synergy with culture, character plays out the emotional conflicts and aspirations of the time. Whether we witness this in the mostly silent resistance of unassimilable characters like Barnardine in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure or in the silent prayer of nineteen-year-old Emma Gonzalez, in public protest against uncontrolled gun violence in American schools, we are all called upon, as citizens in public life, to occupy an emotional space that attains centrality within deep narratives that vie for political dominance. Reverse engineering liberal society, we might ask: what emotional and character ideals are optimal in order for a particular kind of political society to arise and be sustained? There is a reciprocal relationship between the sovereign authority of law and the character ideals that express a capacity and willingness to accept that authority. What will the configuration be? Addressing this question constitutes the ethical, esthetic, and epistemological calling of our time. (shrink)

Contemporary accounts of evil attempt to identify features or properties that transform an act of wrongdoing into an act of evil. What is missing from the discussion, however, is a phenomenology of evil that engages with the standpoint of the subject that undergoes evil. This paper discusses basic themes for a phenomenology of evil through a critical comparison between Hannah Arendt and Jean Améry’s respective conceptions of evil. Central for this discussion is a claim Arendt and Améry share: evil destroys (...) subjectivity and undermines trust in the world. Furthermore, both argue that the perpetrators of evil inhabit a distorted moral framework. They differ, however, insofar as Améry foregrounds the subject that undergoes evil, a standpoint that remains tacit in Arendt’s account. Recounting his torture by the Gestapo, Améry reveals how embodied subjects experiences evil and how it is in light of these experiences that perpetrators of evil should be understood. (shrink)

This essay emerges from a series of reflections on the presence of 'ethical' narratives and images of the Holocaust in debates and demonstrations around the recent conflict in Gaza. I argue that the lack of measure and violence of these narratives, which are now turned onto the descendants of the Holocaust, arise as a consequence of contemporary theories of the Holocaust that eschew the possibility of legal reflection, legal judgement and legal justice. I conclude with a discussion of Hannah Arendt's (...) attempts to rethink law in the wake of the Holocaust, a law that does not exceed its limited, but clearly defined, area of competence. (shrink)

The perplexing relationship between two of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, has been the subject of much speculation within academic circles. For Arendt, Heidegger was at once, her mentor, her lover, and her friend. In this paper, we juxtapose Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil against her relationship with Heidegger in an effort to consider the question: How does corporeality inform theorizing? In answering this question, we repudiate the conventional reading of the banality (...) of evil, which attributes the theory to Arendt’s analysis of Adolf Eichmann during the latter’s criminal trial for the actions that he perpetrated in the operation of the Holocaust. Instead, we argue that the theory is, more compellingly, reflective of Arendt’s deeply personal attempts at making sense of Heidegger’s decision to affiliate himself with the German Nazi Party in the years preceding, and during, the Second World War. Through this revisionist account of the banality of evil, we animate the idea that theorizing is the discursive corollary, and belongs within the phenomenological parameters, of corporeality. Finally, we contend that any constructive understanding of how corporeality informs theorizing will only be realized, when there is a collapsing of the seemingly impervious philosophical boundaries that demarcate between ontology and epistemology. (shrink)

Malevolence and cruelty are commonly attributed to a failure of moral reasoning or a lack of moral imagination. We present the contrasting viewpoint – immorality as an active, creative, or resourceful act. More specifically, we develop the concept of "immoral imagination" (Jacobs, 1991) and explore how it can enter into Rest's (1986) four processes of decision making: sensitivity, judgment, intention, and implementation. The literature on revenge and workplace deviance illustrates these processes.

ABSTRACT The influence by Walter Benjamin on Arendt’s notion of narrativity has been firmly established, but little research has been done to contextualize his influence. This paper fill this lacunae by showing how, like Benjamin, Arendt was concerned to deploy a form of writing history that ensures the individuality of its agents, but that as she articulated her notion of the public space, the redemptive, messianic elements in his historiography were replaced with a secular and political mode of remembrance. The (...) notion of the public space and the accompanying secularization of Benjamin’s redemptive history should not be understood as the result of a linear development, but rather as responses to contemporary political events, of which I focus on three: (1) her early writings on totalitarianism, in which she tries to come to terms with the Shoah; (2) her reflections on the Greek city state, in which she criticizes the instrumentalization of politics in post-war democracies such as West-Germany; and finally, (3) the court room as a space for storytelling and the contestation over the history of anti-Semitism during the Eichmann trial. (shrink)

This paper examines the changing relationship between the disciplines of international criminal law and international human rights law; I particularly focus on the associations of the former with comfort and the latter with discomfort. It appears that a shift may be taking place in that ICL is being refashioned from a field enforcing human rights law to one which has assumed an entirely independent status. Indeed, ICL appears to be crowding out international human rights law. The inquiry begins with the (...) question whether ICL is becoming the preferred discursive framework for practitioners, academics, and politicians. A contemporary desire for certainty over contention, action over discourse, and simplicity over complexity is revealed; in short, a preference for comfort over discomfort. The second half of the paper is dedicated to highlighting some of the concerns attached to this preference and suggesting possible techniques for addressing these concerns. Employing the idea of ‘discomfort’, I refer to the relevance of Michel Foucault’s Ethics of Discomfort, Judith Butler’s idea of the Language of Discomfort, and draw on Franz Kafka’s literary exploration of the Comfort in Discomfort. The ideas culminate in a call for relearning the comfort in discomfort of contention, discourse and complexity in international law. (shrink)

This paper argues for a psychological understanding of Nietzsche's categories of master and slave morality. Disentangling Nietzsche's parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed. In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the (...) horrific violence visited upon the Gaza Strip by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault. (shrink)

This paper explores postmodern and Shakespearean-baroque parallels in asking, “Can we make a New World?” In Shakespeare’s case, paradigm shift was occurring willy-nilly—a New World hoving into view, geographically, socio-politically, spiritually, and through a science that shifted views of earth and heaven. This inquiry into The Winter’s Tale, in search of a new coherence then and now, discovers that Shakespeare envisioned a rebalancing of hypermasculine internal and external life by way of the Feminine, both youthful and mature. Portraying the tragic (...) ruler at the center of his tale as part puer and part jealous tyrant, Shakespeare established what is almost a case history, one that serves to type the Masculine that lacks balance. He viewed the Feminine in vividly drawn characters, but also as archetypes; as to the youthful and mature Feminine, he matched these respectively—although not exclusively—with virtues of fertile natural renewal and compassionate advocacy of social justice. (shrink)

(2006). Performativity and self-revelation as key concepts in Hannah Arendt's ethic of virtue. South African Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 189-205.

(2006). Performativity and self-revelation as key concepts in Hannah Arendt's ethic of virtue. South African Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. 189-205.

Iris Marion Young articulated a social connection model of responsibility to conceptualize political responsibility for structural injustice. Schiff argues that actually confronting our responsibility is problematic: the pervasiveness of structural injustice makes it difficult to acknowledge as a problem, while distances between sufferers and contributors complicate our acknowledgment of social connection. These problems are exacerbated by thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition. Narrative can facilitate the acknowledgment necessary for us to confront our political responsibility.

Iris Marion Young articulated a social connection model of responsibility to conceptualize political responsibility for structural injustice. Schiff argues that actually confronting our responsibility is problematic: the pervasiveness of structural injustice makes it difficult to acknowledge as a problem, while distances between sufferers and contributors complicate our acknowledgment of social connection. These problems are exacerbated by thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition. Narrative can facilitate the acknowledgment necessary for us to confront our political responsibility.

This paper discusses the issue of German moral responsibility for the Holocaust in the light of the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen and others that inherited negative stereotypes of Jews and Jewishness were prime causal factors contributing to the genocide. It is argued that in so far as the Germans of the Third Reich were dupes of an ''hallucinatory ideology,'' they strikingly exemplify the ''paradox of moral luck'' outlined by Thomas Nagel, that people are not morally responsible for what they are (...) and are not responsible for. The implications of this paradox for the appraisal of German guilt are explored in relation to the views of a number of recent writers on the Holocaust. (shrink)

Auschwitz and Hiroshima stand out as two realities whose uniqueness must be reconciled with their inevitability as outcomes of highly rationalized processes of technoscientific progress. Contrary to Michael Walzer’s notion of “double effect”, whereby unintended consequences and the particular uses to which warfare may lead remain outside the moral purview of scientists, this paper endorses the commitment of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science to argue that members of the technoscientific community are always responsible for their work and the (...) eventual uses made of it. In what follows four related views are outlined pertaining to modern situations within which the technoscientific community operates, so as to highlight the urgency of infusing a sense of responsibility for the products of their activities into this community. A provisional “code” is suggested that may serve as a guide for increased personal responsibility of individual technoscientists (academic scientists and industrial engineers). (shrink)

How do nuclear technologies become commonplace? How have the borders between the exceptional and the banal been drawn and redrawn over the last 70 years in order to make nuclear energy part of everyday life? This special issue analyzes the role of fun and display, broadly construed, in shaping the cultural representation and the material circulation (or non-circulation) of nuclear technologies. Four case studies, covering the United States, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, and Ukraine from the 1950s to the 2000s, explore (...) how specific forms of public display and playful practices of cultural production were used as means to banalize (or de-banalize) nuclear energy. This introduction addresses the main theoretical and historiographical signposts of the special issue and outlines the different ways in which the articles explore them. (shrink)

This article addresses Hannah Arendt’s controversial engagement with European imperial ventures in Africa. For many of her critics, Arendt’s description of imperialism either duplicates the ideologically inflected accounts and justifications of mass-murder, or conveys her own personal views of Africans and peoples of African descent. I argue that Arendt’s account in the “Imperialism” chapter of the Origins of Totalitarianism must be read parallel to her discussion of the conflict in Palestine between Jewish settlers and native Arabs. Rather than provide us (...) with an anthropological account of Africans, Arendt provides a political account of the necessity for cooperation in order to blunt imperial power-politics. In a second move, I develop a normative critique from Arendt’s remarks by relying on Heideggerian aspects of “World.” I argue that Arendt’s criticisms are really directed at Europeans who were unable to take the Africans’ point of view. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 19-33, March 2022.

This essay considers the divergent efforts of Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek to arrive at a postmetaphysical conception of ethics that would sidestep the pitfalls of traditional Western humanism yet still possess universal applicability. Butler approaches this task through her ethics of precarity, which posits vulnerability as a foundation for a generalizable ethics of relationality in the Levinasian vein. Badiou and Žižek, in turn, work from a more Lacanian perspective, attempting to leap directly from the singular to the (...) universal by bypassing the particular. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, I propose that posthumanist theory needs to reconsider its resistance to a priori norms, for such norms do not need to be metaphysically grounded to be ethically compelling and politically useful. (shrink)

This article explores how Julia Kristeva's construction of a fictional narrative space enables her to examine the conditions that can produce a culture of revolt. Focusing on one of her novels, The Old Man and the Wolves, the article brings together Hannah Arendt's political philosophy with Duns Scotus's principle of individuation and Giorgio Agamben's notion of quodlibet to argue that the future of a culture of revolt is closely connected to the role of women. By aligning feminine thought to political (...) revolt, I demonstrate that Kristeva's revalorization of feminine experiences in the novel constitutes the basis of an ethics that includes the recognition of “whatever” forms of life that have been historically neglected. (shrink)

The present article discusses the “peace versus justice” dilemma in international criminal justice through the lenses of the respective legal theories of Judith Shklar and Hannah Arendt—two thinkers who have recently been described as theorists of international criminal law. The article claims that in interventions carried out by the International Criminal Court, there is an ever-present potentiality for the “peace versus justice” dilemma to occur. Unfortunately, there is no abstract solution to this problem, insofar as ICC interventions will in some (...) cases be conducive while in others, they will be deleterious to peace. If a tension between peace and justice arises in a particular case, the article asserts, the former must be prioritised over the latter. Such a prioritisation, however, requires a vision of the ICC as a flexible actor of world politics which is situated at the intersection of law, ethics and politics, rather than a strictly legalistic view of the court. Ultimately, then, the present article seeks to probe whether the legal and political theories of Shklar and Arendt—in isolation, but ultimately also in combination—support such a flexible vision of the ICC. (shrink)

Not all those who write philosophy are recognized as philosophers. In this paper I argue that Dutch writer Isabelle de Charrière, usually known as a novelist, is actually engaged in doing moral philosophy. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Charrière wrote novels about characters who endorsed moral theories and commitments. Her novels track the dilemmas that these characters face in trying to live according their moral theories and commitments. I consider the case for treating fiction as philosophically valuable, (...) and argue that Charrière's novels fall into the category of philosophically valuable fiction. (shrink)