Abstract Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated - that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic “oughts” that apply in the first instance to belief-forming strategies that are partly under our control. But the beliefforming strategy of not believing conspiracy theories would be a political disaster and the epistemic equivalent of selfmutilation. I discuss several variations (...) of this strategy, interpreting “conspiracy theory” in different ways but conclude that on all these readings, the conventional wisdom is deeply unwise. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on a philosophical analysis of literature. The central question is: when making moral choices in a forced labor camp, what options remain? Hannah Arendt has written about the forced labor, concentration and extermination camps as the central institutions of totalitarianism, where the project of complete destruction of unwanted human beings is carried out; the end result is the removal of spontaneity and uniqueness in people. We join Arendt’s insights with those of Richard Rorty who employed the concept (...) of unmaking a person’s world in his discussion of Orwell’s 1984. A synthesis of their ideas highlights the importance of language and the freedom of narrativity for countering the elimination of spontaneity (Rorty emphasized the importance of redescription). Chapter 3 uses this synthesis for analyzing the Gulag stories of an Estonian writer, Jaan Kross. Our reading of the stories “Vürst” and “Halleluuja” outlines the concept of playfulness which employs independent redescription of the characters themselves and the situation, and upholds the inmates’ freedom of narrativity and spontaneity. This playfulness emerges in theatricality, bravura, distance from the situation and its script (the distance-keeping has a notable parallel to Rorty’s concept of irony), enacting the unexpected, and playing with risks and possibilities. (shrink)

Among the astonishing variety of sources mentioned in Martin Jay's new book on lying in politics the reader will find ancient Greek philosophical dialogues, pamphlet controversies between eighteenth-century philosophers, post-structural literary theories and, resting easily among the likes of these, a familiar old joke. “How can you tell when a politician is lying?” Jay asks. “He moves his lips” is the answer my grandfather used to give, and that is the punch-line that Jay recounts here. But my grandfather told the (...) joke as part of a syllogism whose unstated premise was “lying is bad” and whose common-sense conclusion was that politics is corrupt. Jay is not satisfied with that conclusion. His book, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics , puts forward a very different argument: He assumes that politics is worthwhile, suggests that it is unavoidably linked to lying, and concludes that lying must not be as bad as we think it is. There are a host of complications and caveats, so many that one could spend a whole review admiring the virtuosity involved in constructing such a rich pastiche of historical episodes and texts touching on mendacity. But the frisson that the book provokes comes almost entirely from its willingness to flirt with the endorsement of vice, so any serious engagement with it cannot avoid responding in some way to that flirtation. (shrink)

. Possibly preventing catastrophes: Hannah Arendt on democracy, education and judging. Ethics and Education: Vol. 7, Creating spaces, pp. 237-249. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2013.766540.

Vitoria and Suárez defend the categorical immunity of the innocent not to be intentionally killed. But they allow for inflicting collective punishment on the innocent and the noninnocent alike during and after a just war. So they allow for deliberately harming them. Inflicting harm on the innocent can often result in their death. Hence, holding both claims seems incoherent. First, the objections against using the term “innocent” are explained. Second, their views on just war are explored. And third, by appealing (...) to Aquinas' double-effect reasoning, it is shown how they try to avoid the above-mentioned incoherence. Still, their appeal might be insufficient to palliate the tension between the above-mentioned claims. If just wars are possible, the deliberate harming of the innocent is reasonably unavoidable for defeating and punishing those who wage them. Hence, defenders of just wars, whether from a religious or a secular perspective, must live with such a tension. (shrink)

Though many have recently attempted either to locate Arendt within feminism or feminism within the great body of Arendt's work, these efforts have proven only modestly successful. Even a cursory examination of Arendt's work should suggest that these efforts would prove frustrating. None of her voluminous writings deal specifically with gender, though some of her work certainly deals with notable women. Her interest is not in gender as such, but in woman as assimilated Jew or woman as social and political (...) revolutionary. In this paper, I argue that Arendt recognized that what frequently passes for a gender question is not essentially a matter of gender at all, but rather an idiosyncratic form of loneliness that typically affects, though is by no means limited to, women. In her work one finds the conceptual tools necessary to understand the “woman problem” rather than an explicit argument or a solution to it. (shrink)

Purpose. To study the phenomenon of a woman-author as a subject of culture and philosophy from a development of literary aspect in the works both Western and Ukrainian scientists. To define the significance of the philosophical representation of the gender stereotypes to reconsider their place and role in the socio cultural discourse. Theoretical basis. To investigate the theoretical framework in the postmodern philosophy the cross-disciplinary approach is used. The comparative approach is methodologically important to clarify the problems concerning a woman-author (...) as a subject of culture. It is underlined that the boundary line between literature and philosophy is movable, which coincides with the shapes of the human experience. Based on the conviction that gender has integrated into all social relations, that means it is a gender context of any social interaction, it is important to emphasize the productivity of a new scientific methodology of sociocultural constructing of gender. Originality. Is in systematic literary analysis of Ukrainian and Western women’s prose as specific philosophical phenomenon. It was proved that the investigation of women’s literature, its identity is an important focus of both philosophy and culture, which helps find philosophical problems in literary texts. Besides the analysis of gender implications in texts allows to start theoretical dialogue on gender problems, which means the participation in the discussion about the targets of our cultural life. Conclusions. It has been proved that literature of the ХХ th -XXI st centuries is characterized by strengthening interaction between philosophical systems and literary works that reflects mainstreaming of intellectual and thinking bases. It was revealed that women’s philosophical and literary conceptions have created a unique woman’s world of being and an image of "a new woman", thus leading the way towards the new stereotypes based on comprehension that sex differences should not be determining factors both in cultural and social coexistence. (shrink)

Occupational science is undergoing dynamic development and claims have been articulated that human occupation must be understood from multiple ontological standpoints. Hannah Arendt is known for her work The Human Condition in which she explored human occupation from a philosophical and political standpoint. She distinguished the modalities labor, work and action, and labelled them vita activa. The aim of this paper is to present Arendt and her vita activa, in order to provide examples of its relevance for occupational science, showing (...) how vita activa can assist occupational scientists to take a deeper perspective on human occupation. According to Arendt, human occupation is always conditioned. The condition for labor is necessity, which reflects human biological needs and represents the basics of life. The condition for work is utility, as something persistent and durable is produced. Action is the activity that takes place between people without the intermediary of things. Similar to occupational science, vita activa is concerned with human doing but their origins differ. Arendt also emphasized the public sphere as an arena for human occupation, a viewpoint that is shared with recent occupational science literature. The need to expand the scope of occupational science to encompass all aspects of human occupations, including the deleterious, has been expressed and vita activa can contribute to broadening this perspective. Examples of the need for sustainability in working life are also presented in this paper. (shrink)

Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial 'crashing' captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for reading (...) representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred. (shrink)

Should we be concerned with, or alarmed or outraged by, the insincerity and hypocrisy of politicians who apologize for historical injustice? This paper argues that the correct reply to this question is: sometimes, but not always. In order to establish what types of insincerity must be avoided, Judith Shklar?s hierarchy of ordinary vices is critically revisited. Against Shklar?s overly benign account of hypocrisy, the paper then tries to demonstrate that only institutional and harmful forms of hypocrisy must be rejected in (...) political apologies for historical injustice. Employing Melissa Nobles? ?membership theory?, this paper defends the claim that the sincerity standard for political apologies is, in stark contrast to apologies between individuals, agent independent. This means that in political apologies, rather than focusing on the remorse and regret of the agent who apologizes, we must primarily examine the apology?s consequences in terms of renegotiating the legal, political and affective dimensions of citizenship. In domestic affairs, the paper shows that apologies can only be considered sincere if they push the polity towards a more inclusive conception of membership in the political community. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 93-101 [Access article in PDF] A Political LifeArendtian Aesthetics and Open Systems Sue Spaid Since the 1990s, artists have broken ground by producing works that are "open systems." That is, they are incomplete, participatory, and elastic. In this paper, I will argue that open systems exemplify Hannah Arendt's conception of vita activa, in contrast to art's traditional role as inspiring vita contemplativa. Since (...) they do not explicitly affirm or refute political policies, such works are generally not considered "political" art. However, they accommodate Arendt's notion of the political life, since they incorporate process, durability, pluralities of spectators, and unpredictability. Furthermore, because they do not resemble what ordinarily passes for art, reflective judgment is required to engage them, and to determine whether they are art.Echoing Diotima's interest in immortality, Arendt links beauty to durability. Open systems are particularly durable because we remember them as a public experiences that include participants and spectators. Such performative and pleasurable worldly actions entail aesthetic engagements that are very much in line with Arendt's description of the political life. Critical Engagement In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this [End Page 93] is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce... It is the reification that occurs in writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought things, which we usually call art works, the same workmanship is required that through the primordial instrument of human hands builds the other, less durable and more useful things of the human artifice. (Arendt 2000, 177-78) In a 1964 interview with Gunter Gaus, Hannah Arendt described herself as a political theorist, who though trained as a philosopher had "said good-bye to philosophy once and for all." In identifying the tension between philosophy and politics, she differentiated man as a thinking being from man as an acting being, and she identified with the latter. She found that, because philosophers cannot be neutral or objective with regards to politics, they share a certain enmity toward politics, and she sought to avoid that response. Not surprisingly, she named Kant as an exception, because he understood this enmity to lie in the nature of the subject itself. In The Critique of Judgement, experience precedes reflective judgement, thus affirming a place for each subject's particular experiences. Kant, too, was a man of action.Kant's aesthetic judgment of taste, which is a normative but non-prescriptive process, makes room for Arendt's notions of worldliness and unpredictability. Critics have decried Arendt's political theory for its anti-rationalism, political existentialism and "aestheticization of politics," yet much can be learned from her clear commitment to equality, and the way she trusted and perhaps even idealized humanity (Curtis 1999, 18). She wrote, "Only action and speech relate specifically to this fact that to live always means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present" (Arendt 2000, 179). Given her interest in freedom, active engagement, critical thinking, and anti-instrumentalism, it is perhaps not surprising that Arendt found inspiration in Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment as requiring only communicative sociability, the object's purposeless purposiveness, and the spectator's free play of imagination and understanding.I am interested here in Arendt's aesthetics of the political life in relation to recent art that unwittingly fosters an engaged and open conception of the political. The works in question are not necessarily conscious of their political capacity. Rather, their presence assumes that spectators are [End Page 94] equals, and facilitates an active life, what Arendt described as the vita activa, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. An active life, which requires a public space, entails active... (shrink)

There has been a resurgence of interest in cosmopolitanism in contemporary political theory, based upon the hopeful premise that it heralds an ameliorative response to the malignity of sovereignty's lack and the treacherous violence of sovereignty's excess. The promise of cosmopolitanism inheres in the claim that state sovereignty is and should be supplemented by an international system backed by the legitimacy of international law, grounded in the sovereignty of human rights. Drawing upon Foucault and Agamben, my argument in this essay (...) is that the laudable endeavour of liberal cosmopolitans is flawed in two ways: first, cosmopolitanism cannot escape sovereign violence, because it cannot escape sovereignty; and second, cosmopolitans misconstrue the composition of the very sovereignty they aim to escape. This means that cosmopolitan theorists are unable to identify cosmopolitan practices of sovereignty that also entail forms of violence: cosmopolitan exception. Cosmopolitan exception denotes violent sovereign practices that cannot be differentiated from the protection of rights. (shrink)

This article attempts to bring together the life, situation, and philosophical work of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka in order to present his conception of philosophy and sacrifice and to understand his action of dissent and his own sacrifice as spokesman for Charter 77 in light of these concepts. Patočka philosophized despite being barred from teaching under the German occupation and under the communist regime, even after he was forced to retire and banned from publication. He also refused the official (...) philosophical categories of communism and, what is more, criticized the very manner in which its ideology allowed it to function. Against the destruction of moral and political life by communist and liberal regimes alike, he outlined the necessity of a “life in the idea” that would be responsive to the notion of sacrifice. Such a position of distance from the things of the world which remains anchored among them is meant to respond to dissatisfaction with the world as it is found and is the very movement of human freedom. Taken together, these three aspects of his philosophical practice made him a dissident, a role he took on more completely when, as part of the Charter 77 movement, he publicly opposed the state, in a course of action that led to his death. (shrink)

While avoiding the pretence of producing an exhaustive reading of such a complex object as Lars Von Trier's Dogville, this article selectively uses the film to explore the process of the emergence of a new legality and a new set of legal relationships within a community. Two superimposed layers of meaning, the biblical and the mythic, are considered and their interaction with two different reasons, the symbolic and the economic, is suggested and explored. The categories of ‘critical being’, by Fitzpatrick (...) and Tuitt, and homo sacer, by Agamben, are taken as useful tools to understand such interaction and the connected dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Throughout the article, it is argued that the perspective of the sacrifice, as framed especially by Girard, is useful to highlight an anthropological mechanism that can be retrieved in Dogville. (shrink)