This article canvases some of the issues involved in the idea of form as a practice in Kant, Blumenberg and Foucault, and it also outlines the different contexts and approaches the individual papers collected in this Special Issue use to explore this idea.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the use of the idea of distance in philosophical anthropology. Distance is generally presented in works of philosophical anthropology as the ideal coping strategy, which rests in turn on the thesis of the instinct deficiency of the human species. Some of the features of species life, such as its sophisticated use of symbolic forms, come to be seen as necessary parts of this general coping strategy, rather than a merely expressive outlet, incidental to (...) the ultimate goal of life preservation. The paper analyses the arguments used in support of the thesis of instinct deficiency in Hans Blumenberg and considers their implications for the status of symbolic expression in species life. It contrasts the approach this thesis involves with one that proceeds by presenting and arguing from biological evolutionary evidence. The contrast is used to examine the questions: in what sense instinct deficiency is specifically anthropological, and in what precise sense philosophical anthropology is ‘philosophical’. (shrink)

This paper deals with Claudia Card's important contributions to a theory of evil that steps out from traditional models of thinking about this problem . Instead, our author seeks to explore important elements from other theorists in order to build up her ideas of what she calls the "atrocity paradigm." This critical essay focuses mainly in the spaces where Card's conclusions need to rethink the limits and constraints of her theory.

This essay examines one aspect of the wide-ranging philosophical background of the intellectual and dissident movement for human rights in one-time communist Czechoslovakia. I shall meditate on Jan Patočka 's finite responsibility, Derrida's aporetic emphasis on the infinite dimension of responsibility, and Lévinasian-Dostoyevskyan ethico-existential variations on in/finite responsibility. Havel alludes to hyperbolic ethics in a parenthetical remark on the birth of "Charta 77", the Manifesto for Human Rights in Czechoslovakia. The question before us is this: which dimension of responsibility appears (...) at this birth or, to put it otherwise, what responsibility is born in care for the soul and polis? (shrink)

This paper explicates how we might positively understand the distinctive, nonconceptual experience of our own actions and experiences by drawing on insights from a radically enactive take on phenomenal experience. We defend a late-developing relationalism about the emergence of explicit, conceptually based self-awareness, proposing that the latter develops in tandem with the mastery of self-reflective narrative practices. Focusing on the case of human newborns, Sect. 1 reviews and rejects claims that the capacities of actors to keep track of aspects of (...) themselves—e.g. their bodies, body parts, movements, activities, actions and experiences—when coordinating what they do equates to or is best explained by positing minimal, tacit awareness of their experiences as their own. Section 2 then considers and resists more familiar arguments, based on the so-called reflexivity thesis, that take such minimal self-awareness to be implied wherever there is any kind of phenomenal experience. In place of these ideas, we promote an alternative proposal of what is involved when agents keep track of aspects of themselves, drawing on a radically enactive conception of basic experience. Section 3 concludes by proposing that our first conceptual, explicit sense of self is something that only arrives on the scene once we become able to hold our own—through the support of others—in discursive, narrative practices that give us a conceptual grip on what it is to be a temporally extended self that persists over time. (shrink)

Late antique Gnosticism and Heidegger’s Existentialism are usually counted among the main theoretical targets of Hans Jonas’s philosophy of life and responsibility, since they are supposed to share the dualistic and nihilistic attitude the philosopher deemed most mistaken and pernicious. In particular, Gnosticism is commonly understood as the exact opposite of what Jonas strove to accomplish in his work. However, I think it is simplistic to relegate Gnosticism to a merely antagonistic role in the development of Jonas’s philosophy. My claim (...) is that Gnosticism, being a non-nihilistic form of dualism, might have been a relevant source of inspiration – although not the only one – for amending the flaws of Heidegger’s Existentialism. By taking a closer look at the essay Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, this article aims to clarify the critical and constructive role that Gnosticism might have played in shaping some of the major traits of Jonas’s thought. The first part of this essay deals with Jonas’s ‘gnostic reading’ of Heidegger’s Existentialism and highlights the positive insights drawn from such interpretative strategy. The second part focuses on three main motives in Jonas’s philosophy that may be traced back to the gnostic narrative: value objectivity and vulnerability, human responsibility and involvement in the history of being, and the sense of belonging to a wider dimension capable of providing orientation and meaning to human life. (shrink)

This article examines why Günther Anders, one of the 20th century’s most formidable critics of technology, deemed a critique of technology necessary at all. I argue that the radical philosophy of industrialism in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Obsolescence of Human Beings) and related texts is a response to what Anders’s work presents as inadequacies of traditional Marxism, with its focus on class struggle and property relations. In effect, his critique of technology, which is more attentive to forms of domination (...) emergent with mechanization, would come to supplant classical Marxist thought. The piece concludes with some thoughts about how Anders’s ‘post-Marxist’ perspective provides insights for contemporary Marxism and, in turn, how the latter can throw light on problems in Anders’s philosophy of the machine. (shrink)

This article is concerned with two interrelated questions: what, if anything, distinguishes synthetic from natural organisms, and to what extent, if any, creating the former is of moral significance. These are ontological and ethical questions, respectively. As the title indicates, I address both from a broadly neo-Aristotelian perspective, i.e. a teleological philosophy of life and virtue ethics. For brevity’s sake, I shall not argue for either philosophical position at length, but instead hope to demonstrate their legitimacy through their explanatory power. (...) I firstly argue that synthetic organisms differ in kind from natural organisms and machines, and differ only by degree from genetically modified organisms. I then suggest that this is nevertheless sufficient to give us specific ethical reservations about synthetic biology: namely, that more than any other widely used biotechnology, it is characterised by a drive to mastery that stands opposed to due appreciation of the giftedness of life. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHans Jonas’ philosophy of responsibility is a major contribution to environmental ethics and political theory, but aspects of it have proven controversial. Jonas’ critics, in particular Richard Wolin, have argued that his thought is deeply reactionary. By contrast, Nathan Dinneen has sought to show that Jonas’ apparent eco-authoritarianism is misunderstood. I argue here that Dinneen’s interpretation is too probably too generous, but also that Wolin’s wholesale critique is fundamentally misguided. Rather, the vast majority of Jonas’ thought is of enduring value, (...) including a nascent ecological republicanism which has thus far been overlooked by commentators. (shrink)

Abstract. Darwinism has attracted proportionately less attention from Jewish thinkers than from Christian thinkers. One significant reason for the disparity is that the theodicies created by Jews to contend with the catastrophes which punctuated Jewish history are equally suited to address the massive extinctions which characterize natural history. Theologies of divine hiddenness, restraint, and radical immanence, coming together in the sixteenth-century mystical cosmogony of Isaac Luria, have been rehabilitated and reworked by modern Jewish thinkers in the post-Darwin era.

A comprehensive analysis of the evolving conditions that provided for the emergence and autonomization of the field of bioethical inquiry, as well as the social, cultural and political background against which its birth can be set, should enlighten us about the problematic nature that characterises it from its very onset. Those conditions are: abuses in experimentation on human subjects, availability of new biomedical technologies, the challenging of prevalent medical paradigms and the ultimate meaning and purpose of medical care, new scientific (...) and social fields of concern dealing with ecology and environmental health, genetic engineering and biotechnologies, demographics, behavioural manipulation, reproductive medicine, etc., the upsurge of social movements raising issues of medical importance, and the need for an ethics for the technological age. The scope and meaning of bioethics is best defined by the overriding questions that open up the field of both theoretical and practical bioethical inquiry rather than by the individual responses given to such questions by the most prominent spokesmen in bioethics. (shrink)

Abstract. Biology has been able to systematize and order its vast information through the theory of evolution, offering the possibility of a more engaged dialogue and possible integration with religious insights and emotions. Using Judaism as a focus, this essay examines ways that contemporary evolutionary theory offers room for balancing freedom and constraint, serendipity and intentionality in ways fruitful to Jewish thought and expression. This essay then looks at a productive integration of Judaism and biology in the examples of co-evolution, (...) environmental ethics, the place of humans within nature, the relationship of mind and brains, and the ways that individual and group identity blur. (shrink)

A philosophy of management that incorporates the big picture of human experience, all levels, and degrees of awareness in relationship with the world, will better develop and sustain an environment conducive to creative contributions that meet organizational goals. Quantum physics reveals the nature of reality to be connection and creativity engaged in a process of actualizing possibilities. Human beings participate in this process of actualization, as both observer-creator and experiencer of the universe through multiple domains of knowing – a collaborator (...) in Alfred North Whitehead’s panexperientialism. Whitehead’s God of process, the primordial field of creative possibilities, and the consequent nature which holds all the experiences of every actualization, supports human consciousness, as it self-actualizes by engaging and integrating the experience of external and internal events and their effects on awareness. Through understanding the participatory nature of consciousness with God and the world as experienced, deep meaning emerges for human life. Tapping into this deeper meaning through a philosophy of management that acknowledges the full human experience, including the embedded spiritual connection to the creative energy that is God, strengthens an organization’s vision, mission and contributions to a community. This brief overview traces a path toward a preliminary framework for a philosophy of management based on God and the ideas of connection, creativity and process. (shrink)

It is sometimes asserted that Hans Jonas would have formulated the precautionary principle because of his awareness of the involuntary consequences of human activity as well as his profound respect for nature. Returning to the origins of the arguments regarding his contribution to 20th century ecological thought, I identify two principal themes in the philosophical enterprise of the German-born American Jewish philosopher. One is a critique of technology and a practical philosophy, i.e. an ethics, regarding mankind and nature. The other (...) is linked to the phenomenology of life and the fundamental ontology of its evolution according to a specific view. In line with this genealogy, I discuss the initial assertion that Jonas’ thinking actually articulates the precautionary principle. Qualifying the two kinds of precaution we are dealing with, I finally offer an analysis of their differences in a strong sustainability framework from the point of view of epistemology. (shrink)