Le papier commence par une rétrospective des débats sur l'origine de la vie : le virus ou la cellule ? Le virus a besoin de la cellule pour se répliquer, mais la cellule est une forme plus évoluée à l'échelle évolutive de la vie. De plus, l'étude des virus soulève des questions conceptuelles et philosophiques pressantes sur leur nature, leur classification et leur place dans le monde biologique. Le sujet des pandémies est abordé à partir de l'existentialisme d'Albert Camus et (...) Sartre, du remplacement du rituel d'exclusion par le mécanisme disciplinaire de Michel Foucault, et de l'hypothèse Gaia, développée par James Lovelock et soutenue dans la pandémie actuelle par Bruno Latour. Les dimensions sociales des pandémies, leur lien avec le réchauffement climatique, qui a conduit à une augmentation des maladies infectieuses, et la déforestation de vastes zones, qui ont provoqué la migration des virus de leur zone d'origine (leur « réservoir ») sont mis en évidence ci-dessous. L'éthique des pandémies est abordée sous plusieurs points de vue philosophiques, dont le plus important dans une crise de telles dimensions globales est l'utilitarisme qui consiste à maximiser les bénéfices pour la société en conflit direct avec la vision ordinaire (kantienne) du respect des personnes en tant qu'individus. Après une rétrospective du virus COVID-19 qui a causé la pandémie actuelle, son cycle de vie et son histoire, avec un accent sur la philosophie de la mort, est discuté le concept de biopouvoir initialement développé par Foucault, en référence à la pratique des États modernes de contrôle des populations, et le débat généré par Giorgio Agamben qui déclare que ce qui se manifeste dans cette pandémie est la tendance croissante des États à utiliser l'état d'urgence comme un paradigme normal de gouvernement. Une autre approche intéressante et très débattue est celle générée par les travaux de Slavoj Žižek, qui déclare que la pandémie actuelle a conduit à la faillite du capitalisme « barbare » actuel, se demandant si le chemin que l'humanité empruntera est un néocommunisme. Un autre effet négatif important est la désocialisation, avec la conclusion de certains philosophes que nous ne pouvons pas exister indépendamment de nos relations avec les autres, que l'humanité d'une personne dépend de l'humanité de ceux qui l'entourent. La dernière section est consacrée à prédire à quoi ressemblera le monde après la pandémie, et il y a déjà des signes de changement de paradigme, y compris la disparition soudaine de l'idéologie du « mur » : une toux a suffi à rendre soudain impossible d'échapper à la responsabilité qui chaque individu l'a envers tous les êtres vivants pour le simple fait qu'il fait partie de ce monde et du désir d'en faire partie. Le tout est toujours impliqué en partie, car tout est, en un sens, dans tout et dans la nature il n'y a pas de régions autonomes qui font exception. La pandémie COVID-19 semble restaurer la suprématie qui appartenait autrefois à la politique. L'une des vertus du virus est sa capacité à générer une idée plus sobre de la liberté : être libre signifie faire ce qui doit être fait dans une situation précise. -/- SOMMAIRE: -/- Abstract Introduction 1 Virus 1.1 Ontologie 2 Pandémies 2.1 Dimensions sociales 2.2 Ethique 3 COVID-19 3.1 Biopolitique 3.2 Néocommunisme 3.3 Désocialisation 4 Prévisions Bibliographie -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.17905.92003 . (shrink)

De l'existentialisme d'Albert Camus et Sartre, au remplacement du rituel d'exclusion par le mécanisme disciplinaire de Michel Foucault, forme idéale de contrôle des autorités étatiques de toutes les formes de « désordre », et à la modernité virale et au bioinformationalisme. Et à propos de l'hypothèse Gaia, développée par James Lovelock et soutenue dans la pandémie actuelle par Bruno Latour. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20639.18089.

The paper begins with a retrospective of the debates on the origin of life: the virus or the cell? The virus needs a cell for replication, instead the cell is a more evolved form on the evolutionary scale of life. In addition, the study of viruses raises pressing conceptual and philosophical questions about their nature, their classification, and their place in the biological world. The subject of pandemics is approached starting from the existentialism of Albert Camus and Sartre, the replacement (...) of the exclusion ritual with the disciplinary mechanism of Michel Foucault, and about the Gaia hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock and supported in the current pandemic by Bruno Latour. The social dimensions of pandemics, their connection to global warming, which has led to an increase in infectious diseases, and the deforestation of large areas, which have caused viruses to migrate from their native area (their "reservoir") are highlighted below. The ethics of pandemics is approached from several philosophical points of view, of which the most important in a crisis of such global dimensions is utilitarianism which involves maximizing benefits for society in direct conflict with the usual (Kantian) view of respect for people as individuals. After a retrospective of the COVID-19 virus that caused the current pandemic, its life cycle and its history, with an emphasis on the philosophy of death, the concept of biopower initially developed by Foucault is discussed, with reference to the practice of modern states of control of the populations and the debate generated by Giorgio Agamben who states that what is manifested in this pandemic is the growing tendency to use the state of emergency as a normal paradigm of government. An interesting and much debated approach is the one generated by the works of Slavoj Žižek, who states that the current pandemic has led to the bankruptcy of the current "barbaric" capitalism, wondering if the path that humanity will take is a neo-communism. Another important negative effect is desocialization, with the conclusion of some philosophers that we cannot exist independently of our relationships with others, that a person's humanity depends on the humanity of those around him. The last section is dedicated to forecasting what the world will look like after the pandemic, and there are already signs of a paradigm shift, including the sudden disappearance of the "wall" ideology: a cough was enough to make it suddenly impossible to avoid the responsibility that every individual has it towards all living beings for the simple fact that he is part of this world, and of the desire to be part of it. The whole is always involved in part, because everything is, in a sense, in everything and in nature there are no autonomous regions that are an exception. The COVID-19 pandemic seems to restore the supremacy that once belonged to politics. One of the virtues of the virus is its ability to generate a more sober idea of ​​freedom: to be free means to do what needs to be done in a specific situation. -/- CONTENTS: -/- Abstract Introduction 1 Viruses 1.1 Ontology 2 Pandemics 2.1 Social dimensions 2.2 Ethics 3 COVID-19 3.1 Biopolitics 3.2 Neocommunism 3.3 Desocialising 4 Forecasting Bibliography -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31039.74405/1. (shrink)

From the existentialism of Albert Camus and Sartre, to the replacement of the exclusion ritual with the disciplinary mechanism of Michel Foucault, an ideal form of control of state authorities of all forms of "disorder", and viral modernity and bioinformationalism. And about the Gaia hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock and supported in the current pandemic by Bruno Latour. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.34967.80801.

De la existențialismul lui Albert Camus și Sartre, la înlocuirea ritualului de excludere cu mecanismul disciplinar al lui Michel Foucault, o formă ideală de control al autorităților statului a tuturor formelor de ”dezordine”, și modernitatea virală și bioinformaționalism. Și despre ipoteza Gaia, dezvoltată de James Lovelock și susținută în actuala pandemie de Bruno Latour. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31276.49284.

I offer an approach to Dreyer's film Ordet as a contribution to the phenomenology of a certain kind of religious experience. The experience in question is one of a moment that disrupts the chronological flow of time and that, in the lived experience of it, is charged with eternal significance. I propose that the notoriously divisive ending of Ordet reflects an aim to provide the film's viewers with an experience of this very sort. l draw throughout on some central ideas (...) in Kierkegaard’s work, especially his category of ‘the moment’. (shrink)

To speak of being religious lucky certainly sounds odd. But then, so does “My faith holds value in God’s plan, while yours does not.” This book argues that these two concerns — with the concept of religious luck and with asymmetric or sharply differential ascriptions of religious value — are inextricably connected. It argues that religious luck attributions can profitably be studied from a number of directions, not just theological, but also social scientific and philosophical. There is a strong tendency (...) among adherents of different faith traditions to invoke asymmetric explanations of the religious value or salvific status of the home religion vis-à-vis all others. Attributions of good/bad religious luck and exclusivist dismissal of the significance of religious disagreement are the central phenomena that the book studies. Part I lays out a taxonomy of kinds of religious luck, a taxonomy that draws upon but extends work on moral and epistemic luck. It asks: What is going on when persons, theologies, or purported revelations ascribe various kinds of religiously-relevant traits to insiders and outsiders of a faith tradition in sharply asymmetric fashion? “I am saved but you are lost”; “My religion is holy but yours is idolatrous”; “My faith tradition is true, and valued by God, but yours is false and valueless.” Part II further develops the theory introduced in Part I, pushing forward both the descriptive/explanatory and normative sides of what the author terms his inductive risk account. Firstly, the concept of inductive risk is shown to contribute to the needed field of comparative fundamentalism by suggesting new psychological markers of fundamentalist orientation. The second side of what is termed an inductive risk account is concerned with the epistemology of religious belief, but more especially with an account of the limits of reasonable religious disagreement. Problems of inductively risky modes of belief-formation problematize claims to religion-specific knowledge. But the inductive risk account does not aim to set religion apart, or to challenge the reasonableness of religious belief tout court. Rather the burden of the argument is to challenge the reasonableness of attitudes of religious exclusivism, and to demotivate the “polemical apologetics” that exclusivists practice and hope to normalize. Lexington Books Pages: 290 978-1-4985-5017-8 • Hardback • December 2018 • $95.00 • (£65.00) 978-1-4985-5018-5 • eBook • December 2018 • $90.00 • (£60.00) ISBN 978-1-4985-5018-5 (pbk: alk. paper) (coming 2020) [Download the 30% personal use Discount Order Form I uploaded for hardcover or e-book, and please ask your library to purchase a copy for their collection.]. (shrink)

A mysterious remark to Friedrich Waismann on 30 December 1929 marks the only occasion where Wittgenstein refers to both Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Yet although this has generated much controversy, little attention has been paid to the charge of nonsense that Wittgenstein here appears to bring against Heidegger; thus, the supporting argument that may be latent has not been unearthed. Through analysis of this remark, Wittgenstein's arguments in the Tractatus and 'A Lecture on Ethics', and Heidegger's account of anxiety (Angst) in (...) Being and Time, I argue that we can extract an argument against the central question of Heidegger's philosophy: the question of being. To understand this, I examine the Kierkegaardian ideas employed by Wittgenstein and Heidegger and attempt to show that this argument can be partly understood in Kierkegaardian terms. I further argue that examining what Heidegger means by 'being' (Sein) shows that Wittgenstein's argument does not meet its target. (shrink)

Susan Haack has recently attempted to discredit religion by showing that science is an extended and enhanced version of common sense while religion is not. I argue that Haack’s account is misguided not because science is not an extended version of common sense, as she says. It is misguided because she assumes a very restricted, and thus inadequate, account of common sense. After reviewing several more realistic models of common sense, I conclude that common sense is rich enough to allow (...) various kinds of extensions. Just as science can be correctly seen as an enhanced version of common sense, so also religion. (shrink)

In this essay, I first describe Kierkegaard’s understanding of free and responsible selfhood. I then describe one of Kierkegaard’s unique contributions to freedom and responsibility – his perceptual theory of the emotions. Kierkegaard understands emotions as perceptions that are related to beliefs and concerns, and thus the self can—to some extent—freely participate in the cultivation of various emotions. In other words, one of the ways that self takes responsibility for itself is by taking responsibility for its emotions. In the final (...) section, I turn to Kierkegaard’s understanding of social comparison and the role that the “crowd” plays in shaping the self’s beliefs, desires, and emotions. Kierkegaard is clear that envy and social comparison are detrimental to becoming a self, yet envy and social comparison are pervasive social practices. I conclude that Kierkegaard understands both the value and the difficulty of cultivating social courage: the crowd is untruth due to the difficulty of holding fast to one’s values when confronted by crowd. (shrink)

This paper reexamines Kierkegaard's work with respect to the question whether truth is one or many. I argue that his famous distinction between objective and subjective truth is grounded in a unitary conception of truth as such: truth as self-coincidence. By explaining his use in this context of the term ‘redoubling’ [Fordoblelse], I show how Kierkegaard can intelligibly maintain that truth is neither one nor many, neither a simple unity nor a complex multiplicity. I further show how these points shed (...) much-needed light on the relationship between objective and subjective truth, conceived not as different kinds or species of truth but as different ways in which truth manifests itself as a standard of success across different contexts of inquiry. (shrink)

In this essay, we focus primarily on Moore’s “Proof of an External World” and Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism.” We are not exactly commenting on Clarke’s “The Legacy of Skepticism,” interpreting it, although what we do involves us in (some of) that. Instead of directly commenting on it, we do things with Legacy; we read Moore’s Proof and Kant’s Refutation with Clarke in mind. And by way of doing this, we bring onto the stage a post-Legacy Moore, and a post-Legacy Kant. (...) We do not claim to present Moore and Kant per se (to use Clarke’s term); we do not portray Moore and Kant as they are independently of “The Legacy of Skepticism.” We propose instead Moore and Kant as we read them after Legacy, i.e., in light of the pure/plain distinction. (shrink)

... From the notion of self as a relation's relating itself to itself, I discuss the concept of the other in relation to the self in each of the Kierkegaardian life stages: the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious. First of all, I describe the notion of self in Kierkegaardian philosophy as it appears in Sickness unto Death, and the problem of the human being as a conscience in the world. After that, I describe the esthetic notion of the other, (...) which is no more than a casual opportunity of the self for enjoying itself in life. In the ethical stage, the other is described as an image of the self, a second-self: no more than an intermediate between the self and the same self. Finally, the religious stage is arrived at, where the other is, for the self, another being with independent reality. There the other is, firstly, God – the true source of all reality and the life of the self – and it is the biblical neighbor with whom the self must establish itself as a singular being. The religious other is then the basis of the Kierkegaardian social philosophy, since it is not a second-I but the first-Thou. (shrink)

This paper looks at the ways in which Mikhail Bakhtin had appropriated the ideas of Kant and of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. While Bakhtin was greatly indebted to Kantian philosophy, and is known to have referred to himself as a neo-Kantian, he rejects the main tenets of neo-Kantianism. Instead, Bakhtin offers a substantial re-interpretation of Kantian thought. His frequent borrowings from neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and others) also follow a distinctive pattern of appropriation, whereby blocks of interconnected ideas (...) are removed from their original context, and made to serve Bakhtin’s own—substantially different—philosophical purposes in the context of his own thought. Bakhtin’s thought thus remains original even as he is borrowing ideas from others. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard is often considered to be one of the most vocal critics of German idealism. The present paper analyzes the philosophical similarity between Friedrich Schelling ’s early idealistic work and Kierkegaard ’s existential writings, endeavoring to display Schelling ’s epic 1809 publication Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom as a possible forerunner to Kierkegaard. This juxtaposition reveals concrete similarity that supports the thesis that Schelling ’s work could have been of great inspirational value for Kierkegaard, especially Kierkegaard (...) ’s core concepts such as freedom, morality and God. However, Schelling ’s early work is primarily appreciated as a philosophy of nature, and therefore fundamentally different from Kierkegaard ’s theistic-psychological writings. The present paper tentatively opposes this distinction, concluding that if Schelling really is a forerunner to Kierkegaard, then we ought to appreciate Kierkegaard ’s writings as conveying more than a theological message. The conclusion suggests that Kierkegaard ’s writings should be interpreted in a broader philosophical context, closer to the metaphysical idealism he is often assumed to resist. (shrink)

One of the most hotly contested debates in Kierkegaard studies concerns his sense of the relationship between faith and reason. Often caricatured as a proponent of irrational fideism, scholarship in recent decades has tried to present a more nuanced account of Kierkegaard’s position. Two likely interpretive options have emerged: supra‐rationalism and anti‐rationalism. On the former view, Kierkegaard believes that while the achievement of faith is beyond the capabilities of reason, there are still ways that reason can aid the maintenance of (...) faith once reason’s limits are recognized. On the latter view, faith is a constant struggle against rationalizing justification, and thus, any attempt to use reason to assist in the maintenance of faith is a mistake. Interestingly, a comparison with Pascal can help one arbitrate between these two responses to the dubious irrationalist reading of Kierkegaard. (shrink)

Mozart's great opera, Don Giovanni, poses a number of significant philosophical and aesthetic challenges, and yet it remains, for the most part, little discussed by contemporary philosophers. A notable exception to this is Bernard Williams's important paper, ‘Don Juan as an Idea’, which contains an illuminating discussion of Kierkegaard's ground-breaking interpretation of the opera, ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical-Erotic’, in Either/Or. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author's approach here is, in some respects, reminiscent of a currently rather fashionable narrative-inspired moral philosophy, (...) of which Williams himself is perhaps the most impressive recent exponent. In the light of this apparent methodological confluence, Williams's disagreement with A about the meaning of Don Giovanni's final two scenes seems particularly significant. By offering an interpretation of Don Giovanni that both retains A's fundamental ideas and manages to get round the problems in Williams's account, I will show that the greatness of Mozart's opera is largely a function of the challenge it presents to the ‘morality system’. (shrink)

This essay tries to show that there exist several passages where Kierkegaard (and his pseudonyms) sketches an argument for the existence of God and immortality that is remarkably similar to Kant's so-called moral argument for the existence of God and immortality. In particular, Kierkegaard appears to follow Kant's moral argument both when it comes to the form and content of the argument as well as some of its terminology. The essay concludes that several passages in Kierkegaard overlap significantly with Kant's (...) moral argument, although Kierkegaard ultimately favors revealed faith over natural theology in general and Kant's moral faith in particular. Whereas Kant uses the moral argument to postulate the existence of God and immortality, Kierkegaard mainly uses it as a reductio ad absurdum of non-religious thinking. (shrink)

The paper argues that Sergej Bulgakov's sophiology was an attempt, via antinomism or the philosophy of antinomies, to overcome the rationalism, monism, and determinism (in a word, "pantheism") of Vladimir Solov'ëv's philosophy of the Absolute understood as an abstract Trinitarianism. After detailing Solov'ëv's thought on the Trinity and Bulgakov's criticisms of it, the study then describes Bulgakov's antinomism and its application to the doctrine of God. However, it is contended that Bulgakov's antinomism ultimately falls into the same problems with pantheism (...) found in Solov'ëv and so the last part of the paper tentatively proposes resources in his work, stated in the form of a suggested "fourth (Bulgakovian) antinomy" between ousia (divine Being as such) and Sophia (the revelation in God and the world of the divine Being), that might help to avoid a collapse of God and the world by making the divine Being proper utterly transcendent and unknowable. (shrink)

What are the conditions required for becoming better human beings? What are our limitations and possibilities? I understand “becoming better” as a combined improvement process bringing persons “up from” a negative condition and “up to” a positive one. Today there is a tendency to understand improvement in a one-sided way as a movement up to the mastery of cognitive skills, neglecting the negative conditions that can make these skills mis-educative. I therefore tell six stories in the Western tradition about conditions (...) for a combined improvement process. The first three stories belong to our cultural ABC: an Aristotelian story about moral wisdom which brings people up from being enslaved by passions and up to a good life of virtues; a Biblical story about God’s word bringing listeners up from a self-centred life and up into creative work as God’s fellow workers, and a short Cave story by Plato about liberation—up from living by common illusions and up to enlightenment from what is perfectly good. The subsequent three stories interpret and actualise these basic stories in different ways: a story about moral wisdom and divine love (Thomas Aquinas), a story about individual freedom and rationality (Immanuel Kant), and a story about the love that builds us up as equal human beings (Søren Kierkegaard). These stories may directly guide us adults—and indirectly the children and youth who learn from our examples—when we struggle to become better human beings. (shrink)

Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements. This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport. The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments. The potential for aesthetic appreciation of environmental engagement is found to (...) be strongly dependent on whether or not environmental engagement is exploited for the end of producing a quantifiable result or enhancing technical skill. It is also argued that an existential rather than spectatorial attitude to aesthetic experience is offered by specifically nature oriented sport. Aesthetic experience achieved in this way is therefore neither passive nor detached, but extends Berleant's concept of participatory environmental aesthetics and underpins both an alternate (wide) conception of excellence in sport activity and a richer experience of aesthetic engagement than more objectivised standpoints. (shrink)

This paper is an enquiry into the meaning of teaching. I argue that as a result of the influence of constructivist ideas about learning on education, teaching has become increasingly understood as the facilitation of learning rather than as a process where teachers have something to give to their students. The idea that teaching is immanent to learning goes back to the Socratic idea of teaching as a maieutic process, that is, as bringing out what is already there. Against the (...) maieutic conception of teaching I argue for an understanding of teaching in terms of transcendence, where teaching brings something radically new to the student. I explore the meaning of the idea of transcendence through a discussion of Kierkegaard and Levinas, who both criticise the maieutic understanding of teaching and, instead, argue for a transcendent understanding of teaching—an understanding of teaching which they refer to as ‘revelation.’ Whereas Kierkegaard argues that revelation—which he understand as a process of ‘double truth giving’—lies beyond the power of the teacher, Levinas interprets revelation as the experience of ‘being taught.’ I use Levinas’s suggestion in order to explore the distinction between ‘learning from’ and ‘being taught by’ and argue that teaching has to be understood in the latter sense, that is, in terms of the experience of ‘being taught.’ To connect the idea of teaching to the experience of ‘being taught’ highlights that teaching can be understood as a process of ‘truth giving’ albeit that (1) this ‘gift’ lies beyond the powers of the teacher, and (2) the truth that is given, has to be understood in terms of what Kierkegaard calls ‘subjective truth’—which is not relativistic truth but existential truth, that is, truth that matters for one’s life. Understanding teaching in these terms also opens up new possibilities for understanding the role of authority in teaching. While my argument implies that teachers cannot simply and straightforwardly ‘produce’ the experience of ‘being taught’—so that what matters has to do with the conditions under which the gift of teaching can be received—their actions and activities nonetheless matter. In the final section of the paper I therefore argue that if we want to give teaching back to education, we need to resist the depiction of the teacher as a disposable and dispensable ‘resource’ that students can learn from or not, and need to articulate and enact a different story about the teacher, the student and the school. (shrink)

This essay considers the critical response to Hegel's view of Socrates we find in Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony. I argue that this dispute turns on the question whether or not the examination of particular thinkers enters into Socrates’ most basic aims and interests. I go on to show how Kierkegaard's account, which relies on an affirmative answer to this question, enables him to provide a cogent defence of Socrates' philosophical practice against Hegel's criticisms.

Knowledge is a highly valued state in which a person is in cognitive contact with reality. It is, therefore, a relation. On one side of the relation is a conscious subject, and on the other side is a portion of reality to which the knower is directly or indirectly related. While directness is a matter of degree, it is convenient to think of knowledge of things as a direct form of knowledge in comparison to which knowledge about things is indirect. (...) The former has often been called knowledge by acquaintance since the subject is in experiential contact with the portion of reality known, whereas the latter is propositional knowledge since what the subject knows is a true proposition about the world. Knowing Roger is an example of knowledge by acquaintance, while knowing that Roger is a philosopher is an example of propositional knowledge. Knowledge by acquaintance includes not only knowledge of persons and things, but also knowledge of my own mental states. In fact, the knower's own mental states are often thought to be the most directly knowable portion of reality. (shrink)

This essay explores connections and divergences between Alasdair MacIntyre's eudaimonistic ethic and Søren Kierkegaard's agapeistic ethic--perhaps the greatest proponents of these ethical paradigms from the past two centuries. The purpose of the work is threefold. First, to demonstrate an impressive amount of convergence and complementarity in their approaches to the transcendent grounds of an ethic of flourishing, the rigors necessary for a proper self-love, and the other-directed nature of proper social relations. Second, given the inapplicability of common dichotomies, to pinpoint (...) more precisely where Kierkegaard departs from eudaimonism, and where MacIntyre departs from agapeism. Finally, to show that both Kierkegaard's and MacIntyre's grounds for departure are inadequate, and thus that the most central insights of eudaimonist and agapeist ethics can be harmonized to a greater extent than either Kierkegaard's or MacIntyre's framework can allow. (shrink)

Thomas Flynn's work on Sartre and Foucault, the first of a two-volume project, offers a unique opportunity for examining an existential theory of history. It occasions rethinking existential-social categories from the vantage point of the poststructuralist turn. And it contributes to developing existential variants of critical theory. The following questions guide me in each of the three above areas. First, how is human history intelligible, given not only our finite sense of ourselves but also claims that we have reached the (...) end of history? Second, with the poststructuralist eclipse of dialectics, can we render existential categories in social terms and vice versa? Third, critics decry grand theorizing even in fallibilist reason, e.g., of Habermas, while others are worried by the normative deficits of poststructuralist nominalism, e.g., of Foucault. Can existential variants of critical social theory, anticipated before Sartre by Marcuse, split the difference? (shrink)

Kierkegaard's theory of pre-ethical, aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres of moral reasoning was applied to the case of an individual rejected for promotion to full professor. The evaluators seemed to represent the public morality of the profession, assumed that they represented the highest level of moral reasoning, and judged that the candidate represented a private morality based on a lower level of moral reasoning. The article questioned the view that moral reasoning could be discerned from one's actions. It was paradoxical (...) that different spheres seemed to produce similar kinds of actions, though for differing reasons, making identification difficult. It was easy for the evaluators to confuse spheres representing private moralities and to conclude, based on the candidate's research record, that she/he was unsuitable for promotion. It was equally difficult for the candidate to discern whether the evaluators' moral reasoning represented the public morality of the profession, or a pre-ethical need by the evaluators to appear in solidarity with the public morality. This made it difficult for the candidate to know whether the evaluators' recommendations represented absolute standards that would be applied to any future re-application, or not. The article's contribution was the identification of different spheres of moral reasoning, the interactions between spheres, and the paradoxical indeterminacy of gauging moral reasoning from moral action. It supported Kierkegaard's view that the highest truth attainable by an individual was "an objective uncertainty" and that this truth was lost in self-deception when one claimed to have been able to solve the paradox. (shrink)

This essay examines texts from Kierkegaard's signed and pseudonymous authorship on immortality and the resurrection, challenging the received opinion that Kierkegaard's account of eternal life merely connotes a temporal, existential modality of experience as a present eternity. Kierkegaard's thoughts on immortality are more complicated than this reading allows. I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's ideas on the afterlife emerge out of a context in which the topic had been vigorously debated in both Germany and Denmark for more than a decade. In responding (...) to these debates, Kierkegaard establishes a "new argument" for immortality that stands as a robust account of the Christian resurrection and highlights the power of a personal God at the center of life, death, and post-mortem existence. (shrink)

This paper provides an account of Kierkegaard’s central criticism of the Danish Hegelians. Contrary to recent scholarship, it is argued that this criticism has a substantive theoretical basis and is not merely personal or ad hominem in nature. In particular, Kierkegaard is seen as criticizing the Hegelians for endorsing an unacceptable form of intellectual elitism, one that gives them pride of place in the realm of religion by dint of their philosophical knowledge. A problem arises, however, because this criticism threatens (...) to apply to Kierkegaard himself. It is shown that Kierkegaard manages to escape this problem by virtue of the humorous aspect of his work. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders certain of Kierkegaard's criticisms of Hegel's theoretical philosophy in the light of recent interpretations of the latter. The paper seeks to show how these criticisms, far from being merely parochial or rhetorical, turn on central issues concerning the nature of thought and what it is to think. I begin by introducing Hegel's conception of "pure thought" as this is distinguished by his commitment to certain general requirements on a properly philosophical form of inquiry. I then outline Hegel's (...) strategy for resolving a crucial problem he takes himself to face. For his account of the nature of thought depends upon the idea of a form of inquiry in which nothing whatsoever is presupposed; but this idea appears basically paradoxical inasmuch as the mere act of beginning to inquire in a certain way embodies an assumption about how it is appropriate to begin. Turning to Kierkegaard, I consider a key objection to the effect that Hegel's strategy for resolving this paradox depends on the incoherent idea of a purely reflexive act of thinking. Finally, I draw out some central features of the alternative account of "situated" thought and inquiry which Kierkegaard presents as distinctively Socratic. (shrink)

Lucrarea debutează cu o retrospectivă a dezbaterilor privind originea vieții: virusul sau celula? Virusul are nevoie de celulă pentru replicare, în schimb celula este o formă mai evoluată pe scara evoluționistă a vieții. În plus, studiul virușilor ridică întrebări conceptuale și filozofice presante despre natura lor, clasificarea lor, și locul lor în lumea biologică. Subiectul pandemiilor este abordat pornind de la existențialismul lui Albert Camus și Sartre, înlocuirea ritualului de excludere cu mecanismul disciplinar al lui Michel Foucault, și despre ipoteza (...) Gaia, dezvoltată de James Lovelock și susținută în actuala pandemie de Bruno Latour. În continuare sunt evidențiate dimensiunile sociale ale pandemiilor, legătura lor cu încălzirea globală care a dus la o creștere a bolilor infecțioase, și despădurirea unor zone întinse, care au determinat virușii să migreze din zona lor nativă („rezervorul” lor). Etica pandemiilor este abordată din mai multe puncte de vedere filosofice, din care cel mai important într-o criză de asemenea dimensiuni globale este utilitarismul care presupune maximizarea beneficiilor pentru societate în conflict direct cu viziunea obișnuită (kantiană) privind respectul față de persoane ca indivizi. După o retrospectivă a virusul COVID-19 care a cauzat actuala pandemie, a ciclului său de viață și a istoriei sale, cu accent pe filosofia morții, este discutat conceptul de bioputere dezvoltat inițial de Foucault, cu referire la practica statelor naționale moderne de control al populațiilor și dezbaterea generată de Giorgio Agamben care afirmă că ceea ce se manifestă în această pandemie este tendința crescândă de a folosi starea de excepție ca o paradigmă normală de guvernare. O altă abordare de interes și foarte dezbătută este cea generată de lucrările lui Slavoj Žižek, care afirmă că actuala pandemie a dus la falimentul actualului capitalism ”barbar”, întrebându-se dacă nu cumva drumul pe care îl va lua omenirea este un neo-comunism. Un alt efect negativ important este desocializarea, cu concluzia unor filosofi că nu putem exista independent de relațiile noastre cu ceilalți, că umanitatea unei persoane depinde de umanitatea celor din jurul ei. Ultima secțiune este dedicată previziunilor despre cum va arăta lumea după pandemie, existând deja semne ale unei schimbări de paradigmă, inclusiv dispariția bruscă a ideologiei legate de „ziduri”: o tuse a fost suficientă pentru a face dintr-o dată imposibilă evitarea responsabilității pe care fiecare individ o are față de toate ființele vii pentru simplul fapt că este parte a acestei lumi, și a dorinței de a fi parte a ei. Întregul este întotdeauna implicat în parte, pentru că totul este, într-un anumit sens, în tot și în natură nu există regiuni autonome care să constituie o excepție. Pandemia COVID-19 pare să restabilească supremația care a aparținut cândva politicii. Una din virtuțile virusului este capacitatea acestuia de a genera o idee mai sobră de libertate: a fi liber înseamnă a face ceea ce trebuie făcut într-o situație specifică. -/- CUPRINS: -/- Abstract Introducere 1 Viruși 1.1 Ontologia 2 Pandemii 2.1 Dimensiuni sociale 2.2 Etica 3 COVID-19 3.1 Biopolitica 3.2 Neocomunism 3.3 Desocializarea 4 Previziuni Bibliografie -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.27611.39205 . (shrink)

What are the freedom-relevant conditions necessary for someone to be a morally responsible person? I examine several key authors beginning with Harry Frankfurt that have contributed to this debate in recent years, and then look back to the writings or Søren Kierkegaard to provide a solution to the debate. In this project I investigate the claims of semi-compatibilism and argue that while its proponents have identified a fundamental question concerning free will and moral responsibility—namely, that the agential properties necessary for (...) moral responsibility ascriptions are found in scenarios where the agent acts on her own as opposed to her action resulting from freedom undermining external causes such as manipulation, phobias, etc.—they have failed to show that the freedom-relevant agential properties identified in those actual-sequence scenarios are compatible with causal determinism. My argument is that only a voluntarist-libertarian theory can adequately account for the kinds of cases that the semicompatibilist identify. I argue that there are three freedom-relevant conditions necessary for someone to be a morally responsible person: a hierarchical understanding of human desires [specifically and mental states generally], an incompatibilist (non-deterministic) understanding of human action, and a historical understanding of character development. The ability to reflect critically about one’s own desires and emotions, and thus to have a kind of self-knowledge and understanding with regard to the springs of one’s own actions, is required to make it possible for the agent to be the “source” of her own actions and character. The non-deterministic understanding of human action is needed for a similar reason: if determinism is true, then every action a person performs can be ultimately traced to and exhaustively explained in terms of factors outside the agent’s control, thus making the agent’s responsibility for his actions an illusion. And finally,human nature must be such that, over time, one’s choices leave a dispositional residue self-understanding and motivation in the person’s self, out of which, in mature understanding and motivation, the person acts as a fully responsible agent. (shrink)

This essay argues that there are concrete emotion regulation practices described, but not developed, in Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses. These practices—such as attentiveness to emotion, attentional deployment, and cognitive reappraisal—help the reader to regulate her emotions, to get rid of negative, unwanted emotions such as worry, and to cultivate and nourish positive emotions such as faith, gratitude, and trust. An examination of the Discourses also expose Kierkegaard’s understanding of the emotions; his view is akin to a perceptual theory of the emotions (...) that closely connects emotions and concerns. In particular, this analysis unearths two main regulatory strategies located in the Discourses, strategies that closely resemble present-day psychological accounts of emotion regulation. I conclude that contemporary research reinforces Kierkegaard’s philosophical analysis of emotions and emotion-regulation strategies. Drawing on this research provides the most persuasive interpretation of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the emotions and emotion-regulation strategies. Additionally, present-day research clarifies the otherwise elusive, opaque strategies he describes. Finally, my analysis demonstrates that Kierkegaard’s work can uniquely contribute to the present-day psychological research by emphasizing the need for diachronic regulation strategies, while the contemporary literature overwhelmingly focuses on synchronic strategies. (shrink)

If educators are to educate they must be accorded some level of trust. Anthony Giddens claims that because trust is not easily created, it is now being replaced with ‘confidence’ because this latter disposition is much easier to give and is more convenient. It is argued in this paper that this shift from trust to confidence stifles education because emphasis is placed solely upon qualifications and competence, and is neglectful of disclosing one’s motives and desires—which are considered to be essential (...) elements for relationships and communities which depend upon trust. Therefore, educators ought to seek to become more trustworthy by going beyond evidence-based practices and codes of ethics, towards articulating a developed personal philosophy of education outlining the ultimate end-purposes to which they aspire. Through such a philosophy, educators identify their ultimate desires and commitments and this self-disclosure can make trust-giving more likely. Demonstrated evidence of achievements and qualifications encourage confidence and this has some value. In addition to these artefacts of evidence, it is argued here that educators must also articulate what they actually desire. This can be understood as John Dewey’s virtue of ‘genuine interest’ which he characterises as being wholehearted, persistent and impartial. For educators, this is often represented in our personal philosophy of education and because it is personal, it is also existential in the sense that it pertains to giving sense, meaning and purpose to all of our activities and way of life for which we are individually responsible and passionately committed to as professionals. As a consequence of being existential, our philosophy and our commitment to it has an intellectual and moral aspect and because it reaches to the very depths of our raison d’être, it pertains to our passion as described by Søren Kierkegaard. This paper shall draw upon Dewey’s notion of wholeheartedness and Kierkegaard’s notion of purity of heart, to make the case that if educators embrace these in their practices, we may become more trustworthy. (shrink)

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent (...) to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view. (shrink)

The mysterious phrase, ‘the eternal validity of the self,’ is clearly quite important in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. A reader of those works will see that becoming aware of your eternal validity is a prerequisite for becoming both Judge William’s ‘ethical man’ and Johannes de Silentio’s ‘knight of faith,’ but the same reader is likely to be unsure just what it means to become aware of yourself in your eternal validity. In this paper, I discuss and critique various accounts of the (...) concept of the eternal validity of the self. Then, I offer an account of that notion which proceeds from careful attention to Judge William’s use of the phrase in Either/or. Finally, I connect my account with some of Kierkegaard’s writings beyond Either/or. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a reading of Fear and Trembling that responds to critiques of Kierkegaardian ethics as being, as Brand Blanshard claims, “morally nihilistic,” as Emmanuel Levinas contends, ethically violent, and, as Alasdair MacIntyre charges, simply irrational. I argue that by focusing on Isaac's singularity as the very condition for Abraham's “ordeal,” the book presents a story about responsible subjectivity. Rather than standing in competition with the relation to God, the relation to other people is, thus, inscribed into (...) this very relation. Fear and Trembling, I contend, advocates a bidirectional responsibility that is constitutive of subjectivity itself and, as such, actually resonates with certain aspects of Levinasian ethics. I conclude by suggesting that Abraham's ordeal is not due to the conflict between a nonreligious duty and the duty to God, but instead reflects a tension that is internal to the life of faith itself. (shrink)

In a journal entry from 1906, Husserl complains of lacking "internal stability" and of his desire to "achieve" it. My claim in this paper is that the "phenomenological method," which he made public in his 1907 lectures "Die Idee der Phänomenologie" was, and is, a means to achieve the inner harmony that Husserl longed for. I do not provide an analysis of why Husserl might have felt the way he did; my aim is to show what internal stability might be (...) and how one might achieve it. I conclude that the phenomenological method is the means, the "how," to internal stability, which I characterize as "clarity" and "harmony" regarding our beliefs and, and ultimately, our authentic comportment. (shrink)

In this paper I challenge Merold Westphal's claim that Jean-Luc Marion's hermeneutical phenomenology is especially useful for theology. I argue that in spite of his explicit allegiance to Husserl's "principle of all principles," Marion fails to embody a commitment to phenomenological seeing in his analyses of revelation. In the sections of Being Given where he discusses revelation, Marion allows faith-based claims to bleed into his phenomenological analyses, resulting in what I call his 'blurred vision'—the pretension that phenomenological seeing can be (...) extended to theological matters. This pretension undermines Marion's phenomenological aspirations, because it invests his analyses with a theological content that phenomenological intuition cannot account for or clarify. At the same time, this blurring of the line between theology and phenomenology also makes Marion's work theologically ineffective. For it furnishes the theologian and believer with the false assurance that faith-based commitments can be grounded in phenomenological knowledge—a claim that he simply cannot make good on. In light of these problems, I propose an alternative Heideggerian approach that maintains the boundary between philosophical and theological discourse and thereby safeguards the integrity of both. (shrink)

In regards to the problem of evil, van Inwagen thinks there are two arguments from evil which require different defenses. These are the global argument from evil—that there exists evil in general, and the local argument from evil—that there exists some particular atrocious evil X. However, van Inwagen fails to consider whether the problem of God’s hiddenness also has a “local” version: whether there is in fact a “local” argument from God’s hiddenness which would be undefeated by his general defense (...) of God’s hiddenness. This paper will argue that van Inwagen’s present account contains no implicit response to the “local” argument from God’s hiddenness, and, worse, the “local” argument brings to the fore crucial inconsistencies in van Inwagen’s account. These inconsistencies concern van Inwagen’s criterion for philosophical success—his methodological use of an “ideal audience” in an ideal debate—and a crucial premise in his argument: namely, that people who do not believe in God are culpably deceiving themselves regarding the manifest presence of God. These considerations will be a platform for my arguing that the failures of van Inwagen’s account amount to his ignoring the extra-rational, concrete aspect of grasping “spiritual propositions”—propositions which, in order to be affirmed, require the full self-understanding which precipitates out of the mind, body, and will of a particular existing individual. (shrink)

Karen Barad develops a view she calls ‘posthumanism,’ or ‘agential realism,’ where the human is reconfigured away from the central place of explanation, interpretation, intelligibility, and objectivity to make room for the epistemic importance of other material agents. Barad is not alone in this kind of endeavor, but her posthumanism offers a unique epistemological position. Her aim is to take a performative rather than a representationalist approach to analyzing ‘socialnatural’ practices and challenge methodological assumptions that may go unnoticed in some (...) disciplinary fields. Yet for all the good of the challenge, Barad must support it with sound epistemological theorizing, theorizing that would apply to any methodology, whether that be sociological, historical, anthropological, or philosophical. Thus, where one might critique Barad on her assessments of sociological, historical, or anthropological incorporations of humans and the nonhuman, I critique Barad’s epistemology on its sense of objectivity and dismissal of the centrality of the human. I argue that Barad’s epistemology must retain a particular form of humanism, a humanism that stakes human subjectivity as the locus of rationality and objectivity, without which it creates intractable problems. To recuperate Barad’s challenge to contest assumptive distinctions while avoiding her epistemological problems, I offer some parting reflections. (shrink)

A Special Issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2005, issue 2, contains an interesting ‘Philosophy of the Teacher’ by Nigel Tubbs. It rejects attempts in pedagogical traditions to ignore or avoid the contradiction between the teacher as master and as servant, and ends with an interpretation of ‘upbuilding’, a central concept in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. According to Tubbs’ reading, the teacher’s patient struggle with herself in doubt is the basic condition for upbuilding, whereby the eternal’s perfect gift of (...) love is given to the students. I maintain that the original Danish text does not fully support this interpretation and defend an alternative reading. The text says that the condition for receiving the perfect gift is itself a gift of God. Doubt is necessary, but if our doubt were sufficient, we could manage our lives without God, the condition for receiving the gift would not be a gift, and the possibility for receiving the gift would be spoiled both for teachers and students. (shrink)

Personal Identity theorists as diverse as Derek Parfit, Marya Schechtman and Galen Strawson have noted that the experiencing subject (the locus of present psychological experience) and the person (a human being with a career/narrative extended across time) are not necessarily coextensive. Accordingly, we can become psychologically alienated from, and fail to experience a sense of identity with, the person we once were or will be. This presents serious problems for Locke's original account of “sameness of consciousness” constituting personal identity, given (...) the distinctly normative (and indeed eschatological) focus of his discussion. To succeed, the Lockean project needs to identify some phenomenal property of experience that can constitute a sense of identity with the self figured in all moments to which consciousness can be extended. I draw upon key themes in Kierkegaard's phenomenology of moral imagination to show that Kierkegaard describes a phenomenal quality of experience that unites the experiencing subject with its past and future, regardless of facts about psychological change across time. Yet Kierkegaard's account is fully normative, recasting affective identification with past/future selves as a moral task rather than something merely psychologically desirable (Schechtman) or utterly contingent (Parfit, Strawson). (shrink)

In a journal entry from 1906, Husserl complains of lacking “internal stability” and of his desire to “achieve” it. My claim in this paper is that the “phenomenological method,” which he made public in his 1907 lectures Die Idee der Phänomenologie was, and is, a means to achieve the inner harmony that Husserl longed for. I do not provide an analysis of why Husserl might have felt the way he did; my aim is to show what internal stability might be (...) and how one might achieve it. I conclude that the phenomenological method is the means, the “how,” to internal stability, which I characterize as “clarity” and “harmony” regarding our beliefs and, and ultimately, our authentic comportment. (shrink)

The article shows the “Appendix” to Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments to be a response to Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity. While previous studies have detected some influence by Feuerbach on Kierkegaard, they have so far discovered little in the way of specific responses to Feuerbach’s ideas in Kierkegaard’s published works. The article first makes the historical argument that Kierkegaard was very likely reading Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity while he was writing Philosophical Fragments, as several of Kierkegaard’s journal entries from that (...) period discuss Feuerbach in relation to central ideas in Fragments. The article then shows how Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus inverts Feuerbach’s projection theory, turning it against critics like Feuerbach. At the heart of Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity is the claim that religion is a conceptual illusion, whereby the individual projects his or her personal limits onto the species and then projects the unlimited onto a supposed divine being. Furthermore, Feuerbach sees Christianity as rife with absurdities that tell against its reasonableness. In exploring a hypothetical transcendent avenue toward the truth, Climacus inverts both of these philosophical moves. He argues that on the transcendent hypothesis, the immanentist critic is himself a victim of an “acoustical illusion”: the absolute paradox of the appearance of the god in time is in fact not judged by, but rather judges, the critic as absurd. In inverting and not repudiating Feuerbach’s critique, Climacus reveals the critic as a Socratic figure who displays the heights—and ultimately, the limits—of secular philosophy’s capabilities. (shrink)

The project of critical management theory is based on a view of a theorist who intervenes in the activity of managers and employees aiming at their emancipation. It involves an image of subjectivity governed by structural determinants that render the subject incapable of freeing himself without a scholar's involvement. In the discussion that follows, I seek to explain how this image has been developed and how it paved the way to ethical–methodological necessity, which obliges the theorist to intervene in the (...) realities of the objects of their study. I contrast this with a view of subjectivity provided by Søren Kierkegaard. I explain how he theorizes its relationship with the ethical and the limitations in generating knowledge claims about the morality of the other. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two rationalist readings of Either/Or: the Rational Argument Interpretation, according to which the aim of the book is ultimately to offer a rational argument in favor of living ethically, and the Rational Presupposition Interpretation, according to which the pseudonymous authors presuppose that it is rational to live ethically. The paper argues in favor of . In particular, it argues that the fundamental presuppositions of Either/Or are those of Kant’s moral philosophy and rational religion. At the heart (...) of Kant’s arguments for the practical postulates lies an “existential moment”: Kant’s practical arguments are subjectively valid in virtue of the personal decision of the individual to do his duty. According to the Rational Presupposition Interpretation advanced here, Either/Or is best understood as an attempt to communicate indirectly and to confront the reader with the significance of personal choice for inhabiting a hopeful moral life-view. (shrink)

This paper takes the position that the aim of existential teaching, i.e., teaching where existential questions are addressed, consists in educating the students in light of subjective truth, where the students are ‘educated’ to exist on their own, i.e., independent of the teacher. The question is whether it is possible to educate in light of existence. It is, in fact impossible, as existence is a subjective matter, meaning that it must be determined individually. In this way the existential teaching appears (...) thus: even though existence cannot be determined educationally, as it is a subjective matter, it does require some kind of education. However, the teacher cannot make use of pedagogical means that coerce the students to take responsibility for their subjective truth. A pedagogical ‘expedient’ is nonetheless required, which deprives of all types of constraint but still opens up for the students taking responsibility for their subjective truth. I argue that this expedient must be irony, but not all types of irony. I therefore discuss which conception of irony the existential teaching should and should not be connected with. (shrink)