Either we are in an elevated extinction rate event or in a mass extinction. Scientists disagree, and the matter cannot be resolved empirically until it is too late. We are the cause of the elevated extinction rate. What does this say about us, we who are Homo sapiens—the wise hominid? Beginning with the Renaissance and spreading during the 18th century, the normative notion of humanity has arisen to stand for what expresses our dignity as humans—specifically our thoughtfulness, in the double (...) sense of our capacity for reasoned choice and our capacity to enter sympathetically into the lives of others considering their good outside of the egotistical orbit of our own. Concurrent with this tradition has been a counter-current of critical thought viewing humans as self-defeating or self-destructive beings. This view reached great heights in the 20th century. Our causing an elevated extinction rate is largely unintentional and goes against our humanity in form as well as in content. Accordingly, it shows us to .. (shrink)

This manuscript brings the early writings of M.M. Bakhtin to the contemporary concern over pluralist ethics. Generally, I argue that many ethical quandaries which individuals face cannot be ascribed to a plurality of ethics or a social indeterminacy of morals. I maintain that human valuation, as an ethics of action always already in play, refers to existing individuals'' struggles to participate in their personally proclaimed and endorsed value systems. Thus, I draw upon Bakhtin to suggest that concrete acts of valuation (...) (ethics in everyday practice) are not reducible to theoretically agreed upon ethical systems, but rather, they are inseparable from the emotional-volitional moments within the total context of my uniquely held existence. (shrink)

The books’ goal is to answer the question: Do the weaknesses of value-free economics imply the need for a paradigm shift? The author synthesizes criticisms from different perspectives (descriptive and methodological). Special attention is paid to choices over time, because in this area value-free economics has the most problems. In that context, the enriched concept of multiple self is proposed and investigated. However, it is not enough to present the criticisms towards value-free economics. For scientists, a bad paradigm is better (...) than no paradigm. Therefore, the author considers whether value-based economics with normative approaches such as economics of happiness, capability approach, libertarian paternalism, and the concept of multiple self can be the alternative paradigm for value-free economics. This book is essential reading to everyone interested in the current state of economics as a discipline. (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)

The aim of this paper is to further an understanding of how a soul comes to despair and how the spirit of life is wounded. This question is approached from the perspective of death – in the form of death defying acts and voluntary death – as the dialectic aspect of being and non-being. Death can be a reflection of the life lived and the experience of who I am. The relation between ego and Self determines who I am. Two (...) forms of misrelating between ego and Self will be considered. One causes a sense of omnipotence as the ego identifies with Self, and the other causes a sense of alienation as the ego renounces the Self to establish an intellectual vacuum, which becomes a substitute for lived experience. In both instances, there is a growing despair of inauthenticiy and the experience of non-being, which voluntary death and death defying acts attempt to put an end to. Both manifestations of death are attempts to resolve the imbalance between the eternal and temporal dimensions of being – to put an end to the despair of being unconscious of Self – and to affirm being. It is only when there is a conscious dialectic between ego and Self that an authentic existence becomes possible. An authentic existence represents the ongoing commitment to incarnate the human reality that exists between the world of imagination and the world as it appears to our senses. This, I argue, amounts to a spirit with soul. (shrink)

Can we love and envy the same person at the same time? There is an overwhelming, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary, consensus that love and envy are deeply incompatible. In this paper, I challenge this consensus, and focus in particular on the normative thesis that true love should be void of envy proper. I first propose an indirect argument. Because love and envy thrive in the same psychological conditions, it is not unlikely to feel envy toward the beloved. If we want ideals (...) that do not go against our psychological propensities, then we should not aim for a love that is wholly void of envy. I then propose a direct argument, in defense of two positive ideals. I argue that a certain kind of envy—emulative envy—can be beneficial to the loving relationship; in turn, a certain kind of love—wise love— which accepts the presence of envy, can be beneficial to our lives. Thus, that love and envy are so linked in our psychology is not something that we should merely tolerate, but wholeheartedly embrace. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI suggest that Kierkegaard proves a helpful interlocutor in the debate about Analects 13.18 and the meaning of yin 隱. After surveying the contemporary debate, I argue that Kierkegaard and the Confucians agree on three important points. First, they both present relational selves. Second, both believe certain relationships are integral for moral knowledge. Third, both present a differentiated account of love where our obligations are highest to those with whom we are closest. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s ‘covering’ in the deliberation ‘Love covers (...) a multitude of sins’ in Works of Love of ‘covering’ suggests innovative meanings for yin 隱 that are compatible with Confucian philosophy. Finally, I argue that sagely discretion in covering on the Confucian account is like the teleological suspension of the ethical. (shrink)

L. A. Paul’s Transformative Experience makes the claim that many important life decisions are epistemically and personally transformative in a way that does not allow us to assign subjective values to their outcomes. As a result, we cannot use normative decision theory to make such decisions rationally, or when we modify it to do so, decision theory leads us to choose in a way that is in tension with our authenticity. This paper examines Paul’s version of decision theory, and whether (...) this version in fact admits of the challenge she wants to raise. I focus on her psychological realist view of utilities and beliefs and her notion of rational, authentic preferences as informed by imaginative acquaintance. I argue that Paul fails to engage critically with traditional accounts of decision theory and, on closer inspection, it is not clear that her version of decision theory entails a tension between rational and authentic choice. More importantly, I argue that if her contribution is instead to bring to light the importance of authenticity alongside rational decision-making, the definition she provides of authenticity in fact undermines her argument. (shrink)

In this study I provide a thematic comparison of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to suggest that the representation of the ethical in Fear and Trembling is transparently Kantian. At times I draw on Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Conflict of the Faculties, and The Metaphysics of Morals to offer a comprehensive account of Kant’s ethical theory. Both philosophers hold profoundly important positions within the milieu of ethics, however (...) they have always shared a tenuous and at times negative relationship. In this study, I challenge such commentators by showing that when the figure of Abraham is taken typologically and excluded from the text, what emerges from Fear and Trembling is a Kantian based ethics. I argue that a comparative reading of Kant’s Groundwork and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling reveals that Kierkegaard’s thought gravitates towards three central principles of Kant’s categorical imperative, as well sharing some similarities with Kant’s understanding of duty. (shrink)

My view on what I see as the predicament of Christian philosophy in ethics has been shaped by a number of experiences. I will first share with you some of these experiences, to give you an impression of the background against which this article has been written.

The paper encircles the subjectivity of drug taking as one form of contemporary practice in which fundamental theoretical issues are dealt with. In particular, following Mariana Valverde's genealogy of alcohol regulation (Valverde, 1998), the question of the free will, and the paradox of the simultaneous being and non-being of the autonomous subject, are viewed as present in various approaches to drugs. The current neo-pragmatist wave substitutes low-key practical notions of habits for a dichotomy of free will or determinism. The concept (...) of objectification promises to overcome that dichotomy by externalizing it; in terms of this concept, we can distinguish the abstract-imagined 'fix' from a genuinely transforming realization, and suggest that ours is the age of the fix, of instrumental commodities that change us in ways we do not intend. But, it is claimed, an inescapable issue of the self-dissolution of the subject remains; perhaps in the definitive shape of a suicide, or in the minor shapes of fixes such as a tactics of feigned surrender, New Age Higher Powers, or imagined communities. Determined to realize the idea of a benevolent surrender of the subject, the paper ends in an attempt to contribute to the coming to an understanding of herself and with herself of a person who finds herself at the troublesome intersection of Narcotics Anonymous and a social work development network of Copenhagen City called Wild Learning. (shrink)

This article proposes to approach issues around the self and its derivate concepts such as motivation through a methodology of rearticulation. For this, we build on the idea developed in the Vygotskian tradition of the self as mediated by cultural artifacts in activity, viewed as a transformative social process that reconfigures sense and meaning. We aim at suggesting these potentials by rearticulating activities in which people display their motives. Most contemporary ‘motivational technologies’ stage a pragmatic self-calculation. For some, these technologies (...) confirm a common-sense, managerial self; others read them as a ‘poetics of practice’ that performs and produces new motives and selves in a liminal space of discursive creativity. These two readings are superseded as we – with art theory from Vygotsky through Brecht to Groys, Bourriaud and Rancière – consider drug counsellors’ experiments with aesthetic practices of self-display in which sense is reconfigured as dis-sensus, as meaning deferred. Aesthetics provide a lense through which we can appreciate how an artifact-mediation can be also a struggle for recognition that reconstitutes emerging selves, senses, and motives. (shrink)

In the novel A Burnout-Out Case, Graham Greene argues for an intimate relationship between burnout and happiness. The novel claims that a life worth living is a continuous balancing between something painful, e.g. burnout and something desirable, e.g. happiness. In this essay, I try to make a case for the happiness of burnout. By examining the case story of a young artist, who suffered from burnout, I describe how such suffering might open up for a necessary reevaluation of the values (...) that actually make sense. Such creation of new values is what eventually leads to more happy moments, not happiness per se. This essay provides a philosophical reflection regarding the relationship between happiness and burnout in order to say something regarding which life is worth living. (shrink)