For contemporary critical philosophers of education, the thought of Paul Tillich, a protestant theologian, does not seem to be a very likely point of reference. Nevertheless, we decided to read some of his works within a philosophical-educational context. Reading those works of Tillich we realized that they required a pedagogical-philosophical acknowledgement. Scarce as the educational analyses of Paul Tillich’s writings are, they concern mostly either religious education or some specific issues connected with teaching. Our proposal was to read him differently: (...) as a critical tool for grasping contemporary educational issues, independent from a religious or didactic approach. In the article, referring to the thoughts of Tillich, we analyze the three most important tensions of the last and present centuries: kairos I and II, referring to the human condition after World Wars I and II, and kairos III, related mainly to the war on terrorism and to the growing climate crisis. The analysis of these special moments in the history of humankind is related to the postulates and pedagogical attitudes articulated by us. We conclude that as a result of the deepening climate crisis and the looming specter of a cataclysm, the transition to a better aion may enable the pedagogy of radical hope. The essence of this pedagogy is to shape the “courage to be” during grassroots, collective and political action - an existential attitude saturated with resistance, concern and hope that such grassroots, cultural-religious practices can contribute to social change and reduce the fear of inevitable death associated with the risk of annihilation of the Earth. (shrink)

The expression ‘second nature’ can be used in two different ways. The first allows phronēsis to count as the sort of thing a second nature is. The second speaks of second natures...

A prominent trend in moral philosophy today is the interest in the rich textures of actual human practices and lives. This has prompted engagements with other disciplines, such as anthropology, history, literature, law and empirical science, which have produced various forms of contextual ethics. These engagements motivate reflections on why and how context is important ethically, and such metaethical reflection is what this article undertakes. Inspired by the work of the later Wittgenstein and the Danish theologian K.E. Løgstrup, I first (...) describe one of the ways in which context plays a central role with regard to ethical meaning and normativity. I then examine how ‘context’ is to be defined, and finally I discuss some of the questions which arise when giving context prominence in ethics – namely, how to delimit the scope of relevant context, the relevant traits of a particular context and what ‘the ethical’ is. (shrink)

The orthodox definition of hope suffers from an exclusion problem: it is unable to exclude subjects without hope. In fact, the orthodox definition even allows for despair to be falsely classified as hope. This problem suggests two basic desiderata for a successful analysis of hope: it should solve the exclusion problem, and it should have the resources to explain why, in a given situation, a subject does or does not form a hope. Bearing these desiderata in mind, I assess two (...) recent hope‐accounts offered by Jack M. C. Kwong and Cheshire Calhoun. I then offer my own view, which is based on the Jamesian notion of a “live possibility”. I suggest that a possibility needs to reach a certain probability threshold in order to count as live, and according to my account, to hope is to desire the truth of such a live possibility. This view is well‐equipped to solve the exclusion problem, and it can explain why a subject does or does not hope. (shrink)

Climate change is a temporally fragmented phenomenon: the causes and effects at work are dispersed over a remarkably long time period. Climate change exceeds human ability to forecast and quantify its effects in time. This creates serious epistemic, moral, and psychological difficulties and poses challenges to generating adequate ethical responses. Augustine’s understanding of time as a measure of imagination emphasizes the way in which human beings actively shape their sense of time. He sees “looking forward” in time as a matter (...) of spiritual vocation that collects the self out of dispersion and connects to a transgenerational collective. A notable example of how this “looking forward” may be practiced is singing the Psalms. The Augustinian “temporal imagination” links the imaginative, affective, moral, and vocational dimensions of measuring time. This offers some preliminary avenues for reimagining a sense of time responsive to climate change’s temporal fragmentation. (shrink)

What drives moral revolutions like the legal abolition of slavery and women’s right to vote? The importance of having an answer to this question lies in the hope of it being able to help us create moral progress in the future. This can be changing harmful practices and traditions like honour killing, child marriage, genital mutilation and political corruption. Furthermore, a wrong or insufficient picture of the dynamics of change, held by e.g. politicians or NGOs and incorporated into laws and (...) institutions, can lead to misfired inventions, wasted resources and possibly human harm. If we lack conceptual clarity and empirical insights, we will have trouble making good decisions. However, before answering the above question we need to consider what answering it entails. This article therefore discusses which form an understanding of the dynamics of moral revolutions should take in order to best help us create progress. I do so by critically investigating one currently dominant way of approaching this issue, namely the idea that we should produce a general explanatory theory of the fundamental dynamics of change. In order to expose the problems in this approach, I engage with a contemporary example of it, namely Appiah’s work on moral revolutions, and demonstrate that honour codes cannot have the explanatory role, which Appiah claims for them. The article concludes by pointing to alternative models of understanding the dynamics of moral revolutions and changes. (shrink)

I argue that Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy articulates a radical conception of hope. According to Lear, radical hope is ‘directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is’. Given Adorno’s claim that the current world is radically evil, and that we cannot know or even imagine what the good is, it is plausible that his conception of hope must be radical in this sense. I develop this argument through an analysis of Adorno’s engagement with (...) Kant’s conception of hope, Adorno’s references to hope and his critical diagnosis of a metaphysical need for hope. Having demonstrated that Adorno must reject both ordinary and Kantian hope, I examine why Adorno thinks that we still may have reasons for hope. I also show that Adorno’s conception of hope differs from Lear’s in one important respect. (shrink)

Responding to renewed interest in political rhetoric among contemporary International Relations –realists, this article advances three main claims. First, it suggests that tragedy—the dominant...

This essay introduces a tension between the public Wittgenstein’s optimism about knowledge of other minds and the private Wittgenstein’s pessimism about understanding others. There are three related reasons which render the tension unproblematic. First, the barriers he sought to destroy were metaphysical ones, whereas those he struggled to overcome were psychological. Second, Wittgenstein’s official view is chiefly about knowledge while the unofficial one is about understanding. Last, Wittgenstein’s official remarks on understanding themselves fall into two distinct categories that don’t match (...) the focus of his unofficial ones. One is comprised of those remarks in the Investigations that challenge the thought that understanding is an inner mental process. The other consists primarily of those passages in PPF and On Certainty concerned with the difficulty of understanding others without immersing oneself into their form of life. In its unofficial counterpart, Wittgenstein focuses on individuals, rather than collectives. The official and the unofficial sets of remarks are united in assuming a distinction between understanding a person and understanding the meaning of their words. If to understand a language is to understand a form of life, then to understand a person is to understand a whole life. (shrink)

The concept ‘silence’ has diametrically opposed meanings; it connotes peace and contemplation as well as death and oblivion. Silence can also be considered a practice. There is keeping the rule of silence to still the mind and find inner truth, as well as forcibly silencing in the sense of subjugating another to one's own purposes. The concept of teaching runs the gamut between these extremes, from respectfully leading students to search and discover, to relentlessly bending them to one's own will. (...) This article examines contradictory connotations and practices of silence and teachers’ ambivalent perceptions of it in order to conceptualize a positive practice of silence for teacher education. (shrink)

Darrel Moellendorf places hope at the core of his call for climate-change vision and action, positing a ‘hopeful vision of a sustainable and prosperous world’ committed to ‘green growth’ – along th...

This contribution aims at discussing the agonistic dimension of John Dewey’s pragmatism. The paper starts by reconstructing Dewey’s influence on Albert Meyer, a leading figure of 20th-century American psychiatry. This comparison will shed light on Dewey’s influence on Meyer, focusing on some core psychological notions such as mental health and growth. Moreover, it will show the key role played by the category of conflict in Dewey’s pragmatism, and how the latter can account for the darker and more problematic sides of (...) human life. The paper ends with a quick elaboration on the notion of survivance, which denotes the ability to “go on” – both as individuals and as societies – in the face of conflict and devastation. (shrink)

Academic essays typically and quite rightly advance theses and defend them with arguments. In this essay, I do not propose or defend a thesis. Instead, I try to ask, in a sustained way, a straightf...

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this 2021 AFHVS Presidential Address, Kim Niewolny provides a brief foray into the onto-epistemic framing of critical praxis for sustainable food systems transformation. Niewolny proposes we engage in the creative entanglement of critical praxis and the social imaginary to “unthink” the orthodoxies that govern our ideas of the possible. She offers several possibilities as pathways toward a food system that embodies health equity, ecological justice, land sovereignty, and human rights, including: agroecological research and movement building; food, farm, and health (...) policy; food and farm system worker protections as public health and human rights concerns; intersectional food justice scholarship and curriculum; narrative-led, community-based, and action-oriented methodologies as multi-dimensional inquiry; and multi-sector and multi-racial coalitions as dynamic networks that challenge linear, neoliberal, and technical-rational practices. Niewolny concludes with a call for radical hope as a principle for critical food systems praxis. (shrink)

In this essay, Kim Niewolny, current President of AFHVS, responds to the 2020 AFHVS Presidential Address given by Molly Anderson. Niewolny is encouraged by Anderson’s message of moving “beyond the boundaries” by focusing our gaze on the insurmountable un-sustainability of the globalized food system. Anderson recommends three ways forward to address current challenges. Niewolny argues that building solidarity with social justice movements and engendering anti-racist praxis take precedence. This work includes but is not limited to dismantling the predominance of neoliberal-fueled (...) technocratic productivism in agricultural science and policy while firmly centering civil society collective action and human rights frameworks as our guiding imaginary for racial, gender, environmental, and climate justice possibilities for sustainable food systems praxis. She concludes by exploring the epistemic assertion to push beyond our professional and political imaginaries to build a more fair, just, and humanizing food system. (shrink)

This essay explores the existential difficulties involved in being a non-indigenous scholar of philosophy and early childhood education in an indigenous context. It begins by recalling an encounter with young Sámi children that happened while doing research at an early childhood centre in northern Scandinavia. This is read alongside the poetry of the Sámi writer Nils Aslak Valkeapää, a personal documentary text by Sámi author Elin Anna Labba, and Wittgensteinian philosophy. These texts are read as a philosophical exercise of the (...) imagination through which the scholar‘s words, thoughts, and assumptions are reworked in a decolonising process. This process involves the scholar in a lived philosophy of avoiding deflection of what Cora Diamond has called “difficulties of reality” and considerations of the role of imagination in ethics. In doing so the essay reimagines the notion of hybrid cultures and identities through Wittgenstein‘s invitation to imagine forms of life. The essay concludes by suggesting that by thinking of scholarship in this way hope and meaning can emerge out of the silences in the encounters between the non-indigenous scholars and the indigenous children. (shrink)

For better or worse, places matter to us. Especially the familiar places we call home—the ones that embody our personal and cultural histories, give our lives a sense of stability, and support the routines of everyday life. Global Climate Change (GCC) poses an existential threat to these places, engendering nonmaterial losses that threaten subjective well-being and overall mental health. Unfortunately, these nonmaterial losses are often overlooked or underappreciated. My aim in this article is to counter this tendency and explore the (...) relationship between people and place in a way that sheds light on the nonmaterial threat of GCC. I approach this task from the lens of everyday aesthetics. While finding adequate compensation for these nonmaterial losses is unlikely, I suggest that sensitivity to the aesthetic texture of everyday life can provide a source of aesthetic consolation that can make the challenges of GCC easier to manage. (shrink)

Characterizations of the Anthropocene often indicate both the challenges that our new epoch poses for human well-being and a sense of loss that comes from a compromised environment. In this paper I explore a deeper problem underpinning both issues, namely, that decoupling humanity from the world with which we are familiar compromises human flourishing. The environmental conditions characteristic of the Anthropocene do so, I claim, by compromising flourishing on two fronts. First, the comparatively novel conditions of the Anthropocene risk rupturing (...) our narratives, putting at risk our sense of self and connections to familiar environments. Second, by undermining the connections between our environmental background and the sense of well-being conditioned by that background our ability to exercise options that constitute a recognizable good life are compromised. This paper argues that to the extent humanity is decoupled from their environments humans are not only less able to access opportunities our understanding of who we are, our identities, and our capacity to make sense of the world around us through those identities is compromised. I conclude that the Anthropocene does more than challenge our ability to utilize resources, it challenges our understanding of who we are in the world. (shrink)

This paper examines the identity of Asian swamp buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) from different value orientations. Buffalo were introduced into Northern (Top End) Australia in the early nineteenth century. A team of transdisciplinary researchers, including an ethicist, has been engaged in field research on feral buffalo in Arnhem Land over the past three years. Using historical documents, literature review, field observations, interviews with key informants, and interaction with the Indigenous land owners, an understanding of the diverse views on the scientific, cultural, (...) and economic significance of buffalo was obtained. While the diverse stakeholders in buffalo exploitation and management have historically delivered divergent value orientations on the nature of the human–buffalo relationship, we argue that over time there is the possibility of values and ethical convergence. Such convergence is possible via transdisciplinary and transcultural agreement on the value stances that constitute the construction of the being or identity of buffalo in the face of the overwhelming need to manage population density and gross numbers. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron has plausibly argued that historical injustices can be superseded by serious efforts to achieve justice in the present and future. This essay considers what it might mean to arrange things justly in the relevant way, focusing on the work of John Rawls as our best existing template for conceptualizing justice of this kind. The essay outlines ways in which a Rawlsian system of social justice seems unable to meet its own normative aspirations and unable to provide a model (...) for overcoming historically constituted disadvantage. As the essay argues, the society described by Rawls is likely to remain divided by inherited class structures, given the motivational requirements of markets and the psychological effects of the division of labor, so that inheritors of historical injustice would remain disadvantaged even if Rawlsian principles were put into practice. The essay considers some speculative methods for overcoming these inequalities, and argues that the most promising approach in circumstances as we know them will draw on already-existing programs of compensation for historical expropriation. The essay also argues that Rawlsians should take seriously the application of the difference principle to the distribution of political authority alongside material resources, suggesting that we should give careful thought to how political structures can protect the interests of the least advantaged. The paper argues that, once again, existing mechanisms for Aboriginal self-governance are more appropriate as a system of forward-looking justice than they may otherwise appear. The essay argues in closing that political philosophy should give increased attention to the ethics of political action and to conflict among the disadvantaged in imperfect circumstances. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, there has been an increase in philosophical inquiries of hope both in philosophy of mind and of virtue as well as in the philosophy of education. This paper wishes to add to this discussion by presenting the analysis of hope by French existentialist philosopher and theologian Gabriel Marcel and examining its possible contribution to educational practices and beliefs. As one of the very few modern, systematic accounts of hope, Marcel’s provocative conception of it and his (...) critique of its common “technical” use could prove promising when applied to educational theory and practice. Following Marcel, I argue that in hope we find a complex and possibly contradictory view of the future: as a result of planning and technical problem-solving on one hand, and on the other, as an inclination towards the mysterious and radically unexpected. I suggest that maintaining educational hope within the tension between the planned and the unexpected, and specifically rejecting a complete disenchantment of the educational act, could help in securing education from being reduced to instrumental training and socializing, opening it up to new and unimaginable possibilities. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 840-853, June 2022.

In much environmentally concerned literature, there is a burgeoning concern for the status and sustainability of human hope. Within Christian circles, this attention has often taken the form of eschatological reflection. While there is important warrant for attention to eschatology in Christian examinations of hope, I claim that to move so quickly from hope to eschatology is to confuse a species of Christian hope for a definition of hope itself; as such, it is important for theological ethicists to examine hope (...) also from the experiential perspective of the human hoper. In particular, this is important today given the shortcomings of an eschatological focus in addressing anxieties arising due to the environmental crisis. Through examining hope as a fallible human activity, one can come to better understand hope's importance to human life, its profound ambiguity, and the potential threat that the environmental crisis poses to it. (shrink)

It seems intuitive that human development and environmental protection should go hand in hand. But some have worried there is no framework within environmental ethics that suitably conjoins them. I...

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 59-75, Spring 2022.

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 5, Page 1083-1098, October 2021.

Communitarianism has been the dominant disposition of many African scholars towards ubuntu. The nature of the concept somewhat limits how one can theorise about ubuntu. However, I argue that there is still a lot more that can be harnessed from the ubuntu concept, especially as it pertains to the ontology of radical escape. I use radical escape as an ontological character of every human being whereby to exist is to escape. In this paper, I argue that ubuntu does not provide (...) the possibility for radical escape. The nature of escape that ubuntu provides is limited to the confines of its communitarian outlook. In this paper, I bring on board the works of Mogobe Ramose, Thaddeus Metz, Kwame Gyekye, Emmanuel Levinas, and Thomas Lear, among others, to substantiate my position. I hope to demonstrate the need to accommodate the concept of radical escape in theorising about ubuntu. (shrink)

The aim of the SI is to bring to the fore the places in which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are formed; how place shapes the dynamics of CSPs, and how CSPs shape the specific settings in which they develop. The papers demonstrate that partnerships and place are intrinsically reciprocal: the morality and materiality inherent in places repeatedly reset the reference points for partners, trigger epiphanies, shift identities, and redistribute capacities to act. Place thus becomes generative of partnerships in the most profound (...) sense: by developing an awareness of their emplacement, CSPs commit to place, and through their place-based commitments produce three intertwined modalities of place-specific ethics that bind CSPs and place: ethic of recognition, an ethic of care, and an ethic of resilience. Our authors have found vivid examples of how emplaced CSPs embody these ethics, signaling hope for the sustainability of our (always hyper-local) life-worlds. (shrink)

Discussions of habit in Hegel’s thought usually focus on his subjective spirit since this is where the most extended discussion of this issue takes place. This paper argues that habit is also important for understanding Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The discussion of habit and second nature occur at a critical juncture in the text. This discussion is important for understanding his notion of ethical life and his account of freedom.

In the late 18th century, Immanuel Kant attracted attention for his criticisms of colonialism, that problematized the established boundaries between civilization and barbarism, and chastised English colonialism in particular. Some years later, however, in his lectures on Anthropology, he ventured some oddly racist views, concerning the specific differences between European and Indigenous peoples. Kant's racism is by now well‐documented. However, less attention has been paid to the peculiarities of that racism, and especially its foundations in a theory of virtue. His (...) racism comes to light especially in his discussions of the virtues of patience and courage, and in passages which have rarely been subject to critical scrutiny still to this day. This article starts out from an analysis of the functions of Kant's concepts of courage and patience in his account of European versus Indigenous difference, with a view to interrogating the politics of virtue in the present, where this discussion is reoccurring in new guises. What Kant considered courage has now been devalorized, while what he considered patience is now valorized. This reversal of perspectives on what counts as virtuous has occurred in correlation with a reversal in western perspectives on Indigeneity. Such that contemporary accounts of courage are correlated with contemporary accounts of Indigeneity. These reversals of perspective must be understood in context of the transformation which philosophical anthropology has undergone under the duress of the Anthropocene. Contemporary works by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Jonathan Lear are of great relevance to this correlated transformation and will be discussed here. The article analyses what both Chakrabarty and Lear understand by courage today, its relevance to the Anthropocene, and points out the limitations of their theories. Ultimately the article argues for a rethinking of the definition of courage as a political virtue of the Anthropocenic present. (shrink)

The gaps, fissures, and lapses of attention in a life—what I call “ordinary oblivions”—are fertile fragilities that present a compelling source for ethics. Plato, not Aristotle, is the ancient philosopher specially poised to speak to this feature of human life. Drawing upon poet C. K. Williams's idea that forgetting is a “looking away” that makes possible “beginning again,” I present a Platonic approach to ethics as an alternative to Aristotelian or virtue ethics. Plato's Phaedrus is a key source text for (...) this alternate picture; from it I suggest how we might construe Iris Murdoch's “task of seeing” in terms of the engagement with written form. Poetry is a central locale for such engagement, and thus suggests a kind of ethical praxis that arises from the theoretical emphases of my examination of forgetting, the unmoored self, remade other-regard, and sacred sources. (shrink)

The concepts of hope and its absence, hopelessness, are seen as crucial in palliative care for people with motor neurone disease. A primary measure in psychological research on hopelessness in people with motor neurone disease is the Beck Hopelessness Scale. This scale can be understood as being conceptually based on the philosophical standard account of hope, which understands hope as an intentional expectancy. This essay argues that this is a misconstruction of hopelessness in palliative care. Rather, pre-intentional hope is essential (...) for palliative care of people with motor neurone disease. Pre-intentional hope enables the formation of intentional hopes and is intrinsically relational. Finally, it is argued that the absence of pre-intentional hope should not be subjected to psychiatric diagnosis, for example, in the form of demoralization disorder. (shrink)

In order to address the question of hope in the present, it behooves us to revisit Kant’s third and fourth questions: ‘What may we hope?’ and ‘What is the human being?’ I reexamine these questions through an analysis of Thomas McCarthy’s recent book Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development and several works by Hans Blumenberg. I agree with McCarthy that Kant’s anthropology is incomplete and that the postmodern rejection of macronarratives was premature, but I claim that he requires (...) a more complex philosophical anthropology to guide a philosophy of history. In order to address the question about hope, I reconstruct the anthropology implied in Blumenberg’s writings. I claim that this answer to Kant’s fourth question supplies conceptual scaffolding missing from McCarthy’s book, provides resources necessary for making normative claims on behalf of all human beings, and can inform a multiversal history for grounding rational hope in the present. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 685-698, December 2021.

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How (...) will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries. (shrink)

It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the debate away from metaphysics and epistemology (...) towards ethics and moral psychology. Despite the important progress they make towards a de-alienated and reified understanding of the self-relation, however, I argue that the Kantian paradigm is ultimately inadequate because its methodological individualism makes it incapable of accounting for the irreducibly social dimension of the self-relation and, therefore, of successfully making the transition from ethics to social and political philosophy. In other words, an adequate ontology of the self-relation is possible only as a social ontology. In order to motivate this thesis, I appeal to two examples that expose the “social deficit” of the Kantian approach: Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of race/racism in “The Lived Experience of the Black” and the phenomenon of cultural collapse in Jonathan Lear’sRadical Hope. I then go on to provide a sketch of an alternative approach based on the notion of “self-appropriation”, distinguishing it from Rahel Jaeggi’s use of the term in her recent critique of alienation, in the process. (shrink)

This paper seeks to develop a phenomenological account of the disorientation of grief, specifically the relationship between disorientation and the breakdown in practical self-understanding at the heart of grief. I argue that this breakdown cannot be sufficiently understood as a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space that leaves the bereaved individual at a loss as to how to go on. Examining the experience of losing a loved person and a loved person-to-be, I instead propose (...) that this breakdown should be understood primarily in relation to a distinctive kind of futurity operative in disorientation,irrespectiveof the extent to which there is a breakdown of formerly shared practices and habitual patterns of navigating lived-in space. Drawing on the resources afforded by Heidegger’s phenomenology, I argue that it is acore characteristicof the experience of disorientation in grief that the grieving person can no longer meaningfully press ahead into aspecific futural self. This view comes with certain advantages over existing accounts of the temporality of grief for making sense of the disorientated relationship to futurity, which the appeal to Heideggerian resources makes possible. (shrink)

Hegel’s philosophy of history is fundamentally concerned with how shapes of life collapse and transition into new shapes of life. One of the distinguishing features of Hegel’s concern with how a shape of life falls apart and becomes inadequate is the role that habit plays in the transition. A shape of life is an embodied form of existence for Hegel. The animating concepts of a shape of life are affectively inscribed on subjects through complex cultural processes. This paper examines the (...) argument Hegel puts forward in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History for why civilizations come to atrophy and examines the decisive role habit plays in this process. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way in which the central role of second nature in historical transitions and norm formation conflicts with Brandom’s account of norm formation in Hegel’s thought. (shrink)

After briefly describing the history and significance of the nature–reason dualism for philosophy this article examines why much of the Kantian inspired examination of norms and ethics continues to appeal to this division. It is argued that much of what is claimed to be rationally legitimated norms can, at least in part, be understood as binding on actions and beliefs, not because they are rationally legitimated, but because they are habituated. Drawing on Hegel’s discussion of ethical life and habit it (...) is argued that human subjects identify most practices and norms as their own through self-feeling, not reason. It is on this basis that norms are taken not just as the basis for action but are constitutive of human identity, an identity that is spiritual, embodied and affective. While habit is central to the way Hegel reconfigures ethics and norms, as well as the distinct model of freedom that he develops in his social and political thought, it will be argued that habit has its limits as a model for human freedom, limits of which Hegel is well aware. (shrink)

This article tells the story of an anthropologist and a research subject who encountered each other in the middle of the 20th century on an island in the southwestern Pacific. In the midst of an intensive spate of evidence gathering for his dissertation, anthropologist Melford Spiro noted that one of his would-be interlocutors, a man named Tarev – notable for failing all of his psychological tests – still managed to contribute a different form of evidence: if his views could not (...) be amalgamated in numbers via test scores, they could still be rendered as a case. Tarev’s personality study, ‘A Psychotic in the South Seas’, counted as one of many cases contributing to a broad, worldwide effort to explore the meaning of suffering – specifically psychological illnesses – in non-Western cultures. This article examines Tarev’s rejected test-response ‘data’ and the ways in which his answers did not fit the epistemological and geopolitical frameworks that provoked them. The encounter between anthropologist and interlocutor, today, allows an investigation into how mid-20th-century scholars amassed ambitious data sets meant to revolutionize the sciences that dealt with human beings as psycho-social entities. What sorts of data made it into their archives and what sorts did not? How was the data of happiness, sadness and other fleeting emotional states collected from whole islands newly under US naval occupation? (shrink)

It is twelve years since the article you are about to read was published. During that time, the philosophy in schools movement has expanded and diversified in response to curriculum developments, teaching guides, web-based resources, dissertations, empirical research and theoretical scholarship. Philosophy and philosophy of education journals regularly publish articles and special issues on pre-college philosophy. There are more opportunities for undergraduate and graduate philosophy students to practice and research philosophy for/with children in schools. The Ontario Philosophy Teachers Association reports (...) that in English-speaking Canada there are over 28,000 senior high school students studying philosophy in over 440 schools, and philosophy is now a Teachable Qualification. In the USA, the Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization was founded in 2009 to create a network of pre-college philosophy teachers. With the loss of its founders—Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp and Gareth Matthews —the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children is developing a digital archive in P4C. My original article was inspired by the design and pilot of a new philosophy elective for the Victorian Certificate of Education. This initiative garnered considerable interest from the P4C community because many believed that the decision to offer a VCE philosophy elective reflected the effectiveness and popularity of P4C in elementary schools, and the new philosophy elective would establish P4C as an essential prerequisite for the study of philosophy in senior secondary school and at university. In my view, enthusiasts overlooked an important difference in the conception of philosophy informing the new philosophy elective: it introduced students to the theoretical or academic discipline of philosophy, whereas P4C conceived of philosophy as a wisdom tradition—otherwise known as the art of living. (shrink)

Richard Stanley Peters appreciates the centrality of concepts for everyday life, however, he fails to recognize their pedagogical dimension. He distinguishes concepts employed at the first-order (our ordinary language-use) from second-order conceptual clarification (conducted exclusively by academically trained philosophers). This distinction serves to elevate the discipline of philosophy at the expense of our ordinary language-use. I revisit this distinction and argue that our first-order use of concepts encompasses second-order concern. Individuals learn and teach concepts as they use them. Conceptual understanding (...) is an obligation that all individuals, and not just academically trained philosophers, must fulfil. I conclude that the role of philosophy in education is to provide a conversational context for the pedagogical dimension of concepts. I draw upon the philosophies of Cora Diamond, Stephen Mulhall, Iris Murdoch and Rush Rhees. (shrink)

This article examines the tension in Hannah Arendt’s thought between the creativity of political action and the worldlessness of labour in light of fieldwork with feminist activists in Mexico City. Drawing from my ethnographic research, I explore how labour and action are knitted together in the feminist practice of accompanying women who seek safe abortion in the city. Bringing Arendt’s thought into dialogue with anthropologies of illness experience as well as the reflections of my interlocutors in the field, I shift (...) from an approach to the situation of abortion as a decision-making event, to ask other questions about autonomy and dependency, freedom and necessity, mortality and political life. I argue that what is interesting about Arendt’s conceptualisation of the labouring body is not that she separates ‘bare life’ from the political sphere of ‘men’, but rather that it alerts us to the uncertain way our life is implicated with others. In conclusion, I argue that feminist accompaniment networks foster an ephemeral relation of care between activists and women in situations of abortion, one that invites us to re-imagine the temporality of political action and to ask, again, what it is to make a new world versus make this world livable. (shrink)

Hegel famously accuses Christianity of ‘unhappy consciousness’: it has a normative goal – union with the divine – that it cannot, in principle, satisfy. Kierkegaard was intimately aware of this criticism and, unlike some of Hegel’s other accusations, takes it seriously. In this paper my co-author and I investigate the way in which Kierkegaard addresses this issue in two texts published in 1843: Fear and Trembling and ‘The Expectancy of Faith’. We are especially interested in how the two texts describe (...) faith’s relationship to finitude: for instance, whether the person of faith is permitted to expect that God will bless her in particular and concrete ways. My co-author and I offer competing interpretations. I argue that there is a deep tension in the way faith is described in the two texts; my co-author argues that there is consonance. (shrink)