ABSTRACT Militant democracy calls for pre-emptive measures against political actors who use democratic institutions to undermine or outright abolish a democratic political system. Born in the context of interwar fascism, militant democracy has recently been revived by political and legal theorists concerned about the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists. A long-standing charge against militant democracy—also articulated with renewed force in our era—is that, as a top-down way to deal with the intolerant, militant democracy is inherently elitist and bears uncomfortable similarities (...) with technocracy. But while it is true that militant democracy relies on state institutions to preserve democracy, it by no means excludes citizen engagement: “courts or the people” is a false choice. On the other hand, citizens engaged in militant democracy must take on the difficult task of distinguishing very clearly between democratic essentials under threat and political questions about which citizens might reasonably disagree. While citizen assemblies are not the answer to all of contemporary democracies’ travails, they might be very helpful in clarifying such distinctions for wide audiences. (shrink)

William Osler's description of the ideal physician remains the dominant character-ideal for modern physicians. He believed that the personality traits that resulted from a belief in ascetic Protestantism, what has been called the Puritan temper, were essential in the practice of medicine. However, this idealism has been weakened by modern psychological theories which view idealism as an illness. In a culture oriented to health, rather than virtue, as an ultimate ideal, physicians can help develop a science of limits.

This essay discusses a less known period of Karl Mannheim's life, namely the period he spent in Hungary. I attempt to point out that the career of the young Mannheim, starting from a philosophical interest and continuing with a sociological one, is continuous. His first published works and letters prove that in the period preceding his emigration to Germany in 1919 he was concerned with questions that received their mature form in his sociology of knowledge. They include primarily the question (...) of culture, that of perspective-boundedness (relativity) of cognition, interpretation and the problem of intellectuals. Despite changing disciplines from philosophy to sociology, the continuity of his oeuvre can be shown. (shrink)

Most works about the philosophy of Martin Heidegger either disregard Heidegger’s attachment to National Socialism or assume the ‘minimalist’ view that his attachment was a brief political aberration of no consequence for his philosophy. This paper contends that the minimalist view is not only factually wrong but also that its assumption promotes methodological errors and poor philosophy. To assess this contention we examine two important texts from one of the more fertile fields in current philosophy: Jeff Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology: Being, (...) Place, World (2006) and Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (2012). Malpas claims that Heidegger’s rejection of National Socialism spurred, or was concomitant with, new directions in his philosophy. These claims are wrong. The paper concludes that any work about Heidegger’s philosophy must first acknowledge and understand his enduring attachment to National Socialism. (shrink)

This essay—a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on contextualism—is concerned with the gradual rise of awareness of the existence of modes of thought or systems of belief that are different from those that are dominant in one's own culture. The awareness can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but was developed further in the early to mid-twentieth century. Its main consequence has been to encourage individuals to distance themselves from their own system—to criticize and change it.